(Offered as BCBP 232 and PHYS 232) Statistical mechanics describes how the movement of microscopic particles leads to their macroscopic properties. Thermodynamics is the study of how heat is transferred between systems and turned into other forms of energy. This course will cover the fundamentals of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics including states of a system, statistical distributions, the laws of thermodynamics, heat transfer, and how thermodynamic processes can be used in a cycle to make an engine.

(Offered as PHIL-311 and LJST-211) Law shapes every corner of our lives. Law defines our rights against the state as well as our obligations to it. Law makes us into citizens, criminals, owners, spouses, and more. But what justifies law’s enormous power over us, and what is law, really? This course, an introduction to legal philosophy, explores the nature of law’s authority and in particular, law’s relationship to morality. Our questions will include: Are laws best understood as social conventions or as moral truths? When, if ever, is criminal punishment justified?

(Offered as RELI 218 and PHIL 229). Christian religious traditions have assumed that God is omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent.  But attributing these attributes to the creator of the universe makes the existence of evil puzzling.  If God is omnibenevolent, then God would not want any creature to suffer evil; if God is omniscient, then God would know how to prevent any evil from occurring; and if God is omnipotent, then God would be able to prevent any evil from occurring.

(Offered as PHIL-221 and SWAG-219) This course will offer a systematic examination of a variety of philosophical issues raised by the existence of gender roles in human society: What’s the connection between biological sex differences and gender roles? Are gender roles inherently oppressive? How does the category gender interact with other socially significant categories, like race, class, and sexual orientation? What would gender equality look like?

Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Visiting Professor Louise Antony. (T) or (V).

(Offered as MUSL 182H and THDA 182H) This course provides individual performance instruction in digital music production and recording including sound capture, mixing, mastering, and use of Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) to create music. Students have weekly lessons with the instructor with an expectation of five hours per week of practice. The course is open to students of any level, beginning to advanced, and it may be repeated.

Admission with consent of the instructor. Fall and spring semesters.

How to handle overenrollment: null

(Offered as MUSI 419 and THDA 247) What is music? What are its materials? Where does it begin and end? Where does it happen? And who makes it? In this seminar, we’ll explore music at its borders with other art forms, including sound, dance, theater, film, sculpture, the museum, and the archive. Asking questions of medium, audience, and authorship, we’ll study how music’s boundaries have been navigated—and at times dissolved—by a variety of groups and individuals from the late nineteenth century until today.

(Offered as MUSI 128 and BLST 114). This course examines the relationship between blues music and American culture. Using Amiri Baraka's influential 1963 book of music criticism, Blues People, as a central text, we will explore ways in which the "blues impulse" has been fundamental to conceptions of African-American identity. At the same time, we will trace the development of African-American music through its connection to West African musical traditions and through its emergence during slavery and the Jim Crow South.

(Offered as MUSI 108 and PHYS 108) Appreciating music requires no special scientific or mathematical ability. Yet science and mathematics have a lot to tell us about how we make music and build instruments, what we consider harmonious, and how music is processed by the ear and brain.

(Offered as HIST 264 [LA/TC/TE/TR/P] and LLAS 264)  Over the course of three centuries, massive migrations from Europe and Africa and the dramatic decline of indigenous populations in South and Central America radically transformed the cultural, political, economic, and material landscape of what we today know as Latin America. This course will investigate the dynamism of Latin American societies beginning in the ancient or pre-conquest period and ending with the collapse of European rule in most Spanish, Portuguese, and French speaking territories in the New World.

(Offered as HIST 470 and ASLC 470) The rise of Shanghai as a cosmopolitan modern city in the nineteenth century and the vicissitude of its fortune in the twentieth century closely paralleled China’s modern history–in fact, many of China’s most important modern transformations first took place in the metropolis. Shanghai was the largest treaty port with the first foreign concessions in China, and thus emerged as the primary conduit for western ideas and culture.