This is a hybrid literature and creative writing course that begins with examining what is meant by "Asian" and "Asian American." Other topics we'll explore include intergenerational loss and silence; race and power; casteism; Islamophobia; colonialism; immigration. There will be a high emphasis on reading as writers, i.e., on paying close attention to craft, as demonstrated through a richness of genres and literary forms that may include contemporary fiction, historical fiction, non-fiction, comics, and hybrid forms.

The course focuses on the musics of Africa and the African diaspora through the lens of ethnomusicology. Concentrating on selected countries, including Brazil, Cuba, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United States, it examines the musical performance of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality and the role of music in social and political movements. The course explores the global dimensions of Africanist musical aesthetics as enabled historically and sustained through ongoing transatlantic exchanges between Africa and the African diaspora.

This course examines the European New Waves of the 1960s and 1970s, a pivotal era of artistic innovation and revisionism in narrative filmmaking. Focusing on the cinema of this period as a cultural text and formal experiment, we will begin by exploring the importance of Italian Neorealism and continue with a close examination of modernism in European cinema focusing on key works from France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia. We conclude with a foray into the Japanese New Wave and Cinema Novo in Brazil.

In recent years, we have seen what appears to be a revival of the Afrosurrealist movement in literature, film, and television, among other genres. But why? What does it mean for Black poets, writers, and creators to turn to the strange and fantastical in our current historical moment? And what did it mean in the past? In this course, students will consider not only the history of surrealism but also earlier periods in which Black artists and creatives in particular have turned to the weird and dreamlike to articulate their plight and circumstances.

Critical theory analyzes how structures, institutions, and norms perpetuate and reproduce oppression. By exposing the "ordinary" practices of society as contingent constructions that create and maintain hierarchies, critical theories create opportunities to change those practices and pursue a more just world. This seminar offers an introduction to the methods and tools critical theories employ and apply, across a range of intersecting identities.

We will learn how to build stuff that moves! Using wire, sheet metal, paper, wood, and a range of other media, we will examine and build mechanisms. We will contemplate the basic ingredients of mechanical forces and motion such as bearings, cams, cranks, gear ratios and more. Each student will develop an independent project that incorporates some type of physical motion. All levels of experience are welcome, but students should be comfortable using hand tools, able to devote 6 - 10 hours a week outside of scheduled class time working on projects.

The goal of experimental psychology is to try to understand why people think and act as they do. How do we interpret and use the information gathered by our senses? Why do we pay attention to some things and not others? How do we learn things? How do we remember things, and why are some things forgotten? What is the source of our beliefs? What is the process by which we make decisions? This course will focus on the ways in which psychologists have attempted to answer these questions over the past century and a half using scientific methods.

This course will explore the concept of color and its use in the visual arts from the perspective of a physicist. We will cover the basics of wave mechanics and the electromagnetic theory needed to describe light as an electromagnetic wave, the absorption and emission of light through quantum-mechanical processes and basic optics. We will then explore the relation between these physical principles and the fundamentals of color theory and its application in art.

In this noisy world with its surplus of words, does it matter what one says? This course introduces students to the linguistic turn in 20th Century French philosophy, with particular attention to the role of language in what it means to be a person among others. We will read primary texts by Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Blanchot, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Derrida. Among the first to explore the ethical impact of language, these works provide tools for thinking about today's most pressing questions.

What does it mean to write well? How do you craft a compelling sentence? Or structure a strong paragraph from beginning to end? What the heck is a comma splice, and why does it matter? Writing is a field of infinite possibilities; it's all about the choices you make. In this introductory college-writing course, we'll explore the building blocks of writing from the ground up. We'll get funky with grammar and punctuation-not as rules but as tools for making meaning.