Why has the U.S. Congress failed to address so many environmental issues since the heyday of the 1970s? How can one act on climate and environmental justice when blocked in some parts of government? Where is environmental policy being made if not in Congress? This course explores the political, economic, legal, ethical and institutional dimensions of the environmental policy making process. The focus is on understanding the real-world details of policy-making systems at a range of scales and how to influence and improve them. Prerequisite: ENV 101 or equivalent. Enrollment limited to 25.

In this laboratory complement to ENV 201, students use a variety of methods to gather and analyze different types of environmental data (quantitative, qualitative, spatial). Corequisite: ENV 201. Prerequisite: ENV 101. Enrollment limited to 18.

While focusing on topical environmental issues, students learn how to gather, analyze and present data using methods from the natural and social sciences. Data are drawn from multiple sources, including laboratory experiments, fieldwork, databases, archival sources, surveys and interviews. Emphasis is on quantitative analysis. Environmental topics vary in scale from the local to the global. Corequisite: ENV 202. Prerequisite: ENV 101. Enrollment limited to 18.

Offered as GEO 150 and ENV 150. A geographic information system (GIS) enables data and maps to be overlain, queried and visualized in order to solve problems in many diverse fields. This course provides an introduction to the fundamental elements of GIS and applies the analysis of spatial data to issues in geoscience, environmental science and public policy. Students gain expertise in ArcGIS--the industry standard GIS software--and online mapping platforms, and carry out semester-long projects in partnership with campus offices or local conservation organizations. Enrollment limited to 20.

How do humans build a more just and sustainable world? What processes promote social-ecological flourishing? In this course, students explore these urgent questions, engage with real-world answers, and develop their own views. They also contrast individualistic and tech-centered solutions to environmental issues with systems approaches. The course examines complex social–ecological systems across the world—from local initiatives on the Indigenous lands now known as the Pioneer Valley to international examples of transformative action toward justice and sustainability.

This seminar engages questions of literary history and theory through a consideration of one of the most popular and enduring poetic forms in the English (and European) poetic tradition: the sonnet. The course is not a survey of the form’s history. Instead, it explores the relationship between the sonnet’s tight formal constraints and its related affordances and pleasures. The course focuses on a handful of key episodes in the form’s history in light of theories of lyric from the Renaissance to the present and theories relating phenomenology, power, and eros. Prerequisite: ENG 199.

Offered as AMS 351mn and ENG 351mn. This nonfiction writing course cultivates creative work that takes inspiration from the discoveries, controversies, crimes, and unsolved mysteries of the sciences. Students’ writing is artful as well as informative, and the emphasis is on craft and creative process. Students read a wide range of writers who explore social issues through the lens of science, from Susan Sontag and Jamaica Kincaid to Elizabeth Kolbert and Anna Tsing.

This seminar explores the creation and afterlife of Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s extraordinary first novel (written at age 19) about monstrosity and the experience of feeling not quite human.

Vampires are inescapable. Figures of incomparable (often simultaneous) threat and desire, vampires enable one to delve into an immense array of anxieties that can include but are not limited to complex distinctions regarding race, class, gender, and power, and representations of lifeblood, bloodlust, contagion, addiction, disability, temporality, xenophobia, queer and non-monogamous sexualities, the human and non-human.

What is Canadian literature and culture? This question is central to the course’s objectives through study of authors and orators working in a variety of forms and genres—fiction, poetry, newspapers, essays, film, and television produced in what is known as Canada.