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Writing Seminars, Bachelor of Arts

School of Arts and Sciences

http://e-catalogue.jhu.g.sjuku.top/arts-sciences/full-time-residential-programs/degree-programs/writing-seminars/writing-seminars-bachelor-arts/

AS.220.105 Introduction to Fiction & Poetry I  or AS.220.108 Introduction to Fiction & Nonfiction and AS.220.106 Introduction to Fiction & Poetry II are courses required for all majors and others who want to take advanced courses in writing seminars. They serve as pre-requisite courses to all other courses offered by the department. Students must take a minimum of 15 credits at the 300-level or higher towards the Writing Seminars major; these fifteen credits can come from any combination of Writing Seminars courses and courses towards the outside requirements (literature, history, philosophy).  Majors must receive a grade of C- or better in all courses required for the major and no major requirements may be taken satisfactory/unsatisfactory.    

AS.190-AS.191 (Political Science)

http://e-catalogue.jhu.g.sjuku.top/course-descriptions/political_science/

AS.190.101.    Introduction to American Politics.    3 Credits.    This course examines the ideals and operation of the American political system. It seeks to understand how our institutions and politics work, why they work as they do, and what the consequences are for representative government in the United States. Emphasis is placed on the federal government and its electoral, legislative, and executive structures and processes. As useful and appropriate, attention is also given to the federal courts and to the role of the states. The purpose of the course is to understand and confront the character and problems of modern government in the United States in a highly polarized and plebiscitary era. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.102.    Introduction To Comparative Politics.    3 Credits.    To understand politics, the sound bites of the modern media take us only so far. In this course, we will take a step back and implement an intellectually rigorous method. Scholars of comparative politics use the method of comparison in order to illuminate important political phenomena of our times. Following this method, we will embark on a scholarly tour of the world and compare the politics of various countries. We will also trace these politics back to their historical sources. We will work from the assumption that there is something to be gained from such comparisons across space and time. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.108.    Contemporary International Politics.    3 Credits.    An introduction to international politics. Emphasis will be on continuity and change in international politics and the causes of war and peace. The first half of the course will focus on events prior to the end of the Cold War, including the Peloponnesian War, the European balance of power, imperialism, the origins and consequences of WWI and WWII, and the Cold War. The second half will focus on international politics since 1990, including globalization, whether democracies produce peace, the impact of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and the prospects for peace in the 21st century. Theories of realism and liberalism will also be considered. This course was previously AS.190.209. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.109.    Politics of East Asia.    3 Credits.    This course examines some of the central ideas and institutions that have transformed politics in the contemporary world through the lens of East Asia, focusing on Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. We analyze two enduring themes of classic and contemporary scholarship in comparative politics: development and democracy. The purpose is to introduce students to the various schools of thought within comparative politics as well as to the central debates concerning East Asian politics. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.111.    Introduction to Global Studies.    3 Credits.    This course surveys scholarly approaches to processes, relations, institutions, and social structures that cross, subvert, or transcend national borders. The course will also introduce students to research tools for global studies. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.122.    Western Political Theory.    3 Credits.    An introductory overview of Western Political Theory, starting with Plato and the Greeks, moving through Machiavelli and the moderns, and ending up with a brief look at current political theory. We will analyze a range of theoretical styles and political approaches from a handful of thinkers, and develop our skills as close readers, efficient writers, and persuasive speakers. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.180.    Introduction to Political Theory.    3 Credits.    In the Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato posed three questions: what is justice? How would a just person live? How would a just society be governed? These three questions form the basic subject matter of of political theory. In this course we will survey the history of political theory, reading a series of political theorists who took up Plato’s questions in a wide range of contexts, from Renaissance Italy and early modern England to late colonial India and the Jim Crow US South. Throughout, we’ll consider whether there are better and worse answers to these questions, or simply different answers that appear better or worse depending on the perspective from which one considers them. We’ll look closely at how the circumstances in which political theorists lived influenced their thinking, and how those circumstances should influence our own evaluation of their thinking. And we’ll ask whether Plato’s questions were the right questions to ask in his time, whether they are still relevant in ours, and whether there are other questions that political theorists would do better to spend their time considering. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.181.    Introduction to Political Theory: Power and Authority.    3 Credits.    This course provides an introduction to Western political theory, focusing on theories and practices of power and authority. We will examine the extent to which it is possible to describe, theorize, and make visible how political power operates, and power's relationship to authority, knowledge, truth, and political freedom. A strong tradition of political thought argues that people's consent is what makes political power legitimate. But what if one of the most insidious workings of power is its ability to prevent us from telling the difference between consent and coercion? Can power allow certain authorities to effectively brainwash people? If so, does that mean that those who obey authority should no longer be held politically responsible for their actions? Does the coercive power of norms and conformity prevent any robust practice of freedom? What role (if any) should state power play in negotiating questions of morality, religion and sexuality? Lastly, we will be haunted by a related question: can political theories of power make people free, or are those theories implicated in the very coercion they profess to oppose? Classes will be a combination of lectures, critical discussions/debates, film screenings and presentations. Throughout the term, you will sharpen your ability to formulate coherent written and spoken arguments by organizing and supporting your thoughts in a persuasive manner. An important part of this skill will include the ability to wrestle with complex and controversial political problems that lack any single answer. The stakes of these problems will be brought to life by the political examples we will study, and made legible by looking through the theoretical lenses of diverse thinkers. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.204.    Ancient Political Thought.    3 Credits.    The premise of this course is that a political perspective is tied up with a (meta)physical one, that is to say, with ideas about the nature of Nature and of the status of the human and nonhuman elements within it. How is the universe ordered? Who or what is responsible for it? What place do or should humans occupy within it? How ought we to relate to nonhuman beings and forces? We will read three different responses to such questions and show how they are linked to a particular vision of political life. In the first, the world into which human are born is ordered by gods whose actions often appear inexplicable: Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, Oedipus the King by Sophocles, and Hippolytus by Euripedes will represent this tragic vision of the cosmos. In the second, Plato , in Republic and in Phaedrus, the forces of reason and eros play central and powerful roles. In the third, Augustine of Hippo presents a world designed by a benevolent, omnipotent God who nevertheless has allowed humans a share in their own fate. We end the course with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy , which offers a perspective on these three visions of the world -- the tragic, the rational, and the faithful -- which will help us evaluate them in the light of contemporary political and ecological concerns. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.220.    Global Security Politics.    3 Credits.    Contemporary and emerging technologies of nuclear (weapons, terrorism, energy) outer space (missiles, missile defense, asteroids), biosecurity (bioweapons, pandemics, terrorism) and cyber (war, spying, surveillance) and implications for security, international politics, arms control, and political freedom. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.223.    Understanding the Food System.    3 Credits.    This course examines the politics and policies that shape the production and consumption of food. Topics include food security, obesity, crop and animal production, and the impacts of agriculture on climate change. We will also consider the vulnerabilities of our food system to challenges such as the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as efforts to transform food and agriculture through new food technologies and grass-roots movements to create a more democratic food system. Prerequisite(s): Students who have completed AS.190.405 may not enroll in this class. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.224.    The Politics and Society of E. Asia.    3 Credits.    This introductory course seeks to examine the politics of China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan as part of a distinct region. We will seek to understand how individual polities responded to regional developments and trends, such as the tide of colonialism, socialism, regional economic developments, and democracy. The course will introduce students to the most pressing questions concerning the rise of China, the future of the innovation economy, and intra-regional tensions. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.227.    U.S. Foreign Policy.    3 Credits.    This course provides an analysis of US foreign policy with a focus on the interests, institutions, and ideas underpinning its development. It offers a broad historical survey that starts with US involvement in the First World War, covers major developments of the twentieth century, and concludes with contemporary issues. Important themes include the developments underpinning the emergence of the liberal world order, strategies of containment during the Cold War, nuclear deterrence and antiproliferation efforts, the politics of international trade, alliance politics, technological and security policy, and the re-emergence of great power competition. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.228.    The American Presidency.    3 Credits.    Over the past several decades, the power and importance of America’s presidency have greatly expanded . Of course, presidential history includes both ups and downs, some coinciding with the rise and fall of national party systems and others linked to specific problems, issues, and personalities. We should train our analytic eyes, however, to see beneath the surface of day-to-day and even decade-to-decade political turbulence. We should focus, instead, on the pronounced secular trend of more than two and a quarter centuries of American history. Two hundred years ago, presidents were weak and often bullied by Congress. Today, presidents are powerful and often thumb their noses at Congress and the courts. For better or worse, we have entered a presidentialist era. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.231.    Politics of Income Inequality.    3 Credits.    This course is about the interplay of democracy and capitalism. A core principle of democracy is equality. A core principle of capitalism is inequality. In democracies, the resource-poor are vote-rich. In contrast, the resource-rich are vote-poor. This helps combining capitalist economic systems with democratic political systems (“democratic capitalism”). But the sharp increase in income inequality in recent decades raises questions about the viability of democratic capitalism. What are the patterns, causes, and consequences of (income) inequality? How does inequality influence how democracy and capitalism interact? Why are there large differences in terms of redistribution between countries? For concreteness, the course compares the U.S. case to other rich democracies. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.239.    Power and Global Politics.    3 Credits.    Global politics involves power: hard and soft power; power over, power with, and power to; resources as power; and relations and processes of power. This course will explore aspects of power as they play out in case studies of diplomacy and war, global markets, and communications networks (cyber and other information technologies). The course will also examine the nature of actors and the powers they have to act across state borders. Readings will include classic texts on power, as well as more recent works of International Relations scholarship, and class assignments will focus on using insights from these works to draw one’s own positions on foreign policy issues. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.246.    Climate Solutions: The Global Politics and Technology of Decarbonization.    3 Credits.    This course provides an introduction to climate solutions by reviewing the politics and technologies in all major sectors: electricity, transportation, biofuels, hydrogen, buildings, heavy industry, and agriculture. In each area, we will first understand the existing technologies and potential solutions. But to understand decarbonization, we also have to study the political economy of these technologies. What role do the technologies play in the broader economy? Who will win or lose from the transition? What firms and countries dominate and control current and emerging supply chains? What makes a climate solutions project bankable? How can states design policies, regulations, and programs to successfully manage the politics of technology change? Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.249.    Fictional World Politics: International Relations Through Fiction.    3 Credits.    The plots and settings of fictitious works provide “cases” for the exploration of international relations theories. Incorporates literature, film, and works of IR scholarship. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.251.    Labor and American Politics.    3 Credits.    This course will explore working people’s political strategies from the Civil War through the present. We'll examine the shifting alliances among trade unions and political parties, and investigate mobilizations by freed people, women, immigrants, and LGBTQ workers. And we’ll pay special attention to the ways that workers’ action shaped the development of the modern American state. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.255.    Race and Racism in International Relations.    3 Credits.    This course introduces students to the foundational importance of race and racism to the construction of our contemporary global order. Topics include the Crusades, European imperialism, eugenics, Apartheid, freedom struggles, decolonization, and global development. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.264.    What You Need to Know About Chinese Politics (Part 1).    3 Credits.    What you need to know about Chinese politics covers the major scandals, political events, and policy debates that every China watcher needs to know. This first module of a two-semester experience brings together two professors, Prof. Andrew Mertha (SAIS) and Prof. John Yasuda (KSAS), with very different perspectives on China's past achievements, its political and economic futures, and the global implications of China's rise. The course seeks to give ample coverage to every major political question about China that is often missed in a semester long class. In addition to lively debates between the instructors, students can also expect guest speakers from the policy world, business, and the academy for a fresh take on what's going on in China today. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.267.    Introduction to Political Economy.    3 Credits.    An introduction to the fundamental questions and concepts of political economy: money, commodities, profit, and capital. The course will study the nature of economic forces and relations as elements larger social and political orders. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.269.    What you need to know about Chinese Politics, Part 2.    3 Credits.    This serves as a two-semester survey of Chinese politics from 1911-Present. This second module explores the politics of the reform and post-reform eras. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.283.    Human Security.    3 Credits.    While traditional studies on security have focused largely on border protection, sovereign authority of the state, and interstate alliances, the threats posed to everyday people were not a central focus of security analyses until the end of the Cold War. The human security approach has evolved as a challenge to conventional thinking on security. This course will introduce the notion of human security, trace its emergence and evolution in the global political discourse, explore the theoretical scholarship from which it developed, and evaluate its effectiveness as a framework for addressing the most egregious threats human beings face today. From refugee flows, gender inequality, ethnic conflict, mass atrocities, poverty, to climate change, human security scholarship and policy has sought to examine the various threats to the lives of people that transcend national borders and allow us to break out of narrow thinking to develop innovative and globally-minded solutions. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.286.    Liberalism, Republicanism, and Democracy in American Political Theory.    3 Credits.    For 250 years, American politics and society have reflected tensions between two foundational ideals. On the one hand, the notion of republican citizenship in the Declaration of Independence has inspired notions of the common good and institutions from majoritarian democracy to jury duty and state militias. Meanwhile, the tradition of liberal protections eventually enshrined in the Bill of Rights has grown to guarantee equal treatment and more rights for more people. At times, these two principles have gone hand in hand – at others, they have pointed in two very different directions. In this class, we will explore the philosophical origins of liberalism and republicanism and trace them through historical events and cultural landmarks, from the Revolutionary War until today. In the process, we will study, interpret, and discuss the contentious history of democracy in America. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.300.    Racial Inequality, Policy and Politics in the US.    3 Credits.    While policies were passed to ensure equal opportunity for racially subjugated Americans, the United States witnessed increasing stratification of wealth and income and deepening concentration of poverty, stagnation in closing racial gaps, and new forms of inequality posed by the striking upsurge in contact with the criminal justice system at the bottom of the skills ladder and concentration of wealth at the top. At the same time, the welfare state came under attack and faced challenges posed by an aging population, women entering the labor force, deindustrialization, and international pressures of globalization. Social spending withered in some areas while spending on citizens was increasingly likely to happen through tax expenditures and private means. This course investigates the politics around these developments and competing perspectives in debates over redistributive policies in the United States and their impact on inequality, particularly race and gender inequality. We will examine the contours of inequality and explanations for why it has expanded over the past several decades. We explore why the US is exceptional in both the level of inequality it tolerates and the generosity and types of remedies to alleviate poverty in comparison to its European counterparts and debate the role of race, unions, electoral politics and institutions. We investigate several specific cases of persistent racial inequality – concentrated poverty, segregation, and incarceration. We investigate both how policies have reinforced racial and gender divisions from a top-down perspective as well as examining under what conditions the disadvantaged contest inequality, exploring how political struggle shapes policy from the bottom-up. The last part of the course examines the consequences of inequality and social policy for representation and citizenship and how economic inequality affects political representation and responsiveness of elites to masses. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.302.    Human Rights and Global Justice.    3 Credits.    This course investigates the norms, rules, and institutions associated with efforts to achieve international and global justice. We begin with arguably the most familiar vehicle for moral advocacy and global justice in the latter part of the twentieth century: international human rights. Readings consider both the achievements and limitations of human rights ideas and institutions. The second part of the course then reflects on the more ambitious question of what global justice could and should look like in the future. The course will address liberal theories as well as critical perspectives, including those concerned with the experiences and struggles of marginalized groups and societies. Readings and discussions will address various pressing topics in global affairs, which may include: food insecurity, humanitarian crises, climate change, racism, global health, migration, and artificial intelligence. Students will complete the course with a deeper understanding of the challenges associated with using rights-based instruments and institutions to remedy global injustices with complex social, cultural, economic, and political underpinnings. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.305.    Human Rights as a Practice, Weapon, and Symbol.    3 Credits.    This course studies the complexity of international human rights as a vehicle for political change. The course approaches human rights as a set of legal instruments and practices, but also as a flexible political and symbolic toolbox used to address sometimes very divergent claims to justice. It pays attention to the roles of states, as well as the growing authority of human rights organizations, institutions, and online networks. We begin with a survey of major international human rights instruments before using a series of case studies to better understand how those instruments are used in practice. Rather than assume that human rights are always effective and benevolent, we set out to consider which kinds of policies they enable and which they foreclose. Cases also raise questions about the universality of human rights across cultural settings and demand critical reflection on how human rights function in North-South relations. The course draws from research aimed at improving the practice of human rights, as well as perspectives approaching human rights as instruments of power. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.306.    Latin American Politics and Society in Comparative and Historical Prespective.    3 Credits.    The seminar will introduce students to the political and economic trajectories of Latin America as a whole and of individual countries, including Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Special attention will be paid to the long-term trajectory of the political regime (democracy versus dictatorship) and of economic development (variations in GDP per capita). Competing theories, from economic dependence to historical institutionalism, will be examined for their contribution to our understanding of Latin America’s relative economic backwardness and low quality democracies. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.308.    Democracy and Dictatorship: Theory and Cases.    3 Credits.    The course will cover three topics: 1) The conceptualization of political regime, democracy and authoritarianism. We will also consider neighboring concepts of other macro-political structures—government, state, and administration—in order to be able to demarcate what is distinctive about the study of political regimes.2) The characterization of political regimes in most Western and some non-Western countries, in history and today. We will centrally focus on the so called “Waves of Democratization,” but we will also consider stories with less happy outcomes, that is, processes that led to the breakdown of democracies and the installation of repressive dictatorships.3) The explanation(s) of the stability and change of political regimes around the world. Theoretical accounts of regime change come in many flavors—emphasis on economic versus political causes, focus on agents and choices versus structures and constraints, international versus domestic factors, among others. We will consider most of them. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.310.    The Global Color Line: American Segregation and Colonial Order.    3 Credits.    At the end of the 19th century racial segregation was imagined as a more than a part of Jim Crow in the U.S. South: it was imagined as a model for global order. Theorists of imperial rule crisscrossed the Atlantic to study “race relations” in the United States to bolster projects of colonial rule in Africa and the Pacific. This course will unpack the theories of spatial, racial, and urban control that underwrote these visions of global order as well as the long-lasting material impact of these ideas on cities across the globe. Together, we will also uncover the role of Baltimore, as the first city in the United States to try and implement a law upholding residential segregation, in these international relations. Other case studies include Charleston, Chicago, and Johannesburg and topics include the politics of rioting, racial capitalism, race war, gender and sexuality, and public health. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.314.    What is Money?.    3 Credits.    This undergraduate seminar will explore the mysteries of money. We will focus on a central and straightforward, but vexing question: what is money? Pursuing this question will take us from deep philosophical explorations of the nature of money, through the diverse history of money and theories of money, to today’s complex and dynamic financial instruments – from securities, to derivatives, to crypto. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) AS.190.315.    Asian American Politics.    3 Credits.    This course examines issues of political identity, political incorporation, and political participation of Asian Americans. Themes include Asian American panethnicity, the struggle for immigration and citizenship, Asian American electoral politics, political activism and resistance since the 1960s, and the impact of Asian Americans on the politics of race and ethnicity in the United States. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.316.    America at War in Korea.    3 Credits.    This course takes a “war and society” approach to the Korean War. It explores the ways in which the war entangled the United States and Korea, shaping society and politics in the US and on the Korean peninsula. The course looks at the Korean War “in the round,” as involving culture, gender, and economy as well as military operations, diplomacy and strategy. We will consider the causes, course and consequences of the war locally and globally and we will look at literature and film as well as history and social science. Properly understanding a war requires an interdisciplinary approach. Students will come away from the course not only knowing about the Korean War but also how to approach understanding any war in all its dimensions. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.317.    Marxism and Revolution.    3 Credits.    What is "Marxism"? After years of obscurity, Marxism has returned to recent political and academic debates, often without any clear indication of what the term might actually mean, or how it might differ from other "radical" political traditions. In this class, we will study and discuss the most important works of Karl Marx and Marxian thinkers, from their philosophical foundations to their analysis of global capitalism, class struggle, and the roles of states and culture. In the second part of the semester, we will trace this tradition through some of the great upheavals in the 20th century: from the Russian Revolution to particular variants of the struggles against colonialism in the developing world and against racism in the United States. In the process, we will focus on the central ideas distinguishing Marxism from other philosophies as well as from adjacent, allied, and rival political movements. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.318.    Does Israel Have a Future?.    3 Credits.    The future of Israel has never been more uncertain. Although external threats from Arab countries have abated, the danger posed by a nuclear attack from Iran grows with each passing day. Equally alarming is the growing domestic threat to Israel’s existence as a Jewish democracy. Efforts by Israel’s ruling coalition to weaken the High Court call into question whether the liberal democratic character of Israel can persist. The possibility of civil war, once thought impossible, cannot be discounted. In assessing how Israel can cope with these existential threats, lessons from the destruction of the ancient Israelite kingdoms will be examined. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.319.    Policy & Politics Design.    3 Credits.    The study of public policy is the study of power—who has it, how it is acquired, and how policies themselves grant or diminish the power of individuals and groups. It is also the study of choice—how political actors make consequential decisions to deploy their resources in different ways, some of which enhance magnify their power while others diminish it. This class will examine the scholarly literature on how public policy is made and how it can be changed. We will also engage directly with actors seeking to change public policy, in order to integrate our academic knowledge with their practical experience. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.322.    Future of American Democracy.    3 Credits.    For the most part, observers of American politics have not considered the possibility that the American democratic regime might be at risk. But the unexpected election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the subsequent course of his presidency have occasioned a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety about whether democracy in the United States is at risk and whether American political institutions can withstand the stresses of contemporary politics. This course will use the Trump era to explore the conditions that seem to threaten the stability of the American regime. We will begin by exploring the political circumstances that led to Trump’s rise. We will then examine what we can learn from the experience of other countries about the conditions that make democracy either robust or fragile. Finally, we will consider how a set of contemporary political conditions in the United States — extreme partisan polarization, intense racial antagonism, growing economic inequality, and expanded executive power — contribute to the challenges facing American democracy today and in the future. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.324.    The Law of Democracy: The United States and Canada in Comparative Perspective.    3 Credits.    The Law of Democracy refers to the statutes, court decisions, and other practices that govern the electoral processes. Although the United States and Canada have a great deal in common, they have approached many of the problems involved in institutionalizing democracy quite differently. Recognizing these differences should contribute to understanding both the strengths, and the problems, of the two approaches. Specific topic will include the right to vote, political finance, delineation of district boundaries, electoral dispute resolution, and the role of electoral management bodies and elections administrators. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.326.    Democracy And Elections.    3 Credits.    An examination of most aspects of democratic elections with the exception of th e behavior of voters. Topics include the impact of various electoral systems and administrative reforms on the outcome of elections, standards for evaluations of electoral systems, and the impact of the Arrow problem on normative theories of democratic elections. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.327.    Politics of Information.    3 Credits.    Considers global and comparative politics of information, information technologies, and the Internet. Examines governance of information (ownership of information, rights to information, privacy) and governance of information technologies (domain names, social media websites, etc.). Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.328.    Political Thought in the Americas.    3 Credits.    Reflection on political ideas and institutions in the United States is often oriented by the notion that the US is in some sense exceptional. For some commentators, the US is exceptionally democratic, exceptionally stable, exceptionally productive, and exceptionally innovative. For others, the US is exceptionally racist, exceptionally unequal, exceptionally violent, and exceptionally unhealthy. What both sides share is a common point of comparative reference in Europe. For all these commentators, Europe is the norm against which all of the exceptional qualities of the US stand out. In this course, we will ask how well notions of US exceptionalism stand up against the different comparative references found in the Americas, focusing in particular on the history of political thought in the Americas. We’ll begin by studying texts from the pre-colonial and colonial periods, noting similarities and differences between the political institutions, economies, and social and racial hierarchies of in the regions that comprised British, Spanish, Portuguese, and French America. Next, we’ll consider the US, Latin American, and Caribbean independence movements, early constitutionalism, and debates on women’s role in society, slavery, and the rights of Indigenous Americans, asking what, if anything, distinguished the US from its neighbors in its early years. Finally, we’ll examine theories of imperialism, racism, patriarchy, exploitation, and environmental destruction that have emerged from the Americas in the course of the 20th century, to see how both shared and divergent historical experiences have shaped perspectives relevant to contemporary political issues. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.329.    National Security-Nuclear Age.    3 Credits.    This course examines the impact of weapons of mass destruction on international politics with an emphasis on security issues. The first half of the course focuses on the history of nuclear weapons development during the Cold War and theories of deterrence. The second half of the class considers contemporary issues including terrorism, chemical and biological weapons, ballistic missile defense and proliferation. Requirements include a midterm, final and a ten page paper. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.330.    Japanese Politics.    3 Credits.    This course introduces students to the major debates and issues of postwar Japanese politics. Topics include nationalism, electoral politics, civil society, and immigration. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.331.    America and the World.    3 Credits.    This course is a survey of the unique position of the United States in world politics. We will cover the broader international relations literature on the dynamics of hegemony and empire, from work in the realist tradition to more critical approaches. The course will encompass security politics as well as the economic and monetary dimensions of American influence. Interested students must have at least completed one 100 or 200 level introductory course in international relations. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.333.    American Constitutional Law.    3 Credits.    This course covers enduring debates about the way the Constitution has structured the U.S. government and about which powers the Constitution assigns to the federal government and to the states. We will examine these debates in the context of American political history and thought by studying the writings of prominent participants, and landmark Supreme Court cases. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.334.    Constitutional Law.    3 Credits.    Topics include executive and emergency power, racial and gender equality, and selected free speech and religious freedom issues. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.335.    Imagining Borders.    3 Credits.    What is a border and why do borders matter in global politics. What do borders mean under conditions of globalization? An examination of the politics of borders, transborder flows, and networks within and across borders. The readings, which come from political science and other social science disciplines, will include theoretical and case-specific works. Goals for this writing intensive course also include learning to identify researchable questions, to engage with the scholarly literature, and to understand appropriate standards of evidence for making claims. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.339.    American Racial Politics.    3 Credits.    Recommended Course Background: AS.190.214 Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.340.    Black Politics I.    3 Credits.    This course is a survey of the bases and substance of politics among black Americans and the relation of black politics to the American political system up to the end of Jim Crow. The intention is both to provide a general sense of pertinent issues and relations over this period as a way of helping to make sense of the present and to develop criteria for evaluating political scientists' and others' claims regarding the status and characteristics of black American political activity. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.342.    Black Politics II.    3 Credits.    Recommended Course Background: AS.190.340 . Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.344.    Seminar In Anti-Semitism.    3 Credits.    Jews exercise a good deal of power in contemporary America.. They are prominent in a number of key industries, play important roles in the political process, and hold many major national offices. For example, though Jews constitute barely two percent of America’s citizens, about one-third of the nation’s wealthiest 400 individuals are Jewish and more than ten percent of the seats in the U.S. Congress are held by Jews. One recent book declared that, “From the Vatican to the Kremlin, from the White House to Capitol Hill, the world’s movers and shakers view American Jewry as a force to be reckoned with.” Of course, Jews have risen to power in many times and places ranging from the medieval Muslim world and early modern Spain through Germany and the Soviet Union in the 20th century. In nearly every prior instance, though, Jewish power proved to be evanescent. No sooner had the Jews become “a force to be reckoned with” than they found themselves banished to the political ma rgins, forced into exile or worse. Though it may rise to a great height, the power of the Jews seems ultimately to rest on a rather insecure foundation. Cross-listed with Jewish Studies. Course is open to juniors and seniors. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.345.    Public Opinion.    3 Credits.    This course provides an overview of public opinion in the United States. We will explore what affects people’s political opinions, how opinions change, and how opinions affect (and are affected by) politics. Some of the questions we will discuss are: What is public opinion? How much do Americans know about politics? How do the issue positions of leading politicians affect public opinion? How do race relations affect public opinion? What role does partisanship play in all this? When and how do people change their minds about politics? How can my voice be heard in politics? The class will read papers that include quantitative/statistical work; a prior knowledge of statistical methods would be helpful but it is not required for success in the course. The final paper will be based on an original research project, the successful completion of which does not require any statistical training. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.346.    Foundations of International Relations Theory.    3 Credits.    This course is a broad conceptual introduction to international relations theory in a format that stresses close reading and critical discussion. We will explore mainstream theoretical perspectives and critiques of those perspectives, as well as more recent developments in the field. By the end of the course, students will have a firm grasp of the core issues and debates in the field. The course is conceptually demanding; interested students should have at least completed an introductory course in political science. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.347.    A New Cold War? Sino-American Relations in the 21st Century.    3 Credits.    “Can the United States and China avoid a new Cold War? One might think not given disputes over the South China Sea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, human rights, trade, ideology and so much more. Moreover, competition for influence in the developing world and American concerns as to whether China will replace it as the preeminent world power suggest a new Cold War is in the offing. Nevertheless, their extensive economic ties and need to work together to solve common problems such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, and pandemics argues against a continuing confrontation. This course will examine whether cooperation or conflict will define Sino-American relations, and whether a new Cold War—or even a shooting war—lies in the future.” Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.348.    Business, Finance, and Government in E. Asia.    3 Credits.    Business, Finance, and Government in East Asia explores the dynamics of East Asia's economic growth (and crises) over the last fifty years. We will examine Japan's post-war development strategy, the Asian tiger economies, and China's dramatic rise. Centered on case studies of major corporations, this course examines the interplay between politics and economics in East Asia, and considers the following questions: How have businesses navigated East Asia’s complex market environment? In what ways can the state foster economic development? How has the financial system been organized to facilitate investment? What are the long-term prospects for growth in the region? Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.350.    Political Violence.    3 Credits.    An examination of the ways in which violence has been used to secure political ends. Topics include civil wars, targeted killings, terrorism, ethnic conflict and war itself. Students examine what makes types of political violence unique and what unites them. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.353.    China and the World.    3 Credits.    This introductory course explores China's expanding global presence and influence in the context of rising US-China tensions. We will begin with an overview of China's rise since market opening in the 1980s, leading up to its ascendence as a global power in recent times. In addition to learning about the historical and political-economic dimensions of China's engagement with the world, the course aims to impart you with some basic skills in evaluating the quality of evidence and expertise, so that you can form your own informed assessment of contentious issues. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.355.    Comparative Racial Politics.    3 Credits.    Whether thought of as a biological reality or a social construction, “race” is viewed simultaneously as global and as intensely domestic. In this course I seek to examine race from a comparative perspective. What if we thought of race as a political construction, one produced both domestically and transnationally? In this class we will examine how race and racism are produced across as well as within borders, comparing the United States with similar and dissimilar cases. Further we will examine how comparative racial politics shape and are shaped by political movements, ideologies, and orders. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.357.    The State of Nature.    3 Credits.    Though it is possible to imagine ways of addressing the multiple crises the world will face as the atmosphere warms, seas rise, and pollutants seep into the surface of the planet, any serious proposal will require a degree of coordination amongst nation-states that has proven impossible to achieve in the past. In this course, we will consider this difficult situation by treating it as an instance of an old problem in political theory: how to escape the infamous “state of nature,” where individuals struggle to obtain the resources they need to survive at others’ expense, rather than cooperating to satisfy their needs and address the threats they face in common. First, we will study some influential reflections on the state of nature by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Freud, and Pateman, as well as efforts to apply the logic of the state of nature to problems in international politics by Kant, Wendt, Waltz, Enloe, and others. Then we will read contemporary work on the international politics of climate change and ask what it would take to start building the better world that is possible today. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.360.    Data Science meets Political Science.    1 Credit.    How might data science help us to better understand political phenomena? This course allows students who might not be computer scientists to understand the various applications of data science in political science. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4) AS.190.364.    Conversations on the Crisis in the Middle East.    1 Credit.    This class introduces students to some of the most vexing issues in the Middle East. Students will listen to a series of five Zoom conversations from renowned experts with diverse views discussing anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, origins of the conflict and possible solutions, human rights, international law, and freedom of speech and academic freedom. After each session, the class will get together (usually over lunch or dinner) to discuss the points made by the speakers. At the end of the course, students will submit a ten-page paper on a subject related to these discussions. No prior experience in Middle East affairs or international politics is required. Distribution Area: Humanities AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.365.    Research and Inquiry in the Social Sciences.    3 Credits.    How do we assess research in the social sciences? What makes one study more persuasive than another? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the main methods used in research in the social sciences? What are the elements that go into designing a research project? This course considers these questions, introducing students to the basic principles of research design. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.366.    Free Speech and the Law in Comparative Perspective.    3 Credits.    This class explores the ideas and legal doctrines that define the freedom of speech. We will examine the free speech jurisprudence of the U.S. in comparison to that of other systems, particularly the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the Supreme Court of Canada. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.370.    Chinese Politics.    3 Credits.    This course is designed to help students better understand the politics of China. Lectures will focus on the tools of governance that China has employed to navigate its transition from plan to market, provide public goods and services to its citizens, and to maintain social control over a rapidly changing society. The course will draw heavily from texts covering a range of subjects including China's political economy, social and cultural developments, regime dynamics, and historical legacies. Students interested in authoritarian resilience, governance, post-communist transition, and domestic will find this course particularly instructive. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.373.    Theories of Global Violence.    3 Credits.    In this course, we will explore a constellation of theories loosely tied together under the rubric ‘violence’. Where and to whom does violence occur? What qualifies as violent, and why? The focus of our attention be both above and below state-to-state wars and international relations. Although war will never be far from our focus, our emphasis will be on those forms of violence that are not reducible to the traditional notion of international conflict. Political theory will help us better understand violence; violence will help us better understand political theory. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.374.    Political Violence.    3 Credits.    This undergraduate seminar is designed to introduce students to the comparative study of political violence and intra-state conflict. We will examine social science theories and empirical studies on a wide range of forms of political violence, including civil war, coups, state repression, communal violence, riots, terrorism, genocide, and criminal-political violence. We will study these phenomena at the micro, meso and macro levels, and focus on understanding their causes, dynamics, outcomes, and aftermath. The class will also equip students with an ability to analyze political violence by using social scientific tools. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.377.    Rastafari in Baltimore and the Caribbean: Transnational Community Development in the Black World.    3 Credits.    This is an exploratory research lab course that examines Rastafari – a transnational movement with roots in the Caribbean and presence in Baltimore and DC. Students learn about the history, philosophy, and practices of the movement as well as its confrontations with racist systems of political and economic governance. Students are prepared to undertake research with the movement, which culminates in a week long immersion with the movement in Jamaica. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.378.    The U.S. Supreme Court and Social Movements.    3 Credits.    This class explores the relationship between the U.S. Supreme Court and the social movements that have shaped or resisted its rulings. It examines both contemporary and historical cases of social movement influence on the development of constitutional law in areas including: civil rights, reproductive rights, rights to gun ownership, and debt relief. We will read Supreme Court opinions as well as scholarship in legal theory and movement politics. Throughout the class, we will ask whether and how grass-roots politics can drive constitutional change. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.379.    Nationalism and the Politics of Identity.    3 Credits.    Nationalism ties powerful organizations to political mobilization, territory, and individual loyalty. Yet nationalism is typically studied in isolation from other social formations that depend upon organizational – individual linkages. Alternative types of identity category sometimes depend similarly upon organizations that collect and deploy resources, mobilize individuals, erect boundaries, and promote strong emotional connections among individuals as well as between individuals and institutions. In this class, we study classic and contemporary works on nationalism, drawn from multiple disciplinary and analytic traditions, in the comparative context of alternative forms of identity. The focus of the class will be primarily theoretical, with no regional or temporal limitations. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.384.    Urban Politics.    3 Credits.    An analysis of public policy and policy-making for American Cities. Special attention will be given to the subject of urban crime and law enforcement, poverty and welfare, and intergovernmental relations. Cross-listed with Africana Studies Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.385.    Urban Policy.    3 Credits.    An analysis of public policy and policy-making for American Cities. Special attention will be given to the subject of urban crime and law enforcement, poverty and welfare, and intergovernmental relations. Cross listed with Africana Studies. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.388.    Race and the Politics of Memory.    3 Credits.    This is a writing intensive, advanced undergraduate political theory seminar. The course will examine the politics of memory: how power shapes what is available to be remembered, the timing and occasions of memory, who is allowed to remember, and the spaces inside of which remembrance takes place. Specifically, the seminar will explore how segregated memory enables racial segregation and racial inequality. Toward that end, we shall investigate political and theoretical interventions potentially equipped to contest contemporary forms of racial amnesia haunting what some have labeled a “post-truth” world. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.390.    Race and American Democracy.    3 Credits.    While the United States has long been a democracy for white men, it has mostly been anything but democratic when seen through the eyes of Black Americans. But progress toward the expansion of democracy has occurred at a few times in American history. What made American democratization possible, and how might the United States again move toward more complete and inclusive democracy? AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.391.    Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism.    3 Credits.    Since antiquity, global politics have been defined by the struggle between imperialism and anti-imperialism. This course examines the arguments that have accompanied this struggle, considering influential texts written to defend or to denounce empires, as well as contemporary scholarship on imperial and anti-imperial ideologies. We will focus in particular on how imperial conflicts shaped natural law, international law, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism, as well as the connections between imperialism and contemporary capitalism, development assistance, and humanitarian intervention. The fundamental questions for the course are: What is an empire? and What would it mean to decolonize our world, our international institutions, and our minds? Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.393.    Nonviolent Resistance in World Politics.    3 Credits.    In this seminar we examine the origins, dynamics, and consequences of nonviolent struggles around the world. How do ordinary people organize for social change? What are the differences in people power campaigns in authoritarian and democratic contexts? When does nonviolent resistance succeed or fail, and what are the political consequences of these outcomes? In answering these questions, we will study the central ideas behind nonviolent action, learn about the most important scholarly discoveries in this field and analyze paradigmatic cases. Students will choose a historical or contemporary nonviolent movement to interrogate throughout the semester, as we learn new concepts, theories, and empirical patterns to make sense of them. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.394.    Comparative Politics of the Middle East and North Africa.    3 Credits.    This course examines the domestic, regional, and transnational politics of the Middle East and North Africa. The class is organized into three units. The first examines major armed conflicts—anti-colonial, intra-state, and inter-state—from 1948 through the 1990s. It uses these historical moments as windows onto key issues in Middle Eastern and North African political issues such as external intervention/occupation, human rights, sectarianism, social movements, and memory politics. Unit Two focuses on policy relevant issues such as democratization, minority populations, religion and politics, and gender. In Unit Three, students will explore the politics of the Arab Uprisings through critical reading and discussion of new (post-2011) scholarship on MENA states, organizations, and populations. Enrollment limited to Political Science and International Studies majors. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.396.    Capitalism and Ecology.    3 Credits.    Capitalism and Ecology focuses on the relations between capitalism and climate during the era of the Anthropocene. How do capitalist processes of fossil extraction, consumption, production and governance contribute to the pace of climate warming, glacier flows, the ocean conveyor system, species loss and other phenomena? What are the effects and the possible modes of political response? How do the nonhuman, self-organizing processes such as glaciers, oceans and climate change on their own as they also amplify the effects of capitalist emissions? The course combines texts on capitalism and activism with those by geoscientists on how the nonhuman systems work. Books by authors in the fields of political theory, geology, anthropology, economics, philosophy and ethology will be drawn upon. Authors such as Michael Benton, Brian Fagan, Hayek, Naomi Klein, Fred Hirsch, Fred Pearce, van Dooren and Connolly are apt to be read to engage these issues. A previous course in political theory is recommended. The class is organized around student presentations on assigned readings. Two papers, 10-12 pages in length. Extensive class discussion. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.397.    The Politics of International Law.    3 Credits.    This course introduces students of politics to international law. We will explore historical roots and current problems, recognizing along the way persistent contestation over the participants, sources, purposes, and interests associated with international law. The course situates formal aspects of law—centered on international treaties, international organizations, the World Court (ICJ), and the International Criminal Court (ICC)—within a broader field of global governance consisting of treaty-based and customary law, states and transnational actors, centralized and decentralized forms of legal authority. We will place special emphasis on the significance of international law to colonialism, decolonization, and contemporary forms of imperialism, keeping in mind that the law has been experienced differently in the Global South and by actors not recognized as sovereign by states in positions of power. Students will be exposed to a range of approaches, including rational choice, various species of legalism, process-oriented theories, critical legal studies, and postcolonial critiques. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.398.    Politics Of Good & Evil.    3 Credits.    The Politics of Good and Evil examines comparatively a series of classical myths and modern philosophies concerning the sources of evil, the nature of goodness and nobility, the relations of culture to politics, nature and the gods, the degree to which any metaphysic or theological faith is certain, and so on. It is a course in “elemental theory” in the sense that each text pursued challenges and disrupts others we read. Often the reader is disrupted existentially too, in ways that may spur new thought. A previous course in political theory or a theoretical course in the humanities is advised. A high tolerance for theory is essential. Texts on or by Sophocles, Job, Genesis ("J" version), Augustine, Voltaire, Nietzsche, James Baldwin, W. Connolly and Elizabeth Kolbert form the core of the class. Assignments: 1) One 12 page paper and a second 5-7 page paper, both anchored in the readings; 2) a class presentation on one text; 3) regular attendance and quality participation in class discussions. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.405.    Food Politics.    3 Credits.    This course examines the politics of food at the local, national, and global level. Topics include the politics of agricultural subsidies, struggles over genetically modified foods, government efforts at improving food safety, and issues surrounding obesity and nutrition policy. Juniors, seniors, and graduate students only. Cross-listed with Public Health Studies. A student who takes AS.190.223 (Understanding the Food System) in Summer 2021 cannot also enroll in this course. Prerequisite(s): A student who takes AS.190.223 (Understanding the Food System) cannot also enroll in this course. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.406.    The Executive Branch.    3 Credits.    In the 19th Century America was noted for its courts, political parties and representative institutions. Today, America’s political parties and representative institutions have declined in importance while the institutions of the executive branch have increased in importance. This seminar will examine the nation’s key executive institutions and aspects of executive governance in the U.S. Students will alternate primary responsibility for week’s readings. Every student will prepare a 10-15 page review and critique of the books for which they are responsible in class. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.408.    Sovereignty: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Issues.    3 Credits.    This seminar provides an in-depth exploration of the concept of sovereignty as the central organizing concept of international relations. Rather than taking it for granted as a framework that simply individuates state actors in international politics, we will explore the history of its emergence in colonial and imperial relations and trace its interactions with phenomena such as nationalism, globalization, territoriality, and intervention. The course is open to undergraduates with previous coursework in political science. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.413.    Asian American Political Thought.    3 Credits.    Despite growing awareness in other subfields of political science of the importance of Asian Americans as a political constituency, Asian American political theory and thought has yet to be recognized. This course provides an opportunity to investigate and interrogate the possibility of a textual “tradition” of Asian American political thought, including writings by thinkers before the invention of “Asian American” as an analytic, political, and identity category. How do Asian American writers, thinkers, and activists conceive of core political concepts such as freedom, citizenship, inclusion, and justice in the face of longstanding historical injustices–ranging from legal and social exclusion to internment? How do Asian Americans understand, portray, and attempt to alter their social position and relation to state power? What tools of resistance were available to them, and how did they use those tools to negotiate and reconfigure central conceptual categories of political thought and politics? We will engage a wide-ranging group of Asian and Asian American writers as well as contemporary theorists, as well as a variety of genres. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.414.    Frontiers of Empirical Political Science.    3 Credits.    This advanced level course is intended to help students understand the frontiers of empirical political science research – that is, research concerned with answering causal questions – as presented in recent books by (for the most part) junior scholars. The books represent the substantive and methodological pluralism of our field, with books coming from American, Comparative, IR, and Political Economy. We will give two weeks’ treatment to most books on the syllabus, spending the first week reading “motivating” or classic material that inspired the book project, as well a companion of a key methodological text that inspired the research design. Along with reading the materials that help to situate the book in larger debates in its subfield we will read the first several chapters of the book. In the second week of discussion we will read the second half of the book – the evidence chapters and the conclusion – and focus on understanding whether and how the evidence that is presented matches with the theoretical and empirical claims made in the book’s beginnings. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.415.    Political Arts: Dada, Surrealism, and Societal Metamorphoses.    3 Credits.    In the years between World Wars I and II, a fascinating group of artists, manifesto-writers, performers, intellectuals, and poets, in Europe and the Caribbean, who were put off by conventional politics of the time, decided to pursue other means of societal transformation. This seminar explores the aims and tactics, and strengths and liabilities, of Dada and Surrealism, as it operated in Europe and the Americas in the years between the World Wars. We will also read texts and images from writers and artists influenced by Dada and Surrealism but applied to different historical and political contexts. Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.001.193 OR AS.190.613 are not eligible to take AS.190.415 . Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.421.    Violence: State and Society.    3 Credits.    This course will examine violence that occurs mainly within the territory of nominally sovereign states. We will focus on violence as an object of study in its own right. For the most part, we will look at violence as a dependent variable, though in some instances it will function as an independent variable, a mechanism, or an equilibrium. We will ask why violence starts, how it “works” or fails to work, why it takes place in some locations and not others, why violence take specific forms (e.g., insurgency, terrorism, civilian victimization, etc.), what explains its magnitude (the number of victims), and what explains targeting (the type or identity of victims). Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.423.    Planetary Geopolitics.    3 Credits.    With the tools of geopolitics, course explores political debates over globalization of machine civilization and changes in scope and pace, space and place, and role of nature in human affairs. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.425.    The New Deal and American Politics.    3 Credits.    This seminar explores how the New Deal, the fundamental moment in the post-Civil War United States, has structured politics and government across a variety of domains ever since. Topics include presidential leadership, executive power, political parties, labor, race, and the welfare state. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.427.    Political Economy of Japan and Korea.    3 Credits.    This upper-level seminar examines some of the major debates and issues of postwar Japanese and South Korean political economy. Topics include nationalism, gender politics, civil society, immigration, and US-Japan-South Korea trilateral relations. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.428.    Hobbes and Spinoza.    3 Credits.    A close reading of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Ethics by Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), with consideration of important commentaries on these works. What conceptions of the human being, nature, reason, God, and freedom are defended and affirmed by Hobbes and Spinoza? What rhetorical strategies accompany their theories of self, ethics, social life? Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.190.628 are not eligible to take AS.190.428 . AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.429.    Politics of the Market Economy.    3 Credits.    Although “the market” is conventionally understood as separate from “politics”, the modern market economy did not arise in a political vacuum. In fact, the very separation between the economy and politics is itself the product of a politically potent set of ideas. This course is an upper-division reading seminar on the origins and evolution of the modern market economy. Readings will include Smith, Marx, Weber, Polanyi, Keynes, Hayek, Friedman, Becker, and Foucault. Recommended course background: Introduction to comparative politics OR any college-level course in social or political theory. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.432.    Afropessimism.    3 Credits.    Afropessimism represents a critical body of thought that takes as its fundamental premises two ideas, the Black is the Slave, and in order to end that ontological condition the world must end. In this course, we will interrogate the key readings associated with this body of thought as well as responses. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.437.    Race and Ethnic Politics in the United States.    3 Credits.    Race has been and continues to be centrally important to American political life and development. In this course, we will engage with the major debates around racial politics in the United States, with a substantial focus on how policies and practices of citizenship, immigration law, social provision, and criminal justice policy shaped and continue to shape racial formation, group-based identities, and group position; debates around the content and meaning of political representation and the responsiveness of the political system to American minority groups; debates about how racial prejudice has shifted and its importance in understanding American political behavior; the prospects for contestation or coalitions among groups; the “struggle with difference” within groups as they deal with the interplay of race and class, citizenship status, and issues that disproportionately affect a subset of their members; and debates about how new groups and issues are reshaping the meaning and practice of race in the United States. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.438.    Violence and Politics.    3 Credits.    This seminar will address the role of violence–both domestic and international–in political life. Though most claim to abhor violence, since the advent of recorded history, violence and politics have been intimately related. States practice violence against internal and external foes. Political dissidents engage in violence against states. Competing political forces inflict violence upon one another. Writing in 1924, Winston Churchill declared–and not without reason–that, "The story of the human race is war." Indeed, violence and the threat of violence are the most potent forces in political life. It is, to be sure, often averred that problems can never truly be solved by the use of force. Violence, the saying goes, is not the answer. This adage certainly appeals to our moral sensibilities. But whether or not violence is the answer presumably depends upon the question being asked. For better or worse, it is violence that usually provides the most definitive answers to three of the major questions of political life--statehood, territoriality and power. Violent struggle, in the form of war, revolution, civil war, terrorism and the like, more than any other immediate factor, determines what states will exist and their relative power, what territories they will occupy, and which groups will and will not exercise power within them. Course is open to juniors and seniors. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.439.    The American State from Above and Below.    3 Credits.    Despite its well-known idiosyncrasies, the American state has consistently wielded substantial power, and many Americans have long experienced the state’s power as potent, omnipresent, and structuring their lives in important ways. This research-based course will examine theories of the state and political authority both from “above” - considering the political sources of both the American state’s power and its limitations - and from “below,” using people’s own narratives and political formations to explore how Americans develop knowledge about the state, confront and resist the state’s power, and expand or shift its distribution of ‘public’ goods. How do people understand the state, theorize its operations and possibilities, deploy it, and sometimes build parallel structures of provision and governance? We explore several cases of when people marginalized by race, class, gender, or precarious legal standing organized deep challenges to state power and transformed state authority. Considering the state as both formal structure and frame for everyday experience can offer a fresh perspective on contemporary democratic challenges and political struggles. Students will conduct original research using archives and sources like the American Prison Writing Archive, oral history archives like the Ralph Bunche collection and HistoryMakers collection, and archival sources in the History Vault such as the Kerner Commission interviews. The course is appropriate for advanced undergraduates (juniors and seniors), preferably having taken courses in political science or related coursework, and graduate students in political science, history, and sociology. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.440.    European Politics in Comparative Perspective.    3 Credits.    Europe has been in a sense the first testing ground for theories of comparative politics, but many outsiders now see Europe as a pacified and somewhat boring place. This course will question conventional wisdom through an examination of European politics in historical and cross-national perspective. We will apply the comparative method to the study of European politics today, and conversely we will ask what Europe tells us more generally about politics. We will see that Europe is still a locus of intense conflict as well as remarkably diverse experimentation. Topics will include: political, legal, and economic governance; the evolution of democracy and fundamental rights, the welfare state, class stratification, immigration and race, the role of religion; European integration and globalization. Recommended background: Introduction to Comparative Politics. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.443.    Politics of Outer Space.    3 Credits.    Humans have long dreamed of leaving Earth and venturing into the vastness of cosmic outer space. During the 20th century space travel became a real possibility, stimulating an extraordinary outpouring of visionary space projects. Space Expansionists claim these projects are increasingly feasible and desirable. Advocates assert that human expansion into space will fundamentally improve the human situation by enabling perennial human goals (improved security from violence, expanded and protected habitat, and ultimately survival of the human species). In the first steps beyond the atmosphere, a variety of military, scientific, and utilitarian activities have been conducted. The history of space activities has been marked by sudden and unexpected spurts of activity, followed by periods of relative stagnation. Recent developments point to another period of rapid expansion: renewed military tensions, new space private sector initiatives, renewed interest in Luna, and growing efforts to divert and mine asteroids. A core part of the arguments for the desirability of space expansion are geopolitical in that they claim broadly political effects will result from humans interacting with extraterrestrial material environments composed of particular combinations geographies and human-built artifacts. Space expansionist arguments are advanced through analogies to Earth geographies (e.g. space is an ocean), as well as large-scale historical trends and patterns. Space expansion is advanced as the opening of a new frontier, reversing the contemporary global closure brought about by rising levels of interdependence. The goal of space expansionists is to make humanity a multi-world species, and it is anticipated that biological species radiation will occur. This course explores the causes and consequences of space activity; how space activities reflect and effect world political order; and whether human expansion into space is desirable, as its fervent advocates believe. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.444.    Comparative Politics.    3 Credits.    This course offers a graduate-level introduction to the field of comparative politics, focusing on the substantive questions that drive contemporary research. Issues will include: state formation and state capacity; regime typology, democratization, and democratic backsliding; party systems and political behavior; political economy and economic development; racial, ethnic, and religious politics; and revolutions and political violence. Readings include both classic and recent works, selected to help students both prepare for major or minor comprehensive exams and frame their own research projects. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.449.    War and Society in World Politics.    3 Credits.    This course is an advanced introduction to war in the modern world, encompassing its political, social, cultural and ecological dimensions. It adopts a “war and society” approach in that it covers the ways in which society shapes war and, in turn, how war shapes society. It situates “war and society” in an historically evolving global context, attending to the nature of war in both the core and the periphery of world politics. Topics include the totalization and industrialization of war; civil-military relations; modernity, reason and war; “small war”; and race, culture and war. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.451.    Geopolitics.    3 Credits.    Intensive exploration of theories of how geography, ecology, and technology shape political orders. Case studies of ancient, early modern, global, and contemporary topics, including European ascent, industrial revolution, tropics and North South divide, climate change, geo-engineering and global commons (oceans, atmosphere and orbital space AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.454.    Nuclear Weapons and World Politics.    3 Credits.    Over the seven decades since their invention, nuclear weapons have been a central focus in international politics. This course explores the fundamental question: what political arrangements ensure security from nuclear weapons? The debate has evolved through three stages. Initially (1945-1960), radical political changes were anticipated due to the perceived imminent threat of nuclear war. In the second stage (1960-1990), deterrence became a key concept, but opinions differed on the necessary conditions for it. The end of the Cold War marked an unexpected shift. In the third stage (1990-present), concerns about proliferation and terrorism emerged, leading to disagreements on preventive/pre-emptive actions versus arms control and disarmament. Realist international theories have been conflicted throughout these stages, with ongoing debates on arms control, public involvement, and the impact of nuclear security measures on liberal democratic governments. Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.190.416 are not eligible to take AS.190.454 . Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.456.    Humanitarianism and World Politics.    3 Credits.    Humanitarianism has become a pervasive form of moral and political action in world politics. Over the course of the twentieth century and beyond, humanitarian logics infused the conduct of war and informed global governance in many areas—from refugee relief and post-conflict reconstruction, to peacekeeping and development, to migration, ecological security, and recovery from natural disasters. And yet, while often celebrated as an achievement, humanitarianism involves ambiguities, contradictions, and pathologies demanding critical scrutiny. This seminar aims, first, to interrogate critically the history of humanitarian practices and, second, to refine and revise concepts used to study and evaluate those practices. We pursue these aims in part with an eye to understanding mutations of humanitarian politics accompanying contemporary challenges to the post-WWII liberal international order. Topics include: (1) the invention of “humanity” as an idea/ideal; (2)humanitarianism, war and empire; (3) varities of humanitarianism; (4) humanitarian violence; (5) humanitarian expertise and institutions; (6) humanitarianism, media, and technology; Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.190.656 are not eligible to take AS.190.456 . Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.457.    Sovereignty, the State, and War in International Politics.    3 Credits.    We are used to thinking of sovereignty, the state, and war as fairly self-evident concepts and as the bedrock of so much work, not only in academic international relations, but also in policy discourse. It seems straightforward that sovereign states wage war, and war in turn may make or break states. Under conditions of rapidly advancing globalization, however, the relationship of these concepts is anything but straightforward. This class builds on historical investigations into state formation, the relationship of the military instrument to the state, the progressive globalization of the defense industrial base, the rapidly changing practices of security under technical innovation, and related phenomena to question notions of state and security and to better understand the past and present fault lines of conflict. This is a graduate course that welcomes advanced undergraduates with previous international relations coursework at instructor’s discretion. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.458.    Global climate Politics: Net-Zero Industrial Policy and World Order.    3 Credits.    This course will survey the history of geopolitics and green industrial from China’s wind and solar push in the 1990s to the Inflation Reduction Act and beyond. We will seek to understand the determinants of industrial policy, best practices for industrial policy, and the effects of industrial policy on climate politics. The lens of geopolitics and industrial policy provides a unique avenue to understand world order. Through this lens, we will see how energy systems and technology competition animate and structure global politics. Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.190.658 are not eligible to take AS.190.458 . Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.459.    Money and Sovereignty.    3 Credits.    The power to coin money was historically central to the formation of sovereign states. Yet the relationship between money and sovereignty has considerably evolved over time. First, the emergence of nation-states and of popular sovereignty meant that money was no longer primarily a state and elite concern, but also increasingly a matter of everyday life and mass politics. Second, the increasing integration and financialization of the world economy produced new challenges for sovereignty. We will discuss historical and social science scholarship that address these historical trends and the politics of money and sovereignty today. Topics will include: capitalism, public budgets and debts, central banks, populism, democracy, financialization, international integration. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.467.    Theories of Justice.    3 Credits.    This course will explore the classic question, “What is justice?” While we will entertain several different answers to the question, the course will focus on how these answers speak to and past one another, illuminating contemporary quandaries related to intergenerational justice, global justice, and the justice of resistance. Guided by Nietzsche, we will read texts by authors including, among others, Plato, Kant, Bentham, Marx, Rawls, Nozick, and West. Over the course of the semester, students will write three papers. There will also be a final exam. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.468.    Federalism, Sovereignty, and The State.    3 Credits.    Federalism has become an increasingly widespread constitutional form in the world — in America, but also in Europe, the "cradle of the nation-state," and on other continents. While it typically resolves political problems, it also raises many questions about the nature of states and of sovereignty. This course will discuss scholarship that addresses federalism, sovereignty, and the state, both in contemporary politics and in historical perspective. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.469.    White Supremacy.    3 Credits.    This is a writing intensive, advanced undergraduate political theory seminar on racial formation. Specifically, the course examines white supremacy in politics and theory. We shall take a critical-historical approach to theorize the continuities and changes in whiteness over time. For instance, what power hierarchies and political goals has white identity been fashioned to advance historically? By studying whiteness as race---and not the absence thereof--we will take up questions of how to best understand and contest contemporary manifestations of white supremacy in environmental racism, imperialism, discourses of race war and replacement theory, and ongoing neo-colonial, biopolitical and death-dealing necropolitical projects. Building on this work, we will investigate the white disavowal of existential crises of climate change and pandemic threats within apocalyptic modes of whiteness---ways of thinking and acting where the end of white supremacy is imagined and lived as the real end of the world. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.470.    States and Democracy.    3 Credits.    The focus of the seminar is on the formation and transformation sates and regimes. The perspective is both historical and comparative, covering Western Europe, Latin America, Africa and the US as a “non exceptional” case. This is fundamentally a Comparative Politics course, but APD students will almost certainly benefit from it. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.471.    The University and Society.    3 Credits.    In the 20th century, American universities became the envy of the world, leading in most categories of scholarly productivity and attracting students from every nation. In recent years, though, American higher education has come to face a number of challenges including rapidly rising costs, administrative bloat, corporatization and moocification. We will examine the problems and promises of American higher education, the political struggles within the university and the place of the university in the larger society. Upper classes and Grad Students only. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.473.    Political Polarization.    3 Credits.    The American constitutional order, which was designed to operate without political parties, now has parties as divided as any in the democratic world. This course will examine explanations of how this happened, the consequences of party polarization for public policy and governance, and what if anything should be done about it. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.474.    Philosophy of Law.    3 Credits.    The philosophy of law or jurisprudence investigates the nature of law and what makes law, as it were, law. This course will examine some of the ways in which law has been defined and understood. It will also consider how law is distinguished from other systems of norms and values, such as morality, and how law is distinguished from other aspects of government, such as politics. In addition, the course will introduce students to discussions of legal reasoning and interpretation. To complete the course, students will be required to participate in class discussion, take two exams, and write a paper. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.475.    America in Comparative and International Perspective.    3 Credits.    Over the last quarter millennium, the United States of America has been the most successful state in world politics. It has had the world’s largest economy since 1870, and was on the winning side of the three great world struggles of the 20th century. During these struggles, the fate of liberal capitalist democracy in the world has been closely connected with the rise and success of the USA. This course examines the rise and impacts of the USA in comparative and international perspective. What factors account for the success of the USA during the late modern era? How has the rise and influence of the USA shaped world politics? The course focuses on the causes, consequences and possible alternatives of three founding moments (1776-88, 1861-67 and 1933-36), the role of wars against illiberal adversaries in strengthening American liberal national identity, the ways in which the internal logics of the Philadelphian states-union (1787-1861) and the liberal international order among advanced industrial democracies (1945-) as alternatives to Westphalian state-systems, the role and consequences of the US as an anti-imperial power, and the internal dual between liberal America dedicated to the Founding principles and an ‘alt-America’ of slavery and white supremacy. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.476.    Frantz Fanon's Global Politics: Racism, Madness, and Colonialism.    3 Credits.    “The abnormal is he who demands, appeals, and begs” – Frantz Fanon. This course explores the writings and politics of Frantz Fanon, the radical anti-colonial author, psychiatrist, diplomat, and revolutionary who inspired decolonial and anti-racist struggles across the globe. We will situate Fanon’s writings in the global historical context of decolonization, and ask how they can illuminate contemporary questions of madness, racism, fascism, and empire. In addition to reading Fanon’s work, we will trace his influence on radical social movements, political thought, and global politics, and explore the limits and promises of culture, art, and film for social transformation. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.480.    Democracy and Institutional Anxiety across the Political Spectrum.    3 Credits.    Institutions are a ubiquitous part of political life. Much of the work of political life, both inside and outside government, is only possible through institutions - arrangements of power that provide continuity over time, have a relatively stable mission, jurisdiction and organizational structure. Democracy itself is dependent upon - but perhaps also constrained by - institutions. Institutions are subjects of profound anxiety, across the political spectrum, albeit for different reasons. Those anxieties come from fears about hierarchy, elite capture, illegitimacy, inflexibility, gerontocracy and ineffectiveness. This class will investigate the reasons for the creation and maintenance of institutions, the sources of institutional anxiety, and the challenges that this anxiety creates for the effective, responsible and democratic exercise of power Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.481.    Student Activism: Histories, Theories, Practices.    3 Credits.    This course takes a critical look at the histories, theories, and practices of student activism. The course material addresses questions such as: what explains movement success and failure in different contexts? What is the connection between community organizing and campus activism? How and why do non-violent protests turn violent? And what differences, if any, obtain between left and right leaning forms of student protest? Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.489.    Marxisms: Ecological, Feminist, Racial, and Latin American Approaches to Historical Materialism.    3 Credits.    This seminar explores the intellectual origins and ongoing intellectual productivity of the historical materialist account of political economy inaugurated with Karl Marx. It considers, in particular, how fatal couplings between power and difference are leveraged by capitalism as a tool of accumulation. Women’s labor and social reproduction, nature’s availability for mastery and the destructive exploitation of land and natural resources, racial inferiority and exploitative conditions of labor, and Global South peoples conscription into hyper-exploitative labor. The seminar will explore and interrogate the political dimensions of these transformations: how are relationships of political rule entangled with capitalist priorities of accumulation and which peoples/political subjects get to do the ruling and why? How did patriarchal and racial arrangements came to be, how do they relate to the production of value, and how are they sustained politically today? How do historical political transformations (including formal decolonization, democratic transitions, and the onset of free trade and structural adjustment, among others) inaugurate new forms of accumulation and how do these forms and their politics take different shape in the North and the Global South? A sample of the readings include Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, W. E. B. Du Bois, Silvia Federici, Andreas Malm, Ruy Mauro Marini, and others. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.494.    Planetary Geo-Technics, Utopian-Dystopian Futurism & Materialist World Order Theories.    3 Credits.    There is a widespread recognition that the prospects for contemporary civilization and humanity are shadowed by a range of catastrophic and existential threats, a major subset of which are anthropogenic and technogenic in character. (In the simplest terms these threats arise from the collision between scientific-technological modernity and the geography of the planet Earth.) At the same time, the two most powerful institutional complexes on the planet (market capitalism and the war state system) are committed to further rapidly advancing technology for power and plenty, and anticipate further great elevations of the human estate. Over the last long century, a great debate has emerged, across many disciplines, on the ‘terrapolitan question’(TQ): given the new and prospective material contexts for human agency, what world orders are needed to assure human survival, prosperity and freedom? Practical agency responsive to the new horizon of threat and benefit depends upon getting an adequate answer to this question.Any theory capable of illuminating these realities and choices, and answering the TQ, must be significantly materialist in character. Explicitly materialist theories are very old, and very diverse, and material factors appear in virtually every body of thought, yet are still significantly underdeveloped in contemporary international and world order theory. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) AS.190.497.    Modern Political Thought.    3 Credits.    This course is a survey of modern political thought for advanced undergraduate students and graduate students. Its purpose is to (1) introduce some of the most significant texts in early modern European political theory, (2) survey a selection of the most important recent scholarly studies of these sources, and (3) develop theoretical and methodological skills at analyzing and interpreting the texts and the scholarship they have inspired. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.498.    Thesis Colloquium.    3 Credits.    Open to and required for Political Science majors writing a thesis. International Studies majors writing a senior thesis under the supervision of a Political Science Department faculty member may also enroll. Topics include: research design, literature review, evidence collection and approaches to analysis of evidence, and the writing process. The course lays the groundwork for completing the thesis in the second semester under the direction of the faculty thesis supervisor. Students are expected to have decided on a research topic and arranged for a faculty thesis supervisor prior to the start of the semester. Seniors. Under special circumstances, juniors will be allowed to enroll. Enrollment limit: 15. AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6) EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4) Writing Intensive AS.190.499.    Senior Thesis.    3 Credits.    Seniors also have the opportunity to write a senior research thesis. To be eligible to write this thesis, students must identify a faculty sponsor who will supervise the project. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Projects and Methods (FA6) Writing Intensive AS.190.501.    Internship-Political Science.    1 Credit.    Internships provide work experience that relates to student’s academic project. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.502.    Political Science Internship.    1 Credit.    Internships provide work experience that relates to student’s academic project. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.504.    Internship-International Relations.    1 Credit.    Internships provide work experience that relates to student’s academic project. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.535.    Independent Study - Freshmen.    3 Credits.    Independent Studies allow students to pursue advanced research under the supervision of a faculty member. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.536.    Independent Study-Freshmen.    1 - 3 Credits.    Independent Studies allow students to pursue advanced research under the supervision of a faculty member. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.537.    Independent Study-Sophomores.    3 Credits.    Independent Studies allow students to pursue advanced research under the supervision of a faculty member. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.538.    Independent Study-Sophomores.    1 - 3 Credits.    Independent Studies allow students to pursue advanced research under the supervision of a faculty member. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.539.    Independent Study-Juniors.    3 Credits.    Independent Studies allow students to pursue advanced research under the supervision of a faculty member. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.540.    Independent Study-Juniors.    1 - 3 Credits.    Independent Studies allow students to pursue advanced research under the supervision of a faculty member. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.541.    Independent Study-Seniors.    3 Credits.    Independent Studies allow students to pursue advanced research under the supervision of a faculty member. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.542.    Independent Study-Seniors.    1 - 3 Credits.    Independent Studies allow students to pursue advanced research under the supervision of a faculty member. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.543.    Independent Research.    3 Credits.    Independent Research allows students to do a course’s worth of advanced research under the supervision of a faculty member. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.544.    Independent Research.    1 - 3 Credits.    Independent Research allows students to do a course’s worth of advanced research under the supervision of a faculty member. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.592.    Summer Internship.    1 Credit.    Internships provide work experience that relates to student’s academic project. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.598.    Independent Study.    3 Credits.    Independent Studies allow students to pursue advanced research under the supervision of a faculty member. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.599.    Research - Summer.    3 Credits.    Independent Research allows students to do a course’s worth of advanced research under the supervision of a faculty member. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.190.601.    Qualitative Research.    3 Credits.    This class is designed to introduce students to qualitative methodology. Practically, students will gain first hand experience with qualitative research methods via research design, ethics review, in-depth interviewing, participant observation, and archival/primary source research. They will learn to deploy analytical techniques such as discourse analysis and process tracing. Students will also be asked to consider the merits of qualitative approaches more generally, and discuss the relative advantages of qualitative, experimental, and quantitative approaches. Questions that we will discuss include: What place should qualitative research have in a research design? Can qualitative research test hypotheses, or only generate them? Can qualitative research explain social phenomena, or only interpret them? What are the disadvantages and advantages of qualitative approaches compared to quantitative approaches? For what kinds of research questions are ethnographic techniques best suited? Is replicability possible for ethnographic field research? What criteria of evidence and analytical rigor apply on this terrain? Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.603.    Reading Seminar: Marx's "Second Project of Critique".    2 Credits.    This is a directed readings graduate course that takes the form of a reading seminar. Our aim is to read carefully and understand deeply what Michael Heinrich calls Marx’s “second project of critique”; begun in 1863–64 and often referred to by the name “Capital,” this project remains entangled with but must be understood as separate from the “critique of political economy.” It also remains deeply misunderstood, and particularly hard to grasp if one approaches it by starting with chapter one, volume 1, of Capital (especially as interpreted through traditional Marxism). Hence our distinct and distinctive tack. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.605.    Enviromental racism.    3 Credits.    Environmental racism has largely been understood in terms of environmental policy-making that discriminates against people of color, particularly with respect to the state-sanctioned siting of toxic waste facilities, the distribution of pollutants, food-deserts, and the exclusion of non-white peoples from leading positions in the environmental movement. This graduate seminar explores environmental racism more broadly, pushing beyond its conventional, place-based understandings and approaching the corresponding logics that produce human disposability and environmental waste from the standpoint of both space and time. Examining colonial legacies of coding racial others in terms natural disasters, epidemics, infestations, non-human animals and dirt, we shall investigate how the natural world is subjected to exploitation and domination in tandem with the subordination of racial subjects historically identified with nature and rendered expendable. In other words, we shall illuminate the logics of power through which race-making coincides with waste-making. Accordingly, we will explore political and theoretical challenges to environmental racism in multiple registers; such as those posed by indigenous studies, decolonial thinkers and Afro-diasporic theories contesting the intersection of racial biopolitics, ecological crises and racial capitalism in an era of proliferating human disposability. Authors considered may include; Mbembe, Du Bois, Hage, Glissant, Césaire, Wynter & Chakrabarty. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.609.    Indigenous Political Theory.    3 Credits.    This graduate seminar will examine a range of Indigenous political theorists and critics of settler colonialism. In so doing, we will interrogate the role of liberal Anglo-centrism in contested theories and practices of sovereignty, property rights, freedom, equality, race, sexuality and nature. Likewise, we will investigate the contention that settler colonialism is acquisitive of territory in perpetuity, as opposed to being a moment in history, in order to assess the enduring political and theoretical impact of colonial legacies. Importantly, we shall explore how the relays between Indigenous cosmologies and temporalities shape theories and practices of resistance, reason, identity and political imagination. Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.190.648 - Indigenous Political Theory - are not eligible to take AS.190.609 - Indigenous Political Theory AS.190.610.    Process Philosophies and Political Manifestos.    3 Credits.    What do the process philosophies of Bergson, Whitehead and Daoism have to say to political manifestos advanced by writers such as Marx and Engels, Naomi Klein, Hardt and Negri, Dziga Vertov, Haitian and French revolutionaries, Folco Portinari. How, in turn, can the latter illuminate, deform, or inform them? The readings in this seminar bounce back and forth between the cosmic politics of process philosophy and a variety of short manifestos designed to speak to the vicissitudes of today. AS.190.614.    Frontiers of Empirical Political Science.    3 Credits.    This advanced level course is intended to help students understand the frontiers of empirical political science research – that is, research concerned with answering causal questions – as presented in recent books by (for the most part) junior scholars. The books represent the substantive and methodological pluralism of our field, with books coming from American, Comparative, IR, and Political Economy. We will give two weeks’ treatment to most books on the syllabus, spending the first week reading “motivating” or classic material that inspired the book project, as well a companion of a key methodological text that inspired the research design. Along with reading the materials that help to situate the book in larger debates in its subfield we will read the first several chapters of the book. In the second week of discussion we will read the second half of the book – the evidence chapters and the conclusion – and focus on understanding whether and how the evidence that is presented matches with the theoretical and empirical claims made in the book’s beginnings. AS.190.615.    War and Society in World Politics.    3 Credits.    This course is an advanced introduction to war in the modern world, encompassing its political, social, cultural and ecological dimensions. It adopts a “war and society” approach in that it covers the ways in which society shapes war and, in turn, how war shapes society. It situates “war and society” in an historically evolving global context, attending to the nature of war in both the core and the periphery of world politics. Topics include the totalization and industrialization of war; civil-military relations; modernity, reason and war; “small war”; and race, culture and war. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.616.    American Political Development.    3 Credits.    An examination of state-building and nation-building throughout American political history. (AP) AS.190.617.    The Politics of Finance.    3 Credits.    This graduate seminar considers the relationship between finance and state building in both the developing and developed world. Topics will explore the role of central banking, the development of equity and debt markets, bubble economy politics, the effects of financialization, and financial regulatory politics. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.619.    Nature, Climate, Civilization.    3 Credits.    A course designed to rework embedded images of nature, climate and civilization by rethinking how each actuality folds into, supports, and disrupts the others in multiform ways. Recent critiques of the very ideas of “nature” and “civilization” exposed how those western practices carried imperialism and racism. But those who then dropped, rather than reworking, the two concepts first contributed to the cultural opacity of climate change rumbling beneath their feet and may underestimate how several key issues are densely interwoven today. It is thus timely to rethink the three actualities together. The course may include texts from Rousseau, Freud, Nietzsche, Serres, Deleuze & Guattari, and Hanson & de Castro. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.620.    Stengers, Nietzsche and Whitehead: Three Process Philosophies.    3 Credits.    This seminar explores the philosophies of Stengers, Nietzsche and Whitehead comparatively, focusing on their philosophies of agency, multitemporality, affect in ethics and politics, flirtations with panexperientialism, and accounts of planetary/culture imbrications. We will also read contemporary engagements with all three on subjectivity, biology and politics, the Anthropocene, democracy, the shapes of logic, and the visiccitudes of time. Primary texts by Stengers may be Another Science is Possible and Thinking with Whitehead, by Nietzsche Daybreak, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and the Late Notebooks. For Whitehead, Process and Reality and Modes of Thought. Presentation, class discussions, and a seminar paper. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.621.    Free Speech and The Law in Comparative Perspective.    3 Credits.    This class explores the ideas and legal doctrines that define the freedom of speech. We will examine the free speech jurispurdence of the U.S. in comparison to that of other system, particularly the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the Supreme Court of Canada. Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.190.366 are not eligible to take AS.190.621 . Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.624.    The Administrative State in Crisis.    3 Credits.    The graduate seminar examines the waxing and waning power of the administrative state in a comparative context (including the United States). The course considers the forging of bureaucratic authority, the rise of independent regulators, and the emergence of private-public partnerships, and how the current moment of globalization, populism, and slow growth has placed these arrangements under enormous pressure. Regulatory capture, procedural fetishism, cronyism, turf wars, and agency collapse will feature prominently. The second part of the course will bring in guests (section chiefs, program directors, and political appointees) from various government departments to provide their own perspectives on governance from the ground-up. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.625.    Theories of Comparative Politics.    3 Credits.    This seminar is intended for graduate students planning to take the comprehensive exam in comparative politics, either as a major or as a minor. In addition to exploring central methodological debates and analytic approaches, the seminar reviews the literature on state-society relations, political and economic development, social movements, nationalism, revolutions, formal and informal political institutions, and regime durability vs. transition. Graduate students only. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.626.    Quantitative Methods for the Study of Politics.    3 Credits.    This course is intended as Ph.D.-level introduction to applied statistics, with a focus on the identification of causal effects in the tradition of the Neyman/Rubin potential outcomes framework. Prior coursework in applied statistics or quantitative methods will be useful but is not required. Upon completion of the course, students will be in a position to understand and critically assess scholarship that uses instrumental variables, difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, and other quasi- and natural-experimental research designs. Formal mathematical proof will be kept to a minimum. Students will be asked to adapt existing code and write some of their own code in R. AS.190.629.    American Racial Politics.    3 Credits.    Race is not a biological fact but rather a social construction. However, it is a social construction with very real consequences. Definitions of citizenship, allocation of state resources, attitudes about government and government policy, the creation of government policy, all shape and are shaped by race and racial classifications. Serving as a critical corrective to American politics treatments that ignore race, this class will examine how race functions politically in the United States. While not required, some knowledge of statistics is helpful. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.630.    Interpretation and Critique of Political Ideas.    3 Credits.    This is a graduate seminar on the interpretive and critical problems that arise when political theorists read and write about texts from long, long ago or far, far away. The first part of the course will consider approaches to the history of European political thought influenced by Marx, Foucault, Strauss, Skinner, and Arendt, amongst others. Readings will include both major methodological statements and examples of interpretive and critical scholarship undertaken by proponents of these different schools of thought. In the second part of the course, we will ask whether and how methods developed to analyze and learn from the history of political thought can be applied to the study of political thinkers who lived and wrote outside western Europe and North America. Major questions for consideration in both parts of the course include: Can old ideas help us solve problems arising in contemporary politics and political theory? What can we learn from intellectual traditions unconnected to our own? What do we have to do in order to understand the ideas contained within a given text? Do we have to understand a text for it to be useful to us? Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.632.    The Development of American Political Institutions.    3 Credits.    This course explores institutional development in American national politics, from the Founding until the present. It traces parties, Congress, the presidency, bureaucracy, and courts, and also examines how those institutions have interacted with one another across American history. Throughout the course, we will consider how ideas, interests, procedures, and sequence together shape institutions as they collide and abrade over time. Finally, although it hardly covers the entire corpus across the subfield, the course is also designed to prepare students to sit for comprehensive examinations in American politics. AS.190.634.    Federalism, Sovereignty, and The State.    3 Credits.    Federalism has become an increasingly widespread constitutional form in the world — in America, but also in Europe, the "cradle of the nation-state," and on other continents. While it typically resolves political problems, it also raises many questions about the nature of states and of sovereignty. This course will discuss scholarship that addresses federalism, sovereignty, and the state, both in contemporary politics and in historical perspective. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.636.    Information/Knowledge/Power/Politics.    3 Credits.    Explores how information and knowledge flow through political/social/economic configurations, forming and reforming the politics of everyday engagements at different scales. Topics such as mis/disinformation, commodification of information, embodied information, surveillance, and cyber-mediated information provide the context for analyzing practices, power, agency, and ethics. Critical security studies scholarship provides an overarching template, and we will also draw theoretical insights from multiple disciplines. The format will combine elements of seminar and workshop, and the emphasis will be on collaborative participation in the research process. AS.190.640.    States and Democracy.    3 Credits.    The focus of the seminar is on the formation and transformation sates and regimes. The perspective is both historical and comparative, covering Western Europe, Latin America, Africa and the US as a “non exceptional” case. This is fundamentally a Comparative Politics course, but APD students will almost certainly benefit from it. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.643.    Comparative Politics.    3 Credits.    This course offers a graduate-level introduction to the field of comparative politics, focusing on the substantive questions that drive contemporary research. Issues will include: state formation and state capacity; regime typology, democratization, and democratic backsliding; party systems and political behavior; political economy and economic development; racial, ethnic, and religious politics; and revolutions and political violence. Readings include both classic and recent works, selected to help students both prepare for major or minor comprehensive exams and frame their own research projects. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.646.    CLR James: Black Marxism, Pan-Africanism and International Relations.    3 Credits.    This course uses the life and writings of famous Trinidadian Marxist CLR James to explore a set of analytical issues of importance to understanding Pan-Africanism and international relations, including: political economy and slavery, culture and freedom, and the fraught relationship between black intellectuals and black masses. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.647.    Community and Its Disconcents.    3 Credits.    This course is inspired by Hannah Arendt’s claim that the calamity of stateless people is “not that they are deprived of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” but that “they no longer belong to any community whatsoever.” Rather than attempt to verify or disprove this claim, the course will use this claim as a provocation. How do we understand, experience, and imagine “community”? What does it mean to “belong” to a community? Is it possible not to belong to any community? Why is the language of community so ubiquitous? To help us consider these questions, we will read among others, Anderson, Freud, Harney and Moten, Joseph, LeGuin, McMillan, and Rousseau. A final paper of 20-30 pages is required. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.648.    Writing for Research.    3 Credits.    This course is designed to help graduate students in political science craft an original piece of high-quality writing. This class is open to students in their first, second, or third years of the graduate program. We will work on developing the skill of academic writing step by step, focusing first on the question of how to identify and articulate a good question, second on the skill of literature review, third on the art of theoretical engagement, and fourth on the presentation of evidence. During the semester, students may choose to turn a set of interests and questions into a prospectus draft. Alternatively, they may decide to use the class to turn a seminar paper into a dissertation chapter, or a revise a dissertation chapter into an article manuscript. Special sessions will bring other faculty to the class to talk about writing a dissertation and the peer-review process. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.652.    Urban Politics.    3 Credits.    Over the past ten years the urban has become an increasingly important space with which to understand politics, whether examined through the subfields of international politics, comparative politics, political theory, or American politics. In this course we will examine the role the urban plays in producing politics at various scales, and simultaneously consider the urban as a particular byproduct of politics at various scales. How might we understand contemporary shifts in political economy through the urban? How does the urban become a particularly important site of racialization? Why have movements from Occupy Wall Street to Arab Spring begun in cities? What are the opportunities and challenges involved in comparing cities across national contexts? How have scholars used the city to theorize about politics more broadly? We will tackle these and other related questions in this course. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.653.    Comparative Political Behavior.    3 Credits.    The course surveys major topics in political behavior, based on scholarship in political psychology, political science (American politics, comparative politics), and neighboring disciplines. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.656.    Humanitarianism and World Politics.    3 Credits.    Humanitarianism has become a pervasive form of moral and political action in world politics. Over the course of the twentieth century and beyond, humanitarian logics infused the conduct of war and informed global governance in many areas—from refugee relief and post-conflict reconstruction, to peacekeeping and development, to migration, ecological security, and recovery from natural disasters. And yet, while often celebrated as an achievement, humanitarianism involves ambiguities, contradictions, and pathologies demanding critical scrutiny. This seminar aims, first, to interrogate critically the history of humanitarian practices and, second, to refine and revise concepts used to study and evaluate those practices. We pursue these aims in part with an eye to understanding mutations of humanitarian politics accompanying contemporary challenges to the post-WWII liberal international order. Topics include: (1) the invention of “humanity” as an idea/ideal; (2)humanitarianism, war and empire; (3) varities of humanitarianism; (4) humanitarian violence; (5) humanitarian expertise and institutions; (6) humanitarianism, media, and technology; Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.190.456 are not eligible to take AS.190.656 . Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.657.    Sovereignty, the State, and War in International Politics.    3 Credits.    We are used to thinking of sovereignty, the state, and war as fairly self-evident concepts and as the bedrock of so much work, not only in academic international relations, but also in policy discourse. It seems straightforward that sovereign states wage war, and war in turn may make or break states. Under conditions of rapidly advancing globalization, however, the relationship of these concepts is anything but straightforward. This class builds on historical investigations into state formation, the relationship of the military instrument to the state, the progressive globalization of the defense industrial base, the rapidly changing practices of security under technical innovation, and related phenomena to question notions of state and security and to better understand the past and present fault lines of conflict. This is a graduate course that welcomes advanced undergraduates with previous international relations coursework at instructor’s discretion. Writing Intensive AS.190.659.    Money and Sovereignty.    3 Credits.    The power to coin money was historically central to the formation of sovereign states. Yet the relationship between money and sovereignty has considerably evolved over time. First, the emergence of nation-states and of popular sovereignty meant that money was no longer primarily a state and elite concern, but also increasingly a matter of everyday life and mass politics. Second, the increasing integration and financialization of the world economy produced new challenges for sovereignty. We will discuss historical and social science scholarship that address these historical trends and the politics of money and sovereignty today. Topics will include: capitalism, public budgets and debts, central banks, populism, democracy, financialization, international integration. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.666.    Political Economy Of Development.    3 Credits.    "The political economy of development” comprises a broad range of theoretical and policy-oriented concerns. This seminar explores competing causal explanations for the following types of questions: What accounts for the dramatic variation in political, economic, and social conditions throughout the world? In what ways do economic and political dynamics interact in shaping developmental outcomes? To what extent does the timing of industrialization affect the viability of certain developmental strategies? The first third of the course covers post-war classics in the development literature, including modernization theory and its critics, and the political economy of international finance. The second part of the course examines contemporary debates concerning the role of the state in the development process. The last part of the seminar turns to developmental concerns at the sub-national level, including the informal sector and the political economy of migration. Graduate students only. AS.190.667.    Theories of Justice.    3 Credits.    This course will explore the classic question, “What is justice?” While we will entertain several different answers to the question, the course will focus on how these answers speak to and past one another, illuminating contemporary quandaries related to intergenerational justice, global justice, and the justice of resistance. Guided by Nietzsche, we will read texts by authors including, among others, Plato, Kant, Bentham, Marx, Rawls, Nozick, and West. Over the course of the semester, students will write three papers. There will also be a final exam. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.668.    Rethinking Western Thought.    2 Credits.    The history of Euro-American Political Thought has been criticized for its orientations to race, gender, class, Christianity, the subject, capitalism, colonialism, sociocentrism, and humanist exceptionalism. How deeply are those themes ensconced in early Christian traditions, secular orientations to the earth, practices of capitalism, and contemporary images of “the political”? What openings are discernible? The seminar starts with Hesiod’s Theogony and a chapter from Tim Whitmarsh on atheism in ancient Greece. It then explores how Augustine consolidates sharp shifts in orientations to faith, divinity, nature, discipline, time and the earth. An agent of the first conquest of paganism. Readings in The City of God: Against the Pagans and The Confessions in relation to Foucault’s newly translated book, Confessions of The Flesh. Then we turn to what might be called the second Christian/imperial conquest of paganism, launched during the 15th century Spanish invasion of the Americas. How did that conquest re-enact and differ from the first? Texts by Todorov, The Conquest of America, alongside essays by C.L.R. James and perhaps de Castro. Followed by essays from Kant, Marx, Arendt, or Deleuze/Guattari, to see how each consolidates or turns earlier western theories. The seminar then engages Dipesh Chakrabarty in The climate of history in a planetary age as he criticizes Euro-centered thought (“the political”, the earth as background to politics, racism, exceptionalism, etc) and some currents in post-colonial thought. Critiques and augmentations will be explored, too. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.670.    The Dream of the 90s: Political Theory, 1990-1995.    2 Credits.    This graduate seminar will explore works from this extraordinary period in contemporary political theory. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.675.    Nuclear Weapons and Global Politics: History, Strategy, Race and Gender.    2 Credits.    This course provides an analysis of US foreign policy with a focus on the interests, institutions, and ideas underpinning its development. It offers a broad historical survey that starts with US involvement in the First World War, covers major developments of the twentieth century, and concludes with contemporary issues. Important themes include the developments underpinning the emergence of the liberal world order, strategies of containment during the Cold War, nuclear deterrence and antiproliferation efforts, the politics of international trade, alliance politics, technological and security policy, and the re-emergence of great power competition. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.676.    Field Survey of International Relations.    3 Credits.    This course provides a scaffold for the study of international relations theory, organized historically and by major approaches. The focus is on close reading and discussion of exemplars of important bodies of theory. Intended for doctoral students with IR as their major or minor field. Graduate students only. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.678.    Law and Politics.    3 Credits.    As a field, Law and Politics has evolved from the study of constitutional law and judicial politics to the political behavior of judges and their associates to the study of law and society, the operation of law and courts “on the ground” in the international arena as well as in the United States, historical institutionalism, and the carceral state. In this graduate course, we will review some of the classic texts in the field, with a focus on the tension between legal institutions and democratic politics. In particular, we will examine how that tension is manifest in the foundations of the American political system and in critical reflection on contemporary practices of American democracy. Students will turn in response papers every week on the reading. In addition, there will be two 10-20 page papers due during the semester. Graduate Students Only. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.681.    Race and Politics of Punishment in the U.S..    3 Credits.    Contact with criminal justice has become a primary way that many Americans see and experience government, particularly those from race-class subjugated communities. Yet, our field has been slow to appreciate the development of the carceral state or to consider its manifold impacts for citizenship. In this graduate seminar, we will survey key debates around punishment, state violence, and surveillance, with a particular focus on research that takes institutional development, history, and racial orders seriously. Why did the carceral state expand in “fits and starts” and with what consequence for state-building? We explore its (racialized and gendered) relationship to other key systems: foster care, social provision, labor relations and the labor market, and immigration enforcement. A core preoccupation of this course will be to understand the ways in which the criminal justice system “makes race” and how debates about crime and punishment were often debates about black inclusion and equality. How does exposure to criminal justice interventions shape political learning, democratic habits, and racial lifeworlds? In addition to policy, political discourse, and racial politics, we will employ works from a range of fields – history, sociology, law, and criminology – and a range of methods (ethnography, historical analysis, quantitative and qualitative). Required books include: Khalil Muhammad’s Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, David Oshinsky’s Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, Bruce Western’s Punishment and Inequality in America, and Michael Fortner’s Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.682.    The Politics of the Regulatory State.    3 Credits.    This graduate seminar considers regulatory politics in both the developing and developed world. Topics will explore the role of independent agencies, soft paternalism, co-regulation, regulatory failure, and other topics, across a host of sectors. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.686.    The Right to the City.    2 Credits.    Over the past decade, political, economic, and cultural struggles in and over the city have become more important than ever before. Protests against the growing carceral state, against increasing wealth inequality, as well as revanchist attempts to rollback multicultural societal shifts all have the city as its core. While some Marxist thinkers suggest these struggles represent larger struggles over use- versus exchange-value, Black Radical thinkers connect these struggles to anti-black racism. In the wake of one world challenging movement – Black Lives Matter – and one world altering crisis – the Covid-19 pandemic - this course will reflect critically on these two traditions of thinking about the city and to rethink the Marxist tradition through the Black Radical tradition. We will anchor these conversations in an exploratory dialogue between two exemplars of each tradition - the French geographer Henri Lefebvre, and Detroit movement intellectuals James and Grace Lee Boggs. This class will be a vital component of the 2022-23 Sawyer Seminar. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.688.    Political Violence.    3 Credits.    This undergraduate seminar is designed to introduce students to the comparative study of political violence and intra-state conflict. We will examine social science theories and empirical studies on a wide range of forms of political violence, including civil war, coups, state repression, communal violence, riots, terrorism, genocide, and criminal-political violence. We will study these phenomena at the micro, meso and macro levels, and focus on understanding their causes, dynamics, outcomes, and aftermath. The class will also equip students with an ability to analyze political violence by using social scientific tools. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.689.    Marxisms: Ecological, Feminist, Racial, and Latin American Approaches to Historical Materialism.    3 Credits.    This seminar explores the intellectual origins and ongoing intellectual productivity of the historical materialist account of political economy inaugurated with Karl Marx. It considers, in particular, how fatal couplings between power and difference are leveraged by capitalism as a tool of accumulation. Women’s labor and social reproduction, nature’s availability for mastery and the destructive exploitation of land and natural resources, racial inferiority and exploitative conditions of labor, and Global South peoples conscription into hyper-exploitative labor. The seminar will explore and interrogate the political dimensions of these transformations: how are relationships of political rule entangled with capitalist priorities of accumulation and which peoples/political subjects get to do the ruling and why? How did patriarchal and racial arrangements came to be, how do they relate to the production of value, and how are they sustained politically today? How do historical political transformations (including formal decolonization, democratic transitions, and the onset of free trade and structural adjustment, among others) inaugurate new forms of accumulation and how do these forms and their politics take different shape in the North and the Global South? A sample of the readings include Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, W. E. B. Du Bois, Silvia Federici, Andreas Malm, Ruy Mauro Marini, and others. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.691.    The Hopkins Seminar on Racial Politics.    3 Credits.    Race and racism are political productions and—as such—have significantly shaped the study of political science, whose origins in the race science and eugenics milieu of the late nineteenth century (largely at Johns Hopkins) led to a discipline that evolved to systematically exclude and distorts serious consideration of race and racism as constitutive of politics. This exclusion and distortion has resulted in a social science that fails to effectively predict, explain, and diagnose political phenomenon. In this seminar, we will explore both the formative effect of racism in political science and its implications for how political science subfields study race as a political concept and practice, and the tradition of racial capitalism, “written out” of political science until very recently. Students will emerge from this seminar with a solid account of the racial foundations of political science, a critical view on existing approaches to the study of politics, and a grasp of a sidelined tradition of the joint study of race and capitalism. AS.190.693.    Directed Readings: Research Methods & Perspectives on China.    3 Credits.    Focusing on directed readings, this PhD seminar will first explore the logic of research design in the social sciences, before applying these techniques to China. Then we will survey the history of Chinese studies in the United States, the evolution of data sources, research methods, and compare perspectives in the study of Chinese politics and political economy. Taught in conjunction with speaker events at 555 Penn, the first half of the course will be taught at Homewood and the other half at 555. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.694.    Planetary Geo-Technics, Utopian-Dystopian Futurism & Materialist World Order Theories.    3 Credits.    There is a widespread recognition that the prospects for contemporary civilization and humanity are shadowed by a range of catastrophic and existential threats, a major subset of which are anthropogenic and technogenic in character. (In the simplest terms these threats arise from the collision between scientific-technological modernity and the geography of the planet Earth.) At the same time, the two most powerful institutional complexes on the planet (market capitalism and the war state system) are committed to further rapidly advancing technology for power and plenty, and anticipate further great elevations of the human estate. Over the last long century, a great debate has emerged, across many disciplines, on the ‘terrapolitan question’(TQ): given the new and prospective material contexts for human agency, what world orders are needed to assure human survival, prosperity and freedom? Practical agency responsive to the new horizon of threat and benefit depends upon getting an adequate answer to this question.Any theory capable of illuminating these realities and choices, and answering the TQ, must be significantly materialist in character. Explicitly materialist theories are very old, and very diverse, and material factors appear in virtually every body of thought, yet are still significantly underdeveloped in contemporary international and world order theory. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.695.    Global Politics.    3 Credits.    The only academic discipline which has as its central focus the ‘international’ is International Relations (IR). In that discipline, the international is conceived primarily as a space of strategic interaction between sovereign states. In Raymond Aron’s view, it is populated mainly by diplomats, soldiers and businesspeople. Even when IR scholars add other actors like NGOs, IGOs, and MNCs, or norms and principles that encourage cooperation among states, the international remains a relatively spare or thin social space in comparison to domestic societies. This course begins from the opposite presumption, that the global is a thick space of social co-constitution. The course centers global phenomena such as capitalism, imperialism, race and ecology; situates them in historical and sociological perspective; and approaches them as productive of international orders and of the entities—states, societies, empires, colonies, and others—which populate it. Whereas IR focuses on the problem of anarchy among formally equal sovereigns, for global politics the central problematic is that of hierarchies of power, wealth and race. Arguably, this re-problematization returns the field to some of its originating concerns. This course draws on wider scholarship in the humanities and social sciences to reconceive the study of world politics. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.696.    Political Theory in/as Political Economy.    3 Credits.    This graduate seminar in political theory will explore “political economy” conceptually. This is an advanced course in capitalist economics that takes up the study of economic forces as themselves relations of power/knowledge. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.697.    Modern Political Thought.    3 Credits.    This course is a survey of modern political thought for advanced undergraduate students and graduate students. Its purpose is to (1) introduce some of the most significant texts in early modern European political theory, (2) survey a selection of the most important recent scholarly studies of these sources, and (3) develop theoretical and methodological skills at analyzing and interpreting the texts and the scholarship they have inspired. Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.190.497 are not eligible to take AS.190.697 . Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.699.    Writing a Prospectus in the Interdisciplinary Study of World Politics.    3 Credits.    Intended for IR PhD students, this course will assist students in conceptualizing and writing a dissertation prospectus. The course will help you develop your core idea; formulate a research question; and come up with a plan for researching it, including sources, methods and chapterization. The course will help you turn your dissertation idea or question into a dissertation project. The capstone of the course will be a workshop with external faculty where you will present your draft project, scheduled for mid-May 2025. The course will be most helpful to PhD students entering their second or third year and does not satisfy or replace the formal prospectus requirement for your PhD. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.190.800.    Independent Study.    3 - 9 Credits.    Intended for specific research projects designed in conjunction with a supervising faculty member. AS.190.801.    Summer Research.    9 Credits.    General course covering a variety of different projects that can be undertaken independently over the summer, including studying for comprehensive exams, writing a prospectus, finishing term papers, or dissertating. AS.190.849.    Graduate Research.    3 - 20 Credits.    This course is for Graduate students who have completed their coursework and are working toward the other program requirements. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS.270-271 (Earth & Planetary Sciences)

http://e-catalogue.jhu.g.sjuku.top/course-descriptions/earth___planetary_sciences/

AS.270.103.    Introduction to Global Environmental Change.    3 Credits.    A broad survey of the Earth as a planet, with emphasis on the processes that control global changes. Topics include: the structure, formation, and evolution of the Earth, the atmosphere, oceans, continents, and biosphere. Special attention is given to present-day issues, such as global climate change, natural hazards, air pollution, resource depletion, human population growth, habitat destruction, and loss of biodiversity. Open to all undergraduates. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) AS.270.111.    The Story of Earth.    1 Credit.    The four and a half billion year story of Earth's global changes focusing on the co-evolution of Earth and Life. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.114.    Guided Tour: The Planets.    3 Credits.    An introduction to planetary science and planetary exploration primarily for non-science majors. A survey of concepts from astronomy, chemistry, geology, and physics applied to the study of the solar system. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.202.    Introduction to Ecology.    3 Credits.    Ecology is the study of organisms and their environment. This course focuses on the patterns of distribution and abundance of organisms. Topics include population dynamics and regulation, competition, predation, host-parasite interactions, patterns of species diversity, community succession, the flow of energy and matter through ecosystems. We will also discuss the role of natural and human disturbances in shaping communities. Prerequisite(s): AS.270.103 OR AS.020.151 Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.205.    Introduction to Geographic Information Systems and Geospatial Analysis.    3 Credits.    The course provides a broad introduction to the principles and practice of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and related tools of Geospatial Analysis. Topics will include history of GIS, GIS data structures, data acquisition and merging, database management, spatial analysis, and GIS applications. In addition, students will get hands-on experience working with GIS software. Distribution Area: Engineering, Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.220.    The Dynamic Earth: An Introduction to Geology.    3 Credits.    Basic concepts in geology, including plate tectonics; Earth’s internal structure; geologic time; minerals; formation of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks; development of faults, folds and earthquakes; geomagnetism. Corequisite (for EPS Majors): AS.270.221 ; optional for others. The course is introductory and open to undergraduates at all levels; freshmen are encouraged to enroll. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.221.    The Dynamic Earth Laboratory.    2 Credits.    This course is a hands-on learning experience for introductory geological concepts and techniques using geological tools, such as mineral/rock samples, microscopes, and maps. A Saturday fieldtrip in late Sep/early Oct is an essential part. The course is open to undergraduates at all levels; freshmen who wish to get their hands (and boots) dirty are encouraged to enroll. Prerequisite(s): AS.270.220 , credit earned or concurrent enrollment Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.222.    Mineralogy.    4 Credits.    Introduction to the classification, crystallography, and physical properties of minerals. Weekly lab topics include field identification, crystal morphology and symmetry, optical microscopy and Raman spectroscopy. One field trip to the Smithsonian National Museum of History and Research Archives is planned. Prerequisite(s): Students must have completed Lab Safety training prior to registering for this class. To access the tutorial, login to myLearning and enter 458083 in the Search box to locate the appropriate module. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.224.    Oceans & Atmospheres.    3 Credits.    A broad survey of the Earth’s oceans and atmospheres, and their role in the environment and climate. Topics covered include waves, tides, ocean and atmosphere circulation, weather systems, tornadoes and hurricanes, El Niño, and climate change. For science and engineering majors Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.302.    Aqueous Geochemistry.    3 Credits.    Modeling the chemistry of water-rock interactions from weathering and riverine development at Earth’s surface to hot springs at depth, fluids in subduction zones in Earth’s interior, and the ancient fluids preserved in fluid inclusions. Thermodynamic basis for the calculation of equilibria and irreversible chemical mass transfer involving minerals and aqueous species at low and high temperatures and pressures. The course culminates with practical examples of research interest to individual participants. Prerequisite(s): ( AS.030.101 AND AS.030.102 ) AND ( AS.270.220 AND AS.270.221 ) or equivalents. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.303.    Earth History.    3 Credits.    This course will explore the evolution of life in the context of environmental, ecological, and geological changes to the Earth surface system. The goal of the class is to provide students with an understanding of how geological and paleontological records provide insight into the origin(s) of life, oxygenation of the atmosphere, the evolution of multicellularity, evolutionary radiations and extinctions, and modern global change. Prerequisite(s): AS.270.103 OR AS.270.220 OR AS.270.224 ; or permission of the instructor. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.305.    Energy Resources in the Modern World.    3 Credits.    This in-depth survey will inform students on the non-renewable and renewable energy resources of the world and the future prospects. Topics include petroleum, natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, geothermal, solar, wind, biomass, and ocean energy. Global production, distribution, usage, and impacts of these resources will be discussed. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.306.    Urban Ecology.    3 Credits.    Urban ecology has been called the ecology in, of, and for cities. In this course, we will explore how ecological concepts are applied to urban ecosystems and the different approaches to urban ecological research. Topics will include: Biodiversity, water dynamics, energy and heat island effects, and nutrient cycling, urban metabolism, design of greenspace, and sustainability of cities. We will use Baltimore as a case study for studying cities. Prerequisite(s): AS.270.202 OR EN.570.201 Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6) Writing Intensive AS.270.307.    Geoscience Modeling.    4 Credits.    An introduction to modern ways to interpret observations in the context of a conceptual model. Topics include model building, hypothesis testing, and inverse methods. Practical examples from geophysics, engineering, and medical physics will be featured. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.270.310.    Evolution and Development of the Vertebrates.    3 Credits.    Modern vertebrates (animals with backbones) are the products of a more than 500-million-year evolutionary history. This course surveys that history and uses it to explore such core evolutionary concepts as adaptive radiation, convergence, extinction, homology, phylogenetic taxonomy, and tree thinking. Emphasis will be placed on the origins of the modern vertebrate fauna and how fossils are being integrated with developmental biology to better understand major transitions in the vertebrate body plan. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.311.    Geobiology.    3 Credits.    Geobiology is the study of the interaction between rocks and life. Geobiologists investigate questions ranging from how organisms obtain energy from rocks to how evidence of life is preserved in rocks and informs us about the evolution of life on our planet and beyond. It is a rapidly expanding field because of its relevance to astrobiology, microbiology, paleontology, and reconstructing environmental change during ancient periods climate change with implications for evaluating our future under elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. In this course, students will learn about how organisms drive major elemental cycles that impact climate and habitability, how major evolutionary radiations have affected the trajectory of Earth surface environments, and the tools that are used to ask fundamental questions about why life has thrived on this planet and how we might detect if other planets support life. Prerequisite(s): AS.270.103 OR AS.270.220 OR AS.270.224 AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.312.    Mammalian Evolution.    3 Credits.    An introduction to the evolutionary history and diversity of mammals, with emphasis on the first half of the Cenozoic - the beginning of the Age of Mammals. The course will focus primarily on the adaptive radiation of mammals (including our own order primates) that followed the extinction of the dinosaurs, exploring the origins and relationships of the major groups of mammals as well as the anatomical and ecological reasons for their success. Lectures will be supplemented with relevant fossils and recent specimens. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.316.    Agroecology: A Global Perspective.    3 Credits.    How can we balance the increasing global food demand with sustainable ecological practices?How are the agricultural, ecological, and socio-economic aspects of food productionintertwined? This course addresses these questions and enables students to critically evaluateexisting agroecosystems around the world, with special attention paid to the challenges of globalenvironmental change. Students will be introduced to the principles of agroecology, and theywill examine interactions between biodiversity, soil, and people through case studies, peerreviewed scientific papers, and a field trip to a local agroecosystem Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS.270.317.    Conservation Biology.    3 Credits.    In this course, students examine the meaning and implications of biodiversity with a focus on disciplines associated with conservation biology, wildlife conservation and wildlife management, including taxonomy, genetics, small population biology, chemical and restoration ecology, and marine biology. This includes exploring how conservation biology differs from other natural sciences in theory and in application. Students learn the major threats to biodiversity and what natural and social science methods and alternatives are used to mitigate, stop, or reverse these threats. The course also includes the economic and cultural tradeoffs associated with each conservation measure at the global, national, regional, and local levels. One required field trip. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Ethics and Foundations (FA5) Writing Intensive AS.270.318.    Remote Sensing of the Environment.    3 Credits.    This course is an introduction to the use of remote sensing technology to study Earth’s physical and biochemical processes. Topics covered include remote sensing of the atmosphere, land and oceans, as well as remote sensing as a tool for policy makers. Also offered as 270.618. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.270.319.    Rocks as Clocks.    3 Credits.    Introduction to radioisotope geo/thermochronology and mantle stable and radioisotope geochemistry. Course covers: (1) methods for dating of rocks and geologic processes using long-half-life radioisotope systems, including the various isotope systems available and their applicability; (2) radioisotope techniques for investigation of the geochemical evolution of the crust and mantle; (3) isotope fractionation and utility of traditional and novel stable isotope geochemistry for interrogating high-temperature processes, and (4) thermochronology and methods for interrogating upper-crustal processes. Recommended course background: AS.270.220 and AS.270.221 , or instructor permission. AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.270.323.    Ocean Biogeochemical Cycles.    3 Credits.    This course will examine the cycling of trace chemicals in the ocean, consider what we can learn from the distributions of these chemicals about the ocean circulation, and ocean ecosystems. Topics covered will include oceanic biological productivity, open water cycling of nutrients and oxygen, ocean acidification and sediment cycling. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2) Writing Intensive AS.270.325.    Introductory Oceanography.    3 Credits.    This class is an introduction to a wide range of physical, chemical, and biological phenomena in the world’s oceans. Underlying basic principles are exposed wherever possible. Topics covered include: seawater, waves, tides, ocean circulation, chemical oceanography, biogeochemical ocean processes, and remote sensing of the oceans. Recommended Course Background: freshman Physics, Chemistry, Calculus through ordinary differential equations. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2) Writing Intensive AS.270.332.    Soil Ecology.    3 Credits.    The course introduces basic aspects of cycles and flows in the soil ecosystem, and provides students with an overview of the higher groups of soil organisms. Laboratory and field surveying methods are also covered. Prerequisite(s): Students must have completed Lab Safety training prior to registering for this class. To access the tutorial, login to myLearning and enter ASEN in the Search Box to access the proper course. Click here to access the Laboratory Safety Introductory Course Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.270.336.    Freshwater Systems.    3 Credits.    A study of streams, lakes, and groundwater with a focus on aspects of water quality, hydrology, geomorphology, and aquatic ecology that are relevant to human impacts on freshwater systems. US environmental policies and water resource management agencies will also be examined in the context of issues such as dams, cattle grazing, climate change, and water allocation. Prerequisite(s): AS.270.103 OR AS.271.107 or permission of the instructor. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.337.    Freshwater Systems Lab.    1 Credit.    A hands-on investigation of the water quality, hydrology, geomorphology, and aquatic ecology of streams and other freshwater bodies. Includes field trips to water-related facilities such as drinking water and wastewater treatment plants. Prerequisite(s): Students must have completed Lab Safety training prior to registering for this class. To access the tutorial, login to myLearning and enter 458083 in the Search box to locate the appropriate module. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.338.    Field Methods in Ecology.    3 Credits.    This course will introduce student to methods used in field-based ecological research addressing population, community and ecosystem-level questions. Outdoor fieldwork is an essential part of the course. Field activities will center around the riparian ecosystem adjacent to the Homewood campus and on the urban ecology of the greater Baltimore region. Students will build skills in data collection, analysis, synthesis, and presentation. Basic statistical instruction in R will be taught to aid data analysis. Prerequisite(s): Click here to access the Laboratory Safety Introductory Course ; AS.270.202 AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.270.340.    Structural Geology Field Methods.    4 Credits.    This field-based course will put into practice the methods and concepts learned in the co-requisite course, Structural Geology Seminar. The field course will focus on the use of compass, map and pencil/tablet, and will be geared toward learning traditional methods that require a complete understanding of geometric and cross-cutting/overprinting relationships as they are recorded in outcrop. Field areas will include Hutton's unconformity at Siccar Point, Barrow's isograds in the Scottish Highlands, and coastal exposures surrounding Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire and Portsoy, Banffshire. Prerequisite(s): AS.270.346 Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.270.345.    Metamorphic Petrology.    3 Credits.    Introduction to metamorphic geology and the concepts on which it is built. Ideas and techniques that underpin metamorphic petrology are introduced. Focus is on utility of metamorphic geology in understanding petrogenesis crustal processes and plate tectonics. Local field trip(s) to explore the metamorphic geology of the Baltimore region. Recommended course background: AS.270.220 and AS.270.221 , or instructor permission Prerequisite(s): AS.270.220 AND AS.270.221 Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.346.    Structural Geology Seminar.    1 Credit.    Seminar class on fundamentals of structural geology. Involves weekly readings/practical exercises on: (1) rock mechanics and deformation processes; (2) commonly-encountered deformation products/structures; (3) deformation style and associated fabrics/textures/structure; (4) metamorphism and deformation; (5) techniques for describing and measuring structures; (6) interpretation of structural data on maps and cross-sections; (7) approaches for inferring large-scale structure from limited data, and (8) methods for visualizing and analyzing structure. Recommended course background: AS.270.220 , or instructor permission. Prerequisite(s): AS.270.220 AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.350.    Sedimentary Geology.    4 Credits.    Sedimentary rocks are the historical records of the Earth, documenting climate change, mass extinctions, and the evolution of life. This course will provide an introduction to sedimentary processes and sedimentary rocks. Focus is placed on linking physical observations to the ancient environments in which sedimentary rocks once formed. Fundamental tools for interpreting the sedimentary rock record, such as depositional models, geochronology, and chemostratigraphy will be reviewed. Two 1-day weekend field trips will occur over the course of the semester. There will also be weekly 1-hour labs. Lab and field trip times will be determined in the first week of class. Graduate and advanced undergraduate level. Recommended Course Background: AS.270.220 or instructor permission. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.270.353.    Forested Landscapes and Ecology.    3 Credits.    Forests are critical global ecosystems that provide not only timber and wood products, but an array of services including habitat for wildlife, water filtration, carbon storage, and recreational opportunities. This integrated seminar-based course features an interdisciplinary approach to understanding forested landscapes that stresses not only inventorying the biotic and abiotic components, but examining how these pieces are distributed in the landscape (patterns) and what forces drive these patterns (processes). Topics focus on the biological, geological, climatological, cultural, and historical underpinnings needed to observe, interpret, and analyze forest communities. It will cover aspects of biogeography, climate forcing of vegetation dynamics, effects of invasive species, land use change and creation of urban forests. This course has an associated 1- credit field trip that counts as a lab requirement for ENVS majors. Corequisite(s): Students must enroll in AS.270.355 [C] Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4) AS.270.354.    Stable Isotope Geochemistry.    3 Credits.    Stable isotope measurements are used to probe fundamental questions in the Earth and environmental sciences because they can be used to extract information about chemical, physical, and biological processes associated with the formation of geomaterials. Stable isotope patterns have been used for applications ranging from tracking the rise of oxygen on the early Earth to studying human diet. The majority of the course will focus on light isotope systems (O, C, S, etc.) and low-temperature applications, including: (1) tracing sources and sinks of fluids, sediments, biological materials, and contaminants, (2) studying rates and mechanisms of biochemical reactions, and (3) paleoenvironmental reconstructions. We will also review novel stable isotope applications including heavy isotope systems and mass independent fractionations. At the end of the course, students will be able to make interpretations about how stable isotope patterns inform our knowledge of how geomaterials are formed and provide information about the Earth system. Prerequisite(s): AS.270.220 OR AS.270.224 AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.355.    Forested Landscapes and Ecology Lab.    1 Credit.    This field oriented lab focuses on hands-on learning experiences in forest ecology. Efforts focus on foundational topics in forest ecology including: physiography and site quality; forest soils and nutrient cycling; ecological succession; forest dynamics; community structure; natural disturbance; and invasive/non-native species. Labs feature visits to local forest sites and one long weekend trip. Corequisite(s): Students must enroll in AS.270.353 [C] AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.270.359.    Critical Minerals: Origin, Distribution, and Impacts on Society and Climate Action.    3 Credits.    What makes a resource critical? Where do these critical resources come from? This course will provide an understanding of the origin and distribution of mineral deposits that are essential for climate action, particularly in meeting our rapidly growing clean energy needs—from wind turbines and solar panels to electric vehicles. But are these essential minerals sustainable? How does the extraction of these minerals impact the environment and society? Throughout the course, we will explore how geological processes, driven by plate tectonics, form critical mineral deposits and examine their role in the clean energy transition. Through case studies and debates, we will explore the environmental and societal impacts of mineral extraction. A short field trip around Baltimore, combined with the examination of ore and rock samples in class, will help connect the course material to real-world applications. The course will also cover mineral exploration techniques and resource estimation methods. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.363.    How to Live Forever: The Making of the Geologic Record of Life.    3 Credits.    Everything we know about the origins and evolution of life comes from the geologic record: bones and shells, stromatolites, ancient DNA, and subtle variations in the chemical and isotopic composition of rocks. But what processes — biological and abiological — determine which living things really do “live forever” as fossil biosignatures, and which are lost to the sands of time? In this course, students will learn how researchers read and interpret the geologic record of life and quantify its limitations, to better understand how life came to be and how it has changed through time. They will learn how organisms’ lifestyles and metabolisms affect the chemical and physical properties of their environment and how the process of fossilization is facilitated by physiology, ecological relationships, and diagenesis. Students will engage with a wide range of content, from interdisciplinary academic research articles to speculative science fiction, and work with geologic samples and chemical and isotopic datasets. AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.365.    Magmatic and Volcanic Systems on Earth and Other Planets.    3 Credits.    This course will present the fundamental concepts of igneous petrology—the study of rocks that solidify from magmas—which is used to understand how crust is generated on Earth and other planetary bodies. From the generation of ocean floor basalts to granites of the upper continental crust, we will look at the Earth’s dynamic structure and the connections between its mantle and surface. Topics such as the effects of volcanic eruptions on climate, or the role of large igneous provinces on biological mass extinctions will be investigated, linking microscopic details of rocks to major events of Earth history. An overview of the main geochemical tools used by the igneous petrologist will enable students to evaluate the geochemical and petrological variety of igneous systems.This course is intended for both undergraduate and graduate students in the EPS department. There are no pre-requisites, but some background in introductory geology (e.g. Dynamic Earth) and mineralogy will be helpful. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.366.    Spacecraft Instrumentation Project.    3 Credits.    Investigation into the content relevant to an ongoing spacecraft instrumentation project. An interdisciplinary team will enhance the skills and knowledge of science and engineering students. Topics include mission background, planetary science, sensor design, spacecraft systems, and mission planning, and sensor fabrication, calibration, integration, and testing, data analysis and interpretation, scientific/technical writing and publication. Distribution Area: Engineering, Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.270.368.    Geology of Baltimore Area.    2 Credits.    This is a weekly reading seminar and fieldwork course focused on the bedrock geology and tectonic history of the Baltimore area. The course is majority fieldwork, with four local, half-day fieldtrips replacing four of the 1h classroom sessions. The course will consider the following four elements of Baltimore’s hard rock geology: (1) the Grenville-age basement gneisses; (2) Baltimore Terrane stratigraphy associated with rifting of Rodinia and subsequent tectonic activation of the passive margin; (3) Baltimore Mafic Complex record of subduction initiation in the ancient Iapetus Ocean; and (4) metamorphism and magmatism during the Appalachian Orogeny. For each of the four geological elements studied we will first read research papers on their age, origin and significance, before taking a fieldtrip to see associated outcrops. Prerequisite(s): AS.270.220 AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.378.    Present and Future Climate.    3 Credits.    Intended for majors who are interested in the science that underlies the current debate on global warming, the focus is on recent observations one can glean from model simulations. Meets with AS.270.641 . Recommended Course Background: AS.110.108 - AS.110.109 and AS.171.101 - AS.171.102 Prerequisite(s): Student may not receive credit for both AS.270.378 and AS.270.641 . Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.379.    Atmospheric Science.    3 Credits.    A survey of core topics in atmospheric science, including dynamics, thermodynamics, radiative transfer, and chemistry. The course addresses both basic principles and applications to weather and climate. Recommended pre-requisites: General Calculus and Physics I and/or Oceans and Atmospheres. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.399.    Climate and Infectious Disease.    3 Credits.    This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of climate and infectious diseases. We will examine how variability in climate factors (such as temperature and rainfall) influences the incidence of climate-sensitive infectious diseases (e.g., malaria, dengue, meningitis, influenza), learning techniques for analyzing climate data and modeling climatic impacts on disease. A major focus of the course is on scientific communication via a course project involving scientific writing and data visualization. This course is primarily targeted towards upper-level undergraduates who are comfortable with their quantitative skills. Prior content knowledge in climate science and public health is not required. Prior coding experience is not required, but would be helpful. AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2) Writing Intensive AS.270.404.    Planetary Interiors.    3 Credits.    This course investigates the physical processes occurring in planetary interiors. Topics include formation and differentiation of planetary bodies, planetary structure, thermal evolution, convection, and dynamo generation of magnetic fields. Standard remote sensing methods used to investigate planetary interiors and results from recent planetary satellite missions will also be discussed.Recommended: Knowledge of vector calculus, PDEs and introductory physics. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.406.    Deciphering the History of Life.    3 Credits.    The majority of Life that existed on our planet is extinct, and the small and biased number of lineages that survived into the present cannot tell a complete story of Life’s evolutionary history. To fill these blank pages, we need to explore the fossil record on Earth (and elsewhere in the solar system) for information that can be directly integrated with data for living organisms. However, modern biology is mostly a molecular science – and we know that biomolecules experience drastic chemical alteration during fossilization.This course tackles the ‘Molecular Gap’ between past and present life forms from a practical and research-oriented perspective! We will survey the various chemical approaches that allow to extract biologically meaningful information from modern and fossil samples, and explore their individual strengths and limitations. Then we will move on to cover the nature of different biological signatures encoding diagnostic traits across the tree of Life, and explore the importance of corrections for evolutionary relationships when integrating data. Lastly, we will discuss the potential of multivariate statistics in the systematic extraction of meaningful biosignatures from notoriously noisy modern and fossil biological data. We will use prepared training data sets during guided in-session exercises, and students will go through the complete cross-disciplinary process of developing a biosignature – translational skills, that will enable them to conduct independent research on the topic. Recommended Course Background: Three Upper Level Science Courses. AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.410.    Planetary Surface Processes.    3 Credits.    This course explores processes that influence the evolution of planetary surfaces, including impact cratering, tectonics, volcanism, weathering, and sediment transport. These processes manifest themselves as structural deformation of planetary crusts due to loading by volcanoes, formation of craters by asteroid impacts, modification of surfaces by flowing landslides, rivers and glaciers, and the accumulation and transport of sand in dune fields on various planets. Emphasis is on the relationship to similar Earth processes, and the integrated geologic histories of the terrestrial planets, satellites, and asteroids. The focus will be on developing a physical understanding of these processes to interpret the surface characteristics and evolution of planets, satellites, asteroids, and comets from both qualitative assessments and quantitative measurements obtained from spacecraft data. A key component of the class will be the interpretation of these observations from recent and current planetary missions to the Moon, Mars, and other terrestrial bodies.Recommended Course Background: A sound knowledge of Calculus and Introductory Physics, and some prior knowledge of Earth and/or Planetary Science. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.412.    Spring seminar: Geological Field Studies in California.    2 Credits.    Field experience is an integral part of a geology student’s education. During this course, students will learn to digitize, synthesize, and interpret the observations they made during the January field-based class to interpret the geologic history and structure of southern California. Study USA: Geological Field Studies in California is a co-requisite for this course.For Spring 2020, the focus of the field work and course will be on applying concepts and techniques covered in Dynamic Earth ( AS.270.220 /1), Sedimentary Geology ( AS.270.350 ), Earth History ( AS.270.303 ), Planets, Life and the Universe (AS.020.334), and Isotope Geochemistry (AS.270.331). Sedimentary rocks are spectacularly exposed in this region and record over a billion years of key events in Earth history. Students will learn how these rocks have shaped our understanding of major evolutionary and environmental shifts in Earth’s past, while also learning how to map these units’ regional geographic distribution. Finally, students will also learn about the different tectonic events that have shaped the landscape that we see today in the western United States. The class is designed for upper level E&PS majors and E&PS graduate students. Prerequisite(s): AS.270.344 AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2) Writing Intensive AS.270.415.    Seminar in Ecology.    1 Credit.    This is a discussion-based course in current research in ecology. Each week a student will lead a discussion of a published paper in the field of ecology. Prerequisite(s): AS.270.202 Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.423.    Planetary Atmospheres.    3 Credits.    Fundamental concepts and basic principles of chemistry and physics applied to the study of planetary atmospheres. Vertical structure of planetary atmospheres. Atmospheric radiation, thermodynamics, and transport. Principles of photochemistry. Planetary spectroscopy and remote sensing. Upper atmospheres and ionospheres. Evolution and stability of planetary atmospheres. Recommended Course Background: basic physics, chemistry and calculus Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.425.    Earth and Planetary Fluids.    3 Credits.    An introductory course on the properties, flow, and transport characteristics of fluids throughout the Earth and planets. Topics covered include: constitutive relationships, fluid rheology, hydrostatics, dimensional analysis, low Reynolds number flow, porous media, waves, stratified and rotating fluids, plus heat, mass, and tracer transport. Illustrative examples and problems are drawn from the atmosphere, ocean, crust, mantle, and core of the Earth and other Planets. Open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Recommended Course Background: Basic Physics, Calculus, and familiarity with ordinary differential equations. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.431.    Tectonics Seminar.    1 Credit.    Introduction to plate tectonics and its "framework" role in understanding the Earth. Kay papers will be discussed in a weekly seminar class. Focus will be on early works that helped establish the theory, in addition to recent breakthrough contributions that have led to modifications and improvements to the theory of plate tectonics. AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2) AS.270.501.    Independent Study.    1 - 3 Credits.    Exploration of topic(s) in earth, planetary, and/or environmental science under the direction of an instructor. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.270.504.    Independent Research.    1 - 3 Credits.    Research in earth, planetary, and/or environmental science conducted under the direction of a faculty advisor. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6) AS.270.510.    Senior Honors Thesis.    1 - 3 Credits.    Senior thesis research in earth sciences conducted under the direction of a faculty advisor. Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms. AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Projects and Methods (FA6) Writing Intensive AS.270.603.    Geochemistry Seminar.    1 Credit.    A variety of topics of current interest involving mineral-fluid interactions will be reviewed. AS.270.605.    EPS Colloquium.    2 Credits.    A weekly seminar series in which graduate students present their latest research results and attend Departmental seminars. This course is required for all graduate students in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. AS.270.606.    EPS Colloquium.    2 Credits.    A weekly seminar series in which graduate students present their latest research results and attend Departmental seminars. This course is required for all graduate students in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. AS.270.607.    Urban Ecology.    3 Credits.    Urban ecology has been called the ecology in, of, and for cities. In this course, we will explore how ecological concepts are applied to urban ecosystems and the different approaches to urban ecological research. Topics will include: Biodiversity, water dynamics, energy and heat island effects, and nutrient cycling, urban metabolism, design of greenspace, and sustainability of cities. We will use Baltimore as a case study for studying cities. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS.270.614.    Atmosphere and Oceanic Vortices.    2 Credits.    Vortices are observed in the Earth's atmosphere and oceans and in the atmospheres of other planets. Examples are polar vortices in Earth, Mars and Titan's atmospheres, Spots on Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune, Gulf Stream rings, and eddies throughout the oceans. These vortices are often the most dominant feature of the regional circulation, and understanding their structure and evolution dynamics is necessary to understand the dynamics and transport of atmospheres and oceans. In this course we focus on the structure and dynamics of long-lived vortices, i.e., vortices that exist for longer than typical wave periods. The first section of the course will consist of lectures examining the fundamental dynamics of vortices in rapidly rotating, stratified fluids, while the second section will be seminars discussing more detailed aspects of specific vortices occurring in nature. It is suggested that you have taken 270.425 Earth and Planetary Fluids or another similar introductory fluids class. AS.270.615.    Inversion Modeling & Data Assimilation.    3 Credits.    This graduate class will introduce modern inverse modeling and data assimilation techniques. These powerful methods are used in atmospheric science, oceanography, and geophysics and are growing more widespread. Topics will include: singular value decomposition, Green’s function inversions, Kalman filtering, and variational data assimilation. The class will include lectures on concepts and theory, and practical experience in the computer laboratory.Permission of Instructor Required AS.270.617.    Seminar in Geosciences.    1 Credit.    This is a discussion-based course in which students take turns leading the discussion of geoscience science journal articles and other relevant publications. AS.270.618.    Remote Sensing of the Environment.    3 Credits.    This course is an introduction to the use of remote sensing technology to study Earth’s physical and biochemical processes. Topics covered include remote sensing of the atmosphere, land and oceans, as well as remote sensing as a tool for policy makers. Also offered as 270.318. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS.270.626.    Ocean General Circulation.    3 Credits.    The aim of this course is to achieve conceptual understanding of the large scale low frequency ocean general circulation. The role of the ocean circulation in earth's climate is emphasized throughout. AS.270.628.    Seminar in regional field geology.    1 Credit.    This course focuses on select regional geology or ecology sites and involves a weekend field trip to explore key locations. Students are required to prepare short presentations on field trip stops in advance of the weekend trip. Attendance at organizational meetings is required. Open to E&PS graduate students and upper level EPS or ENVS undergraduate majors/minors. The focus area will the Inner Piedmont and Blue Ridge of North Carolina. Two meetings to be scheduled prior to trip. AS.270.630.    Physics and Chemistry of Aerosols.    3 Credits.    This course will cover fundamentals of aerosol physics and chemistry. Topics covered will include aerodynamics and diffusion of aerosol particles, condensation and evaporation, particle size distributions, optics of small particles, characterization of particle composition, and the diversity of aerosols found in planetary atmospheres.Recommended Course Background: Basic Physics and Chemistry. Calculus. AS.270.633.    Seminar on the IPCC Sixth Assessment.    1 Credit.    This course will discuss the contents of the Working Group I contribution to the sixth assessment report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS.270.634.    Seminar in Urban Systems Science.    1 Credit.    This seminar will provide a review of the current state of urban systems science via weekly seminars and readings by current experts in the increasingly important field of urban environmental and social sciences research. The seminar is a joint offering being coordinated by Johns Hopkins, Penn State, and Morgan State Universities. Given the distance between campuses, the course will be held in hybrid mode. Students enrolled in the course for credit will write three reflections on seminar topics over the course of the semester. AS.270.641.    Present and Future Climate.    3 Credits.    Meets with AS.270.378 . Prerequisite(s): Student may not receive credit for both AS.270.378 and AS.270.641 . Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS.270.644.    Physics of Climate Variability.    3 Credits.    Earth’s climate varies over a wide range of time scales. Some of these variations, like rainy or dry summers, are a familiar part of daily life. Others, like the ice ages, have profoundly shaped the evolution of culture and ecosystems, but are largely invisible to us today. Climate variability complicates our ability to detect and attribute changes due to anthropogenic impacts. However, building systems that are resilient to variability may also help with mitigating such impacts. This course covers a range of climate variations, focusing on understanding the mechanisms and impacts of particular modes of variability. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences Writing Intensive AS.270.653.    Earth and Planetary Fluids II.    3 Credits.    A sequel to AS.270.425 concentrating on planetary-scale atmospheric and oceanic circulation. Physical understanding of the underlying fluid dynamics will be emphasized. AS.270.654.    Environmental Data Analysis.    3 Credits.    Environmental data is often messy-contaminated with noise, fundamental nonlinear, potentially stationary. This course will build on Menke and menke's Environmental Data Analysis with Matlab to examine methods of analyzing environmental data that don't lead us to confuse noise with signal. Topics covered will include significance testing, spectral estimation, nonparametric methods, multivariate data analysis. Applications will be tailored to the student interest. AS.270.655.    Baltimore Environmental Data Analysis.    3 Credits.    The Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative (BSEC) aims to develop climate action plans for Baltimore that also improve the well-being of those who live in historically underserved neighborhoods. To achieve this goal an extensive and diverse range of environmental measurements are being made in and around Baltimore City. This course will introduce the science within BSEC, the measurements being made to address this science, and approaches used to analyze these data, including time series, spatial, and multivariate analysis. Students will perform data analysis projects using the BSEC and other data for Baltimore. Topics will be tailored to the student interest. No previous connection with BSEC required. AS.270.656.    Geochemical modeling of water-rock interactions in the deep Earth.    3 Credits.    Thermodynamic basis for the modeling of irreversible chemical mass transfer involving minerals and aqueous species at elevated temperatures and pressures. Reading will start with classic papers by Helgeson and co-workers and proceed to applications in the literature involving hydrothermal ore deposits, subduction zones, and diamond formation in the upper mantle. The course focusses on developing specific projects of research interest to individual participants.Recommended Course Background: AS.030.101 and AS.030.102 or equivalent, AND AS.270.220 AND AS.270.221 or equivalent, AND AS.270.302 or equivalent. AS.270.662.    Seminar in Planetary Science.    1 Credit.    This is a discussion-based course in which students take turns leading the discussion of planetary science journal articles and other relevant publications. AS.270.667.    Seminar in Soil Ecology.    1 Credit.    This weekly seminar explores current research focusing on soil physical, chemical, and biological properties, soil functions, and the interactions among soils, microbes, plants, and fauna. Emphasis is on human impacted soils, such as urban and agricultural ecosystems. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS.270.668.    Geobiology Seminar.    2 Credits.    Geobiology is the study of interactions between life and rocks. In this class we will explore how organisms impact sedimentary records both directly, by leaving behind biosignatures, or indirectly, by affecting their surroundings in a way that promotes formation of certain types of minerals. This will serve as a guide for interpreting geological records during the early evolution of life on Earth, the rise of animals, and major mass extinctions. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS.270.675.    Communication for Scientists.    3 Credits.    Communication for Scientists” and the description is “This course will cover the various ways in which scientists are expected to communicate throughout the life of a project. Topics will include writing proposals, preparing impactful figures, writing press releases, interacting with the press (press conferences, radio/TV, interviews, etc.), writing for and speaking to the public, social media, and interacting with policy makers." AS.270.679.    Atmospheric Science.    3 Credits.    A survey of core topics in atmospheric science, including dynamics, thermodynamics, radiative transfer, and chemistry. The course addresses both basic principles and applications to weather and climate. Recommended pre-requisites: General Calculus and Physics I and/or Oceans and Atmospheres. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS.270.688.    Exoplanets and their Atmospheres.    3 Credits.    This course covers the basic theory of planetary atmospheres as applied to extrasolar planets. The fundamental physical processes related to the structure, composition, radiative transfer, chemistry and dynamics of planetary atmospheres are covered, with an emphasis on those related to observable exoplanet properties. We also provide an overview of the observational techniques of exoplanetary atmospheres and discuss the habitability of exoplanets. AS.270.695.    Graduate Skills in Earth and Planetary Sciences.    1 Credit.    This seminar-style course will enable graduate students in Earth and Planetary Sciences to discuss issues and develop skills relevant to working in earth and planetary science fields. Topics will vary each iteration and may include graduate school expectations, research and communication methods, grant and funding procedures, stress management, organization and management methods, critical conversations, work-life balance, career paths, and JEDI issues and resources in the geosciences. Course open to EPS Graduate Students or by Instructor Permission AS.270.804.    Independent Study.    3 - 9 Credits.    Exploration of topic(s) in earth, planetary, and/or environmental science under the direction of an instructor. AS.270.807.    Research.    1 - 20 Credits.    Research in earth, planetary, and/or environmental science conducted under the direction of a faculty advisor. AS.270.808.    Research.    1 - 20 Credits.    Research in earth, planetary, and/or environmental science conducted under the direction of a faculty advisor.

AS.001 (AS First Year Writing Seminars)

http://e-catalogue.jhu.g.sjuku.top/course-descriptions/as-first-year-seminars/

AS.001.100.    FYS: What is the Common Good?.    3 Credits.    What is “the common good”? How do individuals consider this idea, this question, and how are societies led, or misled, by its pursuit? Together, we will explore sources from a range of perspectives: What does Aristotle’s theory of the common good teach us? Or the Federalist Papers, the design of Baltimore’s public transportation system, meritocracy in higher education, the perniciousness of pandemics, proliferation of nuclear weapons, restorative justice, or intimate love? Drawing from film, journal articles, literature, and other sources—authors/creators include Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Bong Joon-ho, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Sandel, and more—this First-Year Seminar is as much about how we ask and interrogate challenging, timeless questions as it is about the answers themselves. Engaging our material and each other, we will work together to hone the habits of scholarly inquiry essential to this practice: reading, writing, talking. The seminar will culminate in a final, collaborative research project that seeks to map, and manifest, versions of the common good. AS.001.101.    FYS: The Hospital.    3 Credits.    Hospitals: Virtually all of us were born in one, most of us will eventually die in one, and in between all of us will spend at least some time in one. Lots of you likely aspire to spend your careers in one. Along the way we, or some third-party payer, will spend a considerable amount of our health care benefits there. Our focus will be on the history of the hospital from its origins in early modern Europe and the Islamic world, through the early modern period, to the rise of the modern urban mega hospital. The Johns Hopkins Hospital has been ranked as one of the nation’s best by US News and World Report since its annual survey began, and spent nineteen straight years at number one. So we will devote some time to its history, and the history of its affiliated programs—The School of Medicine, The Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the School of Nursing. For your major project, you will serve as advisors to the university’s Planning and Architecture committee. Drawing on your extensive knowledge of the history hospitals and medicine, you will re-envision the medical campus of the 21st century AS.001.102.    FYS: Japanese Robots.    3 Credits.    Japan is a world leader in biomimetic robotics. Japanese society enthusiastically embraces robotic nurses, robotic guides, robotic waiters, robotic pets, and even robotic girlfriends. What are the origins of the Japanese love of robots? What role did robotics engineers play in creating the image of loveable robots? What societal fears do Japanese robots assuage and what hopes do they foster? In the course of the semester, students will learn about the evolution of Japanese robotics, and explore the implications of this evolution to humans’ relationship with robots. While learning about Japanese robots, students will acquire skills necessary for college-level education, including how to write an email to a professor, how to organize and manage digital tools, how to navigate the information resources, and how to develop, complete, and present research projects. This course will equip students with skills essential to their success in college and beyond. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.103.    FYS: When Worlds Collide - Science Goes Global.    3 Credits.    In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore instances of contact between different world cultures and pre-modern and modern science (16th-20th c.). The premise of the course is the understanding that in addition to the cultural, religious and political negotiations that took place during cross-cultural encounters, science also underwent a similar process. We understand science expansively, as the study of nature and the production of knowledge about it embedded in a particular cultural context. The historical episodes we will discuss are selections of instances where agents of the West—missionaries, explorers, businessmen, colonists, scientists—established prolonged contact with non-western cultures and engaged in conversations about their worldviews. Some cases considered include Jesuits in the Chinese imperial court, Spanish missionaries among the Maya, and English explorers in the Pacific islands. Distribution Area: Humanities, Natural Sciences AS.001.104.    FYS: The Science of Color.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar is designed to introduce students to the fundamental physical and chemical origins of color and how we perceive them - from the vivid palette provided by the natural world to the brightly colored clothing we wear. Beginning with the basic principles of light and color, we will embark on an interdisciplinary investigation of color, including, but not limited to: color chemistry; color in biology; the physiology of the eye; how color affects human psychology; the history of color and light; and the use of color in art. Discover the physical and chemical explanations behind several noteworthy phenomena such as sunsets, color-blindness, rainbows, fireworks, chameleons and the Aurora Borealis. AS.001.105.    FYS: The Science Behind the Fiction.    3 Credits.    In this First-Year Seminar, we will seek to answer questions including: could you forge Beskar? What would it take to make a light saber? Is "Image, enhance" really possible? What is possible today? What might be possible in the future? And, what may never be possible, as it violates the laws of nature as we know them? We will take an empiricist approach, gathering data on the needed properties via screenings and related research, and then applying physical principles to reveal feasibility. AS.001.106.    FYS: Legal Fictions - Law and Humanities.    3 Credits.    A legal fiction is a fact assumed or created by courts to help reach a decision. In this First-Year Seminar, we study how legal fictions and fictions about law work in order to examine the possibilities and limits of fiction’s (legal) power. Drawing from legal and literary thought, as well as plays, short stories, cases, and legal commentary, we critically explore the capacity of words to reveal (or conjure) some fundamental features of our shared worlds and discuss their impact in contemporary debates about justice. The course is designed with first-year students in mind and requires no prior knowledge of law. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.108.    FYS: Heart Matters.    3 Credits.    To the human imagination, the heart is more than a muscle and thumping pump keeping us alive. From the Renaissance to the present, writers have helped us make sense of our bodies, in health and in illness or pain. The history of the heart, meanwhile, starts in Antiquity, where it shapes our beliefs about life. One of our aims will be to trace the historical, cultural, and subjective meanings our minds have given to this “sublime engine.” The other will be to discover how our scientifically inquisitive minds, backed up with technical skills and technological devices such as the stethoscope, have found new ways to take care of this volatile organ. Our materials will involve a constellation of texts in medical history, modern fiction in the form of poems and short-stories, and recent scientific prose on such topics as heart transplants, heart-monitoring implants, xenotransplants as well as heartbreaks. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.109.    FYS: Why'd Your Brain Sign You up for This?.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar will explore the neuroscience of choice. In addition to exploring the neurobiology of choice, we will dabble with philosophical ideas of free will and determinism. We will also touch on questions related to culpability. For example, are people who break the law but suffer from brain damage responsible for their actions? Sound interesting? Well, why stop there? Let’s sit back, eat some popcorn and take a look at how popular culture depicts the neuroscience of choice in the movies. Yes, with your help, we can do it all – but will you choose to??? AS.001.110.    FYS: How We Read.    3 Credits.    How does reading work as a cognitive process? How do acts of reading differ across cultures, technologies, and time? Why are reading practices and proficiencies a cultural obsession? How are we conditioned to read "a life" in auto/biographical accounts? This First-Year Seminar considers these questions through texts, museum visits, and hands-on engagement with book cultures. AS.001.111.    FYS: What's Music Do?.    3 Credits.    Why do we listen to music? What use is it? Can it help us learn more, run faster, feel happier? Can it improve our lives? Can it cure disease? WMD is for musician and non-musician alike. It is designed for students with all sorts of musical tastes and academic interests. It also challenges the usual “top down” approach of most courses, where the professor decides most of what will be studied before the class begins and delivers most of the class content. By contrast, in this course students are invited to relate their majors or other interests to the power of music and then share these ideas with the rest of the class. For example, neuroscience majors might study how music benefits memory in Alzheimer’s patients. Or political science majors, the power of music in diplomatic missions. Students research topics like these and then assign related texts as homework to the rest of the class, including the professor. They’re given broad freedom of choice for these texts both in content and form. The goal is not to create a “great books” class so much as a “great questions” class, since great questions can be inspired by terrible or trivial sources, just as awful or insignificant situations can spark epiphany. But whatever the text, I, as the professor, must be willing not to profess. In fact, in this classroom I’m no longer a professor but a professional student, sharing with my fellow students an interest in music and its many possibilities. And yet, even more important than pursuing these shared interests, this course ultimately aims to help students create community by practicing better communication. Even if you forget everything you learned in this class, I hope you will remember your classmates. AS.001.112.    FYS: Story, Song, Food, And Film - A Thousand Years Of Jewish Culture.    3 Credits.    Most Jews in America today are descendants of Ashkenazi Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to the thousand-year history and culture of Ashkenazi Jews through their vernacular, Yiddish. How did Ashkenazi Jews maintain a distinct identity, even while borrowing cultural forms from their non-Jewish neighbors? How did Jews in the modern period challenge tradition and create new forms of Jewish identity? How did Eastern European immigrants adapt to life in America? In addition to studying a wide range of texts—including fiction, poetry, memoir, song, and film—students will learn how to read the Yiddish alphabet, and will explore food culture by preparing Ashkenazi Jewish dishes. No prior knowledge of Yiddish is necessary for this course. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.113.    FYS: The Poetry of Music - Lyrics and the Art of Songwriting.    3 Credits.    In this First-Year Seminar we will examine the poetic artistry of American song, from Tin-Pan Alley and Broadway tunes to Folk songs, Billboard’s Top 40, and Hip Hop. Our focus will be on the linguistic art of song – the meaning(s), rhythm, timbre, and pitch found in words alone. Taught in a workshop format, the course will encourage students to read lyrics as poetry and then write their own. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.114.    FYS: The Politics of Reproduction.    3 Credits.    The idea that the “personal” is “political” finds no greater example than in the politics of reproduction. From inheritance laws, the rights of the offspring of enslaved peoples, or policies to reduce (or increase) fertility, the modern nation state has had a great deal to say about the use and produce of human bodies. In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine how formal and informal institutions have governed reproductive practices over the past 200 years. We will look at how family structures and economic development map onto fertility, and at how technological innovations in fertility control (including birth control and IVF) have influenced women's economic and political participation. We will also consider whether reproductive policies have differential impacts for LGBTQ households. Finally, we examine the “dark side” of reproductive policies -- not only sterilization campaigns but also the treatment of sex workers and sex-selective abortion -- to understand how state policies have divided households based on race, class, and occupation. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.115.    FYS: Illusions, Delusions, and Other Confusions.    3 Credits.    Most people think the strongest kind of evidence in a criminal case is a confident eyewitness. Most students think re-reading textbook materials or class notes is the best way to prepare for an exam. And all too many people think that measles vaccines cause autism. All three of these ideas are wrong. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore what modern psychology has uncovered about how our intuitions concerning human nature deceive us, and lead to incorrect ideas such as the ones just mentioned. We will discuss a wide variety of topics including “the attention economy,” groupthink, and subliminal perception. AS.001.116.    FYS: Literature of the Everyday: The Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel.    3 Credits.    The ordinary, the common, the everyday: why does literary realism consider the experiences of the average individual to be worthy of serious contemplation? In this First-Year Seminar, we will read closely a set of novels by Flaubert, Mann, Dickens, Zola, and Tolstoy from the period in which the development of realism reaches its climax. These novels transform the conventions for the representation of lives of lower and middle class subjects, revealing such lives as capable of prompting reflection upon deep and serious questions of human existence. Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.300.429 are not able to take AS.001.116 . Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.117.    FYS: Composer Biographies in Film.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar focuses on the lives of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin and the depictions of their lives in film during the 20th century. The seminar provides both an introduction to film analysis and music history biography. In the last module, we will examine the canon of Western art music composers and consider historiographical issues along lines of gender, race, and other American demographics within this inherited tradition--all toward a collaborative final project. Excursions to concerts and other events will be offered. AS.001.118.    FYS: Imagined Worlds - Science, Technology and Society.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminars asks how social and technological change are related by reading speculative fiction together with secondary sources from the humanities and social sciences. The imagined worlds we will examine feature technologies that intervene in biological reproduction, and technologies that affect the division of labor by which society reproduces itself, allowing us to probe the relationship between technology, gender, and work. By analyzing imagined worlds conjured by speculative thinkers, we will ask how fictional works mediate between imagination and reality. Students will also experiment with speculative methods—including games, creative writing exercises, and critical design—to probe the social and ethical dimensions of emerging technologies. Potential texts include short fiction by Octavia Butler, T. C. Boyle, Isaac Asimov, Alice Sheldon, and N.K. Jemisin, as well as Boots Riley’s 2018 film Sorry to Bother You. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.119.    FYS: The Nature of Nature.    3 Credits.    How well do we understand the natural world? Are there common principles that can explain everything about it? What remains to be understood? Do we understand our past well enough to predict our future? Can I really take this seminar even if I don’t have a background in science or math? Yes you can! In this seminar we are going to emulate the Greeks, who without the benefit of the technological and mathematical armamentarium available today, driven simply by curiosity and their imagination, identified some of the fundamental questions that still puzzle us today. In the process they laid the foundation for modern science. Many of their insights have stood the test of time. We will examine the nature of nature by asking deep questions about the world around us and by examining phenomena we experience in our daily lives. We’ll try to identify continuity and connectivity between aspects of nature that are usually treated separately. Perhaps you’ll discover that science and religion, and scientific and humanistic inquiry, are more similar than you might think. Our seminar is organized around weekly conversations informed by all manner of sources: popular science writing, newspaper articles, fiction, poetry, and film. We will even do simple experiments in my lab (no lab or science experience necessary) to illustrate the logic of life. AS.001.120.    FYS: U.S. History of the Present.    3 Credits.    Which ideas, movements, problems, and conflicts define the contemporary United States—and where did they come from? In this First-Year Seminar, we’ll study the history of this country since the turn of the 21st century to try to answer those questions. Using a range of texts and visual media, we’ll investigate the history behind concepts like "the War on Terror," “the free market,” “identity politics,” “culture wars,” and "populism," and discuss the causes and consequences of the debates they provoked in this period. We’ll also assess what’s appealing and challenging about studying the very recent past and using it to interpret our present. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.121.    FYS: Socrates and his Intellectual Context.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar will focus on the figure of Socrates. Socrates wrote nothing, so we depend on others for our knowledge of him. We will examine the ways he is portrayed by several different authors, including Plato. We will also examine some other ideas around in his time - some of which were pretty radical - and consider how he may have reacted to them. Finally, we will examine his influence on later thought. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.122.    FYS: Global Cinema in the 21st Century.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar introduces students to the intellectual life of the university by considering some of the riches of contemporary global cinema. After a brief introduction each week, you will watch the assigned film and read some texts to deepen your sense of how to analyze it and think about broader matters the director has taken on. During in-class discussion, we will consider what makes a particular film noteworthy, what the director seems to think about his/her national context, and how local issues intersect with broader questions about the human condition. How does the past shape us? What is justice? What is political action? Who are we responsible to? We will also consider aesthetics. What is a good director? How do we know we are watching good acting (especially when reading subtitles?) What impact do cinematography and editing have on our perception of a film? How do film makers speak to and quote one another? Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.123.    FYS: Wired to Read: the Science and the Art.    3 Credits.    Trying to make sense of words I have written. But how do we do we do it? How do mere shapes and lines on the page suddenly begin to mean something? Is our brain wired for reading? Apart from our eyes, are other parts of the body involved? When did humans start to write and read? These are the kinds of questions we’ll pursue. This First-Year Seminar will explore two distinctive perspectives: one literary, the other is scientific. We'll divide our attention between the study of chapters and articles that present scientific findings about how we read and a practical exploration of a novel. Literary works tax our brains in multiple ways and our example will show why and how. Maylis de Kerangal's medical fiction The Heart will serve as our case study. The book and scenes from its adaptation for the screen will enable us to experience the power of fiction as it transports us into an enhanced reality made of images and words. We'll see how written words are able to redirect our attention in ways that make us more perceptive about a "real" world of human interactions. Slowed down and staged in the book, the life-stories, fateful accidents, and heroic gestures that make up a medical universe can paradoxically bring us closer the life and death decisions that begin in the ER. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.124.    FYS: Monuments and Memorials: Shaping Historical Memory.    3 Credits.    Monuments and memorials traditionally serve as placeholders of memory, inviting viewers to remember and reflect. They aim to speak both to their own moment and to posterity, keeping the past present for the future. Yet what they say—and don’t say—is highly contested. Recent controversies in Baltimore, across the US, and throughout the world have dramatized their problematic power and volatility and demand our thoughtful attention. Drawing on examples from antiquity to the present, this interdisciplinary First-Year Seminar explores monuments and memorials as political, cultural, social, and aesthetic expressions, and examines the ways they operate within and beyond the historical moment in which they were created. Current debates will be considered along with the ancient Roman practice of damnatio memoriae; iconoclasm; and alternative or counter-monuments that intentionally subvert the traditional commemorative lexicon. Particular attention will be given to monuments in Baltimore, with on-site classes whenever possible. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.125.    FYS: Matchmaker, Matchmaker! Love, Marriage, and Modern Jewish Identity.    3 Credits.    Should children accept the match their parents make for them, or at least choose a partner their parents approve of? Is marriage a pillar of traditional society, or a passport to new ways of thinking and being? How do questions of love and marriage help us to understand changes in Jewish life and identity in the modern period? In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine these questions in a broad range of stories, plays, and films spanning Europe and America, including the American movie Fiddler on the Roof and the stories on which it is based by Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.127.    FYS: Public Opinion and Democracy.    3 Credits.    How does public opinion shape electoral behavior and the contours of democracy in the United States, and how have these relationships changed as techniques for measuring public opinion have evolved since the early twentieth century? To consider this question, the course introduces alternative perspectives on the features of a healthy democracy, including both historical perspectives and current arguments. Interweaved with this material, the course examines how public opinion is measured and interpreted by private pollsters, survey researchers, and data journalists. Emphasis is placed on the alternative claims that opposing analysts adopt, as well as how the technologies of data collection and analysis shape the permissibility of conclusions. Students will learn to interpret public opinion patterns, which requires a brief presentation of basic concepts from survey sampling, including what to make of the polling industry’s most boring concept: margin of error. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.128.    FYS: Deep Listening and Multimedia Sound Art.    3 Credits.    Sound plays a rich and complex role in our everyday lives and in our various forms of media art. In the past thirty years, sound studies has become a new addition to the study of the human senses, as well as the relationship of these senses to history, aesthetics, epistemology, culture, and art. How do we listen to the world around us? To different media? In this First-Year Seminar, we explore listening to the lived environment, to music, and to multimedia sound art ranging from performance art to cinema. The nexus of questions surrounding listening opens us up to a host of new texts and approaches: those of acoustic ecology, or how we experience sound via the lived and natural environment; those of the relationship between the senses and our emotions; those of the nature of musical listening; and those of the art world as it engages with sound. This seminar is a mixture of sound theory and practice. We will read, debate, and bring in examples. Students will create their own projects, both written and sonic. No prior experience in sound theory or sound practice are required. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.129.    FYS: Environmental Poisons.    3 Credits.    An exploration of the occurrence and potential effects of poisons in the environment, from naturally occurring ones such as arsenic to those that may be introduced by mankind such as nuclear waste. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS.001.130.    FYS: Evolutionary Psychology.    3 Credits.    In this unique, 1-credit First-Year Seminar, we discuss evolutionary psychology—the idea that the mind can be understood as an adaptation to our ancestral environment by means of natural selection. Topics range from nature vs. nurture and freewill vs. determinism to the exploration of how evolutionary principles speak to broad social issues such sexuality, gender, social class, and violence. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.131.    FYS: Techno - Anthropology.    3 Credits.    This course offers an introduction to anthropological perspectives on technology. We begin the human body as our most basic technology, and survey various tradecraft (fire and animal domestication, time-keeping, inscription, sailing) that have adapted us to diverse environments. We then examine the consequences of industrial technology, with its emphasis on automation, standardization and scaling. Finally, we turn to the rise of information technology such as social media, and the ways it has transformed senses of communication and place. Throughout we attend to the complex interplay of technological power and social organization. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences Writing Intensive AS.001.132.    FYS: Exploring Economic Inequality.    3 Credits.    In this First-Year Seminar, we examine inequalities in income, wealth, and working conditions in the United States today. What do the historical trends look like and how do economists explain them? Is economic inequality a significant problem? If so, why? And what tools do we have in the policy arsenal to address it? We will draw on diverse sources, including economics readings, op-eds, podcasts, and short vignettes from literature to motivate our weekly discussions. Students will have the opportunity to present group research and lead class discussions drawing on the economic concepts developed in class. At the end of the semester, students will complete an individual research project exploring some aspect of current inequality, inspired by their own selection from literature, poetry, music, or film. AS.001.133.    FYS: Hot Topics in Education.    3 Credits.    As a public good, public schooling is often the focus of attempts at purposeful change. Politicians, for example, make policies for fixing schools (public) that never would be entertained for fixing families (private). Parents also make demands of schools, as do a host of other interested parties. Together these stakeholders make up part of the external environment to which schools adapt. But the institutional agents of schooling have interests too—e.g., teachers’ unions, associations of school administrators, the faculty of schools of education—and they too often try to shape the direction of school reform. This First-Year Seminar examines timely, often controversial, issues of education policy and practice through a sociological lens. We will address these topics with discussions of a documentary film on the history of American public schools, readings in contemporary social science, and our own research into specific policy debates. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.134.    FYS: Great Books at Hopkins - a closer reading.    3 Credits.    Modeled after Johns Hopkin’s longstanding Great Books course, this Freshman seminar offers a more focused selection of texts to allow in-depth reading and discussion, with greater attention to historical context. Texts will include: The Odyssey, Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, written by himself, with excerpts from additional slave narratives. In-class lectures and discussions will be supplemented by occasional guest lectures and exhibits from the archives of Eisenhower Libraries. Prior attendance in Great Books at Hopkins is not required; upper class students who have previously taken Great Books may be admitted with permission of instructor. Distribution Area: Humanities Writing Intensive AS.001.135.    FYS: Free Speech and Its Limits.    3 Credits.    Freedom of speech, and the related freedom of the press, are core values for democracies -- and for universities, in which the freedom to challenge accepted beliefs is assumed to be essential to advancing knowledge. The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and of the press, as do the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the European Convention on Human Rights among other statements. But like other rights, my right to freedom of speech may conflict with yours, or it may infringe on other important rights or societal objectives. As a result, freedom of speech cannot be (and in practice is not) unlimited. In this seminar, we will be asking why freedom of speech has been accorded such importance, and how and why it might legitimately be limited, in politics, in business, in everyday life, and in universities, looking both at the United States and at other liberal democracies. Reading will include opinions (both majority and dissenting) of courts in the United States, Canada, and Europe, with discussion informed by Justice Robert Jackson’s quip about the US Supreme Court (but equally applicable to other top-level courts): “We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.” AS.001.136.    FYS: Cults, Communes, and Conspiracies.    3 Credits.    Cults, communes, and conspiracies are unusual social and ideological organizations. How should we understand their origins, structure, and functioning? In our First-Year Seminar, we will assess the value of alternative explanatory concepts from the social sciences, such as charismatic leadership, organizational ecology, network structure, status competition, social influence, and belief propagation. We will then interpret cases in comparative perspective, asking, for example, how cults differ from religious sects, how communes differ from political movements, and how organized crime groups differ from legal businesses. AS.001.137.    FYS: The Power of Speech: Law, Politics, and the Humanities.    3 Credits.    "What don’t we do with words? Even silence makes manifest the power of speech. This course will introduce you to some of the ways that power has been described and thought about. In addition to studying arguments that connect the power of speech to what it means to be human, we will explore various attempts both to protect and limit speech, taking into consideration not only how we do things with words but how words affect us. Topics that will be covered include freedom of speech, censorship, hate speech, talking back, silence, and storytelling. We will read texts in philosophy, political science, law, and literature, and we will watch at least one film or play.While we discuss the power of speech, we will also reflect on the ways in which discussion fosters a community. In other words, the experience of our discussion is a topic for our conversation. First-year seminars are designed to encourage “meaningful civil exchange among students across disciplinary interests and backgrounds” as well as to “foster early, sustained faculty-student interaction and mentorship.” We will talk about how such seminars are supposed to work and how they may (or may not) realize their goals. Reading, analyzing, and discussing the texts assigned in this course will help us develop foundational critical thinking skills; how might these activities also establish a sense of (group) identity? AS.001.138.    FYS: Soccer in Brazil: Opium of the Masses.    3 Credits.    Did you know that we can explain various aspects of Brazil and Brazilian society such as race, politics and national identity through studying its national sport? Futebol offers a unique perspective on politics, race and citizenship in Brazil. This First-Year Seminar seeks to understand Brazilian culture through the historic national pastime of futebol. In addition to the main textbooks chosen for the seminar, by reading a variety of texts from newspapers, academic journals, fiction and film, students will be able to find their own approach to understanding the phenomenon of futebol within the social and political traditions of Brazil. Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken AS.211.294 are not eligible to take AS.001.138 . Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.139.    FYS: Medicine and Cinema.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar explores the intersection between medicine and film, looking at how medicine, medical providers, and narratives of illness and health are depicted in cinematic works. Some of the questions that the seminar pursues are: What are some of the medical issues that filmmakers focus on? How did the cinematic portrayal of medicine change over time? What role do these films play in shaping public perceptions of medicine, medical providers, and medical institutions? By watching a number of films throughout the semester and reading some accompanying texts, students will develop deeper knowledge both of the history of medicine in cinema and the tools that cinema offers to the telling medical stories. AS.001.140.    FYS: What Everyone Should Know about How Science Works.    3 Credits.    Science and scientists often bear the brunt of public displeasure over current events. Recent debates over CoVID (the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, masks, and isolation), climate change, and many other controversies raise questions about the reliability of scientific results and what it means to conduct research. What is and what is not scientific? How can non-scientists determine whether a scientific result is "right?" In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore what scientists do -- the practices of science -- and how they set standards of knowledge. Discussions will be organized around current pressing topics, including: What does it mean to "follow the science" or "do your own research" in the age of COVID? Will science save us from the ravages of climate change? Who or what has ultimate authority over the direction of scientific advances? When are new scientific announcements important new results and when are they just click bait hype? Who pays for science and should we care? What is meant by replication and is it bad if it doesn't happen? How does scientific publication work and what issues have arisen? Why do scientists often get bad press, and is it fair? Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS.001.141.    FYS: The Art of Mathematics.    3 Credits.    Mathematics is so much more that simply the language of science, or a set of techniques for solving quantitative-based problems. In fact, it is not a science at all, but an art, a construct of the imagination that not only provides structure to the reality of the world, but also gives form to anything and everything we can possibly imagine. Many of its fundamental principles and methods of employment are shared by artists of all types, from musicians to painters, sculptors, and poets. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore these principles and methods shared by mathematicians and artists, like the notions of abstraction, metaphor, and pattern, the aesthetic quality both mathematicians and artists give to their work, the geometry of representation and visualization, the imagination as a tool of discovery and structure, and the use of mathematics in art, as well as the use of art in mathematics. Along the way, we will talk to artists and mathematicians, and hopefully visit the studios and galleries of each. Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences AS.001.142.    FYS: The Physics of Democracy.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar considers what we can learn about democratic societies by thinking of them as complex physical systems. We will discuss voting and social choice theories and their relationship to renormalization and emergence; organization and segregation in complex systems: power laws, inequality, and polarization; and the dynamics of information and opinions: networks, bubbles, filters, and phase transitions. Distribution Area: Humanities, Natural Sciences AS.001.143.    FYS: Poets, Physicists, Philosophers, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality.    3 Credits.    In this First-Year Seminar we will explore the long and mostly untold story behind the most revolutionary discoveries of modern physics—quantum mechanics and relativity—a story written, astonishingly, in the languages of poetry, fiction, and philosophy. Shuttling between twentieth-century Germany and Argentina by way of eighteenth-century Prussia, with stopovers in Plato’s Greece and Dante’s Italy, we will pursue the age-old riddle of how the human mind interacts with the physical world; tangle with theologians as they ponder the nature of free will; interrogate cosmologists as they attempt to grasp the shape the universe; and, finally, explores the implications of these profound problems for our understanding of reality today. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.144.    FYS: Literary Multilingualism.    3 Credits.    What does it mean to live and to write in more than one language? This is a particularly charged question in today’s globalized world. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore texts and films produced by multilingual writers and directors, who reflect on the experiences of the multilingual subject; their concerns range from the turmoil of living between identities and cultures, to the playful experience of daily life and existence opened up through thinking and working in multiple languages. Main questions will include: In what ways do languages influence how writers write? How does the presence of multiple languages in a text structure a reading experience and for whom? How do texts by multilingual writers destabilize conceptions of national literature? While some texts we will read were originally composed in English, the majority were written by multilingual writers in other languages. Finally, therefore, we will address what it means to read translated into English texts that were, in some sense, already produced “in translation.” Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.145.    FYS: The Haitian Revolution.    3 Credits.    Long overshadowed by the American and French Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now widely recognized as one of the most important events in modern history. The most radical of the Atlantic Revolutions, it began with a massive uprising of the enslaved against the institution of slavery and culminated in the independence of the nation of Haiti. This First-Year Seminar will examine the origins, course, and legacy of the Revolution, addressing such issues as colonialism, racism, slavery, emancipation, human rights, and national sovereignty – issues that continue to shape the contemporary world. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.146.    FYS: Nature, Nurture, Cognition.    3 Credits.    Using both seminal and contemporary readings as a foundation, we will explore the foundations of cognition and how they support human cognitive development, focusing on how ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ collaborate to shape development of the human mind. This semester, we will read at least three, and possibly four books, along with supplementary readings, as appropriate. Our focus will be on understanding the roles of nature and nurture in the context of typical and atypical development, including an understanding of how knowledge about objects, language, number, and other minds all emerge during human development, from infancy to adulthood, in typically and atypically developing individuals. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.147.    FYS: Reading Ancient Middle Eastern Literature.    3 Credits.    The Middle East is home to some of the world’s earliest and most important literature. In this First-Year Seminar, students will read in translation a selection of texts from different traditions that flourished in the pre-Islamic Middle East. Sample readings include the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld, and the battle between David and Goliath from the Hebrew Bible. As we read, we will consider why ancient Middle Eastern literature may be more relevant to our own present moment than ever before. AS.001.148.    FYS: Dining and drinking in the ancient Mediterranean world.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar focuses on the cultures of dining and drinking in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, with excursions into the foodways of other ancient societies abutting the Mediterranean basin. We will investigate the social practices and values that are associated with conviviality in these societies, and how such practices and values change over time. We will consider the kinds of communities that these practices construct, and how and to what extent different kinds of people are included, excluded, or placed in a social hierarchy by their participation in these practices. Special attention will be given to feasting as represented in the Homeric poems, especially the Odyssey; to the Archaic and Classical Greek symposion; and to the Roman convivium and other dining forms extending to late Antiquity. Fueling our investigation and underpinning our discussions will be a wide variety of ancient Greek and Roman texts (to be read in English translation); images and representations of ancient dining in diverse visual media, including Greek vase painting, Roman wall painting, and mosaics; and archaeological evidence for the spaces, settings, and implements of ancient dining and drinking. Throughout, we will engage with key scholarship on aspects of this topic. The seminar includes visits to the Walters Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, all of which house objects that illuminate our inquiry. It may also involve screenings of films or clips featuring modern imaginative reconstructions of ancient dining events. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.149.    FYS: What Is Poverty? A View from Economics and the Social Sciences.    3 Credits.    Social science is the scholarly study of society and social behavior. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to the social sciences by studying poverty in America through the lens of economics and other social sciences, including sociology and anthropology. The quantitative approach taken by economics will be compared and contrasted with qualitative approaches. Illustrations of how the lives of the poor are led as depicted in ethnographic studies, movies, and literature will be studied to learn how integrated perspectives can be formed. Students will learn how to read scholarly articles with a critical eye, to speak about their interpretations of the material, and to write short critical essays. Students will also be introduced to quantitative analysis using graphs and tables. Group projects will be required. Guest lecturers bringing non-economics perspectives will visit the class. AS.001.150.    FYS: Master of the Senate.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar offers an opportunity to think through the nature of political power, political institutions, and political ambition. We make our way through a single book: Robert Caro, Master of the Senate, an account of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s dozen years in the US Senate, from 1949 to 1961. Through lively discussion centered around this completely riveting text, the class will explore central questions in politics (democratic and non-democratic) that reverberate far beyond the bygone world of the midcentury Senate. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.151.    FYS: Citizenship and Society in the United States.    3 Credits.    Popular sovereignty — the idea that the people rule themselves — has been heralded as one of the preeminent innovations of the modern world. And over the course of the last two hundred or so years, a rising tide of nations committed themselves to the principles of popular sovereignty. Yet in recent years, the inevitability, soundness, and very viability of "rule by the people" has come into question. On the one hand, popular uprisings around the globe have rejected the decisions and practices of governing elites on the grounds that they are out of touch with the people’s needs. On the other hand, these uprisings have resurrected and strengthened authoritarian practices and have facilitated the erosion of liberal rights long considered instrumental to preserving democracy. The result — turmoil, unrest, and uncertainty about what the future holds — is evident from Venezuela to England, Turkey to the United States. Can popular sovereignty survive? In what form will the people rule, and at what cost?This First-Year Seminar is an investigation into the idea and practice of popular sovereignty in the contemporary United States. We will explore this topic by actively consulting theory and empirical research in the social sciences. We will supplement this with our own research on the 2022 election, media coverage of issues, popular attitudes about democracy, and popular representation in government and by interest/advocacy groups.Additionally, this class is organized as a collaboration between two first-year seminars: one at Johns Hopkins, the other at Williams College. Over the course of the semester, the two seminars will meet frequently via videoconference to share research and discuss readings and ideas. This is intended to broaden the perspectives brought to bear on our investigation generally and, specifically, to allow each group to share real time research on the politics of the region in which their respective institutions are located. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.152.    FYS: When Chemistry Changed History.    3 Credits.    The past is littered with discoveries that have altered the course of civilization. In this First-Year Seminar, we will take a deep dive into chemical discoveries that changed history, discussing how they work as well as their impact on society. Topics will range from dirt warfare, to the link between gun powder and workers’ rights, to how cats biochemically domesticated humans. AS.001.154.    FYS: Phage Hunters - Discovering novel bacteriophages.    3 Credits.    We often think of bacteria in the context of dangerous or annoying infections. However, bacteria themselves can be infected by even smaller and more abundant entities: viruses called bacteriophages. This First-Year Seminar will combine readings and discussion of the fundamental biology of phages and their role in controlling populations of bacteria, with lab work to discover new phages from the Johns Hopkins campus. Phages identified in this class will be added to the Science Education Alliance’s archive which is comprised of phages from over 100 academic institutions worldwide and is a resource for phage biologists and physicians directly involved in developing phages as a treatment for disease. AS.001.155.    FYS: Is a Corporation a Person?.    3 Credits.    Corporations are all around us. They interact with us every day in ways minute and profound. We work with them and for them. They have rights and freedoms, for instance, to speech and religious expression. They seem to have intentions, desires, voices, and goals. Yet, they can’t take a walk or feel the wind or smell the earth. If they do harm, they are notoriously hard to punish. When they come to an end, no one writes an obituary. This First-Year Seminar will query whether a corporation is a person across a range of sources and perspectives, including from law, politics, philosophy, literature, and popular culture. Can a corporation be a person? Who should decide and on what basis? What are the implications for our understanding of rights, agency, and morality and for pressing global issues such as climate change? And what are the implications for our own understanding of ourselves as “a person”? Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.156.    FYS: Cognition, Language, and the Self.    3 Credits.    Inextricably bound with self-identity, human language and cognition remains a research area with more questions than answers. Can we think without language? What are the differences in neural mechanisms of language and cognition? How and why does the pediatric human brain acquire language at exponential rates while taking a lifetime to acquire cognition? What is the role of language and cognition in self-identity? Are we still ourselves without language, without memories? In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine the recursive nature of language, cognition, and self through the lenses of neurology, psychology, sociology, linguistics, and cognitive science. We will learn how language and cognition develops and changes across the human lifespan through case study examination of the lived experiences of individuals with cognitive-communication disorders, such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, aphasia, agnosia, and Alzheimer’s disease. We will end our semester by exploring how the interplay between language, cognition, and self makes us distinctively human and how those lessons apply to the field of artificial intelligence. Perhaps most importantly, this seminar provides students an invitation to actively reflect on their own language, cognition, and development of self. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.157.    FYS: Leonardo da Vinci - Art, Science, and Medicine.    3 Credits.    How does a notary’s son trained as a painter gain expertise in the construction of machines and acquire knowledge of the principles of optics, human anatomy, the flight of birds, the dynamics of air and water? How did an artist/engineer who brought few projects to completion come to have such a huge impact on later generations? This First-Year Seminar will focus critically on the myth of Leonardo’s singularity while showing his achievements to be characteristic of the artisanal culture of his time. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.158.    FYS: Love, Anger, Fear, and Hope.    3 Credits.    In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine the roles of love, fear, anger, and hope in our lives. We’ll ask questions about their value, danger, and appropriateness or inappropriateness in our lives at both the individual level and the level of political life. Some examples of questions we’ll consider are these: Should we love those who have wronged us? Is enjoying a horror movie morally problematic? How is fear used in political rhetoric and how should we respond to it? Is anger acceptable, or perhaps even necessary, in protest? Is love necessary for meaningful social change? When and how is hope justifiable and useful? We’ll also draw connections between these emotions and engage with related concepts such as forgiveness and trust. While our engagement with these concepts will be primarily through philosophy, we will also consider works of art and think about the value of portraying and evoking these emotions through various forms of art. Students can expect to read philosophical texts, journalism, occasional fiction and poetry, and to watch at least one horror film, among the sources for the course. Possible authors include Berit Brogaard, Noël Carroll, Myisha Cherry, Raja Halwani, Stephen King, Adrienne Martin, Martha Nussbaum, Edgar Allan Poe, Jason Stanley, and Desmond Tutu. We will take at least one field trip to a location in Baltimore during the semester. Students will emerge from this course with a more nuanced understanding of these powerful and often controversial emotions, and the ability to talk about them in an academic and public context. AS.001.159.    FYS: Apartheid as Analogy - Structures of Racial Hierarchy in South Africa, Baltimore, and Beyond.    3 Credits.    Sites of racial conflict, from Palestine to Baltimore, have been compared to South African Apartheid. This First-Year Seminar examines the creation of a totalizing system of racial segregation and exploitation in twentieth century South Africa, and how it can help us understand histories of race elsewhere in the world, including our own city. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.160.    FYS: The Neuroscience of Learning and Memory.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar will cover multiple topics related to what we know about how the brain allows one to learn new facts and skills and to remember the daily events of our lives. We will cover such topics as classical conditioning (e.g., Pavlov’s Dogs), operant conditioning (e.g., how to train your dog), how we remember events in our lives (e.g., when you received your acceptance to JHU), how memory can go wrong (e.g., fallibility of eyewitness testimony), how artificial intelligence and deep learning are similar and dissimilar to the brain, and how memory is affected in aging and in diseases like Alzheimer’s. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.161.    FYS: Books, Authenticity, and Truth.    3 Credits.    We are living through a crisis in how we take in information. Bombarded by information of all sorts coming at us on phones, tablets, and computer screens, it can be difficult to make sense of it all and harder still to determine whether something is true or false, authentic or inauthentic. The scale and speed of the change in media that we are undergoing is unprecedented in human history. Nevertheless, people in the past have faced moments of crisis – moments when writing seemed unreliable, when the format of written information changed, and when new publication formats forced reevaluations of the nature of truth. This First-Year Seminar will take us from Greco-Roman antiquity to the modern age, with stops along the way in the European Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment. We will read selected texts that illuminate the place of writing, books, and the search for truth, think about the structure of libraries in the western Middle Ages and Renaissance, do extensive hands-on work with rare books, and visit other repositories of information, all toward the end of evaluating how the history of books and information can help us in our current quest to make sense of our world. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.162.    FYS: From Shakespeare to Baltimore.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar is designed around what is on stage in Baltimore and DC this fall. We will attend several plays, both professional productions and student productions at JHU. We will pay attention to the interpretation of plays on the page, and to the ways that scripts materialize as performances on the stage. We will place these performances in the context of larger theatre histories, studying great plays from the age of Shakespeare to contemporary American theatre. No acting experience is required – just the desire to explore the theatre of today. A great way to find out about the lively theatre scene on campus, and a great way to get to know your new city. AS.001.163.    FYS: Black Baltimore Archives - From Frederick Douglass to Billie Holiday.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar carefully considers the lives and works of two globally famous Black Baltimoreans: the abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), and the premier jazz vocalist Billie Holiday (1915-1959). While we will explore key writings and performances of their work, the course also wants to use their historical lives in Baltimore to enrich our knowledge of the city and archival resources that reveal its past. During the semester we will consult a variety of primary resources like newspapers, novels, photographs, rare documents, correspondence, and recorded sound to investigate the complex and intraracial world of Baltimore in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the questions we will be considering: How did the city’s black abolitionist and religious networks contribute to Frederick Douglass’s evolution as a journalist and politician? What was the role of Chesapeake Bay black musical culture—ragtime, marching bands, banjo and fiddle ditties, and riverboat music—in the creation of Billie Holiday’s unique stylistic expression and singing? In what manner did Baltimore’s racial segregation and racism define her life and art? Students are required to visit three archival repositories during scheduled in-class trips, including a visit to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The final project is an archive-laden digital story map. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.164.    FYS: Curating Women.    3 Credits.    From the women who created the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to the "Because of Her" working group across the Smithsonian’s museums, this First-Year Seminar investigates the hidden women of many distinct social positions, racial and ethnic identities whose labor shaped the museums we know today and considers how museums tell the stories of women, including transgender women, in the arts, sciences, and history. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.165.    FYS: Biology in Deep Time.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar will explore seminal ideas in macroevolutionary theory through both classic and cutting-edge studies. Topics will include the relationship between evolution and development, how fossils shape our understanding of biological systems, and the logical basis of evolutionary inference. Students will also gain an appreciation for the historical development of these ideas and their application in modern science and beyond. This course will explore these topics using foundational texts in biology, such as The Origin of Species and writings by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. It will feature guest lectures from curators from natural history museums across the country as well as offer students their own opportunity to go into the field to collect fossils here in Maryland. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.166.    FYS: The Pleasures of the Imagination - British culture in the eighteenth century.    3 Credits.    Music, Art, Theater, Novels, Autobiographies, and Material Culture all expanded dramatically in Britain in the long eighteenth century (c. 1714-1830), creating a culture celebrating ‘happiness’, 'beauty', and the 'pleasures of the imagination'. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to themselves experiencing and discussing these exciting cultural forms, with students attending and watching plays and movies from plays, discussing Jane Austen novels as read and as filmed, reading and discussing an Afro-British autobiography, listening to performances of different kinds of music, and discussing works of art and architecture both in the classroom and in the museum. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.167.    FYS: The Natural History of the Homewood Campus.    3 Credits.    Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus and its surroundings is a wonderful green space in the middle of Baltimore City. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to both the visible and cryptic organisms living above- and belowground. A combination of observational and sampling techniques will be used to demonstrate how ecologists collect data about plants, insects, and other organisms. In the classroom, these field observations, combined with reading material will be used to discuss global environmental issues including climate change on biodiversity, invasive species, and human impacts on the landscape. By the end of the course students will be able to generate research questions based upon field observations and appreciate the diverse life forms both in Earth and in our backyard. Students should be prepared to spend many hours outside. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS.001.168.    FYS: The Psychology of Mass Politics in the U.S..    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar looks at the deeper psychological motivations of the American electorate. We begin by discussing the meaning of democracy and establishing a common understanding of American democracy specifically, placing the current moment into historical and international context. We then gradually dismantle the "folk theory" of democracy that assumes all voters are rational and economically-minded. Instead, we apply theories from social psychology to understand some essential questions about voter behavior. Why do people vote? How do they understand politics? How are their feelings and judgments affected by their own identities, biases, information sources, and by the messages they hear from leaders? Why have Americans grown so polarized? What role do racial and gender-based prejudice play? Is American politics headed toward a more violent future? We use evidence-based research from political science, sociology, and psychology to answer these questions. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.169.    FYS: Inventing a City - Exploring Baltimore Through Maps and Mapping.    3 Credits.    Using maps from the 17th century to the present, students in this First-Year Seminar will explore the historical and contemporary landscape of their new hometown -- Baltimore. These primary sources will show how Baltimore was invented and developed in popular imagination to become the most vital port on the US Eastern Seaboard, but also a symbol American post-industrial decline. Students will have the chance to map how they see Baltimore, by learning and applying Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and converting geospatial data into visual stories. With the goal of fostering a deeper understanding of this complex city, and a student’s place in it, the class will include explorations outside of the classroom. The course will culminate with the creation of a small exhibit whose content and venue will be decided upon mutually by students during the course of the semester. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.170.    FYS: Vive la Différence? The Love-Hate Relationship Between France and the USA.    3 Credits.    What do French views on culture, society, and politics tell us about ourselves? France is frequently misunderstood and criticized in US media, yet books and articles touting various aspects of a “French” lifestyle are bestsellers. French media, for its part, commonly engages in US-bashing, yet the popularity and influence of American culture there are undeniable. Why have many prominent Black American writers sought refuge in France, while many French intellectuals have chosen to bring their academic work to American universities, including The Johns Hopkins University? A cross-cultural examination will allow this First-Year Seminar to bring to light many aspects of the complex relationship between these two countries that are historical allies yet ofttimes rivals. We will explore and discuss food, language, cinema, diplomacy, and health, as well as conceptions of friendship, family, identity, and social justice. Course includes a meal at a French restaurant, a museum visit, film screening, and guest speakers. AS.001.171.    FYS: Rough Magic - Shakespeare and Power.    3 Credits.    “This, therefore, is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror of life.” Samuel Johnson’s judgment applies particularly well to Shakespeare's account of politics. This First-Year Seminar will explore how Shakespeare depicts the acquisition of power, its exercise, and its voluntary or forcible relinquishment. Through a close reading of whole plays and selected scenes and speeches it will examine political education, intrigue, conspiracy, coups, demagoguery, politically motivated assassination, the theater of violence, rhetoric, insurrection, the launching of war, civil-military relations, and ghosts, among other topics. Combines lectures and discussion with close reading of texts, analytic memos, and assignments such as the composing of a contemporary soliloquy. This course will be taught at JHU’s SAIS campus in Washington, DC. All transportation costs are included as part of the course. Private shuttle transportation provided to/from campus. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.172.    FYS: Privacy and Surveillance.    3 Credits.    Few topics are more pressing to contemporary society as the right to privacy, in the face of both state and corporate and state surveillance. But the idea of a "right to privacy" has not always been with us. As E. L. Godkin put it in 1890, "Privacy is a distinctly modern product." Indeed, even 300 years ago, many of our own expectations of privacy would have been unheard of. This First-Year Seminar looks at the relation of privacy to modernity, through the lenses of literature, law, and social practices. How can works of art and thought from the past help us understand our own present? Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.173.    FYS: Taking TV Seriously - Analysis and Interpretation.    3 Credits.    If Shakespeare were alive today, he would be writing for TV. So would Jane Austen. With the advent of cable networks, DVDs, the internet, and live streaming, TV—once considered a “vast wasteland”—has become the most dynamic and creative medium for storytelling, attracting a host of talented writers, directors, and actors. This First-Year Seminar explores the innovative narrative strategies, structures, and character studies that transformed that wasteland into extraordinarily fertile terrain and ushered in a new Golden Age of TV. AS.001.174.    FYS: Women and Family in Chinese Film.    3 Credits.    From the early 20th century, Chinese society underwent a turbulent process of modern transformation. Industrialization, urbanization, and democratization challenged previous gender and family norms. Meanwhile, at exactly this time, the Chinese film industry flourished, especially in the modern metropolis of Shanghai. Women and family provided a useful microcosm through which to explore national questions related to revolution, war, and modernity. They also entertained a public eager for new leisure pursuits. Popular feature films not only recorded but also interpreted and helped shape family and gender roles. Using filmic representations as the main material this First-Year Seminar will survey the "family question" (and "the woman question") in 20th century China AS.001.175.    FYS: Music and Shakespeare.    3 Credits.    The plays of William Shakespeare contain many musical cues. In Hamlet, Ophelia expresses herself through song when she is unable to through speech. In The Tempest, the spirit Ariel lures the shipwrecked Ferdinand to the shore by singing a song. In this course, we will think through the role of music in Shakespeare’s plays, reading The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello, with attention to the sonic worlds they create. In addition, we will explore the various musical pieces that these plays have inspired, from film to stage, opera to musical theater, delving into the methods by which they have been adapted to meet the needs of diverse audiences. In addition to the recorded audio-visual materials we will view together, we will seek out opportunities to view a Shakespearean adaptation with a musical component performed live. AS.001.176.    FYS: Microbe Hunters - Student-sourcing Antibiotic Discovery.    3 Credits.    This First-Year-Seminar covers concepts of biology taught through the lens of microbes and antibiotic resistance. Using environmental samples, students actively engage in the hunt for novel antimicrobials. Broader concepts include the meaning of disease, how that meaning has changed over time, and the implications of widespread antibiotic resistance for society. This is a research-based project lab course in which students participate as part of an international consortium of undergraduates at other colleges. Students will isolate and characterize antibiotic-producing bacteria from the environment using modern molecular biological techniques. This seminar is open to all students, regardless of major. No prior lab experience necessary. Distribution Area: Natural Sciences AS.001.177.    FYS: The Right to the City - Race, Class, and Struggle in Baltimore.    3 Credits.    Over the past decade, cities have become more important than ever before. Protests against policing, against increasing inequality, as well as attempts to rollback societal shifts all have the city as its core. While some suggest these struggles represent larger struggles over the relationship between labor and capital, Black Radical thinkers connect these struggles to anti-black racism. In the wake of one world challenging movement – Black Lives Matter – and one world altering crisis – the Covid-19 pandemic - this First-Year Seminar will reflect critically on these two traditions of thinking about the city by using Baltimore as a case study. This class will be taught alongside similar courses at other universities, offering students a deep dive into Baltimore. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.178.    FYS: Words in Public.    3 Credits.    Does it matter what we read? Of course. But how? And how does what we read and hear shape our lives, particularly in democracy? This First-Year Seminar explores these questions across broad categories: social sciences; public writing of all kinds (for children and adults); and the sciences. For instance, we will explore how teachers’ words of encouragement affect children across demographics, and what the implications are for future civic participation. We’ll ask what happens when a victim of hate crime publicly forgives the perpetrator, how poems and stories shape life choices, and how cognitive neuroscience can contribute to social justice. Our inquiry will be rooted in intellectual life at Homewood, ranging from Earth & Planetary Sciences research to SNF Agora Institute events. We will close with a symposium reflecting our debates and discoveries. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.179.    FYS: Race Before Race - Difference and Diversity in the Ancient Mediterranean.    3 Credits.    How did the Greeks, Romans, and other ancient Mediterranean peoples understand human difference and diversity? How did they form their senses of self in relation to others and articulate kinship and commonalities across ethnic lines? Did skin color, birthplace, language, and lineage matter in constructing social hierarchies? How did their concepts of class and citizenship, beauty and belonging, differ from ours? Did they have anything akin to modern constructions of race and racism, blackness and whiteness, the ‘west’ and the ‘rest’? If not, when and why were such ideas invented, and how was Greco-Roman culture conscripted in their support? Finally and crucially, what can we do to make “classics” today more equitable, inclusive, and accurate to the multicultural reality of the ancient Mediterranean? This First-Year Seminar examines these questions, and many more, through the literature, art, and history of ancient Greece and Rome, with forays into Egypt, Persia, Judea, and northern Europe. It will introduce you to the diversity of the ancient Mediterranean world, hone your ability to critically interpret and discuss art, literature, and scholarship, and explore how systems of categorizing human difference have historically served power. This course will give you a wider historical lens through which to understand race, racecraft, the “classics,” and “Western civilization,” revealing all to be dynamic and historically situated discourses that have been used to exert authority, to include or exclude, and to build communities. It will also build student community and comfort discussing sensitive subjects through a combination of field trips, guest lectures, movie nights, and communal meals. Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.040.212 are not eligible to take AS.001.179 . AS.001.180.    FYS: Lunar Histories.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar will take us on an exploratory journey through the history of our Moon, both as a physical body in its own right and as a formative presence in the cultural imagination. As we examine theories about the Moon’s nature and role in the cosmos - from antiquity to our modern period, and from science to make-believe - we will delve deep into perplexing questions such as the relationship between scientific and imaginative thought, the role played by conspiracy-theory and hoax in our society, the origins of speculation about extraterrestrial life, and what it means to map and write the history of other worlds... This seminar will include sessions of practical observation of the Moon from the JHU Observatory. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.181.    FYS: Introduction to Lives in Medicine - Exploring the Experience of Patients and Practitioners.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar is designed to introduce you to the human side of medicine by exploring ways in which patients and medical practitioners describe their personal experience. It has been structured to allow you to engage that material by reading it, viewing it in film, discussing it, writing about it and meeting with a practicing physician. Its a course not only about content, but also about process, the process of thoughtfully and openly engaging work about the lives of others. It is a seminar style course that emphasizes a friendly, protected setting in which to explore these issues. The course is facilitated by an experienced member of the Hopkins Medical Faculty, and has been designed to open a window through which you can begin to study the human concerns of patients and practitioners. The course is most likely to appeal to premedical and pre-health related students who are interested in exploring the human side of medicine, but also to students interested in biography, memoir and life-writing. At the end of this course, you will have gained an appreciation for some of the ways in which people express themselves about the illness experience or about working with the sick. You will have had a chance to develop longer, more personal relationship to such accounts than you are likely to have in clinical encounters in medical schools, training programs or even in clinical rotations. It takes time to listen. The course draws a small sample from a very wide range of such accounts that number in the thousands, so there is no attempt to generalize; rather, every effort is made to immerse ourselves into one account at a time and to understand one person’s experience at a time. Through this kind of immersion, you will develop a sense of how illness can affect a life, and the way in which practitioners become involved to find themselves in their own work. AS.001.182.    FYS: Seeing Things.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar will explore diverse aspects of how we see and fail to see the world. We’ll discuss questions such as: What can we learn about vision from illusions and hallucinations? What explains why we sometimes miss things even though we’re looking right at them? Does what we believe and desire affect what we see? What happens to our visual experience when the brain is damaged, for example in conditions such as “blindsight,” “neglect” and “visual form agnosia”? And: Is there such a thing as subliminal or unconscious perception? Though primarily psychological, the course will draw on other disciplines, especially the philosophy of perception. We’ll also think about some of the ways visual artists and magicians exploit the workings of our visual systems to achieve their aims. This will likely involve at least one outing to a local art gallery to look for examples of what we’ve learned, an in-class screening, and hopefully a guest speaker or two. Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.183.    FYS: What Does It Mean to Be Religious? Creativity, Experience, and the Individual.    3 Credits.    What do we mean when we say that something or someone is “religious?” Our First-Year Seminar unpacks this question through a comparative approach, and pays special attention to the ways in which this term has been applied to the study of Islamic cultures and Muslim experience. Through an exploration of the categories of experience, creativity and the individual, we offer a less presumptuous and more open-ended way of imagining the many things it may mean to be religious. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.184.    FYS: The Mathematics of Politics, Democracy, and Social Choice.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar is designed for students of all backgrounds to provide a mathematical introduction to social choice theory, weighted voting systems, apportionment methods, and gerrymandering. In the search for ideal ways to make certain kinds of political decisions, a lot of wasted effort could be averted if mathematics could determine that finding such an ideal were actually possible in the first place. The seminar will analyze data from recent US elections as well as provide historical context to modern discussions in politics, culminating in a mathematical analysis of the US Electoral College. Case studies, future implications, and comparisons to other governing bodies outside the US will be used to apply the theory of the course. Students will use Microsoft Excel to analyze data sets. There are no mathematical prerequisites for this course. AS.001.185.    FYS: Why We Science?.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar will explore how some important results in physics and astronomy are discovered, their transformative implications to the basic understanding of nature and their impact on the progress of society. Students will explore how simple rules obtained from the lab or in idealized settings imply the complex behaviors and dynamics observed in the natural world, and how they back-reaction on society. The seminar will explore the motivations for doing scientific research in various context, and how they relate to the application of scientific discoveries. An example of topic that will be explored is General Relativity, a subject that emerged purely from theoretical considerations by Einstein which have revolutionized our basic understanding of the physical world and have reshaped the fields of physics and astronomy. On the other hand, General Relativity is necessary for satellite timing which revolutionized communication in human society. Another example is the basic physics experiments and research that lead to the invention of the transistor and the ensuing revolution of the information age. The students will explore the value of scientific thinking and its necessity in building a more robust society that can effectively serve its citizens. We will have regular visits and talks from leading researchers throughout the Hopkins ecosphere. This will help guide the in-class discussions. AS.001.186.    FYS: Tuberculosis.    3 Credits.    In the age of Molecular Biology, DNA sequencing allows the identification of genes. Biochemical assays allow the measurement of gene expression. Reverse transcriptase and PCR are used to determine the RNA made by activated genes. These tools allow the study of disease organisms on the molecular level with emphasis on particular genes, known as virulence genes, which enable the disease organisms to attack the human body. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to the disease tuberculosis, to human innate and adaptive immune systems and to the molecular biology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, an intracellular pathogen which infects humans and manipulates the human immune response to escape detection and elimination. We will even grow cultures of Mycobacterium smegmatum, M. tb’s harmless relative. In addition, millions worldwide have tuberculosis, and this disease is a case study in the measures that are being used to control the spread of an epidemic disease. Students will learn through by readings from books such as The White Plague by Rene’ and Jean Dubos, The Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif, The Aetiology of Tuberculosis by Robert Koch and Fever by John Fuller, videos, class interactions and discussions, and after the introductory portion of the course, by presentations of research papers about M. tuberculosis pathogenesis and treatment. Finally, we will explore recent genomic research that has yielded specific Mtb peptides that give evidence of being the basis of first effective vaccine for tuberculosis. AS.001.187.    FYS: Gender x Aging x Health in America.    3 Credits.    In this First-Year Seminar students will develop an understanding of the ways in which gender structures health and well being through adulthood and later life. The experience of sexual minorities and the ntersection of gender with class and ethnicity will also be discussed. Students will be expected to participate actively and lead discussions on specific topics. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.188.    FYS: Skepticism - Ancient, Modern, Contemporary.    3 Credits.    Can we gain knowledge of reality, or is everything a matter of opinion? Does it matter? Why do we want (or need) knowledge anyway? Questions like this have been the stock in trade of philosophical skeptics throughout the entire history of our Western philosophical tradition. This First-Year Seminar will involve close readings of some classic works on the topic of skepticism with a view to understanding some of the main arguments for (and against) skepticism: how they work and how they may have changed over time. Readings include selections from Sextus Empiricus, Descartes, Hume and Wittgenstein. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.189.    FYS: Language, Advertising, and Propaganda.    3 Credits.    Advertising pervades our culture; interactions with advertising are an unavoidable fact of modern life. This class uses tools from linguistics and cognitive science to analyze these interactions, and understand the impact of advertising on its viewers. A central theme is to treat ads as communicative acts, and explore the consequences -- what can theories of communication (from linguistics, psychology, and philosophy) tell us about ads? How do ads use central features of human cognition to accomplish their aims? Do ads manipulate, and if so, how successfully? The theories of communication we explore include Gricean pragmatics, theories of speech acts, linguistic theories of presuppositions, and more. Students will collect, analyze, and discuss advertisements in all mediums. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.190.    FYS: Poisons! A History.    3 Credits.    Poisons aren't what they seem. Sometimes they look like food. Sometimes they look like drugs. From cinnabar to cinnamon, from dragon blood to goat bezoars, poisons result from careful human construction, collection, and creation. They are objects of early chemistry. Far from killing us, poisons have been central to the history of medicine. Physicians in the past and present monitor dosage, drug combination, and drug preparation to mitigate poison toxicity while still maintaining drugs' therapeutic potencies. Knowledge about poisons, in other words, quietly undergirds most of human civilization. Poisons are what keep us alive. Or not.This First-Year Seminar comes to understand poisons in three ways. First, it takes on individual poisons (mercury, opium, among others) to introduce major themes in the history of science and science studies. Second, it engages with global perspectives in the history of medicine to understand how poisons were deployed, refined, and neutralized around the world. Third, it introduces frameworks in the philosophy of chemistry to analyze the social, conceptual, and practical demands on empiricism. Together, these three perspectives will shift students’ perspectives on poisons from objects that kill to critiquing them as objects that are intimately tied to ideas of cure. Distribution Area: Humanities, Natural Sciences AS.001.192.    FYS: How Not to be Afraid of Poetry.    3 Credits.    What is poetry? And why don't we like it? Can poetry save the world? Can it save us? This seminar will explore what makes poetry turn ordinary language into something extraordinary, something necessary to our world. Assignments will include attending to details small and large in poems, doing a recitation, becoming an expert about a single poet, exploring banned poems, attending poetry events (JHU poetry readings, attending the Baltimore International Poe Festival, visiting the Poe sites, going to bookstores), keeping a poetry journal that you will submit three times over the course of the term, and creating an anthology of poems (group or individual) for a final project. The class is a seminar, and requires you to talk and think aloud: requirements are attendance, class participation, a poetry recitation (weeks 4-6), a presentation of your chosen poet (Weeks 9-11), and a group final project presentation (last day of class). AS.001.194.    FYS: The Arrow of Time.    3 Credits.    This First-year Seminar will study the direction of time, pointing from past to future. It will primarily be based on the physics of entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, covering aspects of statistical mechanics, probability, and cosmology. But it will also touch on how time's arrow manifests itself in the macroscopic world, including questions of memory, prediction, aging, and causality. Distribution Area: Humanities, Natural Sciences AS.001.195.    FYS: Chemistry and Everyday Living.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar will delve into the surprising ways that chemistry weaves its way through our day-to-day living. We will discuss topics that cover a variety of useful applications from "Chemistry in Medicine" to "Chemistry in Cooking & Baking". We will explore the material covered in our weekly discussions by carrying out a few experiments to enhance our learning. No prior knowledge of chemistry in required. AS.001.196.    FYS: What is Love?: A Long History.    3 Credits.    "Love is mad, love is obsessive, love can be a painful or tragic, or on the contrary an experience to be treasured forever. That's what books have taught us, by giving poetic souls a chance to imagine and develop romantic ideas -- on paper. These books have in turn inspired films, or in earlier days, great operas. This course is offered to those of you who might miss the experience of getting lost in a book or story!As a historian of ideas and a specialist of narrative with a keen interest in bodies, minds and feelings, and in gender, I will explore with you in this seminar a few favorite love stories. Each is chosen because it helps us uncover a universe of romantic feelings, often in conflict with social conventions (as is Romeo and Juliet for example).Our course will also involve the study of a film (Jane Campion's Bright Star) and possibly of the opera, La Traviata -- as well as a class trip to the movies to see, if available, a recent presentation of our theme. Among the readings for this class: The Legend of Tristan and Isolde, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther; a selection of contemporary short stories. AS.001.197.    FYS: Doctors and Patients: A Few Case Studies.    3 Credits.    A famous, very experienced clinician used the phrase "The Soul of Care," signaling that medicine is not merely about fixing bodies. He wants to remind us that scientific knowledge involves mastery as well as empathy. "Narrative medicine" as this domain is called, assumes that the close study of stories can play a decisive role in preparing doctors for the challenging humanistic aspects of their profession. We focus in this First-Year Seminar on stories connected to medical cases, stories that can take us beyond medical questions to deeper issues connected to the human condition. Our seminar will be centered on discussions, often prepared in teams, based on your attentive close reading and research. The aim is to exercise your observational skills and imagination. What is at stake, medically and humanly speaking, is our capacity to uncover problems, dilemmas, ethical questions woven into texts that take us into the worlds of doctors and patients. Readings will involve a combination of modern and contemporary short stories, some of them more obviously fictional than others, some of them geographically or culturally more remote. Part of our study will also involve one longer text, namely When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, and a small "anthology" of documents of a preparatory kind. We'll have at least one guest speaker, and also see a film together. AS.001.198.    FYS: Secret Science.    3 Credits.    In this course, we will examine the concealment of scientific knowledge from the Scientific Revolution to present day. Although science is regularly described as a public good, it has often been a private affair. Why have various scientists, institutions, governments, and media outlets chosen to restrict the flow of scientific knowledge? How have their efforts fared in practice, and what factors explain their successes or failures? More generally, how does our picture of modern science change if we highlight work done behind closed doors? This First-Year Seminar will explore these questions through case studies on alchemy, trade secrecy, nuclear physics, and climate change denial. Students will work with formerly classified sources during several weeks of the term. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.199.    FYS: Technology and Globalization.    3 Credits.    In times of pandemic, trade war, and restrictions on the export of strategic technologies, it has become common to predict the ‘death of globalization.’ Such predictions are hardly new, however, and neither are the protectionist technology policies that are currently in vogue. In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine how technology historically has both helped connect people in different parts of the world and contributed to division and inequality at national and global levels. Focusing on the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, we will pay special attention to the impact of transportation and ICT technologies ranging from the telegraph and container ship to the airplane and the internet. But we will also consider the consequences of globalization and technological change in areas such as mining and agriculture, taking into account the perspectives of a variety of actors including multinational enterprises, governments, standard-setting scientists and engineers, and the anti-globalization movement. The local effects of globalization will be discussed on a class trip to the Baltimore Museum of Industry, and students will have the opportunity to develop a research project on a topic of special interest to them in consultation with the instructor. Course readings will be made available on Canvas; they include both original historical sources and studies by historians and social scientists. Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences AS.001.200.    FYS: Great Adaptations in the Animal Kingdom.    3 Credits.    Animals have evolved a vast array of sensory systems that support a rich repertoire of natural behaviors. Some animals live in dark environments and use tactile, chemical, electrical and auditory sensors that allow them to operate in the absence of light. Other animals rely heavily on vision and take advantage of colors that humans cannot see. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore extraordinary adaptations of sensory systems in animals that live on land and under water. Our focus will be on sensory systems that guide navigation and foraging behaviors in species as diverse as star-nosed moles, weakly electric fish, honeybees, and echolocating bats. As we delve into understanding the extraordinary sensory systems of selected species, we will also consider how these animals have inspired literary and visual artists. We aim to introduce students to a rich interdisciplinary experience that opens their eyes to new areas of inquiry as they take advantage of local resources, such as the National Aquarium, Baltimore Zoo, Wyman Park, Peabody School of Art, and Baltimore Museum of Art. AS.001.201.    FYS: The Four Great Cosmic Questions: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Black Holes and the Origin of Life.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar combines current state of the art issues in Cosmology, Astrophysics and Biology around the Scientific American level. Discusses the history of thought on these issues ranging from Aristotle, Lucretius, Galileo, Newton, Einstein…to the Hubble and JWST era. For the last part of the seminar, we will consider existential issues for humanity in our Universe. Excellent books to read to start thinking about this are by Toby Ord: Precipice and Martin Rees: (1) The Future of Humanity and (2) If Science is to Save us. Our discussions and investigations will likely lead us toward many interesting and innovative paths. AS.001.202.    FYS: The Human Face of Addiction.    3 Credits.    The current paradigm for understanding addiction is a brain disease of compulsion, investigated in large part through animal models. Yet addiction in humans has dimensions of meaning and suffering alike that cannot be captured by neuroscience or modelled in animals. This First-Year Seminar explores addiction by combining what we know from addiction science with what we know from philosophy and the humanities, as well as therapy, journalism, film, and autobiographical narratives. We will work to understand the puzzle of why people use drugs in ways that can come to destroy their lives through these various lenses and without recourse to stigma, dogma, or dehumanization. This interdisciplinary course will develop students' skills in reading, analytic thinking, and writing; we will also visit an animal lab. AS.001.203.    FYS: Eataly: Constructing Identity through Food.    3 Credits.    When thinking of Italy, food is one of the first things that come to mind. But what is beyond a lavishly decked table? What are the questions that can be explored through food and its practices in Italy, but also in Italian communities around the world? This First-Year Seminar explores the relationship between food and the formation of identity through the lenses of migration, gender, race, ideology, nationalism, and diaspora. The seminar will analyze literature on food studies at the crossroads with anthropological, sociopolitical questions. We’ll discuss the relationship with memory, as well as with cultural reproduction in immigrant communities and the tension with a critical discourse around political propaganda on the notion of authenticity in contemporary Italy. Other topics include the formation of taste in conjunction with sociopolitical modes of exclusion and social class, through history, but also exemplified in films. For instance, the class will be presented with movies and readings on Roman-Jewish culinary traditions, its diasporic experience, and the contemporary cultural appropriation. The screening of the movie Big Night, on the other hand, will provide an opportunity to approach a reading through a phenomenological apparatus, and analyze the impact of Italian cinema on American and Italian American culture. A guest speaker will be invited to present their scholarship, followed by a discussion. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.204.    FYS: French Identities: Race, Gender, Religion, and Sexual Orientation in Contemporary France.    3 Credits.    How should a just society come to terms with persistent inequalities? France, the country of liberty, equality and fraternity, that offered sanctuary from US racism to such figures as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Miles Davis and legalized same-sex marriages two years before the US did, is now deeply divided. This First-Year Seminar explores the tensions and contradictions between the universalist and color-blind ideals of the French republic and the realities of discrimination in contemporary French society. Topics studied include the status of the concept of race in political discourse; the law forbidding signs of religious belief in the public schools and responses to it; how American initiatives like Black Lives Matter, #metoo and critical gender studies have both sparked French activism and political movements and generated a powerful backlash; and what Americans can learn about how to fight injustice—and how not to—from the French. We will look at a wide variety of texts, including writings by activists, historians, and journalists, along with sociologies of the police and young adult novels, and will listen to popular French music and watch a number of contemporary French films. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.205.    FYS: Games: History, Theory, and Practice.    3 Credits.    From game theory to gamification, games have become a central part of everyday life. More and more, in fields as diverse as economics, entertainment, and education, the game has become the principal model for interpreting and interacting with the social world, and with ourselves. This First-Year Seminar will look at the history of games in the modern world, with an eye to understanding their increasing prominence in the 20th and 21st centuries. What social and technological changes brought about this shift? And yes -- we will play, and seek to analyze, some games as well (both analog and digital). Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.207.    FYS:Looms and Computers: The analog origins of our digital world.    3 Credits.    The loom is the ancestor of the modern computer: we owe our digital existence to an analog woven structure. In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine the digital screens that surround us, the faces and images projected upon them, and how we can understand them better through fiber art processes. Through discussions of traditional and modern artists as well as hands-on fiber experiments and techniques, we will explore the relationship between the tactile and the digital. With visiting artists and museum trips, we’ll discover new ways to engage with the screens, textiles, and pixels that surround us. AS.001.208.    FYS: Imagining War.    3 Credits.    "Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning." (Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, Apocalypse Now). These iconic words, uttered in an iconic film inspired by an iconic novel, invite us to think of the smell of war as a pleasurable experience, indeed, a joy. But what about the mere joy of watching a film, listening to music, viewing a painting or reading a poem about war? In this First-Year Seminar, we will ask ourselves what is the place of war in our cultural imagination? What attracts us to the “heart of darkness” and how and why does popular culture make this violent experience aesthetically pleasurable? We will cover various media, such as films, television shows, visual art, music and literature from various countries in an attempt to answer these questions and others. The seminar eschews a chronological approach organized around major historical wars in favor of a conceptual framework. As we will see, the creative impulse extends far beyond the representation of historical and particular events reaching deep into the realms of memory and trauma, hate and love, heroism and fear, cruelty and empathy. We will discuss the author/ filmmaker/ artist’s perspectives and methods and will engage in questions of ethics and moral choices in relation to the cultural artifacts we examine. Our main focus will be modern representations of war, but we will also discuss earlier periods and cultures for the sake of comparison. For projects, students will have the option to choose their topics, works, media and format (analytical paper, creative writing, a short documentary, creative film or a short podcast). Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.209.    FYS: Feminism and Media.    3 Credits.    What is feminism and what does it have to do with media culture? This question will be investigated in reference to such historical movements as the suffrage movement and current movements such as #metoo. We will also highlight the extent to which media technology might intrinsically help feminism, as could be argued with film animation and science fiction writing; or, rather, cases in which technologies hinder feminism, as when the pressures of social media negatively impact the social development of young women, particularly affecting the vulnerability of the female body. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.210.    FYS: Democratic Erosion.    3 Credits.    In a moment in time in which our very democracy at risk, this First-Year Seminar will investigate why democratic erosion is occurring, its ramifications, and how to address it. Led by Scott Warren, the co-founder and former CEO of Generation Citizen, a national civics education organization, and a current Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute, this seminar will be heavily discussion-based, relate to current events, and will explore the dynamics and interplay between the realities of democracy in the US and around the world, social entrepreneurship, social change, and policy. This course aims to introduce students to some of the most important issues and debates surrounding democratic consolidation and erosion around the world. Students will study different case studies of democratic erosion and social transformation (or proposed social transformation) from across the United States and world. We will also explore how movements across the world in response to authoritarianism and anti-democratic sentiment are driving the themes explored in the course. AS.001.211.    FYS: Getting a Life.    3 Credits.    Every person has a life to live, but what is this thing, “a life”, that every person has? To begin with, it’s just the temporally extended existence of the person, the proverbial three score and ten. But a person’s life is more than that, because it follows a natural progression of life-stages, from childhood to adolescence to middle age to senescence. And it’s even more still, since it is partly the creation of the person living it, who can plan it, evaluate it, anticipate its future, and remember its past. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore these and other aspects of a person’s life through works of literature and philosophy. What makes you the same person throughout the different stages of your life? How does the passage of time color your perception of life? What makes for a good life? A meaningful life? Should you be grateful for having been born or dismayed at having to die? Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.212.    FYS: Democracy, Diversity and Identity.    3 Credits.    What would a just form of democracy look like in a highly diverse society? What policies and laws should the state adopt to counter long-standing injustices, and how do they fit--or conflict--with the univeralist ideals on which liberal democracy is founded? In this course, we will try to answer these questions by discussing different philosophical views on topics from equity to free speech, and from cultural appropriation to lived experience. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.213.    FYS: Explorations in Contemporary Poetry.    3 Credits.    In this seminar we’ll explore the many ways that contemporary poets tell stories, make music, and create meaning. We’ll read a wide range of contemporary lyric poems, and every week you’ll have the opportunity to apply what you’ve learned in fun, low-pressure writing exercises. (No previous poetry-writing experience required!) Planned activities include classroom visits by contemporary poets as well as off-campus trips to poetry readings around town. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.214.    FYS: Doing Things With Maps.    3 Credits.    In this First-Year seminar, we will ask why maps and mapping technologies have become useful – some would say central – to the pursuit of new knowledge. Do they clarify, simplify, amplify, organize, reveal unexpected connections, point the way forward, or severely complicate our thoughts and send us back to the drawing board? We will learn/review some GIS basics, and those among you with previous experience in these technologies will be welcome to contribute ideas and share skills (no previous experience is required). Over the course of the semester students will pursue their own group projects, developed in class discussions and visits to various mapping technology hubs around Hopkins, such as Geospatial Data and GIS technologies at Milton S. Eisenhower Library, brain mapping technologies at Biomedical Engineering, and approaches to mapping the heavens at the Space Telescope Science Institute. We will also ground ourselves in the Humanities by reading The Odyssey of Homer (trans. James Lattimore, any edition) and testing out various mapping techniques on the intersecting adventures of Odysseus, his son Telemachus, and his wife Penelope. A series of short close reading assignments on selected passages from The Odyssey will help to refine analytical and writing skills, and a final group or personal project report on a topic of your choice will address the (very) general subject of “How maps enhance, change, clarify or complicate ideas. AS.001.215.    FYS: Mosques, Museums, and the Mind’s Eye: Discovering Islamic Art in Person.    3 Credits.    Despite its association with distant regions and time periods, Islamic art has a flourishing presence in today’s America, represented by rich museum collections, modern buildings designed in historical styles, and vibrant scholarly networks. This seminar explores how we, from the vantage point of twenty-first-century Baltimore, might experience works of Islamic art in ways that are informed by their own cultural contexts while also acknowledging the challenges involved in bridging this gap. We will spend much of the course engaging with objects and architecture in person, with visits planned to the recently reinstalled Islamic galleries at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. You will be invited to handle artifacts in person and to try your hand at calligraphy, one of the most distinctive and esteemed Islamic artforms. In the classroom setting, we will read and discuss translations of primary sources written by historical practitioners and consumers of Islamic art, along with examples of modern scholarship that seek to understand the Islamic tradition from a variety of perspectives. As well as learning about such perspectives, you will be encouraged to develop and share—in presentations and written assignments—your own ideas about Islamic art, building on the close, firsthand encounters that run throughout the seminar. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.216.    FYS: The Literature of Food.    3 Credits.    Using literature as our primary lens, in this First-Year Seminar we will explore our complex relationships with food, considering it as both material fact and literary symbol. We will read prose and poetry by writers such as Chang Rae Lee, Kevin Young, Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye, Gary Soto, and Joy Harjo, engaging issues of food and community, food labor and production, climate change, and more. As part of our explorations, we’ll spotlight aspects of Baltimore food culture and history, and students will be asked to examine and share their own personal and cultural relationships with food. Assignments will include creative writing exercises that draw on both research and personal experience. AS.001.217.    FYS: From Cell Phones to Hydrogen Cars: Are the Needed Metals Sustainable?.    3 Credits.    Where do critical metals that we use every day for our technologically advanced society come from? We will discuss questions surrounding the exploration and ownership of metallic resources and their exploitation. We benefit, but at what cost to others? To address these questions, we look at individual critical metals and their exploitation in a variety of countries from Africa, to South America, and Southeast Asia including Australia. As an example, cobalt is currently crucial for electric car batteries: see the book by Siddharth Kara (2022) "Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives". Should we alternatively get cobalt by the proposed mining of the deep ocean floor? Who has the right to do that? Weekly readings and discussions, and guest speakers lead to mini-research projects on such topics. AS.001.218.    FYS Means of Persuasion:The Communication of Climate Change.    3 Credits.    How does language get entangled in our cultural and social understandings? How do we learn to locate a person correctly in a particular social class or ethnicity? This course aims to show the ways in which language is at the center of our daily interactions and our institutions. We will learn conceptual tools to examine the ways in which writers and leaders attempt to persuade their publics in important matters such as climate change, party politics, and religious differences. AS.001.220.    FYS: Reproduction in the 21st Century: Biology and Politics.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar course will explore how 21st century childbearing conditions have changed, and the relationship of politics to these changes. Among the topics to be discussed are the impact on male and female infertility of assisted reproductive technologies that promote birth, including in vitro fertilization and intracytoplasmic sperm injection. But beyond how these technologies function, such topics as how decisions are/should be made about issues such as the acceptability of using genetic material from someone other than the hopeful parents to aid couples in having children will be addressed. Also to be discussed are how genetic technologies can be used to modify sperm, eggs and embryos, including risks, benefits, ethics and politics, and how, when and whether stem cells obtained from in vitro fertilization “leftovers” can be used. The ways in which these new approaches are perceived by the general public and by politicians, and how these perceptions affect the use of the new approaches, will be explored. Topics also will include whether abortions should be disallowed, allowed only under specific circumstances such as fetal anomalies observed during prenatal screening, or available as a women’s (or couple’s) right to choose. Contraception, both female and male, also will be explored. Thus, in addition to the science, this course will focus on when and how decisions are made regarding issues related to childbearing, including the roles of politics and social media. AS.001.221.    FYS: Music, Religion and Healing.    3 Credits.    Our class will explore how religious and spiritual communities have understood and practiced music as a healing and reparative force, with a particular focus on Sufi spirituality and the living South Asian musical tradition of khayal. Khayal is both a vocal practice and a system of spiritual self-development, and singers are trained to activate the healing that resides in sound. We will take this journey through essays, film, music, meditative listening, and conversations with musicians as well as practitioners of reparative and healing education in the arts. Students will also have the opportunity to participate in an ethnographic project on music and healing with artists and creators in Pakistan. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.222.    FYS: Exploring Intellectual Property from Marvel to Zombies to Ed Sheeran and Beyond.    3 Credits.    What does it mean to “create”? Who is the “creator” of a beloved comic book or a best-selling song and by what standard(s) is that determined? What rights, if any, does “creation” convey legally, or even morally? In this First-Year Seminar, we’ll take an in-depth, interactive, inside look under the hood of intellectual property rights and the battles that shape the multi-billion-dollar global entertainment industry. Reading sections of Supreme Court and lower Federal Court decisions, as well as relevant outside articles, we will explore (allegedly) stolen award-winning films and hit songs, understand why zombies eat copyright for breakfast, investigate why artists behind iconic Marvel and D.C. superheroes believe their rights—and staggering sums of profit—got zapped far across the multiverse, and much, much more. The seminar will involve weekly readings and/or screenings, and will culminate in a final project where you, the class, will serve as the (mock) jury on a real copyright infringement case involving three of the most popular, diverse and wealthiest entertainers of all time. AS.001.224.    FYS: Critical Playlists: 1961-1989.    3 Credits.    Set against the background of the Cold War and highlighting the soundtrack of Stranger Things Season IV, this class asks students to bring their own playlist of five songs from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. In the course of the semester we will use these lists as a springboard to compile a final playlist that reflects the values and lived realities of the class. Some of the questions that will guide our evaluation of the song-texts are: What is the relationship between our taste and what we find beautiful? Can we find something ugly and repellent beautiful? How do the songs that we promote impact our society's understanding of what is good and important? Readings will include excerpts from Lessing, Hume, D. Albright, J. Chang and their critics. AS.001.225.    FYS: Figures of Thought: Dangerous Women.    3 Credits.    Why are we drawn to female figures such as Medusa and Mystique? How do representations of women, especially in paintings, film and theater, mediate our understanding of who or what is desirable, dangerous and powerful? In this course we will practice reading visual cues from female figures, taken from history, pop culture, and visits to the BMA, in order to explore the relationship between fiction and reality, and to ask questions about how art depicts women. Course texts include Kant, Kingston, Cass, Paglia and Friedan. Figures for study include Antigone, Medea, Salome, and Bong Joon-ho's Mother. Distribution Area: Humanities AS.001.226.    FYS: Science Fiction.    3 Credits.    This course explores how science fiction functions as a literature of social and political critique just as much as it offers readers an imaginative escape to future or alien worlds. Students will read classic novels, novellas, short stories, and view films that confront such themes as artificial intelligence, posthumanism, ecological catastrophe and the role of technology in creating dystopias and utopias. The combination of reading, writing, discussion, and in-class presentations offers students a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in a particular genre as they journey “where no one has gone before.” AS.001.227.    FYS: Writing with Pictures: an introduction to writing picture books and graphic novels.    3 Credits.    A picture is worth 1000 words, or so goes the old saying. This hands-on writing workshop, explores the often-overlooked importance of TEXT in award-winning graphic novels and children's picture books. Over the course of the semester, we will delve into a wide range of topics, from understanding the relationship between image and text and thinking cinematically, to effective techniques for storyboarding and creating forceful dialogue. And like all good writers, we will work on developing the kind of rich characters, strong dialogue, and compelling themes that captivate readers. To enrich our writing efforts, we will embark on various outings during the semester. These will include visits to an illustrator's studio and an independent bookstore specializing in graphic novels. We will also interact with an array of professional writers and editors both in class and at extra-curricular events. The central goal of this course is to build a community through writing. No prior experience in creative writing or visual art is necessary. All that is required is enthusiasm for the topic and a willingness to share your work with others. AS.001.228.    FYS: Peripheral Nerves in Health and Disease.    3 Credits.    All organs in the body are innervated by peripheral nerves, which deliver biological signals between the central nerves system and the rest of the body. This First-Year seminar will investigate how peripheral nerves interact with different organs, and how diseases and disorders of the peripheral nerves effect core bodily functions such as voluntary movement and temperature sensation. Following short lectures on each topic, students will analyze research papers and other material, discuss sources in small, rotating groups and present their findings to the rest of the class. We will also visit various research labs across campus, hear from leading researchers, and participate together in Grand Rounds at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. AS.001.229.    FYS: Medical Wastes.    3 Credits.    This course combines historical and ethnographic investigations of the wastefulness of modern medicine in ecological, economic, and bodily terms. Why, in the past half-century, has the production of medical waste skyrocketed? Who bears the environmental costs of the incineration of disposable medical technologies? What new sustainable solutions might be retrieved from past practices? At the intersection of medicine, science, and humanities, this course explores the human and planetary costs of our wasteful healthcare systems, and what can be done to envision a more sustainable future. Readings will be centered in historical and ethnographic investigation but will stretch across other humanities and social science disciplines, in conjunction with primary source readings from medical and public health journals, lawsuits and Congressional hearings, and new approaches to materials design for sustainable healthcare. Experiential partnerships with local, regional, and international advocacy groups will be important for this course as well, including the Planetary Health Alliance based in the Bloomberg Center in Washington DC, the Sustainability Leadership Council of Johns Hopkins University, and local environmental justice advocacy surrounding the Curtis Bay Energy medical incinerator, which was recently the subject of the largest environmental fine in Maryland history. AS.001.230.    FYS: Understanding and Addressing Wasted Food.    3 Credits.    How should we, as individuals and a society, reduce wasted food and create a more resilient food system? This First-Year Seminar asks students to apply diverse perspectives to understand and address the complex problem of wasted food. Students will be exposed to a scope of up-to-date research from sociocultural, health, technological, environmental, economic, political, and justice-oriented lenses through guest speakers, multimedia resources, and community engagement on and off campus. By conducting their own examination of this real-world issue and proposing solutions, students in this course will develop critical thinking, research, and presentation skills valuable for future coursework and careers in any field. AS.001.231.    FYS: Death and Daring in the Modern Intensive Care Unit.    3 Credits.    The class will learn by readings from books such as The White Plague by Rene’ and Jean Dubos, The Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif, The Aetiology of Tuberculosis by Robert Koch and Fever by John Fuller, videos, class interactions and discussions, and after the introductory portion of the course, by presentations of research papers about M. tuberculosis pathogenesis and treatment. AS.001.232.    FYS: German Thought, German Theater: Reason, Capital, Sex and Science.    3 Credits.    Over the past 250 years, Germany has produced some of the most influential currents of theory as well as drama. In this course, we will read and view plays and films that address developments in German thought and society from the Enlightenment to the present. We will ask: How effective are performances at transmitting ideas and values? How do they balance emotional involvement with intellectual understanding? These issues will be examined with respect to four themes: reason and enlightenment; capitalism; sexualities; and moral dilemmas raised by scientific discoveries. AS.001.233.    FYS: The Science of Human Individuality.    3 Credits.    How we become unique is one of the deepest questions that we can ask. The answers, where they exist, inform how we think about morality, public policy, faith, health care, education, and the law. Although investigating the origins of individuality is not just an endeavor for biologists, many of this topic’s most important aspects involve fundamental questions about the development, genetics, and plasticity of the nervous system. The good news is that recent scientific findings are illuminating this question in ways that are exciting and sometimes counterintuitive. The better news is that it doesn’t just boil down to the same tiresome nature-versus-nurture debate that has been impeding progress and boring people for years. Genes are built to be modified by experience. That experience is not just the obvious stuff, like how your parents raised you, but more complicated and fascinating things like the diseases you’ve had (or those that your mother had while she was carrying you in utero), the foods you’ve eaten, the bacteria that reside in your body, the weather during your early development, and the long reach of culture and technology.So, let’s dig into the science together. Our sources will be not only books and articles but also visits by guest scientists and artists as well as engagement with films and stories that explore human individuality. It can be controversial stuff. Questions about the origins of human individuality challenge our concepts of nation, gender, and race. They are inherently political and incite strong passions. Given this fraught backdrop, we’ll do our best to play it straight and synthesize the current scientific consensus (where it exists), examine the controversies, and point out where the sidewalk of our understanding simply ends. AS.001.234.    FYS: Bringing the Past to Life with Poetry.    3 Credits.    Unlike Disney's talking teapots and candlesticks, ""real life"" objects can't tell their own stories. Through research and writing, however, we can ""animate"" and contextualize art and artifacts with our words, illuminating the people who made and used those objects, particularly those whose own voices have been historically marginalized. How can creative writing bring the past to life both imaginatively and responsibly? How do writers choose and use literary techniques to reckon with history? Poems we will examine and discuss include ""Ode on a Grecian Urn"" by John Keats, ""Voyage of the Sable Venus"" by Robin Coste Lewis, ""The Museum of Obsolescence"" by Tracy K. Smith, ""In the British Museum"" by Thomas Hardy, ""mulberry fields"" by Lucille Clifton, and ""How to Look at Pictures"" by Rebecca Morgan Frank. This course is an experiential collaboration between the Writing Seminars* and the Homewood Museum*, where students will explore the museum's collection and curate a public exhibition featuring their writing. *By way of introduction, The Writing Seminars is Johns Hopkins University’s creative writing department, offering both a major and a minor to undergraduate students, as well as a Master of Fine Arts graduate degree; Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood Museum is an early nineteenth-century National Historic Landmark site focusing on the enslaved families who lived and labored on the land that would later become the university’s main campus. With a focus on early American decorative arts, Homewood’s collection provides students with the opportunity to have hands-on experience with museum objects and to consider the role of museums and antiques in a new and creative light. AS.001.235.    FYS: Painting, Poetry, and the Novel.    3 Credits.    Poets, novelists, and essayists have gravitated to painting and its powers as a way of testing the powers of their own medium; the visual arts have served them as stimulus and challenge. This course broadly concerns the relation of these two art forms; more narrowly, it concerns attempts by writers to respond adequately to paintings that moved them We are likely to read work by Virgil Lessing, Virginia Woolf, Ali Smith, W,H. Auden, Mark Doty, and Rainer Maria Rilke; and study paintings by Cezanne, Klee, Brueghel, Morisot, Turner, and Monet. AS.001.236.    FYS: Nonhuman Speech.    3 Credits.    Humans are increasingly thinking about their relationship with nonhumans, ranging from AI to animals to corporations, including what it means to communicate with nonhumans or nonhuman systems. AI speech can now be mistaken for human speech but is commonly thought not to have meaning or intention in the same way. Many animals have complex verbal and nonverbal modes of communication; elephants, for instance, raise distinct sounds of alarm based on the kind of danger that is coming. Corporations in the United States have legal personhood, which includes the right to free speech, and are often talked about as if they have intentions, values, and desires. This class will query how we should interpret nonhuman communication across a range of sources and perspectives, including law, literature, philosophy, science, and popular culture. How do we know what such communication means, or if it has meaning, and according to what criteria? What is the relationship between communication and rights, including the right to personhood? And how does nonhuman communication change our understanding of how humans create meaning and connection with one another? AS.001.237.    FYS: Calling Home.    3 Credits.    What do we call "home"? It seems that when we call (something) home, we are all reaching out toward different places or ideas. Is it a haven? a source of identity? the object of longing? a domain of hierarchy and oppression? This course offers a critical examination of the apparently self-evident notion of home. Through the lens of disciplines like anthropology, literature, or socio-legal studies, we will explore home in diverse cultural settings, as realms of care, intimacy, and belonging yet also as sites of subjection, discrimination, and gender/racial inequality. Our analysis will extend to a variety of media such as films, podcasts, music, museum exhibits, and personal experiences. AS.001.238.    FYS: Italy through Different Eyes: Women and others on the Grand Tour.    3 Credits.    Traveling through Europe has been an enriching experience, with its apex in the 18th and 19th century. The Grand Tour of Italy is “the most interesting of all possible voyages” wrote Abbé Gabriel-Françoise Coyer in his travel journal (1763). It was a sort of “gap year” but represented much more. It was a formative journey, where the young elite would deepen their knowledge in classical literature and refine their taste for art and architecture. It was also an immersion in the leisure that traveling offered. The phenomenon of the Grand Tour produced an immense amount of travel literature, journals, and provided a backdrop and inspiration for countless novels. It also played and defining role in constructing identity, individual and national, setting a canonical cultural path. How can we retrace part of this path through Italy through a different point of view? Introducing a less normative dominated reading of the lived experience of the Grand Tour? In this course we will (re)discover Italy in the glory of the Grand Tour golden era through the writing of women writers, the American antislavery activist Fredrick Douglass and A range of queer and other rubbles and outcast visiting Italy. In class, we will look at excerpts of texts including some by Mary Shelley, Vernon Lee, Margaret Fuller, Madame De Stäel, J.A. Symonds, Goethe, Lord Byron. We will take advantage of the great collections of art like (Waters Museum and BMA) becoming grant tourists ourselves and discuss and analyze the styles and subjects of art and architecture of Italy (mostly in Venice, Florence and Rome). We will also take advantage of the Special Collections at the Sheridan Library that houses rare books and documents that we can look closely. Every week the material will be presented in different forms, book excerpts, articles, collections, but also movies, theater pieces and music. AS.001.239.    FYS: What's Up Mr. Disney?.    3 Credits.    The question of what makes Disney characters so popular will guide us through this First-Year Seminar as we examine the films and particular Disney figures, embedded in narratives, from an angle that is both celebratory and critical. We will curate the characters to be analyzed and place them in their social, cultural, literary and filmic contexts, while taking special note of the global, political, economic and technological issues that have shaped the animation enterprise. A special emphasis of the course will be on the question of audience, and our own responses to the aesthetic, ethical, and visceral aspects of select Disney characters -- including Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Maleficent, and Mother Gothel. AS.001.240.    FYS: Death in the Renaissance.    3 Credits.    During the Renaissance, Christians frequently depicted the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the personifications of disease, famine, war, and conquest. Nearly half of all children died before the age of five and ten percent of women died of childbirth or of pregnancy related complications. Wars consumed the continent during the bloody sixteenth century, thanks to advances in military technology and religious violence. With no knowledge of the cause of disease and absent antibiotics, disease was as terrifying as mass murder. In this class, we explore death, dying, health, and hope in early modern Europe. How did death and the fear of death shape society? How did it affect politics and economics, gender and family? At the center of death – and life - was religion; in this chaotic world, disease was a punishment and God the only cure; as a result, we will explore how religion was the other side of the coin of death and disease. We will learn how to read primary sources of Renaissance people grappling with their mortality and examine Renaissance art. In the process, we will investigate one of the biggest questions human beings confront: What is the meaning of life in the face of death? AS.001.241.    FYS: Nobel Physics.    3 Credits.    Is physics a noble science built on inspiration, ingenuity, and ideas? What does it mean to win a Nobel Prize? Why was the prize established? What ideas are awarded? Who gets credit? How long does it take? Has a prize ever been rescinded? How well do Nobel ideas stand the test of time? - Sources that we will explore include library archives, the speeches of Nobel Laureates, and released records of nominees, as well as some of the topics for which the prizes were awarded- We can explore JHU's influence on nobel-awarded physics research, and at the University's involvement in Nobel-based or Nobel-related physics and astronomy research- Experiential components of the semester may include looking at how Nobel prizes are depicted in the media and popular culture, documentaries and biopics of prize winners and research (e.g. the movie Particle Fever for the Higgs) and popular-level books; recreations of demonstrations or laboratory setups of Nobel-winning experiments; recordings of an awards ceremony; class discussion and activities related to the 2024 prizes that will be announced during October/November 2024; invitations to guest speakers; and possibly a museum or laboratory visit. AS.001.242.    FYS: Johns Hopkins: Toward a New Biography of the Founder.    3 Credits.    In this course you will learn about the life and legacy of Johns Hopkins – his ancestors, his family, his Quaker faith, his business career, his philanthropy and what we know about why he decided to found the university that you now attend. Along the way, we will examine rare artifacts, explore archival records, discuss current controversies, and visit some of the most important local landmarks associated with Johns Hopkins’ long and eventful life. AS.001.243.    FYS: Diamonds.    3 Credits.    In this seminar, students will learn about the hardest mineral on earth, diamond. Its unique Crystal structure, Chemical makeup, unusually low Compressibility, and unusually high thermal Conductivity are some of the physical properties that make it extraordinarily useful. We will also learn about geologic formation, diamond mining, the gem industry, and modern replacements. Class materials will include textbook excerpts, the movie Blood Diamond, and a field trip to the Smithsonian Hall of Geology, Gems, and minerals. AS.001.244.    FYS: Death and the Meaning of Life.    3 Credits.    It is difficult to think about the fact that you will die. It is confusing theoretically and it is confusing emotionally. We will be spending the course trying to think our way through the confusions. On the theoretical side, thinking about the fact that you will die raises a cluster of philosophical questions. What are you? Are you necessarily the sort of thing that ceases to exist when your biological life ends? What is it that connects you to your childish self and makes some person in the future you? And does the fact that you die diminish the value of your life? If it means the end of your existence, does it make life absurd, or meaningless, or only more precious? We will address these questions as well as whether death should be feared, whether death is bad, and whether immortality would be desirable.Being confronted with the fact of your death can also help focus questions about how you should live. It presses you to think about what makes life worth living? What makes a life meaningful? Are there objective answers to what makes a life meaningful, or is this a personal choice? If meaningfulness involves some kind of overarching project (e.g., achieving something, leaving something behind, participating in something larger than ourselves) is meaningfulness worth pursuing, or should we instead throw off the tyranny of purposes and just live?These are the things we will be talking about over the course of the semester. AS.001.245.    FYS: Being and Knowing on Turtle Island- American Indian Philosophy.    3 Credits.    More than 500 federally-recognized Native tribes and many more who are not federally recognized live within the borders of the United States. Each of these communities has its own history, identity, traditions, relationship to the land, and story of survivance. This First-Year Seminar examines the views of Indigenous communities on topics such as truth, knowledge, identity and the self, causation, and ethics. It also investigates contemporary American Indian thought as it relates to colonialism and anti-colonialism, land, futurity, sovereignty, and resistance. Students will hear from guest lecturers working at the forefront of the discipline and enrich their learning through a trip to the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. AS.001.246.    FYS: Imagining Climate Change.    3 Credits.    Climate change poses an existential threat to human civilization. Yet the attention and concern it receives in ordinary life and culture is nowhere near what science tells us is required. What are the causes of this mismatch between crisis and response? What accounts for our collective inability to imagine and grasp this new reality, and how can it be overcome? In pursuit of these questions, we will pair literary works and films with texts from politics, philosophy, literary theory, and religion, that frame climate change as a fundamental challenge to our ways of making sense of the human condition. AS.001.247.    FYS: African Cities: Past and Present.    3 Credits.    What are the implications of Africa’s urban revolution? In the last century, Africa’s cities have boomed at a dizzying pace, witnessing the most rapid urbanization in human history. This trend is unstoppable; yet it comes with opportunities and challenges. This first-year seminar invites students to explore Africa’s cities, their evolution from precolonial times to the digital age, their quest for modernity, and the unique repertoires of urban life they have registered thanks to the creativity of their overwhelming young denizens AS.001.248.    FYS: Who has an accent? Dialects of English.    3 Credits.    Language is at the heart of human interaction. What are the linguistic habits that unite or divide us? This First-Year Seminar introduces students to dialects of English speakers around the world. Students will explore the major properties that cross-cut different varieties of English, including regional or socially-driven accents of North America, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia, as well as other World Englishes. Particular attention will be paid to pronunciation, so students will practice the International Phonetic Alphabet and learn acoustic analysis through hands-on activities, but discussion will also focus on dialectal differences in word choice, sentence structure, and linguistic meaning. We will engage with known and emerging varieties of English by drawing on academic sources, multimedia materials, and real-world experience. Who speaks with an accent? Everyone! AS.001.250.    FYS: Queer Archives.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar offers an in-depth exploration of Baltimore’s queer and trans archives, expansively defined, engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship on "the archive" within queer and trans studies. Beginning with a brief survey of U.S. LGBTQ history, students delve into archival research methods and hands-on explorations in JHU Special Collections. We then engage with queer theory, performance studies, and public humanities scholarship to ask what we can know of the recoverable past and what silences the archive might contain, approaching the queer archive as a complex record of activity that includes ephemera of events, shows, and collective affect; innuendo and gossip; residues of queer nightlife; performance and gesture. We ground these theoretical explorations by visiting Baltimore-based institutional and non-institutional archives, where we engage with 1970s LGBT newspapers and 1960s medical documents, oral histories recorded by local trans artists, street youth photography, and the embodied archives of vogue performance. Throughout the course, we underscore the transformative potential of engaging with the queer and trans past to forge solidarities in the present and map more just and gorgeous futures. AS.001.251.    FYS: Ancient Bodies through Ancient Things.    3 Credits.    How can we move from our own interactions with ancient objects today to a sense of the richness and particularity of people’s lived experience in the distant past? This First-Year Seminar is based in the Archaeological Museum on campus, allowing for daily hands-on work with artifacts. We use the lens of bodies as we learn to interrogate ancient things for indications of how people cared for, ornamented, protected, altered, understood, and represented not only their physical but also their socio-cultural persons. The class pairs readings for discussion with analysis of objects. Weekly themes draw out certain types of bodily experience, working with objects that were, e.g., worn in battle; held/worn during birth; connected to healing; used to adorn or shape the body (such as jewelry, clothing, and magical amulets); utilized by craftspersons in their handwork; involved in rites of passage; or incorporated into contexts of bodily death. Our approach is deeply cross-disciplinary, integrating techniques and interests from the fields of classics, archaeology, history of art, the life sciences, and materials analysis. Outings will take us to other museums in the area to engage with their collections, as well. AS.001.252.    FYS: Energy and Climate Change.    3 Credits.    In this First-Year Seminar, we will try to understand together the basic physics of energy and climate change. We'll try to derive estimates, from basic high-school physics, for how much energy it takes to drive a car across the country; fly across the country; to get ChatGPT to write an essay for us; to heat and light our homes; send a SpaceX Starship into space; etc. Should you be riding that electric scooter or e-bike when you could ride a (muscle-powered) bike? We'll figure out how much carbon is put into the atmosphere each time we do any of these things, and how that carbon affects the climate. We'll think about ways to save energy, reduce carbon emissions, and sequester carbon. We'll study various prospects for clean energy and what needs to be done to have them implemented. We'll try to figure out if we should be thinking about geo-engineering. We'll spend the first few weeks working together to identify specific questions we'd like to think about and then follow through the rest of the semester, relying on varied sources along the way. AS.001.253.    FYS: The Drama of Artificial Intelligence.    3 Credits.    From the rise of machine consciousness to the ethics of automation, artificial intelligence has captured the human imagination. This First-Year Seminar explores how playwrights and theater artists engage with AI as a dramatic subject, a creative tool, and a lens for examining the human condition. Through an interdisciplinary approach, and co-taught by faculty in Psychological and Brain Sciences and Theatre, students will analyze plays and performances that grapple with the hopes and anxieties surrounding AI. Works such as Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (which introduced the word “robot”), Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime, Jennifer Haley’s The Nether, and Nick Payne’s Constellations will serve as key texts alongside contemporary plays such as Julia Cho’s The Language, Rolin Jone’s The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, The Effect by Lucy Prebble, and Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler. We will also discuss experimental performances that integrate AI technologies. AS.001.254.    FYS: Passion and Politics.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar examines the significance of passions, or emotions, in contemporary political life. It aims to understand the risks and possibilities associated with emotion, and to reflect critically on how debates over political inclusion and exclusion, justice and injustice are informed by emotions—real and imagined. We will consider questions such as: How did “reason” and passion-less “interests” come to serve as foundational ideals in modern, liberal societies? Why and when are emotional forms of political expression and conduct accepted, and when are they demonized? How and when do public expressions of fear inspire measures to protect national security? Under what conditions does anger fuel struggles for justice? What, if anything, is different about how passions operate within populist political parties and movements? And how are human experiences of emotion changing in algorithmically driven public spaces? Such questions will allow us to secure footholds in contemporary political environments often densely populated with impassioned rhetoric, backlash dynamics, and public fascination with political scandal, provocation, and conspiracy. We draw on some canonical texts in political thought before moving into multidisciplinary readings on moral psychology and the contemporary politics of emotion. Students will also have the opportunity to gather and assess emotional “artifacts” from contemporary political discourse. Topics for the seminar include: passions and interests; the politics of fear; anger and justice; dark sides of empathy; populism and resentment; algorithms and attention; and the carnival of conspiracy. AS.001.255.    FYS: Lab Animals.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar explores the scientific-technological, philosophical, social, and ethical dimensions of using animals for scientific research from the early nineteenth century to present. Why did scientists use animals and how did they choose “the right animal for the job”? How did philosophers define a “model organism”? What were the political economies formed within research communities sharing research animals? How did financial and material infrastructure take shape for large-scale, long-term maintenance of genetically standardized mice or zebrafish? How did the interpretations of animals reflect the social imaginaries of researchers and our society? And how did animals “speak” back? These are questions we are going to examine through reading scholarly publications, watching documentaries, visiting laboratories, and doing mini research projects together. AS.001.256.    FYS: Monuments and Memory in Asian History.    3 Credits.    Sites like the Forbidden City, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, and Angkor Wat conjure images that often have more to do with fantasy than fact. Modern monuments like Yasukuni Shrine and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial similarly evoke history, memory, and myth. Why (and how) were these monuments built? How have their meanings changed over time and why? What forces have transformed them into symbols of national identity and cultural otherness? This First-Year Seminar will explore the ritual, political, historical, and religious significance of monumental sites in Asia. We will also examine their more recent role as sites for political mobilization, as signifiers of cultural and national identities, and as commodities in global and local tourism. AS.001.257.    FYS: Humans, Computers and Artificial Intelligences in Chemistry.    3 Credits.    In this First-Year Seminar, we will discuss the role of humans, computers, data-aggregators, and large language models in discovering or creating chemical principles - and in how such knowledge is distributed. We will start by discussing the nature of scientific research (e.g. Pasteur's quadrant), and its implications on the funding of science. The results of such work must be published in order for science to be advanced. Should access to it be free (open) to consumers? If not, how is the curation of knowledge to be subsidized? Such dissemination must go beyond scientists, and we will explore ways in which we can communicate science to the public effectively. This will lead us to explore how the information will be synthesized. Whoever can best do this task will undoubtedly make the discoveries of this century. Will it be humans, computers or A.I.? We will explore who might win the 2025 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics, and whether an A.I. will eventually outperform them. AS.001.259.    FYS: Global Nude: The Art of the Human Body in the World.    3 Credits.    Ever wonder: we are all born nude, but most of us wear clothes, at least when facing the public in our adult life. We are told nude is not the same as just “naked”: it is an art form. However, in grand museums, we see plenty of representation of nudes in, let’s say, the European wings. But if we turn the corner to other galleries dedicated to other traditions of art, we might see none. We gaze at a marble statue of a classical nude there, and when we go watch a film with nude scenes in a cinema with friends and strangers, we respond very differently in these two spaces. We quickly ask ourselves, is this pornographic? Is this art? Am I cool? Do I look prudish? In this First-Year Seminar, we will go to museums, watch movies, and take a global, historical, and multimedia perspective to approach nude as art in the world. How is nude defined? What are the philosophical and scientific ideas that find nude as an ideal vehicle? What are the historical and cultural particularities of classical nude that have been taken for centuries as universal? How do other art traditions approach the representation of an unclothed nude body? How are nudes gendered, sexualized, classed, and racialized? How do modern media transform nude? These are among the questions that this class explores. The Truth is naked, as the saying goes. Nude is therefore a mirror reflecting both the foundations and aspirations of humanity. AS.001.260.    FYS: Whatever Happened to the Space Age? A Global History from Sputnik to SpaceX.    3 Credits.    Remember the moon landing? Of course you don't, but no one who watched it on television would have guessed that the last moon walk would be in 1972. Now some of us are ready to 'Occupy Mars'. This First-Year Seminar will explore the Space Age from the launch of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957 to the International Space Station, including military and civilian programs, unmanned and manned missions, and new competitors in our current space race, such as China, India, and the European Space Agency. We will read contemporary and historical accounts (October Sky and The Right Stuff) and screen some classic space age feature films and documentaries. We will pay particular attention to Johns Hopkins University's contributions, notably the Hubble and Webb Space Telescopes and the Applied Physics Laboratory's satellite program. We'll talk with experts at the Space Telescope Science Institute and APL, and tour the National Air and Space Museum collections with the curator of manned spaceflight. In groups, students will prepare future space mission proposals for NASA and SpaceX, and present them to a distinguished panel of Hopkins space scientists and engineers. AS.001.261.    FYS: Museum Matters.    3 Credits.    Museums are crucibles, places where public memory, identity, and cultural values are debated, hammered out and refined. This First-Year Seminar examines this premise through guided discussion, close looking at exhibitions past and present, written reflection, and visits that go behind the scenes of many of Baltimore's history, art, industry, and science museums. Just what is a museum and how does it compare to other sorts of cultural institutions? What responsibilities do museums have to their communities? to their collections? How do they balance the two? How are they adapting to broader social, economic, and cultural changes? And what is their future? Learn how to decode museums. Discover the varied roles they play in the life of a city like Baltimore. AS.001.262.    FYS: Flowers in Art and Life: From Lotus-Eaters to The Flowers of Evil.    3 Credits.    "What a strange thing! to be alive beneath cherry blossoms" wrote the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa. Aristotle quotes the musician Stratonicos as saying: while a meal “smells delicious”, a fragrant flower “smells beautiful.” Maurice Maeterlinck, in 1907, ascribes intelligence to flowers. Why do flowers cause positive emotions? What is their relationship to memories? In this First-Year Seminar, we'll consider flowers in an interdisciplinary perspective, including literature, art history, aesthetics, and even ethics, including Ovid's Narcissus, the rose of Sharon in the Song of Solomon, Emily Dickinson's gardens, Marcel Proust's hawthorn-blossoms, and Zuzanna Ginczanka’s “girls like pasqueflowers”. Topics will range from beauty to synesthesia, metaphor to metamorphosis. A foray into music (Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler) may be included. Additionally, visits to the Cylburn Arboretum, Rawlings Conservatory and Botanic Gardens, the Walters or the BMA will enrich our FYS. We'll drink passionflower and linden flower teas and we'll eat orchids! AS.001.263.    FYS: The Utopian Imagination.    3 Credits.    How have we imagined utopic societies in the past and how do we do so now? What are the paradoxes and contradictions involved in imagining social alternatives? This First-Year Seminar examines modes of thought and imagination concerned with alternative, often future, worlds. We will consider classic and contemporary works of utopian (and dystopian) literature alongside instances of utopian thinking as manifested in philosophy, socioeconomic and political theory, art, architecture, and historical and current events. Through class discussions and brief writing assignments, collaborative projects, film screenings, and guest visits, we will engage a variety of themes including the relationship between technology and work, social hierarchy, the nature of history, and the character of social imagination. Texts may include works by Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Thomas More, Samuel Butler, Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Le Corbusier, Marge Piercy, Ursula Le Guin, and W.E.B Du Bois, Samuel Delany, and Margaret Cavendish. AS.001.264.    FYS: Luv Machines: Gender, Sexuality and Dating in Automation and Computation.    3 Credits.    How do we understand and represent ourselves and others in the realm of digitally mediated love and intimacy? Through interdisciplinary readings and hands-on projects, this First-Year Seminar explores the intersection of technology, identity, and relationships, both before and after the advent of the computer age. Seemingly inescapable, computational systems shape the way we connect. However, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and search engines are not neutral—they are deeply entangled with questions of gender and sexuality. Amidst the promises of revolutionary changes brought by technological progress, we will critically examine how digital platforms both challenge and reinforce traditional norms around love, desire, and identity. AS.001.265.    FYS: Who is Baltimore? Applying a Sociological Lens to Charm City.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to Baltimore by investigating various populations and institutions in their adopted hometown. Students will explore questions like: How has immigration shaped the city over the past 300 years? Who is trying to change Baltimore and how are they doing it? Who has power in Baltimore and how do they use it? We will learn about and apply social science research methods, such as analyzing survey data, mining university archives and special collections, and walking the streets of Baltimore observing and interviewing locals. We’ll also investigate research on Baltimore undertaken by Hopkins faculty to help students identify possible courses or research to pursue in the future. AS.001.266.    FYS: Cycles of Life and Death: Exploring Buddhist Death and Ritual.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar examines how Buddhist traditions understand and navigate death, dying, and the afterlife. More specifically, drawing on case studies from South, East, and Southeast Asia, the course investigates historical practices and contemporary adaptations, offering insights into how Buddhist communities confront mortality, support the dying, and honor the dead. Engaging with sacred texts, ethnographic accounts, visual media, and field trips (Buddhist temples, museums, parks, and cemeteries) students will gain a deeper understanding of the interplay between ritual, mythology, material culture, and cultural context in shaping Buddhist responses to life's ultimate transition. AS.001.267.    FYS: George Eliot's Middlemarch: Passion, Idealism, and Science.    3 Credits.    This FYS will be devoted to reading a single work, often called the greatest English novel: George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It's a love story, and story about loving one's work; one of its protagonists is a scientist, the other an idealistic and passionate young woman. It's a novel that readers remember through their lives, and return to reread as their life changes. It's beautiful and the questions it raises continue to matter:What happens when love and your career conflict? How much are you willing to compromise your committments? How can you maintain your ideals when you also need to have an income? And how can stories help us understand, and perhaps change, a disappointing world? Our conversations will address these questions, try to understand why the novel is considered so highly, and reflect on how it speaks to our contemporary concerns. Students will be asked to read the novel with patience and energy and to write informal response papers. AS.001.268.    FYS: What Makes Us Human?.    3 Credits.    In this First-Year Seminar, we explore the long history of humans thinking about what it means to be human. In myth, religion, science, art, literature, and philosophy, humans have never stopped posing the question of how we fit in, or fail to fit in, to the natural world; what our relation is to the cosmos, to gods, to animals, and even to other beings we may not yet have encountered. In our own quest we will read fascinating stories, poems, and philosophical texts; visit museums to view and discuss provocative works of art; and delve into the ramifications of our thinking they impact our relations with machines, with non-human animals, and with each other. AS.001.269.    FYS: What is the Meaning of Life?.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar explores how works of literature and philosophy respond to the question of the meaning of life. We will focus on the conditions of modern life – alienation, boredom, technology, modern warfare, the loss of tradition, the “death of God,” ecological crisis – that give rise to this perennial question in new and urgent ways. As meaninglessness looms, the capacity for revivifying and creative responses to this existential challenge emerge. Through close readings of literary texts such as Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, Kafka’s A Report for an Academy, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, James’s The Beast in the Jungle, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Chekhov’s The Bet, and Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals alongside philosophical texts by Kierkegaard, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger, and others, we will seek to understand how thinkers and writers in the modern era pose key questions about whether life has meaning, and how we can discover or create it. Visits to the rare books collection in Sheridan Libraries, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Charles Theatre will enrich our discussions of these themes. Students will also engage in a series of in-class writing exercises throughout the semester, culminating in a hybrid creative/critical project that explores the philosophical ideas and literary forms they encounter in these works. AS.001.270.    FYS: Computer-Verified Proof: a Hands-On Intro to Interactive Theorem Proving.    3 Credits.    TBD AS.001.271.    FYS: Happy Birthday Jane Austen! Exploring the Magic of Her Fiction.    3 Credits.    Jane Austen was born 250 years ago and remains widely read, but why? The world she inhabited and describes is very remote, so there must be something magical about how she uses words to create a fictional universe. The novel Emma (1815) will serve as our test-case as we delve into its pages to discover Austen’s world and her genius for plotting stories that involve romantic situations. We will need extra tools as well: they are provided by films (Clueless as well as Autumn de Wilde's Emma.), a few scholarly readings, and visits to our BMA museum as well as to the Morgan library. What I am aiming for in this First-Year Seminar is double: to renew or enrich your appreciation of books as long-lasting artefacts made entirely of words, and to help you enter, in your imagination, into a very different reality, which is filled however with aspirations for love and happiness that remain as true now as in her own time.Required for success in this course is a) a willingness to study pages of her text closely (as she wrote to her brother, her literary labors involved a fine brush to create their effects) and b) teamwork leading to oral presentations. AS.001.272.    FYS: Learning to Walk: Experiments in Experience.    3 Credits.    This is a First-Year Seminar about the literature and phenomena of walking: its great poets, its cultural and social meanings, and the practices that organize our attention to movement through space. How does walking relate to necessity and freedom, public and private space, the environment, and the rhythm of thinking itself? We’ll consider major writings and films on walking through urban and wild places, including H.D. Thoreau’s praise of “sauntering,” Walter Benjamin on the urban “flâneur” (stroller), Gwendolyn Brooks’s poems of Chicago streets, Agnès Varda’s documentary of the “gleaner” who makes her art from what others leave behind, Sunaura Taylor’s reflection on walking and disability, and W. G. Sebald’s knack for discovering history wherever he roamed. We will also learn how famous planners and urbanists shape the experience of walking from the Appalachian Trail to the Baltimore Inner Harbor. Most importantly, we’ll adopt these practices of attention to explore Johns Hopkins campus and Baltimore City's landscapes, environments, and geography. About half our sessions will meet outdoors for walks through the many neighborhoods surrounding Johns Hopkins and elsewhere in Baltimore, sometimes joined by a special guest, writer, or artist. Here, we’ll learn how to be something more than detached passers-by. Instead, we’ll become active investigators of the most ordinary parts of our reality and experience. Aside from reading and participating in our walks and discussion, brief exercises prompt you to move through the world and to craft compelling records of your experiences, observations, and curiosity. AS.001.273.    FYS: The Long Civil Rights Movement in 20th-Century America.    3 Credits.    This seminar traces the development of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States over the course of the 20th Century. By exploring some of the major sites of conflict, activism, protest, opposition, and resistance in modern African American History, we will begin to complicate traditional understandings of Black freedom struggles in the United States. Why and how did African Americans mobilize and organize for their rights? How did they imagine citizenship, Black freedom, and equality within the United States? How did these events impact public life and public policy? What are the legacies of the movement? Students will analyze a broad range of primary and secondary source materials, including the writings of W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and more. Additionally, students will watch a series of civil rights films related to the broad themes of the course and will visit local museums and archives as part of a larger experiential component, to better understand the significance of the modern Civil Rights Movement on contemporary American society and culture. AS.001.274.    FYS: Queer Performativity.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar examines the intersections of queer theory, performance studies, and LGBTQ history with a focus on “queer worldmaking:” the ways in which performances—both theatrical and everyday rituals—can establish oppositional publics and politics. We take an interdisciplinary approach to historical research, considering embodied memory, gesture, and ritual as methods for learning, preserving, and transmitting cultural knowledge. Case studies include the ballroom and voguing scene in Baltimore and beyond, migratory street youth subcultures, drag performance, and queer nightlife. AS.001.275.    FYS: French Food for Thought.    3 Credits.    "What is it with the French and snails? Did you know they have a specific word for eating badly? (“la malbouffe”) Where did restaurants come from? This First-Year Seminar will explore the rich and diverse culinary traditions of France, from production to creation, presentation, and consumption. How are food practices informed by historical, political, and cultural factors? To what extent do they contribute to our values and worldview? Students will delve into perceptions of food and eating, shopping habits, the art of meal preparation, the importance of local ingredients and regional dishes, the role of food in French social life, as well as the politics of food and the environment. We will read and discuss materials from a broad range of sources, from scholarly journals and book excerpts to the popular press; examine paintings and archival documents; listen to songs; watch and analyze films; and of course, taste a wide variety of French foods. AS.001.276.    FYS: Friends or Foes? US-European Relations since 1979.    3 Credits.    This First-year Seminar offers students the opportunity to better understand current debates through the lens of key documents and controversies that illustrate shared interests and disagreements between the US and Europe since the pivotal year 1979. Topics include but are not limited to: NATO, arms limitations and reduction, the Polish Crisis, Chernobyl, Gorbachev, German unification, collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11 and the GWOT, the financial crisis of 2008-2012, Ukraine, the EU, the rise of China and climate change. The seminar includes a visit to the Delegation of the European Union in DC and other conversations with experts. AS.001.277.    FYS: Foundations of Acting.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar is an Ensemble-focused exploration of foundational exercises and techniques in the art and craft of Acting. Together we'll practice in voice, movement, listening, and improvisation. Students will read a selection of plays and develop interpretive storytelling skills, building toward scene work and monologue performance. This class requires no previous acting experience, but will offer preparation for advanced acting and performance classes. AS.001.278.    FYS: Games People Play.    3 Credits.    What is play? How does play form part of our social being and innermost sense of self? What importance do particular games hold not only in players’ intimate lives but also in social formations, from quirky subcultures to nations and empires? Historians of play contend that games precede formal philosophy and religion and are arguably the forgotten basis on which societies took shape. As a way of being in the world, play may be understood as a mode of symbolic action and of engagement with the object world. But playfulness is also something more than behavior and meaning alone; it is also that tacit context surrounding activity and signaling “this is play.” When we play today, we may be training or distracting our minds, creating or destroying entire worlds, teaching or transgressing ways of being in the world. Anytime we play a game we enter into it by free volition, yet we surrender our autonomy to its rules and constraints. Play is deeply paradoxical and paradoxically deep! This First_year Seminar will explore the bounding of time and space, the shaping of identities, the cultivation of skill, and the construction of social reality through play. Through ethnographic studies of virtual worlds, simulations, casinos, sports, and war games we will encounter new approaches to understanding imagination, labor, competition, hierarchy, and other key cultural ideas. In addition to outings to observe leisure spaces and film screenings, we will also play selected games, examine their mechanics, and reflect on their worlds of possibility. Finally, you will draw on course materials to design a game of your own and play-test it with classmates. AS.001.279.    FYS: Social and Physical Geography of Baltimore: Making Sense of the City.    3 Credits.    Using multiple disciplinary perspectives, this First-Year Seminar asks us to think about why Baltimore is the way it is, and how we might understand the potential for change. We begin with some history and geography, looking at the impact of the port and of the Jones Falls on the development of the city and its social geography. Through an examination of redlining and housing policy, we then investigate the question of how both geography and policy decisions have lasting repercussions on opportunities for different groups of people. Core questions include, what determines the trajectory of cities and the people within them? How do natural, political, and social factors interact to explain the outcomes of different urban populations? What are the levers available to both policy-makers and activists to change these outcomes? Key texts include David Harvey's A View from Federal Hill, Antero Pietila's Not in My Neighborhood, and Stefanie DeLuca's Coming of Age in the Other America. The course incorporates field trips to see different geographical features, historical sites, and current neighborhoods firsthand, as well as interactions with community members through community-based learning. AS.001.280.    FYS: Spilling the Tea: The Political Economy & Ecology of Tea.    3 Credits.    Tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world, with almost 7 million tonnes grown, harvested, processed, and packaged annually. Whether you use loose leaf or tea bags, drink green tea or black, add sugar or cream, use it to stay awake or go to sleep, or consume it in solitude or with friends to share gossip, you are participating in the worldwide consumption of tea, which has created economic relations (and wars), new ecosystems for plants and animals (and humans), and is culturally significant in public and private spaces. In short, tea organizes people’s homes, government meetings, economies, investment markets, and landscapes. In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine the history and present-day production of tea and how it creates and recreates social relations and environments. In addition to learning about tea (and tasting different kinds), students will be exposed to research methodologies in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and communication studies. By the end of class, students will have an understanding of the different kinds of teas (and how to prepare them), the role tea plays in society, and how tea functions within ecosystems. AS.001.281.    FYS: The Political Economy of the Pinkertons.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar explores the history of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, the first American detective firm and a major force in American politics from the 1850s through the 1930s. We will follow the Pinkertons from Civil War battlefields to the bloody fights over the American West, as they chase train robbers, break strikes, and create a trail of enemies along the way. Over the course of the semester, we will visit the B&O Railroad Museum and also investigate representations of the Pinkertons in popular culture, including the video game Red Dead Redemption 2. AS.001.282.    FYS: Explorations in Biological Anthropology: What it Means to be Human.    3 Credits.    "This First-Year Seminar is an introduction to the field of biological anthropology, which is broadly a mixture of social studies and biological studies that focus on human evolution and human biosocial variation. We will explore evolutionary theory and mechanisms of inheritance, the diversity of living primates, the fossil record, human evolution, and modern human biological variation. We will begin the semester by learning the basic principles of evolution and natural selection as proposed by Charles Darwin. We will then move on to consider the primate condition across species and through time. This involves examining the taxonomy of extant monkeys and apes as well as the fossil and archaeological record of our hominin ancestors that begins some 7 million years ago. This will involve excursions to local zoos and museums, as well as visits to labs right here at Hopkins. Following a survey of human biocultural evolution, we will consider how this history has influenced contemporary human biological variation. AS.001.283.    FYS: Hoop Style: The Culture, Language, and Iconography of the NBA.    3 Credits.    In this First-Year Seminar, we’ll gather high-level hoopheads to study the National Basketball Association (the coolest professional sports league in the world). Our key questions will be why is the NBA so dope and how did it get to be so dope? Said another way, we’ll use the methods of humanistic, linguistic, and rhetorical visual analysis to study the culture, language, and iconography of the NBA. No zone defenses here: we’re bringing a full-court press to cultural artifacts like the dunk contest, the euro-step, Allen Iverson’s hip-hop fashion (and David Stern’s short-lived player dress code), why some folks say they like the college game better than the pro game, uniform/court/mascot designs, how advanced statistical analytics have the changed the game (deep breath), and much, much more. We’ll read texts like David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game (about the 1978 Portland Trailblazers) and the posts from the now defunct but very influential FreeDarko blog. We’ll watch videos like the 1990s Chicago Bulls documentary The Last Dance, Hustle, and Hoop Dreams. Oh, and if you’re into experiential learning, we’ll probably check out a Wizards game in D.C. and play a little pick up at the gym. I hope my knees hold up. See you at the rim. AS.001.284.    FYS: Forensic Isotopes: Where does your food come from and should you care?.    3 Credits.    Knowing where your food comes from is important for various environmental, health, ethical, and aesthetic reasons. Stable isotopes – forms of the same element with different masses – can be used to verify the origin of food. In this First-Year Seminar, we will discuss motivations for determining food sources including questions of the environmental cost of different modes of production, the different environmental factors that impact nutrient levels in food, how regional laws affect food production practices, and how protected designation of origin labels impact how food is made and distributed. We will also discuss how stable isotope signatures can be used to identify food origin and how we assess confidence in stable isotope-based identifications. Have no doubt: in-class food tastings will most definitely be used to guide the discussion of aesthetic motivations for knowing where food comes from. AS.001.285.    FYS: Seeing Nature- Environment and Art.    3 Credits.    This First-Year Seminar combines ecology and art, allowing students to create art inspired by observations of the natural environment. Taken together, these dual methodologies of scientific observation and artistic production will encourage students to explore core questions about human creativity as influenced by nature. The course invites participants to consider their sensory experiences about the poetics and intricacies of the natural world. Together we will focus on ecological details, observing natural patterns and exploring their symbolic meanings. We will also learn to appreciate the visual language of fine art by taking a broader view of landscapes. Through museum visits, recording sounds in nature, and creating visual representations such as drawings, photographs, and video, students will develop various art techniques, culminating in a multimedia art form. AS.001.286.    FYS: Poetry for scientists and everyone else.    3 Credits.    “Why poetry?,” you might ask. At first glance, science and poetry seem like unlikely companions, yet this course will explore the ways in which they can complement each other. Poetry encourages us to slow down, reflect, and engage with big ideas. We will read a diverse selection of poems from various languages and cultures that explore questions of scientific discovery, space, the environment, biology, aging, and medicine. We will examine how these poems grapple with scientific concepts, the natural world, and the human experience. Students will also be invited to discover and share poems that speak to their scientific and intellectual interests. Throughout the course, we will approach poetry not as an intimidating art form to be decoded, but as a space for reflection, playful exploration of ideas, and deeper thinking. Readings are in English and English translation ranging from Dylan Thomas, Marianne Moore, Jane Hirshfield, Scott Momaday, David Ignatow to German writer Johann Wolfang von Goethe, French poet Jacques Prévert, Swedish author Harry Martinson and Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. AS.001.287.    FYS: The Science and Non-science of our Medicines.    3 Credits.    The process of developing new medicines for humans involves tremendous effort across many scientific disciplines. Science has been the driving force behind numerous groundbreaking medicines discovered over the past century. Equally fascinating are the ongoing debates about the true value of medicines in relation to patients' quality of life. This First-Year seminar explores both the scientific and non-scientific aspects behind our medicines through a discussion-driven format. Some of the key questions to be addressed in this course include: How are medicines discovered and developed? How has science influenced the discovery of new treatments? Why does it take so much time and money to bring a new medicine to market? Who decides the price of a drug? Who actually pays for your medicines? Are new medicines really as expensive as they seem? By examining multiple sources of information and engaging in thoughtful discussions, students will develop their own informed opinions on these issues, rather than simply accepting what they see in the media at face value. AS.001.288.    FYS: Planetary Health[care]: Practicing Medicine in the Anthropocene.    3 Credits.    Over the past century, we have increased life expectancy, reduced poverty, and expanded access to education and healthcare, but these achievements now face growing threats from environmental degradation, climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. The emerging field of Planetary Health recognizes that human well-being is inseparable from the health of Earth’s natural systems, which are under unprecedented strain. Healthcare is both a driver of these challenges and a sector uniquely positioned to be part of the solution. From interdisciplinary discussions to off-campus experiences, this First-Year Seminar will challenge students to rethink medical practice—not as an isolated pursuit, but as part of an interconnected system. As we enter the Anthropocene—an era in which human activity is the dominant force shaping the planet—clinicians must confront the responsibility of navigating a world at a crossroads: one where we can either build on our progress or risk backsliding on the very health gains that define modern medicine. To meet this challenge, we will explore not only scientific and technological solutions but also the wisdom embedded in the arts, faith-based traditions, and indigenous knowledge—recognizing that healing has always been a profoundly human endeavor. Engaging with the legacy of innovation at Johns Hopkins Medicine, we will ask ourselves and each other: How must we redefine the role of medicine to meet the challenges of this new era? AS.001.289.    FYS: Origins of Language: Creation, Acquisition, and Invention.    3 Credits.    Any list of human accomplishments will include natural language. While every human society has a language, no other animal has a communication system with this scope and complexity. How do languages emerge and evolve, and how are they learned? What happens when a child is born into an environment with no accessible language (e.g., deaf children who are born to hearing parents who do not know a sign language)?In this seminar, we’ll explore how children acquire – or even create – language in different environments. Case studies include international adoptees, blind children, deaf children, and autistic children. We’ll also examine real-world cases like homesign systems, pidgins and creoles, and Lengua de Señas Nicaragüense (also known as Nicaraguan Sign Language). We’ll also discuss languages which have been consciously and painstakingly designed (Game of Thrones, Avatar, etc.), constructed international systems (Esperanto, International Sign), and large language models (e.g., ChatGPT4). This course invites students to think critically about what language is, where it comes from, and variation in human experiences.

International Studies

School of Arts and Sciences

http://e-catalogue.jhu.g.sjuku.top/arts-sciences/full-time-residential-programs/degree-programs/international-studies/

The International Studies major is an interdisciplinary program drawn from the departments of political science, history, economics, languages, sociology, and anthropology. There are three programs in International Studies: a regular undergraduate major leading to the B.A. degree in four years, and two programs leading to a B.A. and M.A. degree. One of these B.A./M.A. programs is in partnership with the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. and the other is with political science institute Sciences Po in Paris. The three programs, and all other aspects of the International Studies Program, are described on the International Studies website .

Medicine, Science, and the Humanities

School of Arts and Sciences

http://e-catalogue.jhu.g.sjuku.top/arts-sciences/full-time-residential-programs/degree-programs/medicine-science-humanities/

Undergraduate

EN.601 (Computer Science)

http://e-catalogue.jhu.g.sjuku.top/course-descriptions/computer_science_601/

...485 .; AS.110.106 OR AS.110.108...EN.601.220 Distribution Area: Engineering AS Foundational...

Computer Science

School of Engineering

http://e-catalogue.jhu.g.sjuku.top/engineering/full-time-residential-programs/degree-programs/computer-science/

...OR AS.171.104 OR AS.171.108...601.220 Distribution Area: Engineering, Natural Sciences AS...

Engineering Mechanics, Bachelor of Science

School of Engineering

http://e-catalogue.jhu.g.sjuku.top/engineering/full-time-residential-programs/degree-programs/mechanical-engineering/engineering-mechanics-bachelor-science/

...Laboratory II , or AS.171.108 General Physics...may be EN.601.220 Intermediate Programming or...

Mechanical Engineering, Bachelor of Science

School of Engineering

http://e-catalogue.jhu.g.sjuku.top/engineering/full-time-residential-programs/degree-programs/mechanical-engineering/mechanical-engineering-bachelor-science/

...Laboratory II , or AS.171.108 General Physics...may be EN.601.220 Intermediate Programming or...

Writing Seminars, Minor

School of Arts and Sciences

http://e-catalogue.jhu.g.sjuku.top/arts-sciences/full-time-residential-programs/degree-programs/writing-seminars/writing-seminars-minor/

...must take AS.220.105 Introduction to Fiction & Poetry I or AS.220.108 Introduction...