NST2020 Case Studies in Ecosystems Management
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts CreditsSuccessful businesses must fully appreciate and understand sustainable management strategies for our vital natural resources. Here we will focus on understanding the ecological principles of natural resource management while exploring new strategies for environmental conservation.

Prerequisites: NST10%

This course is not equivalent to HSS2080. Please disregard the note indicating equivalency. The system is not able to correct this at this time.

CHN2200 Chinese I
4 General CreditsAn introduction to practical and functional knowledge of modern Mandarin Chinese. Emphasis on developing proficiency in fundamental language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing, using basic expressions and sentence patterns. Computer programs for pronunciation, listening comprehension, grammar and writing Chinese characters will be used extensively.

Prerequisites: None

CHN4610 Chinese II
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsA continuation of the fall semester, an introduction to practical and functional knowledge of modern Mandarin Chinese. Emphasis on developing proficiency in fundamental language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing, using basic expressions and sentence patterns. Computer programs for pronunciation, listening comprehension, grammar and writing Chinese characters will be used extensively.

Prerequisites: CHN1210 or CHN2200

NST1070 Climate and Human Health
4 CreditsThis course investigates the interaction between the spheres of natural science and human health. Human activities impact the global climate and the resultant climate change impacts human health, both directly and indirectly. This course focuses on the background of various global health issues and their links to climate using the scientific method and multiple data-driven activities to evaluate research questions. We will also evaluate the integrity of scientific data, assessing reliable sources of information with respect to transparency and scientific bias.

Specific topics covered in this course include the connections between global changes such as sea level and temperature rise with human impacts including increasing climate migration, spread of infectious disease, and threats to food security. We will also investigate connections between industrialized agricultural, fossil fuel use, and the deterioration of water and air quality. Finally, we address the prominent role of environmental racism in the human health and climate connection. In taking this course, students will gain a broader understanding about the long-term effects of their actions, both on themselves as individuals and on other global citizens, and recognize opportunities for individual and systemic changes that result in a more sustainable world.

Prerequisites: None

FLM4671 Comic Form in Film
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsThis course explores the history and theory of comic form as it applies to movies from the silent film era to the present. Beginning with silent comedies and progressing to more recent films, we will consider such topics as comedy's roots in ancient ritual; recurring comic character types and genre conventions; irony, satire, anarchy, and surrealism as comic principles; and dark comedy. Course readings will introduce students to narrative theories, aesthetic and philosophical questions, and analytical models that address the purposes and strategies of comic form.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

HUM4620 Constructing and Performing the Self
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsIn Constructing and Performing the Self students will examine and attempt to answer the most fundamental of questions: Who am I? A question this significant cannot be adequately answered by any one approach, thus the course brings together two very different approaches to guide the investigation. Psychological studies of identity marshal the tools and methods of science to develop and test theories that describe and explain the self. Theater studies bring interpretative and aesthetic perspectives to represent and reveal identity. In this course, these two approaches will be purposely inter-mingled: the questions asked and the answers derived will be informed equally by psychology and theater. Students will see, on a daily basis, how each field informs, supports, and speaks to the other. While there are some class sessions and assignments explicitly grounded in only one field to build students' fluency, the major activities of the semester will require both.

Given how personally applicable both psychology and theater are, students' own sense of identity will be the central text in this course. Like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, students are both the main character in their own life stories and also the narrator of them. This course aims for true interdisciplinary integration, and students will be called upon to use and apply the theoretical work as they build and create an original solo performance about a key moment in their lives. Our hope is that by semester's end students will have taken a concrete step forward in understanding and articulating their sense of self and feel comfortable and confident in their ability to perform for a live, public audience.

Students are asked to alternate between four roles in this course: scholar, writer, actor, and critic.
- Scholars consume information in analytical ways and produce new knowledge that is deeply grounded in their foundational knowledge.
- Writers produce new works, both analytical and creative, that take a novel position and support it.
- Actors give life to both old and new characters, conveying their shifting objectives over time to impact an audience.
- Critics evaluate texts (in our case, performances) with a constructive, thoughtful, and respectful approach that brings new insights.
Some days students will only adopt one role, other students will be asked to oscillate between the
them.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

HUM4640 Contagious Cultures: Narrative, Film, Society
(Formerly Literature and Film of Contagion)
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

Wherever you live in the world, it is almost certain that your life has been affected if not profoundly transformed over the past two years. The experience of living through such a vast contagion prompted me to think not about illness (I think we're exhausted by that), but about the spreadability and transmission of all sorts of infectious content. In this course, we will look very little at narratives of actual physical contagions. Instead, we will study contagion-as-metaphor for the expansion of a wide range of ideas and movements that propagate, spread, go viral, catch on, etcetera. Through narrative and film, discussion and debate, we will consider such overt topics as humor, laughter, and fear, but also beliefs, environmental contagion, cheating, social media, scapegoating and cancel culture, hair and fashion styles, protest, hope, and happiness, among other possibilities. Why and how do we aspire to some concepts going "viral," while striving to contain others? How is the speed and profusion of transmission of things other than disease both a positive and a negative aspect of our contemporary world?

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT4605 Contemporary World Literature: The Writing of the Unreal
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsStudents who have taken VA2036 are not permitted to take LIT4605This course examines contemporary world literature through the specific prism of _the unreal_. Writers from Latin America, the Caribbean, East Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East will be examined in their rich experiments with surrealism, anti-realism, and hyper-realism. Moreover, this course will explore the enigmatic conceptual territories of the dream, the nightmare, the fantasy, the illusion, the hallucination, the mirage, the vision, and the simulation as breakaway zones of the global literary imagination. To achieve this task, we will evaluate authors as diverse as Franz Kafka, Ghada Samman, Haruki Murakami, Clarice Lispector, Jose Saramago, Naguib Mahfouz, Kobo Abe, Juan Rulfo, Vi Khi Nao, and Reinaldo Arenas, interrogating their different approaches to the creation of phantasmatic, strange, and unknown spaces.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

SCN3689 Crime Science
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsThis course examines the role that the modern natural sciences play in analyzing physical evidence collected at a crime scene. It begins by defining forensic science and understanding why the government has placed special qualifiers on scientific expert witnesses and their testimony. Students will survey the sciences used in a modern crime lab to understand the principles behind the analyses. Historical and current crimes and their trials as well as a mock crime scene will highlight lecture material. Disciplines that will be covered include Toxicology, Controlled Substances, Arson, DNA, Blood Splatter, Friction Ridge, Ballistics, and Crime Scene Processing.

Prerequisites: NST1

CSP 2006: Critical Philosophy of Race

4 advanced liberal arts credit

This course will survey the history of philosophy and race and critical philosophies of race. The first half of the course will begin with a study of the use of Aristotle's Politics as it was taken up by 15th and 16th century theologians in the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the context of the colonization of the Americas. We will then look at early modern philosophy and the shift away from theologically based hierarchies to "scientific" analyses of race as they were developed alongside the Enlightenment political values of individual freedom and republicanism as promised in social contract theory. The first half of the course will end with a case study of the international abolitionist movement. The second half of the course will look specifically at the philosophies of race within the United States as a settler colonial nation. We will look at the social construction of "whiteness" as it coalesced around specific labor and property relations, the prison industrial complex, and contemporary decolonial and abolitionist political philosophy.

Prerequisite: WRT1001 and FCI1000