Critical introduction to philosophical problems, ideas and methods.
This is the first semester of a year-long course designed for students wishing to learn Greek as it is written and spoken in Greece today. As well as learning the skills necessary to read texts of moderate difficulty and converse on a wide range of topics, students explore Modern Greeces cultural landscape from parea to poetry to politics. Special attention will be paid to Greek New York. How do our, American, Greek-American definitions of language and culture differ from their, Greek ones?
Introduction to the basic structures of the Hungarian language. Students with a schedule conflict should consult the instructor about the possibility of adjusting hours.
Covers all of Greek grammar and syntax in one term. Prepares the student to enter second-year Greek (GREK UN2101 or GREK UN2102).
This course examines major developments and debates in the history of cinema between 1930 and 1960, from the consolidation of the classic Hollywood studio system in the early sound era to the articulation of emergent ;new waves; and new critical discourses in the late 1950s. Our approach will be interdisciplinary in scope, albeit with an emphasis on social and cultural history - concerned not only with how movies have developed as a form of art and medium of entertainment, but also with cinemas changing function as a social institution. Discussion section FILM UN 2021 is a required co-requisite.
Prerequisites: GREK UN1101- GREK UN1102 or the equivalent. Selections from Attic prose.
Examines the shaping of European cultural identity through encounters with non-European cultures from 1500 to the post-colonial era. Novels, paintings, and films will be among the sources used to examine such topics as exoticism in the Enlightenment, slavery and European capitalism, Orientalism in art, ethnographic writings on the primitive, and tourism.
Emphasis on foreign policies as they pertain to the Second World War, the atomic bomb, containment, the Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam. Also considers major social and intellectual trends, including the Civil Rights movement, the counterculture, feminism, Watergate, and the recession of the 1970s.
This course will provide a broad overview of the field of social neuroscience. We will consider how social processes are implemented at the neural level, but also how neural mechanisms help give rise to social phenomena and cultural experiences. Many believe that the large expansion of the human brain evolved due to the complex demands of dealing with social others—competing or cooperating with them, deceiving or empathizing with them, understanding or misjudging them. What kind of “social brain” has this evolutionary past left us with? In this course, we will review core principles, theories, and methods guiding social neuroscience, as well as research examining the brain basis of processes such as theory of mind, emotion, stereotyping, social group identity, empathy, judging faces and bodies, morality, decision-making, the impact of culture and development, among others. Overall, this course will introduce students to the field of social neuroscience and its multi-level approach to understanding the brain in its social context.
This course explores the social, cultural, and political history of lesbians, gay men, and other socially constituted sexual and gender minorities, primarily in the twentieth century. Since the production and regulation of queer life has always been intimately linked to the production and policing of “normal” sexuality and gender, we will also pay attention to the shifting boundaries of normative sexuality, especially heterosexuality, as well as other developments in American history that shaped gay life, such as the Second World War, Cold War, urbanization, and the minority rights revolution. Themes include the emergence of homosexuality and heterosexuality as categories of experience and identity; the changing relationship between homosexuality and transgenderism; the development of diverse lesbian and gay subcultures and their representation in popular culture; the sources of antigay hostility; religion and sexual science; generational change and everyday life; AIDS; and gay, antigay, feminist, and queer movements.
This lecture offers a comprehensive view of the Cold War in Latin America and zooms in on those places and moments when it turned hot. It understands the Cold War as a complex and multi-layered conflict, which not only pitted two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—against one another, but also two ideologies—capitalism and socialism—whose appeal cut across societies. In Latin America, the idea of socialist revolution attracted a diverse set of actors (workers, students, intellectuals, politicians, etc.) and posed a significant challenge to both capitalism and United States hegemony. We will probe what the Cold War meant to people across the region, paying particular attention to revolutionary and counterrevolutionary events in Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua, all the while examining the diplomatic and cultural battles for the hearts and minds of Latin Americans.
This course will cover the history of the Middle East from the 18th century until the present, examining the region ranging from Morocco to Iran and including the Ottoman Empire. It will focus on transformations in the states of the region, external intervention, and the emergence of modern nation-states, as well as aspects of social, economic, cultural and intellectual history of the region. Field(s): ME
Several members of the faculty each offer a brief series of talks providing context for a current research topic in the field and then present results of their ongoing research. Opportunities for future student research collaboration are offered. Grading is Pass/Fail.
Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN3001 must also register for one of the sections of ENGL UN3011 Literary Texts, Critical Methods. This course is intended to introduce students to the advanced study of literature. Students will read works from different genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction), drawn from the medieval period to the present day, learning the different interpretative techniques required by each. The course also introduces students to a variety of critical schools and approaches, with the aim both of familiarizing them with these methodologies in the work of other critics and of encouraging them to make use of different methods in their own critical writing. This course (together with the companion seminar ENGL UN3011) is a requirement for the English Major and Concentration. It should be taken as early as possible in a students career. Fulfillment of this requirement will be a factor in admission to seminars and to some lectures.
Prerequisites: LATN UN2102 or the equivalent. Selections from Vergil and Horace. Combines literary analysis with work in grammar and metrics.
This seminar explores the relationship of the nineteenth-century realist novel to urban experience and rural identity. If most novels are, in Raymond Williams’s phrase, “knowable communities,” how do fictions of the city and imaginings of the country represent individual identity as it is shaped by physical, built environments? In this light, we will consider questions of youth and experience, time and space, work and leisure, men and women, landscape and portraiture, privacy and public life, national culture and cosmopolitanism, local custom and globalism. In class, we will juxtapose close readings of novels with analyses of other cultural forms (translations, paintings, operas, popular entertainment, maps) so that we come away with a broader sense of nineteenth-century pan-media culture and its international afterlives as well as a working knowledge of one of its most meaningful manifestations: the novel. French novelists Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, English novelists Charles Dickens and George Eliot, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and the Chinese novelist Lao She (Shu Qingchun, 舒慶春) will provide case studies. Such long novels benefit from nuanced and intensive seminar discussion in which all voices are critical.
This interdisciplinary course situates late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature within the context of historical and cultural change. Students read works by Whitman, Twain, James, Griggs, Wharton, Faulkner, and Hurston alongside political and cultural materials including Supreme Court decisions, geometric treatises, composite photography and taxidermy.
Prerequisites: one philosophy course. A survey of Eurpoean social philosophy from the 18th to the 20th century, with special attention to theories of capitalism and the normative concepts (freedom, alienation, human flourishing) that inform them. Also: the relationship between civil society and the state.
This class offers a survey of major works of French and francophone literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Emphasis will be placed on formal and stylistic elements of the works read and on developing the critical skills necessary for literary analysis. Works will be placed in their historical context.
Prerequisites: one year of calculus-based general physics. The standard hot big bang cosmological model and modern observational results that test it. Topics include the Friedmann equations and the expansion of the universe, dark matter, dark energy, inflation, primordial nucleosynthesis, the cosmic microwave background, the formation of large-scale cosmic structures, and modern cosmological observations.
This course explores the evolution of Italian Cinema from the pre-Fascist era to the millenium, and examines how films construct an image of Italy and the Italians. Special focus will be on the cinematic representations of gender. Films by major directors (Fellini, De Sica, Visconti) as well as by leading contemporaries (Moretti, Garrone, Rohrwacher) will be discussed.
A close reading of works by Dostoevsky (Netochka Nezvanova; The Idiot; A Gentle Creature) and Tolstoy (Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; Family Happiness; Anna Karenina; The Kreutzer Sonata) in conjunction with related English novels (Bronte's Jane Eyre, Eliot's Middlemarch, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway). No knowledge of Russian is required.
This course will offer an account of the multiple migrations out, in and through Italy since 1800. By combining history, literature, and film, and by approaching the topic through the lens of transnationalism, we will study different topics of Italian mobility, such as Exile and the Risorgimento, The Mediterranean in Motion, Migrants’ Experiences at Sea, The Great Italian “Exodus” to the Americas, Mobile Italy and its Colonies, The Lost Italian “Cosmopolitanisms” of the Middle East, Postwar Italian “National Refugees”, and Contemporary Migration to Italy. We will read masterpieces of Italian literature both by Italian-American authors and by contemporary migrants to Italy. We will watch some of the most important films and documentaries on these topics. And we will think about how such phenomena as Italian mass emigration in the long nineteenth century, Fascist colonialism and resettlement of populations in the twentieth century, postwar refugees, and contemporary immigrants to Italy are all intrinsically interconnected and make part of the same story. Overall, the aim of this course is to turn our gaze away from the territorially defined Italy, towards a view of Italy as a space on the move.
What does it mean to enter history through a life? This course will combine the Italian historiographical tradition of microstoria with the global turn in historical studies, in order to explore a series of microhistorical and biographical works. We will look at the biographies of people from the 15th to the 20th centuries who lived their lives on the move between empires and nation states and across continents and seas, and others who never left home but had something interesting to say about how their world went. We will read authors Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis, Linda Colley, Lucy Riall, Karl Jacoby, M’hamed Oualdi, Rebecca Solnit, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Victoria de Grazia, Javier Cercas, Colm Tóibín, and Lea Ypi, and we will learn about the adventures of a 16th-century French miller and his contemporary Muslim geographer Leo Africanus; an 18th-century Jamaican mixed-race woman who became part of world history; Giuseppe Garibaldi, the “Hero of the Two Worlds”; a 19th-century Texas slave who became a Mexican millionaire, and another who was enslaved as an Ottoman but died as an Italian; a late 1800s California pioneering photographer; an Ottoman Sephardic family through the 20th century; an Italian fascist and his jewish wife; a Spanish impostor who passed himself as a victim of Nazism; the contradictory life of Thomas Mann; and a woman who lived in communist and post-communist Albania. Through the micro-perspective of these individuals, the course will trace some of the big themes of the early modern and modern periods. Students will be invited to reflect on the possibilities opened up by ‘global microhistory’, on the prospects and limits of biography, and on how you can combine narrativity with scholarly argumentation. But, above all, we will enjoy the mere pleasure of reading
This course will examine Japanese architecture and urban planning from the mid-19th century to the present. We will address topics such as the establishment of an architectural profession along western lines in the late 19th century, the emergence of a modernist movement in the 1920's, the use of biological metaphors and the romanticization of technology in the theories and designs of the Metabolist Group, and the shifting significance of pre-modern Japanese architectural practices for modern architects. There will be an emphasis on the complex relationship between architectural practice and broader political and social change in Japan.
This course will look at the major works of the poet, polemicist, and revolutionary John Milton in the context of seventeenth-century English intellectual, religious, political, military and colonial events. In addition to reading Milton’s shorter poems, major prose (including
Areopagitica
), and the full text of
Paradise Lost,
we will look at the authors and agents whose activities and writings helped to create the conditions in which he wrote: poets and agitators, natural scientists and utopians, sectarians and prophets, colonists and enslavers, revolutionaries and regicides. The class will pay particular attention to political debates about freedom and tyranny and to the colonial efforts (particularly in Virginia, Ireland and Barbados) that subtended both the English revolution and Milton’s own work.
Mediterranean Humanities I explores the literatures of the Mediterranean from the late Middle Ages to the Early Nineteenth Century. We will read Boccaccio, and Cervantes, as well as Ottoman poetry, Iberian Muslim apocalyptic literature, and the Eurasian connected versions of the One Thousand and One Nights. We will dive into the travel of texts and people, stories and storytellers across the shores of the Middle Sea. Based on the reading of literary texts (love poetry, short stories, theater, and travel literature), as well as letters, biographies, memoirs, and other ego-documents produced and consumed in the Early Modern Mediterranean, we will discuss big themes as Orientalism, estrangement, forced mobility, connectivity, multiculturalism and the clash of civilizations. Also, following in the footsteps of Fernand Braudel and Erich Auerbach, we will reflect on the Mediterranean in the age of the first globalization as a laboratory of the modern global world and world literature.
The course addresses selected issues in the protection of socio-economic rights in an international and comparative perspective. Socio-economic rights have emerged from the margins into the mainstream of human rights. The course will take this status as its starting point and examine the human rights to housing, food, water, health and sanitation in depth. We will explore conceptual issues through the lens of specific rights which will help us ground these principles and ideas in concrete cases. We will discuss developments on socioeconomic rights and examine their relevance in the United States as well as selected other countries, particularly those with progressive legislation, policies and jurisprudence. What is the meaning and scope of the rights to housing, food, water, health and sanitation? What is the impact of discrimination and inequalities on the enjoyment of socio-economic rights? How can governments be held accountable for the realization of human rights? What machinery is there at the international level to ensure that the rights are protected, respected and fulfilled? How can this machinery be enhanced? How can judicial, quasijudicial, administrative and political mechanisms be used at the domestic level? What is the role of different actors in the context of human rights, the role of States and individuals, but also (powerful) non-State actors and civil society? How have activists and policymakers responded to challenges? And what lies ahead for the human rights movement in addressing economic and social rights in a multilateral, globalized world?
This course investigates the boldly experimental world of the early modern English theater. The opening of London’s commercial playhouses in the last quarter of the sixteenth century fundamentally changed the nature of popular entertainment, offering eager spectators an array of secular drama for the first time in English history. We will read a range of playwrights and dramatic genres, asking how these plays both responded to each other and intervened in the issues of class, race, gender, sexuality, and politics that defined English early modernity. We will also spend time discussing the plays in performance, attending to the ways that conditions of early modern staging influence literary meaning. Finally, we will give attention to the performance styles and techniques of those actors who, in inspiring admiration and adoration as they realized these plays onstage, became London’s very first celebrities.
(Lecture). Beginning with an overview of late medieval literary culture in England, this course will cover the entire Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. We will explore the narrative and organizational logics that underpin the project overall, while also treating each individual tale as a coherent literary offering, positioned deliberately and recognizably on the map of late medieval cultural convention. We will consider the conditions—both historical and aesthetic—that informed Chaucer’s motley composition, and will compare his work with other large-scale fictive works of the period. Our ultimate project will be the assessment of the Tales at once as a self-consciously “medieval” production, keen to explore and exploit the boundaries of literary convention, and as a ground-breaking literary event, which set the stage for renaissance literature.
The bildungsroman is the modern, realist version of the hero’s quest. Instead of slaying dragons and weaving spells, the protagonist of the bildungsroman struggles with what it means to become an adult – or to refuse to. Also known as the novel of development or coming-of-age novel, the bildungsroman typically focuses on growth and development, the cultivation of the self, and the tensions between individual and society, idealism and realism, dreamy inertia and future-oriented action.
The reading list spans coming-of-age novels from Germany, France, England, and the United States, from the 1790s through the 2010s. Lectures will focus on the novel as a literary form in dialogue with other literary works; with historical events; and with ideas drawn from philosophy, psychology, and sociology.
The course will address questions that include: what is society, what is a self, and what is the shape of a human life? What fosters human development and what thwarts it? How do coming-of-age novels engage with social norms concerning love, work, personhood, and maturity? The earliest novels of development focused on the dilemmas faced by white, middle-class men; how have subsequent works represented the challenges that non-dominant subjects encounter?
This is a 3-point lecture course. In accordance with university guidelines, you should expect to spend about six hours per week outside of class doing the course reading, which will consist entirely of novels and vary from ~150 to ~300 pages per week.
Prerequisites: at least four semesters of Latin, or the equivalent. Intensive review of Latin syntax with translation of English sentences and paragraphs into Latin.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is an increasingly salient practice in the charitable sector. Done well, DEI practice – such as more diverse recruitment policies, more inclusive organizational culture, and greater attention to the equitable distribution of programmatic outcomes – helps nonprofit and foundation managers and leaders attract and retain talent, improve programmatic outcomes, and lend greater credibility to the work of the charitable sector.
The need for such practice is evident: most nonprofits and foundations are not representative of the communities they serve; the accumulation of wealth that enables large private foundations to exist exacerbates the very issues they may seek to combat; and in seeking to help those affected by inequality, nonprofits and foundations may reproduce the same patterns of inequality within their own organizations.
Despite the growing need for effective DEI practice, much of the knowledge of it is diffuse and disconnected. At times, practitioners can’t even agree on the basic terms. Yet in this disagreement lies a clue: pursued deeply, a DEI analysis leads one to conclude that mainstream institutions, and the broader society of which they are a part, are ultimately designed to make DEI difficult to understand, much less enact. This means that DEI practice eventually names and pushes back on the very power relations and institutional dynamics that surround us in the charitable sector and make our work possible. To reckon fully with DEI means to question the very assumptions and relationships on which our sector is based.
This course aims to equip students with critical faculties and practical tools to be informed and ethical practitioners of DEI in the charitable sector while remaining alive to the tensions between DEI and current sector practice.
This course is for leaders who want to challenge and transform existing ways of working for a greater positive impact on society. You will build the technical skills needed to bring Human-Centered Design (HCD) and innovation to projects and programs through a combination of lectures and assignments. At a higher level, you will also better understand what is needed to launch and manage innovation strategies and projects at NGOs and INGOs. This course builds a foundational understanding of innovation strategies, tools, and ecosystem in the social impact sector. Together, we will also heavily critique the status quo – including power dynamics, innovation methods and consider the importance of ethics, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) – all with the motivation to build an improved practice of innovation. The course will bring together perspectives and guest speakers from across the globe who are diverse ecosystem actors, including innovators and implementers, funders, consultants, and
conveners.
This course has three phases. Phase 1 will provide a foundational understanding of innovation strategy, methodology, and tools, including human-centered design, user personas, journey mapping, etc. In Phase 2, you will be able to better contextualize innovation in the social impact sector, particularly from the perspective of NGOs, INGOs, and U.N. agencies. We will also dive into how DEIA, power, and creative capacities intersect with designing for social impact and learn practical skills for structuring an innovation project. Finally, in Phase 3, the instructor will share perspectives and lessons from practicing innovation for over a decade and help you identify areas of opportunity and entry points for your careers.
As future leaders and innovators in the social impact sector, you will be encouraged to think beyond how thingscurrently operate and expected to explore where and how the innovation sector itself needs to evolve. You will
complete this course with more clarity on your journey in innovation with coaching from the instructor and engaging
conversations with guest speakers.
This course is about leading boundary-spanning coalitions. An old African proverb tells us that, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." While this advice is especially relevant in our interconnected 21st-century world, we have learned that working together is not always easy to do well.
“Collaboration at Scale: Leading Boundary-Spanning Coalitions” takes the study of collaboration into an even wider realm by examining the potential and complexity of large-scale, cross-organizational collaboration, and how to lead it.
The concept of scalability is common in the business world and this course demonstrates what it takes to make collaboration scalable and suitable for a variety of challenging contexts larger than a single organization. Inherent in the concept of scalability are the notions of "appropriate scale" and also "at scale." Both of these notions raise valid questions that we will address in this course. (Though our interpretations of scale have evolved with the advent of social media, specific technology selection is not the focus of the course.)
Students will learn the characteristics, conditions and dynamics of various large-scale collaborations, as well as how to design and lead them effectively. Course materials will be drawn from the for-profit and nonprofit worlds. Using a balance of practice and theory of networks and large system facilitation, students will demonstrate their mastery of course materials through an assignment in which they diagnose and (re)design a “collaboration at scale.” This could be in the business, scientific, religious, political, or humanitarian domains.
Data and analytics have always been central to understanding diseases, delivering healthcare and improving patient outcomes. As far back as the 1800’s, Florence Nightingale used data and analytics to reduce the number of deaths of British soldiers in the Crimean War by two-thirds, and John Snow used data and analytics to contain the outbreak of cholera in London. Both used data visualization to communicate their findings and drive change. Today, we have a much deeper understanding of diseases and many more treatment options available. However, the adoption of advanced analytics in healthcare has not kept pace with adoption in other industry sectors, such as financial services and retail. One thing that has not changed since the days of Florence Nightingale and John Snow is the importance of clearly communicating data-driven insights for maximum impact. These lessons are evident in our current challenges with COVID, especially relating to testing, vaccination and individual behaviors. The barriers in the contemporary healthcare environment are high because the outcomes are critical, there are multiple stakeholders, and the system is siloed with discrete, and sometimes competing, needs and expectations. Healthcare is inherently human-centered. Therapeutic interventions cannot improve lives unless healthcare providers and patients adopt them. As with all applications of analytics, providing insights that are understandable and actionable is critical.
In Healthcare Analytics, students will gain a strategic understanding of the healthcare industry, knowledge of how different stakeholder groups use data and analytics to inform scientific, clinical and operational decisions, and how state of the art analytics are transforming every aspect of healthcare from how drugs are discovered and developed to how population and individual health outcomes are optimized. Students will learn how to communicate healthcare data and analyses to drive the adoption of insights by healthcare providers and patients.
Healthcare Analytics is an elective that is intended for students who are interested in learning about healthcare and analytics and students who are interested in pursuing a career using analytics in the healthcare industry sector or in healthcare consulting. This full semester course will be offered online, and is open to APAN students who have successfully completed Applied Analytics in an Organizational Context (APAN PS5100), Storytelling with Data (APAN PS5800), Strategy and Analytics (APAN
OVERVIEW: Artificial Intelligence is one of the most important technological developments in decades and has already begun to demonstrate significant improvements in healthcare, military, finance, retail, and the arts. In this class we will cover an intro to artificial intelligence with a specific lens on how knowledge driven organizations can benefit from AI. This course is not a coding or a computer science course, but does touch on high level concepts in statistics, data science, and software engineering, though no experience is necessary in these fields.
CONTENT & OBJECTIVES: You will learn how AI works, what are the best and worst use cases for AI, and the implications of implementing AI. As exciting as this space can be, there are real risks, ethical considerations, and new challenges that we will cover and discuss. By the end of the course, you will have a clear understanding of the possibilities with AI, how to implement AI in a knowledge driven organization, and the global nature of this technology. You will build on previous coursework of knowledge strategy and learn how AI accelerates knowledge management including search ranking, content recommendations, and people analytics.
LOGISTICS
:
Class meets once a week.
Since the first Earth Day in 1970, artists have increasingly addressed ecological issues in their work. This trend has magnified greatly in the past two decades. Around the globe, artists are creating artwork that addresses the impact of loss of biodiversity, rising sea levels, extreme weather events, plastic pollution, and the fragility of our shared ecosystems. Their art raises awareness of the need to act collectively, suggesting frameworks for replacing anthropocentric and colonial approaches to nature, and amplifying the urgent need for environmental justice. In this pivotal moment of climate change, artists inspire by cultivating new narratives and giving form to the invisible or unimaginable, demonstrating how art can help awaken resolve and shape our next steps. They invite viewer participation and action, and suggest ways to make a difference. In the process, they expand our potential for empathy and agency.
The cultural sector has an important role to play in shifting attitudes that would lead to developing more sustainable and equitable global futures. Artists focus on both local and global environmental issues, expanding the field of climate change communication and at times offering out-of-the-box solutions. The artists covered in the course are cognizant of the need for systemic social change in order to achieve policy change. Blurring the boundaries between art and activism, many are working collaboratively across disciplines and with various communities to address both the physical and ethical dimensions of sustainability. Others work independently to provide new visions for the future. The course is designed for people who are interested in the contribution that art can play in creating fresh paradigms.
Averting the deepest climate crisis and mitigating the substantial financial costs of global warming and its consequences will require the decarbonization of the world’s energy systems by 2050, necessitating trillions of dollars of public and private investment. Pathways and policies are not clear or are inconsistent on the respective roles of public and private investment, and often overlook the myriad structural legal and institutional barriers to scaling both. The absence of coherent policy frameworks has also led to a proliferation of voluntary private-sector initiatives, including the explosion of “ESG investing.” Many of the challenges of sustainable investment are approached in silos - focusing specifically on public finance or on private capital, or on certain sectors, technologies, or impacts.
This course is decidedly interdisciplinary. We will explore the myriad interrelated challenges to investing in the energy transition, to see why the ‘big picture’ is important for really understanding policies or practices at a granular level. Students will leave the class with a critical understanding of the complexities of investing in the energy transition and how to understand and navigate various
tensions and trade-offs.