Filtered HSS Courses (2024-25)

Topics to be determined by instructor. Not offered 2024-25.

Introduction to the computations made by the brain during economic and social decision making and their neural substrates. Part a: Introduction to social and decision neuroscience. Neural substrates of reward and reinforcement learning. Unconscious and conscious processing. The neural basis of emotion. Goal-directed and habit learning. The neural substrates of facial processing. Not offered 2024-25.

Offered in any two consecutive terms, by arrangement with HPS faculty. Under the guidance of an HPS faculty member, students will research and write a focused research paper of 15,000 words (approximately 50 pages). Work in the first term will comprise intensive reading in the relevant literature and/or archival or other primary source research. In the second term, students will draft and revise their paper. Open to seniors in the HPS option and to others by special permission of an HPS faculty member. Not offered 2024-25.

From teapots to pastries, photographs to palanquins, objects and images mediated encounters between people and helped define the "Orient" and the "Occident". This class looks at the visual and material culture produced by and consumed during encounters between European and Asian travelers, diplomats, artists, writers, and tourists since the eighteenth century. Not offered 2024-25.

This course offers a tour of major (as well as some minor) genres and works written in Britain prior to 1500. Far from a literary "dark age," the Middle Ages fostered dramatic experiments in narrative form, bequeathing to modern literature some of its best-loved genres and texts. We will practice reading in Middle English-the language of Chaucer and his contemporaries-while we concentrate on the following questions: how did these texts circulate among readers? How do they establish their authority? What kinds of historical and cultural currents to they engage? Texts may include the lives of saints, the confessions of sinners, drama, lyrics, romances, selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Malory's Morte Darthur. Readings will be in Middle and modern English. Not offered 2024-25.

A critical survey of major directors, genres, and movements in French cinema. Particular attention is devoted to the development of film theory and criticism in France and their relation to film production. The course may also focus on problems of transposition from literature to cinema. The class includes screenings of films by Méliès, Dulac, Clair, Renoir, Carné, Pagnol, Cocteau, Bresson, Tati, Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Lelouch, Malle, Pialat, Rohmer, and Varda. Students are expected to write three 5-page critical papers. Conducted in French. Not offered 2024-25.

Hum 105 and Hum 116 are taught in alternate years. Topics may include the 20th-century major French novels; French modern theatre; conflicting memories of the second world war; coming of age novels; the French Muslim identity. Conducted in French. Students who write papers in French may enroll in this class as L 105. Not offered 2024-25.

Offered concurrently with Hum 105. L 105 and L 116 are taught in alternate years. Topics may include the 20th-century major French novels; French modern theatre; conflicting memories of the second world war; coming of age novels; the French Muslim identity. Conducted in French. Students who write papers in English may enroll in this class as Hum 105, which satisfies the advanced humanities requirement. Not offered 2024-25.

This course explores how contemporary poets grapple with the most urgent questions of our moment: identity, equality, environmental crisis, and justice. In this class, students will gain confidence in reading, discussing, and writing about contemporary poems and will encounter recent and more distant traditions of protest poetry. We will ask how poetic language articulates questions of embodiment, community, law, and memory. The syllabus will focus in particular on writers of color, including queer and indigenous poets, and will include opportunities to attend local poetry readings. Not offered 2024-25.

The main objective of the course is to develop insight into the process by which firms can create value for their shareholders. We will study major corporate decisions from the perspective of the firm with an emphasis on the interaction of the firm with financial markets: quantitative project evaluation for investment, choice between borrowing and issuing stock, dividend policy, organizational form (for example, mergers and acquisitions). Theory, empirical evidence, and case analysis all play significant roles in the course. Topics include discounted cash flow models, risk and return, capital asset pricing model, capital market efficiency, capital structure and the cost of capital and dividend policy. Not offered 2024-25.

The medieval term romanz designated both a language, French, and a genre, romance, dedicated to the adventures of knights and ladies and the villains, monsters, magic, and miles that stood in their way. This course explores key examples from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, while also examining evolutions in the form. We will consider how romances figured love and desire as well as negotiated questions of law, territory, and cultural difference. Authors and texts may include Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, Gawain and the Green Knight, Arthurian legends, outlaw tales, and hagiography. Not offered 2024-25.

This course is designed to introduce students to the formative period of Western medieval history, from roughly 300 to 1000 CE. It will emphasize the development of a new civilization from the fusion of Roman, Germanic, and Christian traditions, with a focus on the Frankish world. The course focuses on the reading, analysis, and discussion of primary sources. Not offered 2024-25.

In this course we will go over recent works on topics broadly contained in the newly emerging field of Fintech. In particular, the topics include mathematical modeling of strategic actions of agents interacting via a blockchain technology, via crowdfunding platforms, and via online investment platforms ("robo-advisors"). Not offered 2024-25.

This course is designed to introduce students to European history between 1000 and 1400. It will provide a topical as well as chronological examination of the economic, social, political, and religious evolution of western Europe during this period, with a focus on France, Italy, England, and Germany. The course emphasizes the reading, analysis, and discussion of primary sources. Not offered 2024-25.

This course will study topics in behavioral economics demonstrating departures from the classic economics assumptions of rationality and pure self-interest. We will study evidence of these departures, models that have been designed to capture these preferences, and applications of these models to important economic questions. Topics will include biases and heuristics, risk preferences, self-control, strategic uncertainty, and social preferences, among others. The course will be based in readings from both classic and modern research. Methodologically, the course will combine both theoretical and empirical evidence of the mentioned above topics. Not offered 2024-25.

Madness threatens to dissolve boundaries of the most various kinds: between the human and the inhumane, reality and fantasy, sickness and health. One of the tasks of a literary text is to subdue and contain madness through the construction of rational frameworks. How does a literary text accomplish this? Which strategies, such as the use of irony and humor, are the most effective? What role do insane characters play in literary texts? And when - if ever - should we consider an excess of reason as a kind of madness in its own right? Selected readings from Shakespeare, Voltaire, Goethe, Hoffmann, Büchner, Gogol, and Schnitzler, among others. Not offered 2024-25.

An introduction to the theory and practice of venture capital financing of start-ups. This course covers the underlying economic principles and theoretical models relevant to the venture investment process, as well as the standard practices used by industry and detailed examples. Topics include: The history of VC; VC stages of financing; financial returns to private equity; LBOs and MBOs; people versus ideas; biotech; IPOs; and CEO transitions. Not offered 2024-25.

The role of the government is multifold, from providing public goods to intervening in market failures. Additionally, some policies are motivated by paternalistic concerns of citizens not acting in their own best interest. Through a mix of theory, experiments, and empirical analysis, we will cover methods of assessing individual and societal welfare, the identification and measurement of consumer biases, and theories of when and how the government should intervene in the economy. We will cover topics such as taxation, education, savings, and insurance, and the policies and nudges designed to implement these goals. Not offered 2024-25.

This class explores the history of sexuality and gender across the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Exploring both literary texts and visual representation, it considers how previous eras and cultures understood embodiment, sexuality, and gender and asks how we, as modern readers and viewers, approach these questions across the distance of centuries. We will read across a wide range of literature, including theology, philosophy, fiction, romance, and spiritual biography, and examine manuscript illustrations and other early visual media. Questions we will take up include the following: how did writers and artists construct the "naturalness" or "unnaturalness" of particular bodies and bodily acts? How did individuals understand the relationship between their own bodies and those of others? In what ways did writing and art authorize, scrutinize, or otherwise parse the boundaries of the licit and illicit? Finally, how have modern critics framed these questions? How do we approach and make use of earlier theories of sex and gender?

This course takes students through the history of the medieval Christian Church in Europe, from its roots in Roman Palestine, through the zenith of its power in the high Middle Ages, to its decline on the eve of the Reformation. The course focuses on the church less as a religion (although it will by necessity deal with some basic theology) than as an institution that came to have an enormous political, social, cultural, and economic impact on medieval life, and for a brief time made Rome once more the mistress of Europe.

L/VC 109 and L/VC 111 are taught in alternate years. This course looks at popular genres (comedy, thriller, animation film) and auteur cinema. It focuses on major trends in contemporary French movies and their relationships to French society (exploration of class, ethnic, gender and sexual identity, etc.). It analyzes the reappropriation of the national heritage, the progressive feminization of the filmmaking profession and the new appearance of directors who are immigrants or children of immigrants. Throughout this class, students will further develop their understanding of the methods and concepts of cinema studies. Conducted in English. Not offered 2024-25.

The course offers an introduction to international financial markets, their comparative behavior, and their inter-relations. The principal focus will be on assets traded in liquid markets: currencies, equities, bonds, swaps, and other derivatives. Attention will be devoted to (1) institutional arrangements, taxation, and regulation, (2) international arbitrage and parity conditions, (3) valuation, (4) international diversification and portfolio management, (5) derivative instruments, (6) hedging, (7) dynamic investment strategies, (8) other topics of particular current relevance and importance. Not offered 2024-25.

In the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman claimed that "the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." We might ask any number of questions in response to Whitman. If the United States are a poem, then who wrote it? What is this poem about? What genre is it? Is anyone reading it? Is it actually any good? Though we might approach Whitman's statement with some apprehension from our historical moment, this course will take seriously American life lived within poetry and the lives poems lived across the country. Together, we will track the development of American poetry as it engages with enslavement, abolition, genocide, war, beauty, nature, racialization, constructions of gender, sexuality, and affect. Ultimately, we will ask what reading nineteenth-century American poetry, or nineteenth-century America as a poem, might mean for our understanding of the country today. Readings may include Bryant, Poe, Longfellow, Schoolcraft (Bamewawagezhikaquay), Whitman, Dickinson, Harper, Dunbar, and Noguchi. Not offered 2024-25.

This course will take on the Scandinavian seafaring warriors of the 8th-11th centuries as a historical problem. What were the Vikings, where did they come from, and how they did they differ from the Scandinavian and north German pirates and raiders who preceded them? Were they really the horned-helmeted, bloodthirsty barbarians depicted by modern popular media and by many medieval chronicles? What effect did they have in their roughly two centuries of raiding and colonization on the civilizations of medieval and ultimately modern Europe? Not offered 2024-25.

The first of a two-course sequence on Shakespeare's career as a dramatist and poet. We will read plays from the first half of Shakespeare's career, his comedies and histories. Particular attention will be paid to Shakespeare's use of his sources and to the textual history of the plays. En 113 and En 114 may be taken independently and, usually, are given in alternate years. Not offered 2024-25.

The second of a two-course sequence on Shakespeare's career as a dramatist and poet. We will read works from the second half of Shakespeare's career, his tragedies, tragicomedies, and Sonnets. Particular attention will be paid to Shakespeare's use of his sources and to the textual history of the plays. En 113 and En 114 may be taken independently and, usually, are given in alternate years. Not offered 2024-25.

Offered concurrently with L 114abc. This course explores the mixed cultures of the Spanish speaking countries and the United States, through a compilation of novel excerpts, short stories, drama, music, poetry, and film. This heterogeneity of written and audiovisual texts aims to acquaint students with the rich cultures of the Spanish speaking peoples, from the standpoint of ethnicity, gender, and social class. The course also focuses on continuing to develop Spanish language skills. Conducted in Spanish. (a) The traditional role of women during dictatorships and their journey to freedom (b) Family relationships and their impact on mental and physical health (c) building gender, social, and economic equality. Each term can be taken independently. Students who write papers in Spanish may enroll in this class as L 114. Not offered 2024-25.

Offered concurrently with Hum 114abc. This course explores the mixed cultures of the Spanish speaking countries and the United States, through a compilation of novel excerpts, short stories, drama, music, poetry, and film. This heterogeneity of written and audiovisual texts aims to acquaint students with the rich cultures of the Spanish speaking peoples, from the standpoint of ethnicity, gender, and social class. The course also focuses on continuing to develop Spanish language skills. Conducted in Spanish. (a) The traditional role of women during dictatorships and their journey to freedom (b) Family relationships and their impact on mental and physical health (c) building gender, social, and economic equality. Each term can be taken independently. Students who write papers in English may enroll in this class as humanities, which satisfies the advanced humanities requirement. Not offered 2024-25.

Epic remains the most ancient and most modern of literary genres. Women in ancient epic begin as prizes of honor for male warriors and become powerful witches and queens, while some contemporary women writers allow their ancient heroines to speak in their own voices. From Homer to the present, epic narratives also traverse continents as they narrate the founding and foundering of empires historical and imaginary. This course introduces students to key classical epics while exploring historical and contemporary adaptations from Dante's Divine Comedy to Madeline Miller's Circe . By examining the afterlives of epic, we will consider how the genre changes when taken up by the gender typically marginalized in the classical tradition. Possible authors include Homer, Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Christa Wolf, Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeline Miller, and María Baranda. Not offered 2024-25.

The study of how people think about other people and behave toward or around others. Topics include social cognition and emotions (theory of mind and empathy), their development from childhood to old age, impairments in social functions, altruism and cooperation, social groups (ingroup and outgroup), attribution and stereotypes. The class also presents evidence on how these social phenomena are implemented in the human brain and introduces behavioral and neuroscientific methods used in social psychology and social neuroscience. Not offered 2024-25.

Much of modern financial economics works with models in which agents are fully rational, in that they maximize expected utility and use Bayes' law to update their beliefs. Behavioral finance is a large and active field that develops and studies models in which some agents are less than fully rational. Such models have two building blocks: limits to arbitrage, which makes it difficult for rational traders to undo the dislocations caused by less rational traders; and psychology, which provides guidance for the kinds of deviations from full rationality we might expect to see. We discuss these two topics and consider a number of applications: asset pricing; individual trading behavior; the origin of bubbles; and financial crises. Not offered 2024-25.

The use of large data sets and innovative statistical methods has revolutionized professional and intercollegiate sports. This course introduces students to the academic and professional world of contemporary sports science. The course will meet biweekly with instructor lectures on sports science and with guest speakers from collegiate and professional sports. Students will be introduced to the primary data sources for sports science, to methods used to collect sports performance and outcomes data, and to the statistical tools used for sports analytics (for example, logistic regression, regression trees and random forest, network models, time series, and natural language processing). Students will be responsible for weekly writing or homework assignments based on readings and speaker presentations, as well as a quarter-long sports analytics research project. Students should have some background in econometrics, statistics and probability, data science, or machine learning.

The question of what a woman wants animates a central strain of the modern American novel, as do evolving ideas about what women can and cannot have. This course considers female desire-for personal agency and freedom, self- and sexual fulfillment, economic and social opportunity-across a half dozen novels written from about 1880 - 1940, in light of some of the cultural forces that shape and constrain characters' (and real women's) horizons. Authors covered may include Henry James, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Anzia Yezierska, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston.

An introduction to fundamental philosophical problems concerning the nature of science. Topics may include the character of scientific explanation, criteria for the conformation and falsification of scientific theories, the relationship between theory and observation, philosophical accounts of the concept of "law of nature," causation, chance, realism about unobservable entities, the objectivity of science, and issues having to do with the ways in which scientific knowledge changes over time.

A consideration of existing literature on the voting behavior of the citizen, and an examination of theoretical and empirical views of the strategies followed by the parties. Two substantial papers are expected of students. Not offered 2024-25.

This course will provide the student with a unique insight into the skills used by successful scientists in the social sciences, with the focus being on psychology and cognitive neuroscience (although this is interesting for any type of science career). The course promotes active (hands on) learning, to enhance skills such as creative idea formation, theory, science communication including presentation and writing skills for the public. The class will also provide discussion on practices and expert opinions on what departments looks for when recruiting students and hiring faculty. Enrollment limited to 14 students. Not offered 2024-25.

This course examines historical and contemporary representations of the natural world in art and science through a social lens. We will draw upon theory and practices from art, science, geography and landscape studies to critically analyze how artists, explorers, speculators, scientists, military strategists, and local inhabitants use environmental imagery for diverse purposes with sometimes conflicting interests. The course includes projects, lectures, readings, discussions and a 2-day field trip. Students will learn to think critically while developing creative, culturally complex approaches to observing, recording and representing the natural world. Students hoping to combine their course work with a research paper may sign up for a separate independent study and conduct research concurrently, with instructor approval. Not offered 2024-25.

Before modern media, novels had to stand in for every type of sequential entertainment: television, movies, and even hyperlinked web pages. The stories we read in this class, dating from ancient Greece to the 1600s, are long, florid, fantastic, and crammed with characters. What do these books reveal about the values and interests of people in the past? Readings may include Heliodorus, Lodovico Ariosto, and John Bunyan. Not offered 2024-25.

Introduction to the US Congress with an emphasis on thinking analytically and empirically about the determinants of Congressional behavior. Among the factors examined are the characteristics and incentives of legislators, rules governing the legislative process and internal organization, separation of powers, political parties, Congressional elections, and interest group influence. Not offered 2024-25.

Philosophical and conceptual issues arising from the study of probability theory and how it relates to rationality and belief. Topics discussed may include the foundations and interpretations of probability, arguments for and against the view that we ought to have personal degrees of belief, rational change in beliefs over time, and the relationship between probability and traditional epistemological topics like evidence, justification, and knowledge.

Why does the U.S. Constitution feature separation of powers and protect states' rights? Should the Senate have a filibuster? When can Congress agree on the best policy for the country (and what does "best" even mean)? This course uses a rigorous set of tools including game theory and social choice to help students understand the effectiveness of American democracy to represent diverse interests. Using the tools, we study U.S. electoral systems, Congress, federalism, and the courts, with a focus on understanding how the country has tried to overcome the challenges of group decision making and the inevitable conflicts that arise between the branches of government and divided political interests. Students will leave the course with a deeper understanding of how rules and strategy shape U.S. democracy. Not offered 2024-25.

This course uses econometric tools to analyze choices made by people among a finite set of alternatives. Discrete choice models have been used to understand consumer behavior in many domains - shopping between brands (Toyota vs. BMW), where to go to college (Caltech or MIT), choosing between modes of transportation (car, metro, Uber, or bicycle), etc. Models studied include logit, nested logit, probit, and mixed logit, etc. Simulation techniques that allow estimation of otherwise intractable models will also be discussed. Not offered 2024-25.

A survey of the 19th-century novel from Austen through Conrad, with special emphasis upon the Victorians. Major authors may include Austen, Shelley, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Gaskell, Brontë, Collins, Trollope, Stoker, Hardy.

In the historical record, much attention is given to wealthy elites (rulers and lawmakers, aristocrats, wealthy merchants), since they were the ones who left written records of their political and economic activities and their personal affairs. But what about the vast majority of people who lived in the past, most of whom were barely literate and had little opportunity to 'make history'? What can we know about them? This class focuses on the lives of ordinary people, and the sources historians use to learn about them. Special attention will be given to women, the poor, and other marginalized groups in societies ranging from England in the west to Russia in the east. Not offered 2024-25.

A survey of the 20th-century British and Irish novel, from the modernist novel to the postcolonial novel. Major authors may include Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Forster, Lawrence, Orwell, Amis, Lessing, Rushdie. Not offered 2024-25.

Current events have us looking to the past for explanations. How does Russian history help us to understand what is happening in Russia today? Contemporary political commentary emphasizes the recent past: the history of the Soviet Union and its collapse in 1991. This course takes a longer look at Russian political, economic, social, and cultural history - from imperial Russia to the present day. The emphasis is on longer continuities over eras: tsarist, Soviet, post-Soviet. Topics covered include the nature and role of the state, internal politics, rule of law and property rights, serfdom, inequality, art and social commentary, popular resistance, censorship, and the effects of all of these on the lives of ordinary Russians. Not offered 2024-25.

This course will review existing data in several areas of controlled economic decision-making with a focus on individual and group differences. Theoretical and empirical approaches for understanding and decomposing heterogeneity into preference and stochastic components will be presented. Students will gain exposure to prominent experimental techniques, estimation of models of heterogeneity and heterogeneous treatment effects, and out-of-sample prediction exercises. Not offered 2024-25.

A selective survey of English writing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Major authors may include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Austen. Particular attention will be paid to intellectual and historical contexts and to new understandings of the role of literature in society. Not offered 2024-25.

Why was the Russian Revolution of 1917 successful? And how did the Soviet system survive nearly 75 years? These questions will be addressed in the wider context of Russian history, with a focus on political, economic, and social institutions in the pre- and post-revolutionary period. Subjects covered include the ideological underpinnings of Bolshevism, Lenin and the Bolshevik coup, the rise of Stalin, collectivization, socialist realism, the command economy, World War II, the Krushchev 'thaw', dissident culture and the arts, popular culture, and Gorbachev's perestroika. A variety of sources will be used, including secondary historical literature, fiction, film, and art. Not offered 2024-25.

Same as Psy 25, but for graduate credit. Not available for credit toward humanities-social science requirement. Not offered 2024-25.

The literature of horror, fantasy, and the supernatural, from the late 18th century to the present day. Particular attention will be paid to gothic's shifting cultural imperative, from its origins as a qualified reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, to the contemporary ghost story as an instrument of social and psychological exploration. Issues will include atmosphere and the gothic sense of space; gothic as a popular pathology; and the gendering of gothic narrative. Fiction by Walpole, Shelley, Brontë, Stoker, Poe, Wilde, Angela Carter, and Toni Morrison. Film versions of the gothic may be included. Not offered 2024-25.

Corruption taxes economies and individuals in both the developing and the developed world. We will examine what corruption means in different places and contexts, from grand financial scandals to misappropriation of all manner of public resources. How do we measure corruption? What are its costs and social consequences? What have culture and psychology got to do with it? How much do governance and a free press matter? What are the potential solutions? Students will work closely with the professor to develop an independent and original research project of their choice. Limited enrollment. Not offered 2024-25.

This course will focus on the major novels of Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. Film and television adaptations will also be considered, and students may have the opportunity to read Austen's unfinished works, as well as related eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction and non-fiction. Not offered 2024-25.

The development of Irish fiction, poetry, and drama from the early 20th-century Irish literary renaissance, through the impact of modernism, to the Field Day movement and other contemporary developments. Topics may include the impact of political violence and national division upon the literary imagination; the use of folk and fairy-tale traditions; patterns of emigration and literary exile; the challenge of the English language and the relation of Irish writing to British literary tradition; and recent treatments of Irish literature in regional, postcolonial, and global terms. Works by Joyce, Yeats, Synge, Friel, O'Brien, Heaney, Boland, and others. Not offered 2024-25.

An examination of conceptual issues that arise in mathematics. The sorts of issues addressed may include the following: Are mathematical objects such as numbers in some sense real? How do we obtain knowledge of the mathematical world? Are proofs the only legitimate source of mathematical knowledge? What is the relationship between mathematics and the world? How is it possible to apply abstract theory to the world? Views of major historical figures such as Plato, Hume, Kant, and Mill, as well as of contemporary writers are examined. The course will also examine philosophical issues that arise in particular areas of mathematics such as probability theory and geometry. Not offered 2024-25.

"It is the picture of life contrasted with the fact of life, the ideal contrasted with the real, which makes criticism possible," insists Frederick Douglass. This course will take an historical approach to the relationship between literature and photography by examining what Douglass refers to as the contrast between "picture" and "fact" from the advent of photography in the nineteenth century to our present moment. Together, we will think about how each medium creates images, invites different ways of reading or viewing, and makes forms of individual, collective, and political representation possible. We will also examine the ways in which photography and literature shape our understanding of temporality, truth, memory, and history. In addition to our experience of literary and photographic works, theoretical texts on photography will inform the ways of reading and ways of seeing we will develop in this course. Readings may include Boucicault, Douglass, Dunbar, Hartmann, Barthes, Lorde, and Rankine. Not offered 2024-25.

The artificial satellites encircling the planet make up a global information infrastructure. Most of us living in industrialized regions use satellites daily without even realizing it. How did satellites become so integral to terrestrial technological systems? How did Earth orbit transform from a wilderness into a landscape during the second half of the 20th century, and how is that landscape changing in the 21st? We will trace the history of satellites beginning with the first artificial "moons" and moving into the current moment of private industry ascendance, taking into account the development, use, and decay of these technologies. We will consider how designers and users shape satellites, and map out the ways that objects in orbit reflect and reinforce power and geopolitics on the ground below. Not offered 2024-25.

Employs the theoretical and quantitative techniques of economics to help explore and explain the development of the European cultural area between 1000 and 1980. Topics include the rise of commerce, the demographic transition, the Industrial Revolution, and changes in inequality, international trade, social spending, property rights, and capital markets. Each student is expected to write nine weekly essays and a term paper. Not offered 2024-25.

The course offers an overview of experimental findings and theoretical issues in the study of human memory. Topics include iconic and echoic memory, working memory, spatial memory, implicit learning and memory; forgetting: facts vs. skills, memory for faces; retrieval: recall vs. recognition, context-dependent memory, semantic memory, spreading activation models and connectionist networks, memory and emotion, infantile amnesia, memory development, and amnesia. Not offered 2024-25.

This course examines surveillance, one of the defining features of twenty-first-century life, with wide-ranging implications (from intelligence gathering and biometrics to social media and contemporary art), and a key point of intersection between modern technology and visual culture. Though it applies more broadly, the concept of "surveillance," from the Latin vigilare ("to watch") and the French surveiller ("to watch over"), originated in practices of looking and observation that still define many of its most significant practices today. Building on these etymological roots, we will treat surveillance as, first and foremost, a visual practice and survey the longer history of surveillance (and counter-surveillance) techniques as well as the theories that have emerged to describe its social effects, moral and ethical stakes, and changing legal status. Not offered 2022-23.

This course focuses on Edgar Allan Poe and the considerable influence his works have had on other writers. Authors as diverse as Charles Baudelaire, Jules Verne, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, and Philip Roth have used Poe's stories as departure points for their own work. We shall begin by reading some of Poe's s classic short stories, including "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," "The Purloined Letter," and others. We shall then explore how and why Poe's stories have been so important for authors, despite the fact that his reputation as a great American writer, unlike Hawthorne's and Melville's, for example, is a relatively recent phenomenon.

The Victorian period introduced a huge array of new possibilities and constraints for women of all classes, as it witnessed rapid urbanization and industrialization, a changing conception of marriage and motherhood, and a new set of professional restrictions but also opportunities. This class focuses on novels by and about women, as it seeks to take the measure of these transformations and of a larger culture's reaction to them. How did women imagine and re-imagine themselves and what they wanted? How did notions of femininity and masculinity change? How do the imaginings of the Victorians resonate now? Authors studied may include Eliot, Gaskell, the Brontes, Oliphant, Braddon, and Scheiner.

Humans' conceptions of nature have changed dramatically over time. Ecological systems influence human culture, politics, law, and many other spheres, and in turn, humans influence those systems. This class introduces students to the field of humanistic ecology-a discipline that looks to a number of cultural, political, historical and economic elements to better understand the role of ecology in a larger sphere outside of its scientific structure and uses. Humanistic ecology is designed to provide context for the study of ecology, and in a fundamental way, focuses on the appropriate role of humanity in its relationship to nature: what is ethical, or not, what is useful, or not, and a variety of other matters that should be considered when taking a fully three-dimensional view of ecological science. Not offered 2024-25.

Reinforcement-learning concerns the computational principles by which animals and artificial agents can learn to select actions in their environment in order to maximize their future rewards. Over the past 50 years there has been a rich interplay between the development and application of reinforcement-learning models in artificial intelligence, and the investigation of reinforcement-learning in biological systems, including humans. This course will review this rich literature, covering the psychology of animal-learning, the neurobiology of reward and reinforcement, and the theoretical basis and application of reinforcement-learning models to biological and non-biological systems.

We will spend the term studying the famous and eccentric epic poem 'Paradise Lost' (1674) by the British poet and politician John Milton. Each week we will read about 1,000 to 1,500 lines of difficult but beautiful poetry, looking especially for its visual images, literary and mythological references, and poetic sounds, as well as Milton's copious and paradoxical philosophical stances. You will never forget the central character of Satan, the parliament of devils in Hell, the theological conversations in Heaven between God and Jesus, Eve being tempted by diabolical arguments to eat the forbidden fruit, and Adam and Eve being driven from the Garden of Eden at the point of an avenging angel's sword. Not offered 2024-25

Forests - which cover 31 percent of the world's land surface - have played essential roles in enhancing the planet's biodiversity. Forests have also served humans in numerous and often controversial ways, and have also been subjected to dramatic change through human activity. How well have we served forests, as well as being served by them? The class will cover the growth and use of forests from a humanistic and historic perspective, as well as discussions about the role of fire in forests, with a particular emphasis on the unprecedented forest fires in California in the past several years and the global ecological implications. Not offered 2024-25.

This course will critically examine the impact of recent advances in computational neuroscience for central problems of philosophy of mind. Beginning with a historical overview of computationalism (the thesis that mental states are computational states), the course will examine how psychological explanation may be understood in computational terms across a variety of levels of description, from sub-neuronal and single neuroncomputation to circuit and network levels. Specific issues will include: whether computation provides unifying psychological principles across species; whether specific mental states such as pain are computational states; digital/analog computation, dynamical systems, and mental representation; whether conscious experience can be understood as a computational process. Not offered 2024-25.

Charles Dickens and London have perhaps the most famous relationship of any writer and city in English. In this course, we will investigate both the London Dickens knew, and the portrait of the city that he painted, by reading one of Dickens's great mid-career novels alongside a selection of contemporary texts and images and secondary historical sources. We will think about the gap-or overlap- between history and fiction, the idea of the novelist as alternative historian, and the idea of the novel as historical document. Historical topics covered may include: the development of the Victorian police force; plague and public health; Victorian poverty; colonialism and imperialism; Dickens and his illustrators; Victorian exhibition and museum culture; and marriage and the cult of domesticity, among others. Students will practice both textual and visual analysis skills. In addition to written work, students should expect to be responsible for making a short research presentation at some point in the term. Not offered 2024-25.

This course will critically examine attempts to understand moral judgment and behavior from the perspective of neuroscience and controversies surrounding its implications for moral philosophy. Starting from an evolutionary perspective, we will investigate the search for moral precursors in non-human primates and the evolutionary innovations in cognitive, emotional, and motivational mechanisms purported to underlie human morality. From there, we will investigate controversies regarding this emerging "neuroethics" for debates in moral psychology and normative ethics, including the role of reason, desire, and the self in normative theory and whether neuroscience can play any role in adjudicating among competing theories of normative ethics. Not offered 2024-25.

The purpose of this course is to understand legislative elections. The course will study, for example, what role money plays in elections and why incumbents do better at the polls. It will also examine how electoral rules impact the behavior both of candidates and voters, and will explore some of the consequences of legislative elections, such as divided government. Not offered 2024-25.

An overview of the Great Inimitable's fiction, concentrating on four texts representative of different phases of his novel-writing career and their relationship to the changing world of Victorian Britain: Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend. Not offered 2024-25.

This class will introduce students to the methods of archival work in the humanities and social sciences. Over the course of the quarter students will receive an introduction to factors surrounding the collection, organization, and use of various types of archives as a background to several small-scale projects working in an archival collection of their own choosing. The seminar will center around weekly projects and synthetic analytical essays about the archival process and archival discoveries. Students hoping to combine their course work with an archive-based research paper may sign up for a separate independent study and conduct research concurrently, with instructor approval. Not offered 2024-25.

This course analyzes some of the great works of American literature written by African Americans. This body of writing gives rise to two crucial questions: How does African American literature constitute a literary tradition of its own? How is that tradition inextricable from American literary history? From slave narratives to Toni Morrison's Beloved, from the Harlem Renaissance to Alice Walker, from Ralph Ellison to Walter Mosley, African American literature has examined topics as diverse and important as race relations, class identification, and family life. We shall analyze these texts not only in relation to these cultural issues, but also in terms of their aesthetic and formal contributions. Not offered 2024-25.

This course explores the shifting boundary between discourses of crime and disobedience over the last millennium or so of Chinese history. It offers fictional, philosophical, political, propagandistic, official, and personal writings on crime and those who commit it as a basis for a wide-ranging series of discussions about when breaking the law is good, when breaking the law is bad, and who gets to decide where the line between a criminal and an outlaw should be drawn. Not offered 2024-25.

This course will study the divergent theories of realism that arose in the period after the Civil War and before World War I. Authors covered may include Howells, James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and W. E. B. DuBois. Not offered 2024-25.

This course introduces students to some of the seminal writings on the meaning of life, the essentials of rulership, and the place of the individual in the universe from the history of Chinese thought and philosophy. Students are given selected readings from several schools of thought in Chinese history, with an emphasis on the formative Warring States era (the period of the Hundred Schools of classical Chinese philosophy). Instead of being asked to write expository or argumentative essays, participants in this seminar will be introduced to analyzing and presenting texts using the method of annotation. Exposure to the principles of annotation will provide students with a new approach to analyzing and talking about texts both within a humanistic context and beyond. Not offered 2024-25.

This course will investigate how assumptions about human nature shape political philosophy, social institutions, and social policy. The course will begin with a historical perspective, examining the work of such political philosophers as Plato, Locke, Rousseau, and Marx, along with such psychologists as Freud and Skinner. Against this historical perspective, it will then turn to examine contemporary views on human nature from cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology and explore their potential implications for political philosophy and social policy. Among topics to be discussed will be the nature of human sociality and cooperation; economic systems and assumptions regarding production and consumption; and propaganda, marketing, and manipulation. Not offered 2024-25.

We will start the term by reading Homer's 'Iliad' (possibly 8th century B.C.) for two weeks. This is a disconnected, strange, and violent poem, which raises the excellent question how it could become a widely revered classic down to our own time. To look for answers--answers that perhaps also apply to any "classic" book-- we will go on to study the acts of interpretation, revision, and recycling that made the 'Iliad' fresh and different, sometimes virtually unrecognizable, for each new generation of readers. We survey surprising ancient Greek philosophical interpretations, a medieval romance by Geoffrey Chaucer set in ancient Troy, a fake Scottish epic poem allegedly composed by "Ossian," Chuck Palahniuk's novel 'Fight Club' (1996), and other works. My suggestion for you will be that the 'Iliad' has remained alive for millennia only through quasi-biological processes of mistranscription, mutation, and nonlinear evolution. Not offered 2024-25.

This seminar will introduce students to the problems and practices of historical translation for academic purposes, with a focus on primary materials from Chinese history. Students will take responsibility for an individual translation project, participate in seminar discussions and collaborative projects to improve the translations being made, and discuss the philosophical and methodological questions at the heart of the practice of translation. Advanced proficiency in written Chinese is required. Students who write analyses (4,000 words) of the sources being translated may enroll in this class as H 139, which satisfies the advanced humanities credit. Not offered 2024-25.

Policy makers since at least the time of Jeremy Bentham have argued that welfare maximization ought to be the goal of social policy. When this includes perfectionist notions of realizing one's capacities, economic prosperity, prosocial norms, and democratization have all coincided as key drivers of human development. Although the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development envisions worldwide inclusive and sustainable economic growth, there is substantial debate regarding the extent to which sustainability and economic growth are compatible. This course will critically examine the links between human welfare, economic growth, and material culture to better understand why economic growth and welfare have been taken to be intertwined - and the extent to which they could be decoupled. Our starting point will be the Brundtland report, its conception of welfare based on human needs, and subsequent articulations of needs-based theories of human welfare, including evolutionary and biological accounts that include social comparison processes such as esteem, status, and recognition. This will provide us with a theoretical framework for investigating the role of material culture in satisfying these needs and whether they may be satisfied by less resource-intense routes. Not offered 2024-25.

This seminar will introduce students to the problems and practices of historical translation for academic purposes, with a focus on primary materials from Chinese history. Students will take responsibility for an individual translation project, participate in seminar discussions and collaborative projects to improve the translations being made, and discuss the philosophical and methodological questions at the heart of the practice of translation. Advanced proficiency in written Chinese is required. Students who write analyses (4,000 words) of the sources being translated may enroll in this class as H 139, which satisfies the advanced humanities credit. Not offered 2024-25.

This course examines the contemporary literature on economic growth and development from both a theoretical and historical/empirical perspective. Topics include a historical overview of economic progress and the lack thereof; simple capital accumulation models; equilibrium/ planning models of accumulation; endogenous growth models; empirical tests of convergence; the measurement and role of technological advancement; and the role of trade, institutions, property rights, human capital, and culture. Not offered 2024-25.

In the years following World War II, an unprecedented number of African American writers and artists moved to Paris and Rome, many seeking greater personal liberties and a refuge from racial discrimination at home. As we explore literature, nonfiction, and visual culture created by African Americans in postwar Europe, we will consider: how and why does the postwar creative scene in Paris differ from that of Rome? We will analyze postwar African American expatriate writing's unique and often critical perspectives regarding American society and culture and identify the literary strategies that writers used to address the changing times, promote social justice, and advance new narrative forms, often by crossing traditional boundaries of genre and nation. Authors and artists studied may include James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Barbara Chase-Riboud, William Demby, Maya Angelou, and Ralph Ellison. Not offered 2024-25.

Science is no stranger to performance. There is a long tradition of presenting scientific ideas on various stages, whether for audiences comprised of experts or for a curious public, and there is an equally long tradition of integrating scientific ideas into theatrical works. In this course, we will read several scientifically informed plays, with a focus on the twentieth century. We will explore the ways in which scientific ideas shape the dialogue, plot, and staging of theatrical works and how theater can cause us to consider scientific thought from a new perspective. Readings are likely to include The Physicists (Durenmatt), Kopenhagen (Frayn), Arcadia (Stoppard), and Inherit the Wind (Lawrence and Lee), among other examples, including contemporary works. This course will also invite both scientists and playwrights into the classroom in order to enrich classroom discussions. Not offered 2024-25.

The course will focus on the literature - what F.O. Matthiessen called "The American Renaissance" -- produced in the period leading up to the Civil War. We will consider representations of gender, race, and class, as well as the aesthetic sensibilities in works by the following: Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Jacobs, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry David Thoreau. Not offered 2024-25.

The Russian intelligentsia registered the arrival of modern urban society with a highly articulate sensitivity, perhaps because these changes-industrialization, the breakdown of traditional hierarchies and social bonds, the questioning of traditional beliefs-came to Russia so suddenly. This gives their writings a paradigmatic quality; the modern dilemmas that still haunt us are made so eloquently explicit in them that they have served as models for succeeding generations of writers and social critics. This course explores these writings (in English translation) against the background of Russian society, focusing especially on particular works of Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Goncharov, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. Not offered 2024-25.

Novels, poetry, and memoirs often hinge on experiences of crisis. They can be individual and/or general, historically particular and/or universal: a plane crash; a war; a sudden death; a prolonged one. This course will examine representations of crisis, with a specific focus on their narrative implications. What are the temporal, spatial, and aesthetic effects of crisis? Authors covered may include Joan Didion, Percival Everett, Allen Ginsberg, Tom McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf, Elie Wiesel, Joy Williams. Not offered 2024-25.

In this course, we will examine America after Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974, a period that historians have referred to as an age of fracture and social disaggregation. Using fracture as a conceptual framework to investigate American politics and culture in the last quarter of the twentieth century, we'll consider how the recent past has informed present-day American society. Themes of study will include the culture wars, political polarization, globalization, and the growing wealth gap. In addition, we'll investigate the theoretical and methodological challenges of doing recent history.

We tend to think of literary texts as models of a stable poetic order, but modern and postmodern writers conduct increasingly bold experiments to test the contrary. This class explores how writers from the nineteenth century onward draw upon ancient and contemporary concepts of chaos to test out increasingly sophisticated models of disorder though writing. Readings to include Lucretius, Serres, Calvino, Barth, Stoppard, and Kehlmann. Not offered 2024-25.

Read and examine the selected classical Japanese literature and its traditions from 7th to 11th century from the perspectives of women, anti-heroes, and religions. A comparative analysis is applied to many genres such as oral traditions, performing arts, films, picture scrolls, comics, and anime to understand how Japanese think, and how Shinto and Buddhism have formed their ways of life, ethics, and concepts of life and death. Read selected portions of "The Kojiki", "Manyoshu", "The Tale of Ise", "The tale of the Bamboo-Cutter" (The Tale of the Moon Princess), and "The Tale of Genji." Not offered 2024-25.

The way in which humans perceive and record time has a discernable history, and literary texts offer us one of the best ways to study it, particularly in times of war and natural catastrophe. With a focus on 16th- through 18th-century European literature, we will examine various techniques of literary time-keeping as they relate to topics such as, fame and mortality, as well as the experience of time's slowness and acceleration. Readings will include selections from Baroque emblem books as well as texts by Montaigne, Milton, Pepys, Defoe, and Rousseau. Not offered 2024-25.

This course will examine African American politics, culture, and society in the decades following the passage of landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Topics of discussion will include deindustrialization and the rise of hip hop culture, black feminist and queer thought, debates over welfare and affirmative action, and mass incarceration. Analyzing a variety of political and cultural artifacts as well as cutting-edge secondary literature, we will investigate various moments in recent African American history to gain insight into changing notions of rights, citizenship, equality, and freedom in American society.

This course introduces students to French theater and fiction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from Molière's comedies (The Misanthrope, Tartuffe), and Racine's tragedy Phaedra to the novels of Madame de Lafayette, Marivaux, and Laclos. Topics include the aesthetics of neoclassical theater, the rise of the novel, historical and social contexts (the reign of Louis XIV, libertinage, Rousseauism), and writers' creative development. Covers the period 1643-1789. Conducted in English, but students may read the French originals. Not offered 2024-25.

This seminar introduces students to the history of environmental inequality, environmental racism, and environmental justice. Human bodies are inescapably enmeshed in our environments: human health and environmental health are inseparable. But environmental burdens and benefits are distributed unevenly along lines of race, gender, class, and nationality. We will examine local, national, and transnational case studies to understand the historical development of environmental inequalities and movements for environmental justice. We will consider different methods for studying environmental injustice and the politics of environmental knowledge. Not offered 2024-25.

This course focuses on the refugees and migrants' images in documentaries, narrative films, graphic novels, fictional texts, poetic works, and autobiographical narratives. It investigates how these representations participate in the development and strengthening of political discourse. Works by authors such as Hannah Arendt, Antje Ellermann, Achille Mbembe, Martin A. Schain, and Sasha Polakow-Suransky will provide some context to our analysis. Topics discussed in class include the historical and economic relationships of Europe with the refugees and migrants' countries of origin, the rise of anti-immigrant politics and its significance for the future of the European Union, but also its impact on social peace, in France in particular. This course is taught in English and satisfies the advanced humanities requirement. Not offered 2024-25.

This seminar offers an introduction to scholarship on gender and science. Feminist science studies can seem oxymoronic: the objectivity on which science depends appears opposed to the political commitments feminism implies. Scholars in feminist science studies, however, argue that feminist theory and methods can in fact improve scientific practice. This course will introduce students to the historical development of feminist Science & Technology Studies and what this field tells us about the history of women in science, the history of scientific theories of sex/gender, and the future of feminist research. This reading-heavy class will also include discussions of feminist epistemology, feminist research methods, and new directions in feminist STS. Not offered 2024-25.

What do we know about epidemics in the past? What did contemporaries understand about these events? How did societies respond to periodic bouts of epidemic disease? This course examines mortality crises and epidemics from the Black Death in the 14th century to the current coronavirus pandemic, with attention given to the impact of epidemics on societies, the ways in which such outbreaks have been understood over time and the kinds of responses they have elicited. We will draw on studies for a range of societies in order to identify patterns across space and time, and to highlight both continuity and change in the ways societies have dealt with contagious diseases. Not offered 2024-25.

This course introduces students to Hollywood films and filmmaking during the classical period, from the coming of sound through the '50s. Students will develop the techniques and vocabulary appropriate to the distinct formal properties of film. Topics include the rise and collapse of the studio system, technical transformations (sound, color, deep focus), genre (the musical, the melodrama), cultural contexts (the Depression, World War II, the Cold War), audience responses, and the economic history of the film corporations. Terms may be taken independently. Part a covers the period 1927-1940. Part b covers 1941-1960. Not offered 2024-25.

This course examines the post-classical era of Hollywood filmmaking with a focus on the late 1960s through the 1970s, a period of significant formal and thematic experimentation. We will study American culture and politics as well as film in this era, as we consider the relation between broader social transformations and the development of new narrative conventions and cinematic techniques. We will pay particular attention to the changing film industry and its influence on this body of work. Films covered may include Bonnie and Clyde , The Graduate , The Godfather , Taxi Driver , and Jaws .

This class is an introduction to the literary masterworks of the Hispanic tradition from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Readings and discussions are in English, but students may read Spanish originals. Not offered 2024-25.

This advanced humanities course begins with a selection of Octavia E. Butler's (1947-2006) novels and short stories. Born here in Pasadena, CA, Butler's writing explored issues such as chattel slavery, climate change, genetic engineering, pandemics, nuclear apocalypse, and post-apocalyptic life. She was attentive to Black and indigenous modes of care, healing, social justice, and organizing. We will pay special attention to Butler's critical and theoretical contributions to the fields of Afrofuturism, Black studies, feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and the environmental humanities by reading her works in conjunction with criticism and theory. In the second half of the seminar, we will explore connections between Butler and the works of other Afrofuturists and Black science fiction writers today. Finally, we will explore our own ideas for extending Butler's literature of Black futures today. Not offered 2024-25.

What is a Black diasporic analytic and how might it deepen our understandings of the cultural and literary significance of Black lives around the world? The expressive genius of Black people across Black diasporas has resulted in an extensive tradition within and beyond English-speaking nations. This is an intensive advanced humanities reading course on Black diasporic literature and culture since the 1980s as well as the various histories that inform and shape this body of work. Students will read several recent works of Black diasporic literature and culture and criticism that have reshaped our understandings of family, gender, identity, labor, migration, nation, race, sexuality, and more. Students will analyze several literary and cultural works and practice writing their own Black diasporic criticism and interpretive methodologies. Not offered 2024-25.

For centuries, Black people, especially queer and trans women, and non-binary and queer folx, writing in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, the United States, and more, have used literature to reimagine feminisms and queerness. In the decades following the second-wave feminist movement, a body of writing necessitated the creation of "Black feminist criticism" and "queer of color critique." It was a moment in which Black people across identities and national origins wrote several works that radically retheorized family, home, gender, love, race, sexuality, work, and more, in ways that challenged cultures of violence in favor of imagining beloved communities. In this advanced humanities course, students will read, discuss, and better understand multiple literary and critical works participating in Black feminisms and Black queer thought in order to theorize new possibilities for Black futures. Not offered 2024-25.

This course uses a combination of lectures with hands-on laboratory work to bring out the methods, techniques, and knowledge that were involved in building and conducting historical experiments. We will connect our laboratory work with the debates and claims made by the original discoverers, asking such questions as how experimental facts have been connected to theories, how anomalies arise and are handled, and what sorts of conditions make historically for good data. Typical experiments might include investigations of refraction, laws of electric force, interference of polarized light, electromagnetic induction, or resonating circuits and electric waves. We will reconstruct instrumentation and experimental apparatus based on a close reading of original sources. Not offered 2024-25.

Major works of Latin literature, usually one per term. No work will be studied more than once in four years and students may repeat the course for credit. Not offered 2024-25.

One of the last great challenges to our understanding of the world concerns conscious experience. What exactly is it? How is it caused or constituted? And how does it connect with the rest of our science? This course will cover philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience in a mixture of lectures and in-class discussion. There are no formal pre-requisites, but background in philosophy (equivalent to Pl 41, Pl 110) and in neuroscience (equivalent to NB/Bi/CNS 150) is strongly recommended and students with such background will be preferentially considered. Limited to 20. Not offered 2024-25.

A survey of the development of Chinese art in which the major achievements in architecture, sculpture, painting, calligraphy, and ceramics will be studied in their cultural contexts from prehistory through the Manchu domination of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Emphasis will be placed on the aesthetic appreciation of Chinese art as molded by the philosophies, religions, and history of China. Not offered 2024-25.

A study of the experimental, mathematical, and theoretical developments concerning light, from the time of Ptolemy in the 2nd century A.D. to the production of electromagnetic optics in the 20th century. Not offered 2024-25.

This course covers developments in mechanics, as well as related aspects of mathematics and models of nature, from just before the time of Galileo through the middle of the 18th century, which saw the creation of fluid and rotational dynamics in the hands of Euler and others. Not offered 2024-25.

An examination of the impact of Buddhism on the arts and cultures of India, Southeast Asia, China, Korea, and Japan from its earliest imagery in the 4th century B.C.E. India through various doctrinal transformations to the Zen revival of 18th-century Japan. Select monuments of Buddhist art, including architecture, painting, sculpture, and ritual objects, will serve as focal points for discussions on their aesthetic principles and for explorations into the religious, social, and cultural contexts that underlie their creation. Not offered 2024-25.

The course will provide students with a brief yet adequate survey of the history of mathematics, characterizing the main developments and placing these in their chronological, cultural, and scientific contexts. A more detailed study of a few themes, such as Archimedes' approach to infinite processes, the changing meanings of "analysis" in mathematics, Descartes' analytic geometry, and the axiomatization of geometry c. 1900; students' input in the choice of these themes will be welcomed. Not offered 2024-25.

The course will examine how elements of knowledge that evolved against significantly different cultural and religious backgrounds motivated the great scientific revolution of the 17th century. Not offered 2024-25.

Intense training in oral expression, pronunciation, vocabulary, listening comprehension and fluency. This course is designed for students interested in scientific French, planning to attend Ecole Polytechnique, or enrolled in the NSF REU program. Caltech professors and postdocs intending to spend time in France are also welcome. Discussion materials and guest lectures will focus on technical language to prepare students for their classes in math and science. Taught in French. L 175 can be repeated for credit as content changes every year. Not offered 2024-25.

This course examines the frequent and significant encounters between what chemist/novelist C.P. Snow famously dubbed the "two cultures"-the sciences and the humanities-with an emphasis on forms and practices of visual culture that blur the boundaries between science, technology, and art. What role, we will ask, have visual culture and visuality played in the construction of scientific knowledge? Taking a broad historical and geographical approach, we will explore topics including representations of science and technology in the arts and popular culture; the use of photography, illustration, and visualization in the sciences; histories of visuality and visual devices; and the everyday visual practices of scientific inquiry.

What can a slave's narrative teach us about citizenship? How did the new nation identify citizens when its Constitution seemed so silent on the matter? And how did one tailor's pamphlet result in one of most massive restrictions of free speech in U.S. history? Our goal over the semester will be to sketch a story of African American literary production from the latter half of the eighteenth century to the Civil War and to tease out, through this literature, developing understandings of citizenship in the United States. We will read letters, poems, sermons, songs, constitutions and bylaws, short stories, and texts that simply defy easy categorization. We will also spend several sessions becoming familiar with key newspapers and magazines-Freedom's Journal, Frederick Douglass's Paper, The Anglo-African Magazine, Christian Recorder, and The Crisis-to deepen our understanding of the kinds of things people were reading and writing on a regular basis and the kinds of arguments they were making. Writers up for discussion may include: Frederick Douglass, James Madison, Harriet Jacobs, Henry David Thoreau, Sojourner Truth, and David Walker. Not offered 2024-25.

Why does the notion of freedom of knowledge and teaching in science and engineering matter? What kinds of restrictions have been placed on scientists and engineers, their publications and institutions? Who restrained scientific and engineering knowledge of what sorts; for what reasons; and how successfully? These questions will be addressed by exploring the strategies developed by the U.S. research community to protect the international circulation of knowledge after World War II, when scientific freedom and the export of technical data had to be balanced with the needs of national security. Case studies will include the atomic bomb, the semiconductor industry in the 1970s and space technologies, notably rockets/missiles, in the 1990s. The threat to U.S. economics and military security posed by the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and by China today, has transformed the practice of research in university and in industry alike building new walls around the production and circulation of knowledge to affirm national sovereignty that is, all the while, being undermined by the global circulation of trained scientists and engineers. Not offered 2024-25.

Introduction to the use of convex analysis in economic theory. Includes separating hyperplane theorems, continuity and differentiability properties of convex and concave functions, support functions, subdifferentials, Fenchel conjugates, saddlepoint theorem, theorems of the alternative, polyhedra, linear programming, and duality in graphs. Introduction to discrete convex analysis and matroids. Emphasis is on the finite-dimensional case, but infinite-dimensional spaces will be discussed. Applications to core convergence, cost and production functions, mathematical finance, decision theory, incentive design, and game theory. Part b not offered 2024-25.

This course will examine the body of work that the late Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy published under the general title The Wessex Novels, that is, the sequence of works from Far from the Madding Crowd to Jude the Obscure. The six main novels will be read critically to give a sense of the totality of this greatest British regional novelist's achievement. Not offered 2024-25.

In 19th-century Britain, for the first time in human history, more of a nation's citizens came to live in urban areas than in rural ones. This result of the Industrial Revolution produced many effects, but in the fiction of the period, one of the most striking was an obsession with the problem of crime. Victorian authors filled their novels with murder, prisons, poisonings, prostitution, criminals, and the new figure of the detective; in this class we will look at the social history, publishing developments, and formal dilemmas that underlay such a response. Authors studied may include Dickens, Collins, Braddon, Conan Doyle, Chesterton, and Conrad, among others. Not offered 2024-25.

The adjective "Dickensian" makes an almost daily appearance in today's newspapers, magazines, and other media sources. It is used to describe everything from outrageous political scandals, to Bollywood musicals, to multiplot novels. But what does the word really mean? And what part of Charles Dickens's output does it refer to? This class will consider some of Dickens's most famous works alongside a series of contemporary novels, all critically described in "Dickensian" terms. The main concern will be equally with style and form, and 19th-century and present-day circumstances of production (e.g., serialization, mass production, Web publication, etc.). Authors considered (aside from Dickens) may include Richard Price, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, and Jonathan Franzen. Not offered 2024-25.

This course explores late medieval European understandings of the origins, structure, and workings of the cosmos in the realms of theology, physics, astronomy, astrology, magic, and medicine. Attention is given to the position of humans as cultural creatures at the intersection of nature and spirit; as well as to the place of Christian Europeans in relation to non-Christians and other categories of outsiders within and beyond Europe. We will examine the knowledge system that anticipated racializing theories in the West.

A survey of topics in moral philosophy. The emphasis will be on metaethical issues, although some normative questions may be addressed. Metaethical topics that may be covered include the fact/value distinction; the nature of right and wrong (consequentialism, deontological theories, rights-based ethical theories, virtue ethics); the status of moral judgments (cognitivism vs. noncognitivism, realism vs. irrealism); morality and psychology; moral relativism; moral skepticism; morality and self-interest; the nature of justice. The implications of these theories for various practical moral problems may also be considered. Not offered 2024-25.

This class takes up a set of mostly very funny, mostly 20th century British novels to frame a simple-seeming, yet deceptively complicated set of questions: What does it mean to be educated? Who has access to education? What does an ideal education consist in? And ultimately: What is a university for? As we think through these questions we will read op/eds and investigative journalism in addition to fiction, and we will consider a variety of university-centered topics (determined by student interest) including issues of gender, class, privilege, race, and genius. Authors read may include Sayers, Larkin, Amis, C.P. Snow, Lodge, and Zadie Smith. Not offered 2024-25.

This course covers a broad range of topics in the history of maps and exploration from Antiquity to the present. These topics range from the earliest visualizations of earth and space in the Classical world to contemporary techniques in interplanetary navigation. By way of maps, students will explore various ways in which different cultures have conceptualized and navigated earth and space. While maps emulate the world as perceived by the human eye, they, in fact, comprise a set of observations and perceptions of the relationship between bodies in space and time. Thus, students will study maps, and the exploration they enable, as windows to the cultures that have produced them, not only as scientific and technical artifacts to measure and navigate our world. Not offered 2024-25.

This course devotes itself to the writings of the diplomat, courtier, bureaucrat, and poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. Best known for the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer also authored dream visions, lyrics, and philosophical meditations. This course will introduce you to some better-known and lesser-known works in the Chaucerian corpus, while also exploring questions central to the production and circulation of literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. What did it mean to "invent" a literary work in late medieval England? How did Chaucer imagine himself as a writer and reader? What are the hallmarks of Chaucerian style, and how did Chaucer become the canonical author he is today? We will read Chaucer's works in their original language, Middle English, working slowly enough to give participants time to familiarize themselves with syntax and spelling. No previous experience with the language is necessary. Not offered 2024-25.

This course studies Latin America's most influential authors in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a focus on short stories and novellas produced by the region's avant-garde and "boom" generations. Authors may include Allende, Bombal, Borges, García Márquez, Quiroga, Poniatowska, and Vargas Llosa. All readings and discussions are in English. Not offered 2024-25.

Industrialization, economic growth, and democracy came to Germany much later than to England and France, and the forms they took in Germany were filtered through the specific institutional character of Central Europe. German-speaking writers and intellectuals saw these trends from the perspective of indigenous intellectual traditions, and the resulting collisions of values and priorities largely shaped European and American social, political, and literary debates for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This course explores these writings (in English translation) against the historical background of Central European society, focusing on particular works of Goethe, Hoffmann, Heine, Nietzsche, Kafka, Rilke, and Mann. Not offered 2024-25.

This course will introduce students to the series of religiously motivated European invasions of the Middle and Near East that began at the end of the eleventh century and that led to the creation of Latin Christian principalities in Palestine. Though the crusading movement came to embroil much of Europe itself, the course will focus strictly on the military expeditions to what the Crusaders called the Holy Land, and the history of the Crusader states up to the point of their destruction at the end of the thirteenth century. The course will be guided by the following questions: how did medieval Christianity justify wars of aggression against foreign peoples and religions? What motivated western Europeans to leave their homes and march into a hostile environment, where they often faced impoverishment if not death and where maintaining a Christian presence was a constant struggle? How did they manage to erect stable political entities in alien territory that lasted as long as they did, and how did they have to adapt their own culture to do so? Finally, how did the native peoples of the regions the Crusaders invaded and conquered-Muslim but also Christian and Jewish - perceive the Crusaders? How did the Crusaders' presence affect life in a region whose populations had their own ancient histories and patterns of life? Not offered 2024-25.

This course explores how psychological facts and constructs can be used to inform models of limits on rationality, willpower and greed, to expand the scope of economic analysis. Topics include overconfidence, heuristics for statistical judgment, loss-aversion, hyperbolic discounting, optimal firm behavior when consumers are limited in rationality, behavioral game theory, behavioral finance, neuroeconomic dual-self models, and legal and welfare implications of rationality limits. Not offered 2024-25.

Mathematical finance: Pricing financial derivatives, risk management, and optimal portfolio selection. Methods of stochastic, Ito calculus for models driven by Brownian motion. Asset pricing theory: Mean-variance theory, information economics, continuous-time finance and differential equations, intertemporal consumption-based asset pricing theories, recent developments in intermediary-based and behavioral asset pricing theories. Behavioral finance: Empirical facts about asset prices, investor trading behavior, and firm behavior. Psychology about investor preferences and beliefs. Behavioral finance models that explain empirical facts. Trading strategies implemented by hedge funds. Prescriptive behavioral finance that aims at helping individuals and institutions to make better financial decisions. Not offered 2024-25.

Topics in behavioral, affective, and social neuroscience that inform how individuals make economic decisions. Applications of neuroscience ideas and methods to understanding choice under risk and uncertainty, temporal discounting and self-control, advertisement and preference formation, habit, addiction, and judgment bias. Not offered 2024-25.

This course explores the interaction of experimental design and econometric inference in the laboratory approach to economic questions. The course critically evaluates existing experimental studies to highlight this interaction and motivate consideration of inferential strategies early in an experiments design. Methodological topics may include testing theories in two-by-two designs, power and optimal design, classifying subjects into canonical types, testing based on elicited preferences and beliefs, and challenges introduced by communication and dynamics in economic experiments. Not offered 2024-25.

This course is an advanced topics course intended for graduate students with a background in optimization, linear systems theory, probability and statistics, and an interest in learning, game theory, and decision making more broadly. We will cover the basics of game theory including equilibrium notions and efficiency, learning algorithms for equilibrium seeking, and discuss connections to optimization, machine learning, and decision theory. While there will be some initial overview of game theory, the focus of the course will be on modern topics in learning as applied to games in both cooperative and non-cooperative settings. We will also discuss games of partial information and stochastic games as well as hierarchical decision-making problems (e.g., incentive and information design). Not offered 2024-25.

Emotions are at the forefront of most human endeavors. Emotions aid us in decision-making (gut feelings), help us remember, torment us, yet have ultimately helped us to survive. Over the past few decades, we have begun to characterize the neural systems that extend from primitive affective response such as fight or flight to the complex emotions experienced by humans including guilt, envy, empathy and social pain. This course will begin with an in-depth examination of the neurobiological systems that underlie negative and positive emotions and move onto weekly discussions, based on assigned journal articles that highlight both rudimentary and complex emotions. The final weeks will be devoted to exploring how the neurobiological systems are disrupted in affective disorders including anxiety, aggression and psychopathy. In addition to these discussions and readings, each student will be required to write a review paper or produce a short movie on a topic related to one of the emotions discussed in these seminars and its underlying neural mechanisms. Not offered 2024-25.