Stories

This 360°, taught by professors of chemistry, psychology, and East Asian Languages and Cultures (formerly East Asian Studies), examined the history, science and practice of meditation and other mindful practices.

This cluster provides a multidisciplinary approach to the technical analysis, historical interpretation, and museum display of early Byzantine textiles.

This cluster uses the lenses of physics, sociology, and literary studies to critically and comparatively examine the ways we imagine and reimagine the worlds in which we live, from the cosmos to social structures and from cultural to personal experiences.

In a fundamentally decolonial spirit, this course cluster examines the ways colonialism has contained, collected, captured, and commodified Blackness, a practice that circulates objectified images of the peoples, cultures, and cultural objects of Africa and the African Diaspora.

Students will explore the ways in which African societies are trying to overcome colonial legacies, promote well-being, and contribute to fashioning our interconnected world.

This cluster uses multidisciplinary tools from language and culture, literature, and environmental science to reveal histories hidden in and around the city of Angoulême, France.

This cluster focuses on the rich geologic and linguistic history and present of Nicaragua to explore the ongoing interconnectedness between landscape and language.

What comes in the wake of energy extraction? This cluster will examine the afterlives of coal, oil, and nuclear energy through the lenses of the arts, political science, and earth science.

How might human beings live according to nature? Is property natural? Is freedom or unfreedom? How can studying human societies in the past inform collective organization in the present?

What does Europe look like from the perspectives of those whose voices are usually missing from mainstream narratives – the disempowered, queers, migrant laborers, artists, refugees, and people from Europe’s eastern and southern peripheries?

Coastlines, by definition transitional environments, are naturally dynamic and resilient. But climate change, sea level rise and shifting species distributions are now causing rapid physical and ecological changes to the world’s coasts. Anticipating and addressing these changes requires understanding the physical, chemical and biological processes that interact at the land-sea boundary. (Taught 2014-15; 2017; 2020; 2024)

Participants will study the history and theories of self-portraiture, self-representation, and self-fashioning in cultures around the globe from antiquity to the present.