English

This course looks at popular fiction in the late 19th, 20th, and earlier 21st centuries to see how suspense narratives are encoded in society. Students examine detective stories, espionage fiction, ghost stories, horror fiction, and thrillers to see how ideologies are both reinforced and challenged by popular fiction. The course considers the emergence and development of the genres, explores the allure of fear, and examines ideas about class and gender in relation to the practices of reading and the circulation of texts. Though primarily focused on literature, the course is supplemented by optional film screenings and discussions. The course introduces students to the study of popular fiction as it both contributes to and is produced by ideology. The comparison of generically-linked texts from either end of the 20th century encourages discussion of the changes in social history of the period. The chosen texts guide students into a basic understanding of important theoretical ideas: the unconscious, post-Marxist concepts of ideology, Foucauldian ideas about surveillance and power. The course encourages discussion of a wider range of film and general reading and an understanding of students' own cultural environment.

This course examines advanced topics in equilibrium statistical physics. Topics include ensemble theory; theory of simple gases, ideal bose systems, ideal fermi systems; statistical mechanics of interacting systems; statistical field theory; and some topics in the theory of phase transition may be selected.

This course considers some of the most important debates and trends in feminist theory over the last five decades. It considers the intersections of academic and popular, intellectual, and activist dimensions of feminist literary theory. In particular, it focuses on French Feminism and its influence in the United States, the rise of the Wages for Housework Movement in Italy, and in the relations of race and gender theory forged in the United States. The last weeks of the course explore some of the new debates in Queer and Trans theory and investigates how they build on the feminist history previously explored. In each case, the course foregrounds this specialty as ENGEROM scholars able to think in detail about how feminist ideas have travelled back and forth between Europe and the United States, both through literal and cultural translation. The course explores whether feminism is truly a transatlantic phenomenon; what happens to some of these key texts as they move from one language to another; the debates about individual differences and rights; and the impact of race, specific to US, French, Italian, and German contexts; and where the archives of feminism are held in these different national settings.

The course provides an introduction to modern materials chemistry, covering both inorganic materials and organic polymers. Models of bonding and structure in the solid state are developed and linked to functionality of the materials themselves. Synthetic and characterization methods are discussed. Students learn about current challenges in materials chemistry, and how to design materials to overcome them.

This course uses film to examine the cultural translation of famous stories in different times and cultural settings by looking at how shifts in the narrative, images, dialogue, and translation foreground different ideas. The course looks at the expression of cultural translation in movies and the flow of translation; particularly, how a single story changes as times and cultures change. 
 
Why do some stories travel internationally, while others seem less inclined to relocate? What cultural differences are revealed--and what challenges arise--in the process of translating culturally specific texts for new audiences? How does this traffic of ideas, images, narratives and media affect the ways we understand and relate to each other across cultures? 
 
Through the medium of film, this course introduces students to two important aspects of cultural translation: 1) cultural translation as “a way for minority subjects to claim a degree of agency within a majority culture” (Hodgson, 2018), and 2) cultural translation as a process of “negotiating cultural differences” (Bachmann-Medick, 2006) that involves adapting or rewriting texts to foreground issues relevant to their new audiences (see Bahrawi 2016). 
 
Through a series of case studies ranging from Italian adaptations of Japanese Westerns to Disney fairy tales and the gothic excesses of Toho Studios' vampire films, students will discover the extent to which cultural contexts and formal demands affect the translation of a variety of film elements: from images and dialogue to tropes and narratives.

This course offers a study of visual cultures and the theoretical insights garnered by the study of this interdisciplinary field. The course provides an introduction to the field of visual culture and explores topics including vision, visuality, and image in conjunction with varying conceptualizations of culture. Each subsequent unit deals with a “site” of visual culture that offers an object of study, a theoretical problem, and an interdisciplinary opportunity. Visual cultures from high to low are studied along with an examination of how these forms are quickly transforming and breaking barriers of category and genre. The principal sites of inquiry traverse fashion, gaming, museum exhibitions, medical imaging, comics, and cinema. This course requires that students have completed a course in the humanities as a prerequisite.

This course introduces students to the history, archaeology, art, and texts of Ancient Egypt, from the Paleolithic age to the end of the New Kingdom. It covers the development of low-level food producing communities living in the eastern Sahara, to the emergence and growth of the complex society responsible for the construction of some of the world’s most spectacular and (now) famous monuments such as the pyramids of Giza, and the temples of Karnak and Abu Simbel. The course includes studies of many diverse sources for the history and culture of Egypt, including art and sculpture, administrative, monumental, personal, and religious texts, settlements, temples, and tombs, and material culture such as ceramics, stone tools, wooden artefacts, plants, and animal remains. Additionally, the course introduces students to the history of Egyptology, and archaeology in Egypt. 
 

This course is an introduction to blockchain systems and distributed ledgers, the relevant cryptographic tools and smart contracts programming.

This course offers students a broad introduction to political philosophy. Readings are mostly drawn from Contemporary Anglophone political philosophy (so-called “analytic” philosophy): in particular, Rawls and some of his interlocutors (Nozick, Cohen, Moller-Okin, et. al). Yet students may also occasionally read figures from the history of political thought (Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Locke, Mill) and some modern European theorists (so-called “continental” philosophers) as well (Habermas, Honneth, Forst). Questions treated in the course are likely to include the following: What is the source of the state’s authority and what could render it legitimate? What is liberty, and what are its limits? Why is property valuable, and how should it be distributed? Is there a trade-off between equality and freedom? Are there any natural rights or are they all conventional? What is justice? Throughout students are concerned with how these questions are treated in different frameworks: liberal, libertarian, socialist, feminist, utilitarian, and anarchist.  

The course considers how gaming emerged from post-War and Cold War cultures and traces its development alongside a history of contemporary capitalism up to the present. It considers games and their relation to nationalism, gender and sexuality, class and intersectionality, among other things. The course asks students to analyze the complex relationships between political context and games. To do so they develop both deep historical knowledge of the industry and solid theoretical tools through which to understand it. Students consider fan cultures, online activism, and community building around the gaming industry.