This course combines the study of public policy with the study of major environmental problems. Students will explore public policy concepts and the instruments used in environmental regulation. Topics will include air and water quality issues hazardous waste and risk management, natural resources and biological diversity. The course will also discuss the impact of environmental groups and citizen activism on this highly complex area of public policy. Not open for credit to students who have completed POLS 208 or POLS 313.
An interdisciplinary survey of Paris seen through history, culture, literature, and the arts. This course traces the development of Paris from its foundation by Gaulish boatmen of the Parisii tribe to its current status as a global city. Cinema, art, literature, and computer-mediated virtual tours are used to analyze the evolution of major political and cultural events in Parisian history. Taught in English. Does not count toward a French and French Studies major nor minor.
Readings in representative authors, themes and periods from France and from other Francophone countries.
A survey of French films from the invention of cinema to the contemporary period, with an emphasis on points of connection with American cinema. From the Lumieres brothers to Melies, from Pathe and Gaumont to Surrealism (Clair, Bunuel, Cocteau), from Abel Gance to realism (Renoir, Carne) and from "New Wave" (Resnais, Godard, Truffaut) to "Modern Cinema" (Lelouch, Malle).
A general survey of the political, constitutional, economic, and social history of Britain, Ireland, and the British Empire from the Revolution of 1688 to the present.
A study of nation building and strongman government in the nineteenth century, the Mexican Revolution 1910-20, Argentina under Peron, and twentieth-century Brazil. Special emphasis on the roles of women and blacks.
An introduction to the history of German-speaking Europe, c. 1450 to 1850. The course examines the complex history of the Holy Roman Empire, a vast, economically and culturally rich, multi-ethnic state. It also focuses on imperial politics in theory and practice, territorial expansion and diplomacy, the relative autonomy of many German cities, the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath, peasant revolts, the Thirty Years War, the German Enlightenment, and the Vormärz period that culminated in the 1848 Revolutions.
Although modern France is a product of the same tumultuous nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments experienced by the rest of Europe, the French reacted to the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and the democratization of politics, and the two world wars in their own fashion. This course considers in detail how France became "modern" and what the effects of this process were on different groups of individuals in French society. Readings center on primary documents.
An introduction to the field of environmental history, which asks how the natural world has shaped the course of human civilization, and how humans, in turn, have shaped the natural world, over time.
This second offering in a two-course sequence addresses the modern Middle East, and emphasizes the region's place in global politics and the world economy. Among the topics considered are European imperialism and local responses, nineteenth-century reform movements, the rise of the nation-state, the impact of Arab nationalism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Islamic political movements, gender relations in the region, the importance of oil, the Iraq conflict, terrorism and the peace process.
This seminar compares the warfare that accompanied colonial encounters in North America and southern Africa, from the first European contact through the early twentieth century. It focuses on wars fought in response to resistance by native peoples and on the use of native allies in warfare between imperial foes as windows into the processes of acculturation, resistance, dispossession, and representation that characterized the colonial encounter as a whole. Texts range from traditional military history to religious, cultural, environmental, and comparative approaches to the topic.
Religious nationalist parties and social movements play an increasingly important role in our contemporary world. Promising a more “authentic” approach to nationalism than secular nationalism, these movements provide meaning to millions of adherents, while also contributing to partisanship and conflict around the world. This class investigates the history of religious nationalism with a focus primarily on the history of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish nationalism in the 20th and 21st centuries. Case studies will be drawn from the history of Israel/Palestine, India/Pakistan, Ireland, and the United States.
This seminar investigates how and why sexuality became the key to selfhood in modern Europe. Drawing on the tools of gender analysis and cultural history, students explore the ways in which political, socioeconomic and cultural tensions of particular historical moments were manifested in the sexuality of individuals. Students also examine a variety of primary sources from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries to consider how individuals defined themselves through sexuality and how definitions were imposed on them by a variety of institutions and authority figures.
The impulse to combine land, labor, and capital in profitable ways has always existed; this course focuses on how British and American entrepreneurs have attempted this challenge over the past 500 years of history. The differing cultural, institutional, and technological developments faced by entrepreneurs in each country are considered.
An examination of the historical origins and development of the discourses of sustainability, sustainable development, and the green economy, which have been ubiquitous, influential, and critically and historiographically under-examined in contemporary U.S. and global society. The course draws on contemporary global environmental historiography, while analyzing key primary sources such as Malthus' An Essay on the Principles of Population, Marsh's Man and Nature, Ehrlich's Population Bomb, Club of Rome's Limits to Growth, the United Nations' Brundtland Commission's "Our Common Future," the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, and the University of the South's Sustainability Master Plan.
This course examines the first circumnavigation of the globe during the 16th century and considers how the two maritime empires of the time, Spain and Portugal, spawned not only the opening of new routes of commerce and the development of cartography but also the very idea of globalization.
The course introduces students to the concepts of “culture” and “globalization” with an emphasis on exploring how cultural practices are shaped by border-crossing and other forms of cross-cultural exchange. Specifically, the context of Africa allows the examination of shared characteristics of globalization through colonization and other historical developments. The majority of the course then explores the cultural hybridity and heterogeneity that result from this process and continue to inform cultural practice in the contemporary period. Africa as a geographic region provides insight into the complexity of “globalization” outcomes that depend upon the diverse economic, social, cultural, and historical contexts in which cross-cultural exchange occurs.
A course concerned with analyzing how international and global integration shape local development. After reflecting on this integration during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its impact on nation-state formation and economic development, students analyze the construction of the post-World War II international system around the Bretton-Woods institutions. Attention is also given to how international norms pertaining to human rights and democracy apply to diverse countries during the current period of globalization, and to how transnational linkages shape economic and cultural transformations. The course concludes with discussion of living abroadincluding topics such as language acquisition and personal transformation. Required core course for IGS majors.
This course provides students with an interdisciplinary introduction to both the idea of the city and the dynamics of contemporary urban life. Taking a global and international approach, the class looks at how scholars and professionals have defined and analyzed “the urban” and its component parts in cities around the world. To that end, we will consider material from different disciplines that asks: What is a city? How and why do they form? How have cities been shaped by forces such as globalization? How do they function socially, politically, and economically? What ways of life do they support? And what challenges do they face in the 21st century?
An examination of the ways in which global migrations are represented as crises and of the spatial significance of borders. Focusing on three representative spaces—the United States-Mexico border, the Mediterranean-European Union border, and the Balkans-European Union border—the course considers theories of and journalistic discourse on migration as well as aesthetic representations of migration in literature, art, and film.