Courses

Instructor: Marcia Chatelain
M 10:15 AM-1:14 PM
In this course, students will examine the origins of the March on Washington movement in the 1940s, biographies of the March organizers, and the ways the March has been memorialized over the past six decades. By exploring the dynamics that contributed to the demonstrations, students will delve into primary source documents, read secondary literature, and write their own article-length research papers based on the course material. The course will also examine the ways documentary film footage, photography, music, and media coverage of the March has contributed to understandings and misreadings of this moment in Civil Rights history.
Crosslisting: HIST 0816-401
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Instructor: Michael Hanchard
R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM
This undergraduate seminar is for advanced undergraduates seeking to make sense of the upsurge in racist activism, combined with authoritarian populism and neo-fascist mobilization in many parts of the world. Contemporary manifestations of the phenomena noted above will be examined in a comparative and historical perspective to identify patterns and anomalies across various multiple nation-states. France, The United States, Britain, and Italy will be the countries examined.
Crosslisting: LALS 4650-401, PSCI 4190-401
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Instructor: Deborah A. Thomas
MW 10:15 AM-11:14 AM
Anthropology as a field is the study of human beings - past, present, and future. It asks questions about what it means to be human, and whether there are universal aspects to human existence. What do we share and how do we differ? What is "natural" and what is "cultural"? What is the relationship between the past and the present? This course is designed to investigate the ways anthropology, as a discipline, emerged in conjunction with European (and later, American) imperialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the will to know and categorize difference across the world. We will probe the relationships between anthropology and modern race-making by investigating how anthropologists have studied key institutions and systems that structure human life: family and kinship, inequality and hierarchy, race and ethnicity, ritual and symbolic systems, gender and sexuality, reciprocity and exchange, and globalization and social change. The course fundamentally probes how the material and ideological constellations of any given moment shape the questions we ask and the knowledge we produce about human existence.
Fulfills: Society sector (all classes)
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Instructor: Mark T. Lycett
T 10:15 AM-11:44 AM
R 10:15 AM-11:44 AM
What are the limits of nature? When do natural systems become human or socio-natural systems? In this course, we examine the human construction of nature both conceptually, through ideas about environment, ecosystem, organism, and ecology; and materially, through trajectories of direct action in and on the landscape. Beginning with a consideration of foundational concepts in human ecology, we will discuss current problems and approaches, centering on political ecology. Readings and case studies are drawn from human-environmental contexts in Oceania, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America. We will also consider topics including a) the relationship between indigenous and technocratic knowledge and resource governance, b) environmental movements themselves as objects of ethnographic study; c) justice and sustainability as environmental goals; d) inequality, displacement and violence as environmental problems; and e) fair trade and food security or sovereignty.
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Instructor: Jeffery G. Saven
TR 8:30 AM-9:29 AM
This course will explore how biological properties are determined by the microscopic chemical properties of proteins and biomacromolecules. We will discuss how research results, especially those of structural biology, are presented to its various audiences.
Fulfills: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Sector
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Instructor: Jeremy J. McInerney
R 12:00 PM-12:59 PM
The Greeks enjoy a special place in the construction of western culture and identity, and yet many of us have only the vaguest notion of what their culture was like. A few Greek myths at bedtime when we are kids, maybe a Greek tragedy like Sophokles' Oidipous when we are at school: these are often the only contact we have with the world of the ancient Mediterranean. The story of the Greeks, however, deserves a wider audience, because so much of what we esteem in our own culture derives from them: democracy, epic poetry, lyric poetry, tragedy, history writing, philosophy, aesthetic taste, all of these and many other features of cultural life enter the West from Greece. The oracle of Apollo at Delphi had inscribed over the temple, "Know Thyself." For us, that also means knowing the Greeks. We will cover the period from the Late Bronze Age, c. 1500 BC, down to the time of Alexander the Great, concentrating on the two hundred year interval from 600-400 BC.
Crosslistings: CLST 0101-402, HIST 0720-402
Fulfills: Cross Cultural Analysis, History & Tradition Sector
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Instructor: Kate Meng Brassel
MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM
What's the relationship between politics and laughter? What do ancient Greek comedians and Roman satirists have in common with today's stand-up comics and other ranters and ravers? Many things, in fact, but perhaps most fundamental is the ways they shock audiences and test social norms. This course will examine the various arts (including textual, video, and musical media) that transgress the boundaries of taste and convention in the cultures of Greece and Rome and our own era. We will consider, among other topics, why communities feel compelled to repudiate some forms of scandalous art, while turning others - especially those that have come down to us from remote historical periods - into so-called classics.
Fulfills: Humanities & Social Science Sector
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Instructor: TBA
MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM
All books, even those regarded by some as "classics", are potentially dangerous. This course will survey a selection of ancient books that got their authors in trouble, were censored, inspired rebellion, or enabled social (and antisocial) movements, down to the present moment. Most of the books read will come from ancient Greece or Rome, but some will come from other ancient cultures, such as Egypt, the Near East, and China. Issues involved will include atheism, race and ethnicity, sex and gender, nationalism, magic, and mysticism. The course will make use of brief lectures and presentations but leave as much time as possible for seminar-style discussion.
Fulfills: Arts & Letters Sector
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Instructor: Victor Gomes
TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM
How do minds work? This course surveys a wide range of answers to this question from disciplines ranging from philosophy to neuroscience. The course devotes special attention to the use of simple computational and mathematical models. Topics include perception, learning, memory, decision making, and language. The course shows how the different views from the parent disciplines interact and identifies some common themes among the theories that have been proposed. The course pays particular attention to the distinctive role of computation in such theories and provides an introduction to some of the main directions of current research in the field. It is a requirement for the BA in Cognitive Science, the BAS in Computer and Cognitive Science, and the minor in Cognitive Science, and it is recommended for students taking the dual degree in Computer and Cognitive Science.
Crosslistings: CIS 1400, LING 1400, LING 1005, PHIL 1840, PSYC 1333
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Instructors: Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Shawn Patterson Jr.
MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM
This course is an introduction to the field of political communication and conceptual approaches to analyzing communication in various forms, including advertising, speech making, campaign debates, and candidates' and office-holders' uses of social media and efforts to frame news. The focus of this course is on the interplay in the U.S. between media and politics. The course includes a history of campaign practices from the 1952 presidential contest through the election of 2020.
Crosslisting: PSCI 1210-401
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Instructors: Amy Gutmann and Sarah Banet-Weiser
Along with many advances in our country and world, we also face crises with inescapable ethical dimensions—threats to life and liberty, fairness and opportunity, privacy and security—where communication plays a key role. This creates an urgent need for us to understand both the art and the ethics of communication. How can we effectively communicate about controversies with conviction and understanding, rather than closed-mindedness and deception? What does it mean and it take to defend justice or a common good in polarized times? How can we respond productively to a crisis rather than to aggravate it and further upset ourselves? Although we come to this course from distinct backgrounds, we both resonate with Rumi: “Do not stray into the neighborhood of despair. For there are hopes: they are real, they exist.” And with Hillel: “What is hateful unto you, do not do unto your neighbor,” to which he added wise advice: “Now, go and study.” Our goal is to learn how and why to communicate effectively with insight and understanding across differences. The course pairs theoretical readings in political theory and communications with case studies. Everyone is expected to keep up with the readings and participate in class discussions.
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Instructor: David Eisenhower
This course examines the vital aspect of communication as a tool of the modern Presidency. Reading and class discussions focus on case studies drawn from modern Presidential administrations (beginning with FDR) that demonstrate the elements of successful and unsuccessful Presidential initiatives and the critical factor of communication common to both. This course is also an introduction to primary research methods and to the use of primary research materials in the Presidential Library system.
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Instructor: Maria Cuellar
MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM
This course discusses the need for stronger scientific foundations in the analysis of forensic evidence from a scientific and a policy perspective. Forensic evidence, such as fingerprints, firearms, and hair, has been analyzed for hundreds of years to inform crime investigations and prosecutions. However, recent advances, especially the use of DNA technology, have revealed that a faulty forensic analyses may have contributed to wrongful convictions. These advances have demonstrated the potential danger of information and testimony derived from imperfect analysis, which can result not just in wrongful convictions but also in errors of impunity. In this course, students learn about the history of forensics, as well as about the recent advances that aim to improve current practices. It is an interdisciplinary course, but it focuses mostly on the statistical and scientific aspects of testing in forensics. Students discuss recent solutions that quantify the uncertainty, limitations, and errors associated with human factors, pattern evidence, and digital evidence. No prior statistical or forensic knowledge is expected. The course will be useful for students who wish to become forensic practitioners, law enforcement officers, lawyers, judges, researchers, or simply informed citizens.
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Instructor: Dilara Bural
MW 5:15 PM-6:44 PM
This course explores the intricate relationship between media and crime through a multidisciplinary lens. It delves into the foundational principles of journalism and news reporting, examining how news values shape public perceptions of crime. Students will analyze various theoretical frameworks and apply them to understand moral panics, media portrayals of different demographic groups, and the depiction of law enforcement in both fictional and non-fictional contexts. Key topics include the influence of media on public fear and perception of crime, the portrayal of children, women, police, and minority groups, and the comparative analysis of crime news across different countries. The course also investigates the role of media in political discourse and its impact on voter beliefs, as well as media coverage of white-collar crime and anti-corruption efforts. Through critical examination of police, courts, and prisons as depicted in the media, students will gain insights into how these institutions are both represented and scrutinized in public discourse. This course provides a comprehensive understanding of the symbiotic relationship between crime and media, emphasizing critical thinking and analytical skills. By the end of the unit students should be able to 1) Assess the role of news sources and news values in producing crime news, 2) Evaluate crime news in historical context and as a sociocultural product, 3) Analyze and theorize the representation of offenders, victims, and criminal justice agencies in the mass media, 4) Engage with a range of theoretical and conceptual explanations for media renderings of crime and criminal justice, and 5) Evaluate fictional representations of crime and criminal justice by locating them historically, culturally, and socially.
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Instructor: Teemu Ruskola
W 5:15 PM-8:14 PM
This class examines queer phenomena in and around China, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the queer Sinophone world more generally. Beyond seeking to understand sexual subcultures and sites of queer intimacies on their own terms, the course examines their relationship to political economy and geopolitics. In addition to filmic and literary texts, the course includes readings that are theoretical, anthropological, sociological, and comparative. While the focus is largely on modern China, the class also attends to historical reference points both inside and outside the Sinophone world. From a macro perspective, this course examines China’s place in discourses of development, focusing on the role of desire in constituting the sexual and political subject of modernity. The overall goal of this class is to develop alternative frameworks for understanding the relationship between sexuality and politics. The course does not require specialized knowledge of China.
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Instructor: Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde
MW 8:30 AM-9:59 AM
This course will study the historical and intellectual forces behind the appearance of market economies on the world stage. The voyages of exploration undertaken by Europeans in the 15th and 16th century created, in just a few decades, a global economy. By 1600, silver from Mexico was exchanged in Manila for ceramics made in Nanjing (China). After a long trip through the Pacific, Mexico, and the Atlantic, the ceramics ended up in the tables of prosperous merchants in Bruges (modern day Belgium). How did this integrated global economy appear? How did global interconnections over the centuries shap our current world? How did markets emerge and influence these interconnections? Who were the winners of globalization? And who were the losers? How did economists, political scientists, and others think about the strengths and weakness of market economies? This course will explore these questions and the role that markets have played in it from the late 15th century to the present. Even if the economic theory will structure much of the discussion, insights from intellectual history, cultural history, microhistory, legal history, and institutional history will help to frame the main narrative. The course will be, as well, truly global. First, beyond the traditional focus of economic history courses on Europe and the Americas, particular attention will be devoted to Africa and Asia. Second, the priority will be to highlight the interconnections between the different regions and to understand how the people living in them negotiated the opportunities and tensions created by the economic transformations triggered by globalization and how they conceptualized the changing lives around them. Finally, the class will highlight how diverse intellectual traditions handled the challenges presented by historical change.
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Instructors: James N. Green and John Pollack
R 1:45-4:44pm
How did Benjamin Franklin strike it rich in the printing business? Did Common Sense really start the American Revolution? What does it mean to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin on a deck of playing cards? This course will investigate book histories, and the worlds of readers, writers, printers, publishers, and libraries in the Americas. It focuses on the colonial period through the nineteenth century, with a concluding look at the modern era. Each week we will look at books, newspapers, pamphlets, pictures, broadsides, or manuscripts—big and small, famous and forgotten. We will think about how books work, not just as texts but as cultural artifacts, and we learn to decode their languages, from title pages to typography to bindings. Our area of study is sometimes referred to as “book history,” and we will try to define this field together. We will examine sources now considered to be “literature” and those that tend to be more studied in “history,” and we won’t be particularly finicky about the differences. Our strategy is to introduce, each week, a range of topics and questions, including: * Colonization, missionization, and printing * Writing and revolution, printing and politics * Black and Indigenous print cultures * Gender, reading, and book history * Technology and change * Bookselling and marketing. The seminar will be held at the Kislak Center in Van Pelt Library and feature its rare book and manuscript collections. A number of seminar meetings will also be held at the Library Company of Philadelphia (1314 Locust Street), an extraordinary research library founded by Franklin in 1731. Assignments include weekly seminar discussion and posts; brief primary source exercises; and a final research project based upon special collections.
Crosslisting: HIST 2104-401
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Instructor: Syd Zolf
T 1:45-4:44pm
Documentary has been described as “a creative treatment of actuality”: writers and artists use documentary methods to turn newspaper reports, legal cases, government documents, human rights testimony, maps, signs, comics, interviews, letters, and ephemera into innovative new forms. In this creative workshop, we’ll discover how documentary forms question truth, appearance, and knowledge—and we will make our own forms to confront the limits of point of view, witnessing, and ideology. Students are welcome in this course no matter what genre of writing or art you are interested in making. Documentary Forms is open to beginners and more experienced practitioners who have an interest in using their writing and artmaking to engage with history and/or the present.
Crosslistings: COML 3409 / GSWS 3409
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Instructor: Ann Moyer
TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM
This course offers an introduction to the world of thought and learning at the heart of European culture, from the Romans through the Renaissance. We begin with the ancient Mediterranean and the formation of Christianity and trace its transformation into European society. Along the way we will examine the rise of universities and institutions for learning, and follow the humanist movement in rediscovering and redefining the ancients in the modern world.
Crosslistings: COML 1201, HIST 1200
Fulfills: Cross Cultural Analysis, History & Tradition Sector
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Instructor: Vance Byrd
MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM
What is culture? What is German? Where are the borders between German, Austrian and Swiss culture? What is part of the "cultural canon"? Who decides and what role does memory play? Relying on the theory of collective memory (Halbwachs) and the concept of "places of memory" (Erinnerungsorte; Nora, Francois/Schulze) and with reference to examplary scholarly and literary texts, debates, songs, films, documents, and paintings from high and pop culture, this course will weave a mosaic of that which (also) constitutes German or German-language culture.
Fulfills: Cross Cultural Analysis
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Instructors: Sharon Hayes and Brooke O'Harra
W 5:15-8:14 PM
This class addresses the meeting points inside of and between a range of resistant performance practices with a focus on artists using performance to address political and social encounters in the contemporary moment. Performance, a chaotic and unruly category that slides across music, dance, theater and visual art, has long been a container for resistant actions/activities that bring aesthetics and politics into dynamic dialogue. Embracing works, gestures, movements, sounds and embodiments that push against and beyond the conventions of a given genre, performance can't help but rub uncomfortably against the status quo. Scholars working across Performance Studies and Black Studies importantly expanded critical discourse around performance to address the entanglement of the medium with physical, psychic, spatial and temporal inhabitations of violence and power. Generating copious genealogies of embodied resistance, this scholarship instigates a complex, interdisciplinary and multidimensional perspective on intersections between art and life, performance and politics. The class hosts a series of public lectures, presentations and performances by visual artists, choreographers, theater artists, composers/musicians, performers, curators and activists engaged with the social and political moment. Presentations will be open to the public with students in the course developing in-depth research into the work of each visiting artist/performer/presenter to engage the larger context of each visitor's scholarship and/or practice through readings, discussion and in-class presentations. This course is open to all interested students. No prior requisites or experience with performance or the performing arts is necessary.
Fulfills: Cross Cultural Analysis
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Instructor: Melissa Sanchez
MW 12:00 PM-12:59 PM
This course will introduce students to the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality mark our bodies, influence our perceptions of self and others, organize families and work like, delimit opportunities for individuals and groups of people, as well as impact the terms of local and transnational economic exchange. We will explore the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality work with other markers of difference and social status such as race, age, nationality, and ability to further demarcate possibilities, freedoms, choices, and opportunities available to people.
Crosslisting: ENGL 0159
Fulfills: Cultural Diversity in the U.S.
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Instructors: Austin Svedjan and George N. Perez
TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM
While mainstream conversations tend to frame “transgender” as a perpetually new phenomenon, this introduction to trans studies will contextualize present-day gender expansiveness within a longer intellectual history. We will be guided by the following questions: What does trans mean and how has its meaning been shaped by regimes of gender, race, colonization, ability, and medical and legal regulation? What are the main concerns of trans studies/activism, particularly in relation to more established academic fields? How have trans artists, activists, and scholars imagined other, more just worlds? By engaging with scholarship from multiple fields as well as a range of creative work, we will consider the emergence of “transgender” as both an object of knowledge and a way of knowing.
Fulfills: Cultural Diversity in the U.S.
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Instructor:  Ada Kuskowski
MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM
This course explores the history and conceptual underpinnings of modern law in the West. What exactly is law? What is its relationship with politics and religion? Where do our notions of constitutionalism come from? How have we come to think in terms of rights? Using a historical and comparative approach, we will examine legal thought and culture in the European West from the Greek concept of nomos to the main categories of law developed in Roman antiquity, concepts of constitutionalism and rights crafted in medieval Europe, the development of the two main legal traditions of Europe (Common Law and Civil Law), and the emergence of intellectual property, human rights discourse and modern international law. The course will blend intellectual, political and social history. We will study concepts and intellectual categories such as crime, proof, punishment and the public/private distinction alongside illustrative cases that either exemplified the law or pushed it forward, foundational documents such as Magna Carta, and political developments such as the Peace of Westphalia, credited with the birth of modern state sovereignty and modern international law. Together, these subjects form core foundations of how we think and do law today.
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Instructor: Jared Farmer
M 3:30 PM-6:29 PM
The 2020 protests about monuments in Philadelphia and across the nation exposed this truth: Arguments over history are political arguments about the future. The subsequent countermovement to restore monuments, memorials, statues, and place-names, as well as “classical” and “traditional” architecture, has further politicized the landscape of memory. In this place-based, Philadelphia-centric course (including campus walking tours and local field trips), we will examine how the built environment communicates ideas about—and creates connections to—the past. These ideas and these landscapes can be inclusive or exclusive, or both. The goal of this course is to inspire greater dialogue about national history and public space, two kinds of shared projects in a democracy. Students will learn about the making of the US memorial landscape in the long nineteenth century, its remaking in the twentieth century, and its possible futures now in the (re)making. The course will also put Philadelphia and the US in global context, for the politics of historical memory exist everywhere there are monuments.

This course, being held during America250, will feature at least four field trips to sites in Philadelphia. Experiential learning in public spaces is key to understanding monuments. Mobility note: these field trips will require considerable walking.
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Instructor: Seçil Yilmaz
MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM
This course examines the formation of the modern notions of human, humanity, and human rights as well as the emergence of institutions of humanitarianism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The course begins with a theoretical study of religious and secular implications of human and humanitarianism as well as social relief and charity in diverse historical settings from the pre-modern and modern times around the world. Following the conceptual analysis, it delves into the historical and social circumstances of humanitarian politics and discourses that shaped human (and environmental) stories of conflict and survival in the contexts of modern war-making, displacement, public health and epidemic diseases as well as natural disasters. It moves from the “long” nineteenth century into twentieth-century political, social, medical, and natural events by analyzing the emergence of a new and global vocabulary of humanitarianism such as refugee, asylum, settlement, and trafficking. Students explore the connections and distinctions between national and supra-national, colonial and postcolonial, metropole and colony.  The course will cover the humanitarian role of Red Cross/Crescent, League of Nations, missionary networks as well as Cold War initiatives such as USAID, PathFinder Fund, UNHCR, Rockefeller Foundation,  as well as post-Cold War initiatives such as Physicians without Borders and their impact on local practices of education, medical assistance,  and public health networks, gender dynamics as well as natural resources and  refugee settlement architecture.
Crosslisting: GSWS 1765
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Instructor: Adelheid Voskuhl
TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM
What is the relationship between technology and politics in global democracies? This course explores various forms of technology, its artifacts and experts in relation to government and political decision-making. Does technology "rule' or "run" society, or should it? How do democratic societies balance the need for specialized technological expertise with rule by elected representatives? Topics will include: industrial revolutions, factory production and consumer society, technological utopias, the Cold War, state policy, colonial and post-colonial rule, and engineers' political visions.
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Instructor: Jonathan D. Katz
MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM
The establishment of postmodern art as a chronological development is built into the very term postmodern, but unfortunately chronology gets everything about postmodernism wrong. It is not born after modernism but is rather coterminous with it and a product of the same forces. Nor does it succeed modern art, but rather in some fundamental ways instead critiques it, for the postmodern is more concerned with what infects art from outside its frame-including history, society, gender, racial and sexual politics, etc.-- than anything that develops within it. This course is thus concerned with the heyday of postmodern art from roughly the 1950 through the 1980s, although we begin in the early 20th century with the work of Marcel Duchamp. We will look at artists as different as Cindy Sherman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, John Cage, Andy Warhol, and Kara Walker, and pay particular attention to art about AIDS. Roughly evenly divided between art and theory, the course presumes no prior knowledge of either. Still, as Jacques Derrida explained, binaries such as modernism and postmodernism remain extremely useful to power, because they uphold the status quo, circumscribing the field of contestation to either one pole or the other, and thus eliminating other possibilities. This course is concerned with these other possibilities.
Crosslistings: ARTH 6873, GSWS 287s, GSWS 6873
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Instructor: Efrat Yerday
MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM
This course examines the concept of Blackness within Israeli popular culture and contemporary art. We will explore how Blackness is constructed, represented, and contested in Israeli-Jewish society, considering both its historical roots and evolving meanings. Central questions will include: Who is considered Black in Israel? and How does Blackness in Israel compare to Blackness in the United States? Focusing primarily on two major groups within Jewish society — Mizrahi Jews and Ethiopian Jews — the course will analyze their representation in mainstream Israeli culture, and how these representations are challenged by contemporary non-white artists. A range of visual art forms will be incorporated to deepen our understanding of the cultural narratives at play.
Crosslistings: AFRC1145, MELC1660
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Instructor: Simcha Gross
M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM
Attacking the Talmud: From Antiquity to the Alt-Right examines the long and evolving history of polemics, censorship, and hostility directed at the Talmud and rabbinic Judaism, from late antiquity through the medieval and early modern periods to contemporary extremist movements. Treating attacks on the Talmud as a window into broader dynamics of religious conflict, political power, and antisemitism, the course analyzes how Jewish texts have been read, misread, weaponized, banned, burned, and repurposed across cultures and centuries.
Students will study ancient pagan and Christian critiques of rabbinic authority, medieval disputations and trials of the Talmud, early modern censorship and print culture, and modern racial, conspiratorial, and ideological appropriations of anti-Talmud discourse. Special attention is given to how the Talmud has been represented by its opponents versus how it functions within Jewish intellectual, legal, and religious life. The course also explores contemporary digital and alt-right rhetoric, tracing continuities and ruptures with earlier traditions of anti-Jewish thought.
Through close readings of primary sources, engagement with scholarly analysis, and focused case studies, students will develop the tools to critically evaluate polemical texts and to understand how attacks on Jews and Jewish texts have been shaped by the specific historical, social, and political conditions of each era. Emphasis is placed on historical context, methodological rigor, and ethical responsibility in the study of contested religious traditions.
Crosslistings: HIST4560, MELC456, RELS4560
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Instructor: Catherine Bartch
TR 4:30 PM-5:59 PM
Diplomacy in the Americas is an academically based community-service course where students explore what it means to educate youth for global civic and political engagement. Students apply theoretical and pedagogical principles in curriculum design, classroom teaching, and collaborative learning with public high school students on the topics of Latin American politics and the role of the Organization of American States (OAS). Analyzing and strategizing like a diplomat and guided by theories of democracy and the other three OAS pillars of economic development, security, and human rights, students will collectively examine and propose solutions to the most pressing issues in the Americas. This course is also an SNF Paideia Program Course.
Crosslisting: PSCI 2420
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Instructor: Mark Liberman
MW 12:00 PM-12:59 PM
A general introduction to the nature, history and use of human language, speech and writing. Topics include the biological basis of human language, and analogous systems in other creatures; relations to cognition, communication, and social organization; sounds, forms and meanings in the world's languages; the reconstruction of linguistic history and the family tree of languages; dialect variation and language standardization; language and gender; language learning by children and adults; the neurology of language and language disorders; the nature and history of writing systems. Intended for any undergraduate interested in language or its use, this course is also recommended as an introduction for students who plan to major in linguistics.
Fulfills: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Sector
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Instructor: Marlyse Baptista
TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM
This course introduces the foundations of linguistics - the scientific study of language - through exploration of multilingualism in the USA and in different societies around the world. Contacts between groups of people speaking different languages are documented from earliest records, and around the world it remains the norm to find more than one language in regular use in a single community. In this course we will see that multilingualism is a catalyst for linguistic change: sometimes languages are lost; sometimes new languages are created; sometimes the structure of a language is radically altered. We will consider: Which parts of linguistic structure are most susceptible to change under conditions of bilingualism? Does language contact - whether a result of trade, education, migration, conquest, or intermarriage - influence language structure in predictable ways? How do individual speakers handle multiple languages? How have attitudes to speakers of multiple languages changed through history? How have socio-historical events shaped the linguistic situation in the USA?
Fulfills: History & Tradition Sector
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Instructor: Aaron Anderson
MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM
The course focuses on topics drawn from the central areas of mathematical logic: model theory, proof theory, set theory, and computability theory.
Crosslistings: LGIC 3100, PHIL 4721, PHIL 6721 
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Instructor: Lori Flanagan-Cato
T 9:00 AM-10:14 AM
This ABCS course blends academically based community service with a senior seminar focused on neuroendocrinology.  Students in the course will design and teach lessons for high school students that focus on hormones and behavior.  In parallel, college students will participate in journal club-style discussions focused on basic and clinical science discoveries pertinent to these topics. This combination of content learning and community engagement supports Penn's mission to relentlessly create and apply knowledge for the good of society. This is an Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) course.
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Instructor: Doug Paletta
TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM
Market exchange, where the seller provides a good or service at a price the buyer accepts, serves as a basic element of our society. It embodies certain values of freedom of exchange, and, when well-functioning, promotes economic efficiency. We also know there are illegal markets for human organs, an enormous amount of money is spent to influence our democratic elections, and that giving a friend a loan can change the dynamics of your relationship. Should everything be for sale? How should we balance the benefits and values of free market exchange with other values? What influence do markets have in shaping the way we relate to one another? This course will consider questions like these to explore when and what kind of moral limits should be placed on markets.
Fulfills: Society sector (all classes)
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Instructor: Errol Lord
MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM
This first-year seminar presupposes no background in philosophy. 
Fulfills: Society sector (all classes)
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Instructor: Daniel Wodak
TR 10:15 AM-11:14 AM
This is a critical survey of the history of western modern political philosophy, beginning from the Early Modern period and concluding with the 19th or 20th Century. Our study typically begins with Hobbes and ends with Mill or Rawls. The organizing theme of our investigation will be the idea of the Social Contract. We will examine different contract theories as well as criticisms and proposed alternatives to the contract idea, such as utilitarianism. Besides the above, examples of authors we will read are Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Mill and Marx.
Fulfills: Society sector (all classes)
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Instructor: Amy Funck
M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM
Led by fellows in the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program, this course teaches students how to conduct research in PPE with an emphasis on creating a well-formed research question, determining what kinds of data or scholarly research bears on that question, and how to carry out an interdisciplinary, research-driven project on that question.
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Instructor: Jair Alexander Moreira
MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM
An advanced seminar in PPE offered by Paideia-affiliated faculty. As an advanced interdisciplinary seminar, this course is open to juniors and seniors with a declared PPE major (open to others by departmental permission). 
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Instructor: Loren C. Goldman
TR 10:15 AM-11:14 AM
Whether America begins with the Puritans and the Mayflower Compact, or with the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution, it is founded in resistance to empire. In the generations between, Americans have desired, dreaded and debated empire. This course will focus on empire and imperialism in American political thought. We will read primary texts addressing empire: from the departure and dissent of the Puritans, and Burke's Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, to twentieth and twenty-first century debates over America's role in the world. These texts will include political pamphlets and speeches, poetry, novels, policy papers and film.
Fulfills: Humanities & Social Science Sector
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Instructor: Tulia G. Falleti
T 3:30 PM-6:29 PM
This course examines the dynamics of political and economic change in twentieth century Latin America, with the goal of achieving an understanding of contemporary politics in the region. We will analyze topics such as the incorporation of the region to the international economy and the consolidation of oligarchic states (1880s to 1930s), corporatism, populism, and elict pacts (1930s and 1940s), social revolution, democratic breakdown, and military rule (1960s and 1970s), transitions to democracy and human rights advocacy (1980s), makret-oriented reforms (1990s), and the turn to the left of current governments (2000s). The course will draw primarily from the experiences of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Mexico. No prior knowledge of the region is required.
Crosslistings: LALS 1120
Fulfills: Cross Cultural Analysis
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Instructor: Daniel Hopkins
TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM
In 1960, a Democratic candidate won a very narrow Presidential victory with just 100,000 votes; in 2000, the Democratic candidate lost but received 500,000 more votes than his opponent. Still, contemporary scholars and journalists have made a variety of arguments about just how much the American political landscape changed in the intervening 40 years, often calling recent decades a transformation. This course explores and critically evaluates those arguments. Key questions include: how, if at all, have Americans political attitudes and ideologies changed? How have their connections to politics changed? What has this meant for the fortunes and strategies of the two parties? How have the parties' base voters and swing voters changed? What changes in American society have advantaged some political messages and parties at the expense of others? Focusing primarily on mass-level politics, we consider a wide range of potential causes, including the role of race in American politics, suburbanization, economic transformations, the evolving constellation and structure of interest groups, declining social capital, the changing role of religion, immigration, and the actions of parties and political elites. For three weeks in the semester, we will take a break from considering broader trends to look at specific elections in some depth.
Fulfills: Quantitative Data Analysis
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Instructor: Cullen Blake
TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM
The developed world's dependence on fossil fuels for energy production has extremely undesirable economic, environmental, and political consequences, and is likely to be mankind's greatest challenge in the 21st century. We describe the physical principles of energy, its production and consumption, and environmental consequences, including the greenhouse effect. We will examine a number of alternative modes of energy generation - fossil fuels, biomass, wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear - and study the physical and technological aspects of each, and their societal, environmental and economic impacts over the construction and operational lifetimes. No previous study of physics is assumed.
Fulfills: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Sector
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Instructor: Jolyon Thomas
This first-year seminar examines how religion works on, in, and through institutions such as penitentiaries, residential facilities for Native children, private universities, for-profit corporations, and public schools. Focusing on the State of Pennsylvania and the City of Philadelphia as examples of broader national trends, we investigate the fraught religious history of many local educational, correctional, and cultural institutions. The class begins with a field trip to the local Eastern State Penitentiary—the first prison in the world that focused on fostering religious penitence as a mode of rehabilitation—and ends by considering recent calls for the tax-exempt University of Pennsylvania to offer Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILOTs) to the City of Philadelphia. We consider topics such as the role of religion in prison culture, federal and supreme court cases related to mandatory schoolhouse rituals such as Bible reading and the flag salute, and the precursors and aftermath of the 1985 MOVE bombing (a notorious incident in which the Philadelphia police dropped C4 explosives on the residence of a marginalized religious movement, destroying more than 60 homes in West Philadelphia).
Fulfills: Cultural Diversity in the U.S., Humanities & Social Science Sector
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Instructor: Megan Robb
What does it mean to be a gendered individual in a Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, or Buddhist religious tradition? How important are gender differences in deciding social roles, ritual activities, and spiritual vocations? This course tackles these questions, showing how gender - how it is taught, performed, and regulated - is central to understanding religion. In this course we will learn about gendered rituals, social roles, and mythologies in a range of religious traditions. We will also look at the central significance of gender to the field of religious studies generally. Part of the course will be focused on building a foundation of knowledge about a range of religious traditions and the role of gender in those traditions. This course focuses on religious traditions with origins outside the West. Although it is beyond the scope of this class to offer comprehensive discussions of any one religious tradition, the aim is to provide entry points into the study of religious traditions through the lens of gender. This course will train you in historical, anthropological, and theoretical methodologies. We will also read religion through feminist and queer lenses - we will explore the key characteristics of diverse feminist and queer studies approaches to religion, as well as limits of those approaches.
Crosslisting: GSWS 0050
Fulfills: Cross Cultural Analysis, Humanities & Social Science Sector
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Instructor: Ketaki Umesh Jaywant
TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM
Can we deploy a comparative lens to understand the categories of caste and race better? Does their juxtaposition illuminate new facets of these two structures of ‘global inequalities’? The course seeks to explore these questions by systematically studying how both caste and racial institutions, structures, and identities were historically produced, transformed, and challenged through their global circulation from the nineteenth-century to the present. Caste and race have been old co-travelers, and their various points of intersection can be traced at least to the nineteenth century. And so, in this course we will embark upon a historical adventure, one replete with stories of violence, political intrigue, intense emotions, as also episodes of incandescent resistance. Together, we will trace the genealogy of how modern categories of ‘caste’ and ‘race’ were systematically composed by colonial knowledge production, orientalist writings, and utilitarian discourse, both in Europe and the colonies. While colonialism and the global hegemony of European modernity were crucial to the co-constitution and the circulation of caste and race, anti-caste and anti-race politics too have historically brought a unique comparative lens to these two categories. And so, this course will also include a close analysis of critical works on caste and race by activists and intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the present from all over the world.
Crosslistings: AFRC 0511, GSWS 0511, SOCI 0511
Fulfills: Society Sector
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Instructor: Mahboob Ali Mohammad
TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM
This course focuses on the key themes of protest and resistance in contemporary South Asian literarure. Most South Asian countries have been witnessing an endless wave of protests and resistance from various sections of public life for the last three decades. In India, for example, protest literature emerges not only from traditionally marginalized groups (the poor, religious and ethnic minorities, depressed castes and tribal communities), but also from upper-caste groups, whose protest literature expresses concerns over economic oppression, violence and the denial of fundamental rights. Literature is becoming an immediate tool to articualte acts of resistance and anger, as many writers and poets are also taking on new roles as poitical activists. In this class, we will read various contemporary works of short fiction, poetry and memoirs to comprehend shifts in public life toward political and social activism in South Asia. We will also watch two or three documentaries that focus on public protests and resistance. No pre-requisites or South Asian language requirements. All literary works will be read in English translations.
Crosslistings: COML 2223, SAST 5223
Fulfills: Cross Cultural Analysis
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Instructor: Amy Hillier
MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM
The great scholar and civil rights leader, W.E.B. Du Bois, came to Philadelphia in 1896 to research the Black population of the Seventh Ward. The University of Pennsylvania published his study in 1899 as The Philadelphia Negro. We use this text as a starting point to consider how race, racism, class, and gender shaped, and continue to shape, the opportunities and experiences of Philadelphians. We also explore the concepts of abolition, reparations, affirmative action, and restorative justice. Taking inspiration from Du Bois’ mixture of research methods and data sources, the course will focus on a range of historical research and digital humanities methods, including oral history, geographic information systems mapping, podcasts, video, augmented reality, data visualization, and gaming. Students will develop skills in one or more of these methods and develop new materials for teaching high school and college students about Du Bois and Philadelphia.
Fulfills: Cultural Diversity in the U.S., Humanities & Social Science Sector
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Instructor: Dominic Vitiello
T 10:15 AM-1:14 PM
This course focuses on immigrant, migrant, and refugee communities in United States cities and suburbs. We survey migration and community experiences among a broad range of racial and ethnic groups in different city and suburban neighborhoods. Class readings, discussions, regular trips, and assignments explore topics including labor markets, commerce, housing, community organizations, social movements, race and ethnic relations, neighborhood change, refugee resettlement, and transnational communities. The class introduces students to a variety of social science approaches to studying cities and communities, including readings in sociology, geography, anthropology, social history, and political science.
Crosslistings: ASAM 0270, LALS 0270, SOCI 0270
Fulfills: Cultural Diversity in the U.S., Society Sector
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