Please consult ConnectCarolina (through MyUNC) for the most up-to-date information about FYS offerings and availability.

For more information about a specific instructor, please click on the instructor name, if highlighted.

African, African American, and Diaspora Studies (AAAD)
American Studies (AMST)
Anthropology (ANTH)
Art History (ARTH)
Asian Studies (ASIA)
Chemistry (CHEM)
City and Regional Plannning (PLAN)
Classics (CLAS)
Communication (COMM)
Computer Science (COMP)
Dramatic Art (DRAM)
Economics (ECON)
Education (EDUC)
English (ENGL)
Geography (GEOG)
Geology (GEOL)
German and Slavic Languages and Literatures (GERM)
History (HIST)
Interdisciplinary Studies (IDST)
Information and Library Science (INLS)
Latin American Studies (LTAM)
Mathematics (MATH)
Philosophy (PHIL)
Physics and Astronomy (PHYS)
Political Science (POLI)
Psychology (PSYC)
Public Policy (PLCY)
Religious Studies (RELI)
Romance Languages and Literatures (ROML)
Sociology (SOCI)
Statistics and Operations Research (STOR)

African, African American, and Diaspora Studies

AAAD 50.001: Defining Blackness
SS, US
TTH, 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM
Candis Watts Smith

Professor Candis Watts Smith tends to ask research questions that blur disciplinary lines; many of the questions she poses can only be answered by considering bodies of literature, theoretical frameworks, and methodological strategies found in Sociology, Political Science, Psychology and Public Policy. Her research interests focuses on American political behavior and Racial and Ethnic Politics. Here, she focuses on individuals’ and groups’ policy preferences, particularly around social policies that exacerbate or ameliorate disparities and inequality between groups.

Dr. Smith uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to answer research questions. This mixed-method approach is best illustrated in her first book Black Mosaic: The Politics of Black Pan-Ethnic Diversity (NYU Press, 2014). Her work also appears in journals like the Annual Review of Political Science, The Journal of Black Studies, and Politics, Groups & Identities as well as in edited book volumes.

Currently, Candis Watts Smith is working on a book length manuscript focused on the political attitudes, behaviors, and preferences of the Millennial generation. This book aims to answer questions like: Should we expect cohort replacement to continue to liberalize Americans’ racial attitudes as it has done historically? To what extent are the levels, structure and nature of Millennials’ racial attitudes different from members of older generational cohorts? How has the incorporation (or resistance) of colorblindness influenced their preferences on policies concerning racial minorities and racialized groups like low-income people and immigrants?

In addition to being an Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Dr. Smith is also an Adjunct Professor of African and African American Diaspora Studies. Prior to joining the UNC community, Professor Smith taught at Williams College and was also a Postdoctoral Fellow at Texas A&M University. She received her B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University.

The boundaries of Blackness are constantly in flux, and pinning down an accurate definition of Blackness in the U.S., to be specific, is becoming an increasing complicated task due to changing social norms, immigration, emigration, the increasing number of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, the growing number of multi-racial persons, and even increasing socioeconomic bifurcation among those traditionally categorized as Black. Who is included in the definition of Black is not only a matter of color and history but also of politics, culture, and self-identification. Over the course of the semester, we will engage in the debates around Blackness. We will examine scholarly texts and government documents as well as film, novels, and memoirs. Our goal is to attempt to define Blackness as well as to understand the mechanisms that influence the boundaries and definition of Blackness.

AAAD 52.001: Kings, Presidents, and Generals: Africa’s Bumpy Road to Democracy
BN, CI
TTH, 2:00 – 3:15 PM
Bereket Selassie

Bereket Selassie is the William E. Leuchtenburg Professor of African Studies, and Professor of Law at UNC, Chapel Hill. After over 20 years of engagement in government, law and diplomacy, Professor Selassie chose university teaching as a career. He has always enjoyed teaching, even when in government, and he has been engaged in full-time teaching for over 30 years. Professor Selassie’s roles in government service have included serving as Attorney General and Associate Supreme Court Justice of Ethiopia, among other positions. More recently, he served as the Chairman of the Constitutional Commission of Eritrea (1994-1997), and he has been a senior consultant on the drafting of constitutions in Nigeria, Iraq, and other countries.

This seminar is designed to introduce students to Africa’s modern history and politics. Starting with a brief, recent history of the continent, we will focus on the variety of systems of government in Africa and the challenges facing them. Traditional institutions, juxtaposed with modern institutions, will be discussed with a special focus on the types of leadership involved in such institutions. A major part of the seminar will pose questions such as:

What has been Africa’s record in the march toward democracy?
What are the obstacles to democratic transition and how have Africans tried to overcome such obstacles?
What are the roles of the constitutional systems and the forms of government in advancing democracy?
What is the role of leadership?
What difference does the type of leadership (monarchy, republican, etc.) make in the march toward democracy?

AAAD 89.001: Globalization of Hip-Hop
SS, GL
TTH, 2:00 – 3:15 PM
Perry Hall

Dr. Perry Hall was involved in the early development of African American Studies with the National Council for Black Studies, chairing the committee that produced the first report on Black Studies core curriculum. His scholarship has explored issues of culture, identity and transformation, focusing especially on popular music as a medium of cultural production. His current book project, “Orality, Literacy, and Cultural Production: African Americans and Racial Modernity,” presents a fuller development of these issues in a study that respectively situates oral forms of black cultural expression (foregrounding popular music) and literate forms within the wider context of Western modernity.

This course will examine hip hop’s emergence in the US, and the proliferation of its practices and precepts to the far corners of the world through processes of cultural globalization, while focusing particularly on its manifestations on the African continent. Using Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, and South Africa as initial case examples, the course will highlight variations that reflect the unique postcolonial and neoliberal landscapes with which African countries currently contend. In that context, the course will focus on ways that hip hop serves as a major conduit connecting African youth to global flows of information and sensibility, influences and stimulates local, indigenous forms of musical expression, how, particularly for young Africans, hip hop functions as a medium for political discourse and activism, and how, in the wake of neo-liberal austerity, hip hop forms a vehicle of social agency for displaced, generally youthful groups.

American Studies

AMST 61.001: Navigating the World through American Eyes
GL
MW, 11:15 AM – 12:30 PM
Rachel A. Willis

Rachel A. Willis is a Senior Fellow at the Global Research Institute and Associate Professor of American Studies and Economics at UNC. She has won numerous awards including the UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Student Undergraduate Teaching Award, and the Robert Sigmon Award for Service Learning. Her teaching methods incorporate innovative field study, collaborative assignments and experiential learning through events and programs outside of the classroom. Her research focuses broadly on access to work and in recent years have focused on the impact of climate change on transportation infrastructure in port cities

This first year seminar is designed to better prepare students for future international travel, research, service, and work opportunities while understanding the implications of national identity and action in a global environment. Using group projects, collaborative field study, and individual proposal writing, we will explore a wide range of issues. Differences in geography, politics, religion, culture, gender roles, and more will be considered as students intensely develop individual plans for foreign travel, study, and work using readings, class exercises, documentary video and photography, and interviews. There will be a special focus on transportation systems and other forms of infrastructure that impact navigating places, people, and information. In addition, the class will have specialized access to professional resources to help identify funding sources for travel. Students will be individually guided through the fellowship application process of researching international travel opportunities and writing a competitive travel proposal and budget.

ANTHROPOLOGY

ANTH 60H.001: Crisis and Resilience
HS, BN, CI
TTH, 12:30 – 1:45 PM
Patricia A. McAnany

Patricia A. McAnany, Kenan Eminent Professor of Anthropology, has conducted archaeological research and cultural heritage programs in the Maya region for 15 years. Her current project, the Maya Area Cultural Heritage Initiative (MACHI), www.machiproject.org, focuses on educational programs with descendant Maya communities. With support from the National Science Foundation, she has researched the political economy of cacao (chocolate) and salt production in the Sibun Valley as well as ancestor veneration and wetlands reclamation at K’axob. The author of numerous books and articles, she is co-editor (with Norman Yoffee) of Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, Cambridge University Press, 2009. She maintains an active interest in scenarios of societal crises and human resilience as portrayed in popular and scholarly media.

The goal of this FYS is to encourage you to adopt a long view of human societies and examine responses to crises engendered by political, economic, and environmental forces over the longue durée. Perspectives on societal change – both apocalyptic and transformational – are critically examined in this seminar in light of a suite of case studies that reach back to Mesopotamia (3rd millennium B.C.), Classic Maya and U.S. Pueblo dwellers of the first millennium A.D. and also include contemporary situations such as the Rwandan genocide, nations such as Haiti that are alleged to be “failed” states, and the global crisis of environmental sustainability. You will gain familiarity with evaluating archaeological, historical, and environmental information that is pertinent to social change. The aim of the seminar is to foster critical thinking and the ability to evaluate narratives (in both scholarly and popular media) about societal crises and human resilience.

Seminar research materials include books, journal articles, films, and student-run interviews. Class meetings generally consist of a short, introductory lecture followed by discussion headed by class discussion leaders who develop and circulate “talking points” before each class meeting based upon reading material for that day’s seminar. Additionally, each student will select a topic or a case study to research in depth, develop a short class presentation (10 minutes), and write a final research paper.

ANTH 66H.001: Saving the World? Humanitarianism in Action
SS GL
MWF, 1:25 – 2:15 PM
Peter Redfield

Peter Redfield is Professor of Anthropology. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and his doctorate from U.C. Berkeley. His specialty concerns relations between science, technology and society, particularly in post-colonial settings. He also teaches courses on human rights and humanitarianism, and recently completed a book project on the organization Doctors Without Borders.

What happens when people try to “do good”, especially at a global scale? In this seminar we will explore international aid, with an emphasis on its medical end and the set of organizations and institutions that exist to offer assistance to people suffering from disaster, endemic poverty and health disparities. The current aid complex includes a wide variety of forms and activities, from large bureaucracies to tiny NGOs, massive health campaigns to lonely clinics. We will approach this phenomenon from the critical and comparative perspective of anthropology, focusing on actual human practice. Which forms of suffering receive international attention, and which do not? How do money and services flow and stop relative to inequality? What range of outcomes do different aid projects produce?

Over the semester we will engage in two collective endeavors. First, to better situate current problems, we will review the background history of humanitarianism and development, including colonial missions as well as state oriented projects of social welfare. Thus equipped, we will then examine a number of case studies. During this section of the course students will engage in research projects, exploring specific examples in greater depth.

ANTH 89.062: Blackness and Racialization: A Multidimensional Approach
HS, US
MWF, 1:25 – 2:15 PM
Charles Price

Charles Price is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Charles’s research, writing and activity focus on Black racial identity, Rastafari identity, life narrative genres, action research, community organizations and community organizing, people-centered community development, and social movements, with a geographic concentration on the United States and Jamaica. Charles authored the book Becoming Rasta: The Origins of Rastafari Identity in Jamaica (2009, New York University Press), co-authored the monograph Community Collaborations: Promoting Community Organizing (2009, Ford Foundation), and is under contract with NYU Press to write a sequel to Becoming Rasta, a book on collective identity formation and ethnogenesis among the Rastafari people of Jamaica. He is developing a historically grounded qualitative approach to explaining collective identity formation. Another project in development involves a collaboration with a faculty member to develop an action-oriented study of how Black men in North Carolina and Connecticut negotiate challenges and obstacles in their lives.

Blackness and Racialization is an introduction to the history, social construction, cultural production, and lived experience of race. The course focuses on Blackness in the United States and Jamaica (for comparison), though it necessarily addresses other race formations such as Whiteness and Brownness. The course approaches racialization from three angles: historical; social; and personal. It utilizes historical, theoretical, ethnographic, and popular culture productions to explain the effects, uses, durability, and pliability of racial formations.
Some questions that the course will address include:

What does the social construction of race mean in practice? How is race socially constructed?
How do racial categories and identities develop, persist, and change?
How does race work at various “levels,” such as the level of the individual, collectivity, and history?
What are the origins of various racial stereotypes?
Why do people have very different understandings of race, some embracing race, some rejecting race, and some claiming to not understand race at all?

ART HISTORY

ARTH 89.001: Cathedrals, Abbeys, Castles: Gothic Art and Architecture (c. 1130-1450)
VP, WB, CI
MWF, 10:10 – 11:00 AM
Christoph Brachmann

Professor Christoph Brachmann graduated from Technical University Berlin, Germany, in 1994 with a Ph.D. thesis on 13th century French gothic architecture. In 2004 he presented his “Habilitationsschrift”, his second book, on Lorraine Court art in the late 15th, early16th centuries, published in 2006.

After having taught between 1994 and 2009 at the Technical University Berlin (“Assistant”, “Oberassistent”), Christoph Brachmann became in 2010 Mary H. Cain Distinguished Professor of Art History at UNC Chapel Hill. His research focuses on Central European art of the Middle Ages and early modern times (esp. France and Germany).

This course explores Gothic church and secular architecture in France and Europe between 1130 and ca 1450. We will focus not only on the formal and constructive progresses in architecture during this period, but also on the social, political, and economic aspects of medieval society that affected all these developments. Case studies will integrate the churches full array of stained glass windows, as well as the plethora of sculptures embellishing the colossal portals of these buildings.

Students will combine the study of architecture with the study of medieval culture, exploring for example the impact of the cult of saints, princely courts and civil authority, religious reform and radicalism and rising urbanism. By the end of the course students will be familiar with canonical works of European art and architecture, and understand the fruitful exchange within Europe during this period. The focus on single works in a variety of media – architecture, sculpture, glass painting – will offer the opportunity to study them in depth while also gaining exposure to a range of interpretive methods and the richness of the historical context.

ARTH 89.002: Fashion Design: Africa/Europe
VP, GL
TTH, 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM
Victoria L. Rovine

Victoria L. Rovine is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on clothing and textiles in Africa, with particular attention to innovations in forms and meanings across cultures. Her first book, Bogolan: Shaping Culture through Cloth in Contemporary Mali (Smithsonian Press, 2001 and Indiana University Press, 2008), examined the recent transformations of a richly symbolic textile. Her second book, African Fashion, Global Style: Histories, Innovations, and Ideas You Can Wear (Indiana University Press, 2014), explores the innovations of designers from Africa, past and present, as well as Africa’s presence in Western fashion design.

This class, which is taught from the perspective of art history, looks at fashion design as fine art, using dress innovations to explore aesthetics and culture in two different world regions: Europe and Africa. Fashion is generally associated with the West, centered in Paris, the iconic fashion city. We will use scholarly and popular writing about fashion, as well as images and video, to investigate how European and African cultures have imagined each other over the course of several centuries, including the colonial period. Our focus will be on the present, however, as we investigate how fashion design can reveal a great deal about the interactions, and the misunderstandings, between cultures.

ASIAN STUDIES

ASIA 52.001: Food in Chinese Culture
LA, BN
TTH, 2:00 – 3:15 PM
Dr. Gang Yue teaches a variety courses on modern China and Tibet.

“You are what you eat,” but equally important is how you eat it. The rich tradition of Chinese food and the even richer tradition of writing about food offer a great food for thought. This course uses latest food writings to explore the major themes and topics related to food and food culture of China as well as Chinese food in North America.

CHEMISTRY

CHEM 70.001: You Don’t Have to Be a Rocket Scientist
PL
TTH, 2:00 – 3:15 PM
Gary Glish

Professor Gary Glish is an analytical chemist. He cherishes that title because most people do not know what analytical chemistry is so he can do all kinds of different research and call it analytical chemistry. His general field of research is in mass spectrometry, a technique that also spans many different disciplines. His lab is involved in areas from development of new instrumentation to characterizing the chemical content of tobacco and e-cigarette aerosols and detecting leukemia peptide antigens. In his free time Prof. Glish plays basketball, soccer, tennis and bikes. He needs to keep active because he also likes to cook (and eat).

Science as presented in the mass media is often shallow and misleading. Critical evaluation of news reports and claims by politicians, although daunting for the non-scientist, is not difficult if a few basic principles are applied. The underlying theme of this seminar is the development of the basic tools for critically examining information from, or flaws in, news reports and popular science writing. Additional readings by and about scientists are designed to present scientists and science in a more intimate context. The assigned books may include: Cantor’s dilemma by Carl Djerassi; “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman; and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert Pirsig.

CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING

PLAN 58.001: Globalization and the Transformation of Local Economies
SS, GL
TTh, 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM
Meenu Tewari

Meenu Tewari teaches economic development and regional planning in the department of City and Regional Planning. Her interest in studying issues of poverty and development grew out of observing the paradoxes of growth and innovation and resilience that are simultaneously mixed in with deprivation, want and need in industrializing countries like India where she grew up. This led her to study economic and international development at M.I.T, where she earned her Master’s and Doctoral degrees before joining the faculty at UNC. She works on issues of comparative economic and industrial development, the political economy of poverty, small firms, public sector reform and the informal sector. Her work has been published in several journals, and she has served as research consultant for several international organizations including, the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Labor Organization, UNIDO and the World Bank.

Walk down Franklin Street or into any Wal-Mart store and you will enter into the international economy of the 21st century. These days it is hard to go far without encountering someone or something that is part of a global network of production, trade, and consumption. This seminar examines how globalization impacts economic, political, social and spatial structures of regional and local landscapes. Using directed readings, participative class exercises, and cases that cut across developed and developing countries, we will focus on how global pressures and economic integration is changing local economies. Specifically, we will apply the concepts we learn in class to understand the effects of globalization on North Carolina’s economy. We will ask how global pressures are affecting jobs, communities, local industries and skills in the region.

CLASSICS

CLAS 73H.001: Life in Ancient Pompeii
HS, BN, WB
MWF, 10:10 – 11:00 AM
Hérica Valladares

Hérica Valladares is an art historian who specializes in the study of imperial Rome and ancient Campania. She has traveled extensively and conducted research in Italy, Turkey and North Africa. Professor Valladares is the author of numerous articles on Roman wall painting. She is currently working on a book on the representation of love scenes in Roman art and literature.

Ancient Pompeii, the city whose life was snuffed out by a volcanic eruption almost 2000 years ago, has captured the imagination of multitudes since its rediscovery in the late 18th century. In this seminar we will explore the history and archaeology of this ancient city with the goal of better understanding daily life in the early Roman empire. How did ancient Pompeians spend their days? What were their houses like? Who ran the city and how were they elected? How did Pompeians cope with the various challenges of city life, such as sanitation and traffic jams? The course proceeds topically, moving from an exploration of the city’s public spaces to an analysis of more private domains—Pompeian houses, gardens and tombs. Although the city’s material remains will be the primary focus of our study, we will also consider evidence from literature, epigraphy and 18th and 19th-century publications. The impact of the rediscovery of Pompeii in the 18th century on the development of archaeology as a discipline will be one of our final topics of discussion. We will also consider the reception of Pompeii in contemporary popular culture.

CLAS 89.001: Autobiography in the Ancient World: Augustine’s Confessions
LA, WB
MWF, 12:20 – 1:10 PM
Robert Babcock

Robert Babcock’s primary field is Latin Literature of the Late Antique Period (roughly 200-600 CE) and the Middle Ages, particularly the manuscript culture of these periods as well as the transmission and reception of ancient authors in the Middle Ages. He was the curator of ancient and medieval manuscripts at Yale for twenty+ years before coming to UNC, and he regularly teaches courses on manuscript culture. He have published extensively on Greek papyri and Latin manuscripts. His current project concerns medieval biographical writings and the interactions of authors with libraries during the Middle Ages.

In this course we will read, analyze, and discuss the first full-length autobiography written in the Greco-Roman world, The Confessions of Augustine. Born to a Christian mother and a pagan father in North Africa, Augustine was sent to Carthage as a teenager to study law. His interests quickly shifted to philosophy and religion, and he began the struggle which continued to the end of his life to understand the world, God, sin, free will, and evil. In his Confessions, he describes the development of his religious and philosophical ideas, his family, his friends, his travels to Rome and Milan, and his conversion. By close reading Augustine’s work and a selection of the works that inspired him (Genesis, Athanasisus’ Life of Antony, Vergil’s Aeneid), we will investigate the genre of autobiography. Why did Augustine write an autobiography? How did he write it? For whom did he write it?

COMMUNICATION

COMM 51.001: Organizing and Communicating for Social Entrepreneurs
SS
MWF, 9:05 – 9:55 AM
Steve May

Steve May Associate Professor of Communication and is an Ethics Fellow with the Parr Center for Ethics. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Purdue University and his Ph.D. from the University of Utah. His research focuses on communication, ethics, and corporate social responsibility. He has taught courses in Organizational Communication, Teamwork, and Organizational Ethics. He has also taught several APPLES service learning courses in which students provided consulting services to non-profit agencies. He is currently serving as a consultant for the Kenan Institute for Ethic’s new initiative, Ethics at Work. He also provides facilitation and community problem-solving expertise to the Dispute Settlement Center. Originally from Indiana, Steve enjoys basketball, hiking, and international travel.

This seminar is designed to show how we can better understand organizational communication through the medium of different metaphors (e.g., machine, organism, culture, political system, psychic prison). More specifically, the seminar is designed to show how social entrepreneurs—or any other organizational members—can use these metaphors of organizational communication as tools for informing and guiding their entrepreneurial efforts. The course has four primary objectives. First, to introduce students to the theory and practice of social entrepreneurship, with particular attention to successful social entrepreneurs. Second, to provide students with a systematic and critical understanding of organizational communication theory and research related to social entrepreneurship, including the factors involved in the functioning and analysis of today’s complex organizations. Third, to show students how this understanding can be used as a practical tool for their own social entrepreneurship. Finally, to allow students to explore the ways in which organizations are simultaneously the medium and outcome for social, political, economic, technological, and ideological change in our culture.

COMM 73.001: Understanding Place through Rhetoric – CANCELLED 1/6/2016
MWF, 1:25 – 2:15 PM
Carole Blair

Carole Blair’s research focuses on the rhetorical and cultural significance of U.S. commemorative places and artworks. She teaches related courses on visual and material rhetorics, rhetoric and memory, and rhetorics of place, as well as on contemporary rhetorical theory and criticism. Her current research focuses on contemporary rhetorical theory and criticism, attending especially to rhetoric’s crucial role in understanding visual and material phenomena. In particular, she studies the rhetorics of commemorative places and artworks of the twentieth-century U.S.This seminar explores how we come to understand what places are and how they are meaningful. We will look at places “rhetorically”: how they were designed to persuade those who inhabit them, how we actually experience them, and how we make sense of them in our individual lives.

This seminar explores how we come to understand what places are and how they are meaningful. We will look at places “rhetorically”: how they were designed to persuade those who inhabit them, how we actually experience them, and how we make sense of them in our individual lives.

COMM 85.001: Think, Speak, Argue
CI
TTH, 3:30 – 4:45 PM
Christian Lundberg

Christian Lundberg is an Assistant Professor in Communication, where he conducts research on the public sphere, rhetoric, and contemporary American religious discourse. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University’s program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, and currently teaches a class in globalization and communication. One of his passions is teaching people how to debate. He coached teams at three universities to national championships in intercollegiate debate and has taught debate classes at Northwestern, Emory University, and Georgia State, as well as teaching summer workshops on debate at Northwestern, Dartmouth, Miami University of Ohio, and the University of Kentucky.

This seminar helps students learn to think more critically, speak more persuasively, and argue more effectively by focusing on practical skill development in reasoning and debate. Students at Carolina learn to sharpen their thinking, speaking, and argument skills in the course of their normal classwork, but this happens more or less indirectly. This seminar will focus directly on improving each of these skills. Students will learn to think more critically by reflecting on the work of philosophers who deal with reasoning and informal logic, to speak with conviction and clarity through hands-on learning about the tradition of rhetoric, and to argue more effectively by debating the pressing issues of our day. The skills that we hone in on in this course will help students become more effective in the classroom, in their chosen vocation, and as citizens in an increasingly complex global public sphere.

COMM 89.001: Intro to Networked Societies
SS
MWF, 10:10 – 11:00 AM
Neal Thomas

Dr. Neal Thomas’ academic work draws out connections between digital media technologies, knowledge, power, and everyday social life. From a critical humanities perspective, his current research looks at some core computer programming techniques at work in social media, to see how the technology encodes philosophical ideas about what it means to be social, and even what it means to /mean/ in the first place. If you’ve been noticing the rising effects of algorithms and network gadgets in contemporary culture, then this seminar might just be for YOU.

This seminar is designed to introduce early-career students to the role that networks play in contemporary global societies. Over the course of the semester, we will examine key ways to think about network societies, by taking up the idea of the network in social, political, economic, cultural and technological terms. With help from popular and academic writing, we will ask: What does it mean to organize the world through networks? How do identity, commerce, science, and political life function according to network thinking? In formulating responses to such questions, the seminar will center on in-class discussion, taking theories about networks and applying them to everyday life both within and outside a North American context.

COMM 89.002: Technologies of Popular Culture
HS, CI
TTH, 3:30 – 4:45 PM
Michael Palm

Michael Palm’s teaching interests include media history and cultural studies of technology. His research focuses on technologies introduced into people’s everyday lives, and their role in the emergence and interplay between new forms of work, commerce and consumption. He is finishing a book about the history of self-service technology, spanning from the telephone dial to the ATM. His new book combines labor ethnography, cultural history and critical political economy to explore the contemporary revival of vinyl records.

This seminar takes an historical approach to the relationship between popular culture and technological change, focusing on how artists and other workers in the film, TV and especially music industries have incorporated new technology into the production, distribution and consumption of popular cultural products and experiences. From vinyl records to CDs to mp3s, we will track pivotal format ‘upgrades’ and analyze their aesthetic, economic, legal and political ramifications. Controversies such as sampling and piracy will be debated in class, and influential companies including Apple and Amazon will be subject to our collective research. Students’ own expertise and investments in pop culture will inform discussions and, ideally, research projects culminating in individual terms papers and group presentations.

COMM 89.003: Composing Movement
VP
TTH, 2:00 – 3:15 PM
Angeline Shaka

Dr. Angeline Shaka earned her Ph.D in Culture and Performance from the University of California Los Angeles. Her publications include Theatre Journal and the encyclopedic definition of “Hula” to Dance Heritage Coalition’s America’s Irreplacable Dance Treasures. Her current research analyzes representations of identity in indigenous contemporary dance. She teaches dance making from a “beginner’s mind,” an approach that welcomes inexperienced dance makers while challenging those with dance and choreography experience to discover something unexpected with their craft.At UNC-Chapel Hill she teaches in Performance Studies and American Studies and is the faculty advisor of UNC’s ModernExtension Dance Company.

This course is an artistic laboratory introducing students to compositional strategies commonly used by modern and post-modern dance choreographers for creating and structuring movement. Students will work individually and in groups to fulfill movement assignments and to foster their own artistic impulse. Geared toward dancers and non-dancers alike, this class only requires that students enter with a “beginner’s mind:” open, curious, and ready to explore. In addition to compositional assignments, students will view, discuss, and write about professional choreography as well as compositions created by the class. The combination of making dance compositions, discussing student work and analyzing professional choreographies will entail a physical, intellectual-critical, empathic, and curiosity-driven participation. The course will culminate with a public performance of student work.

COMPUTER SCIENCE

COMP 80H.001: Enabling Technology–Computers Helping People
US, EE
TTH, 2:00 – 3:15 PM
Gary Bishop

Gary Bishop is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research centers on the use of computers to help people with disabilities. Bishop won the Tanner Faculty Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2003 and the Class of 1996 Excellence in Advising Award in 2005. He was one of the first six professors chosen to be a Faculty Engaged Scholar, named by the Carolina Center for Public Service and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Public Service to conduct projects that connect faculty work and community needs. He also received the Kauffman Entrepreneurial Fellowship.

Nearly one in seven Americans has a significant disability; should they be exceptions? Through readings, guest lectures, videos, and projects we will explore the legal, moral, cultural, and technical issues and opportunities raised by this “minority you can join at any time”. Ideas originated in this class have been successfully used by people worldwide. This is an approved Apples Service Learning course.

DRAMATIC ART

DRAM 80.001: Psychology of Clothes: Motivations for Dressing Up and Dressing Down
VP, CI
TTH, 3:30 – 4:45 PM
Jade Bettin

Jade Bettin teaches the History of Costume, Costume Design, and Play Analysis in UNC’s Department of Dramatic Art. She is thrilled to work in a field where she can make clothing come alive onstage. Her work as a designer can be seen at PlayMakers Repertory Company and a variety of regional theatres. Jade’s fascination with clothing reaches beyond the theatre into museum collections with a focus on how clothing can speak about who we are and who we hope to be. She works with the Department’s collection of vintage clothing as well as the North Carolina Museum of History and she has spent time at the Kent State University Museum.

Through traditional and innovative teaching methods, this seminar will help students find ways to articulate their own motivations for dress and then apply the ideas they have discovered to the ways in which individuality as well as group attitudes are expressed through clothing. The semester begins with the familiar – observation and analysis of clothing forms on UNC’s campus. Small groups will present their findings to the class with an emphasis placed on not only what the subjects are wearing, but why. Throughout the semester the class will meet “on location” wherever clothing is worn in throughout the community. In the classroom, students will discuss readings from basic texts to create a shared vocabulary. They will also discover common (and occasionally uncommon) motivations for dress, not only in our own culture, but also in others in the world today as well as during selected historical periods.

DRAM 83.001: Spectacle in the Theatre
VP
TTH, 9:30 – 10:45 AM
David Navalinsky

David Navalinsky is the Director of Undergraduate Production in the Department of Dramatic Art and has served on the First Year Seminars Steering Committee. David has taught at the University of Texas at Arlington and the University of Mississippi. David has worked professionally at South Coast Repertory in Orange County California, The Utah Shakespeare Festival, The Illinois Shakespeare Festival, and the Karamu Performing Arts Theatre in Cleveland, OH. Some of David’s favorite projects were at the Dallas Children’s Theater where he made a dinosaur collapse and pirates walk the plank.

This seminar will explore the artists, art and technology involved in creating the world of the play. It is intended as an overview for students who want to learn about theatrical design. Students will create their own designs in the areas of scenery, costumes, and lighting for three plays throughout the semester. These plays will be placed outside of their traditional setting while still maintaining the story and themes. Students have placed Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a trailer park and a daycare center for example. Careful historical research, close reading and analysis, text and source material, and collaboration will be the focus of the student projects. In addition, the seminar will look at theatrical technology and how spectacle has evolved from the Greeks to Cirque du Soleil.

DRAM 85H.001: Documentary Theatre
VP, NA, EE
W, 2:30 – 5:30 PM
Kathryn Hunter Williams

Kathryn Hunter Williams received her B.F.A from University of North Carolina School of the Arts and her M.F.A from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a member of PlayMakers Repertory Company she has performed inDoubt, Romeo and Juliet, Yellowman and String of Pearls. She has also worked with Living Stage, The Negro Ensemble Company, Manhattan Class Company and New Dramatist. Kathryn is currently on the faculty of UNC Dept. of Dramatic Art and will continue exploring the ways the theater can provide insight about our differences and promote a better understanding of our community. She is the performance director for HiddenVoices , a non-profit dedicated to bringing life changing stories in to a public forum.

This seminar explores the political and social ramifications of documentary theatre in the U.S. from the 1990s to the present. We will spend the first half of the semester studying interview techniques and reading examples of documentary theatre by playwrights such as Anna Deavere Smith, Heather Raffo, and Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theatre Project. In the second half of the semester, the students will investigate a local community of their choosing and create an interview-based performance as a final project. The class will perform this play for an invited audience at the end of the semester.

ECONOMICS

ECON 53.001: The Costs and Benefits of the Drug War
SS
TTH, 2:00 – 3:15 PM
Arthur Benavie

Arthur Benavie received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He has been at UNC since 1967. His specialty is macroeconomic theory and policy. His book, Deficit Hysteria: A Common Sense Look at America’s Rush to Balance the Budget, was written for the general public. His most recent book is Social Security under the Gun. In his former life he was a concert violinist, and playing violin is now his main avocation.

The basic question examined in this seminar will be the costs and benefits of the U.S policy of drug prohibition. Does drug prohibition decrease drug abuse? Affect violence in our society? Aid terrorism? Diminish our civil liberties? Affect the public’s health? Corrupt public officials? Should drugs be decriminalized or legalized and if so, how? Should different illicit drugs be treated differently? What is the evidence in the United States and in other countries on decriminalization or legalization? Students will write a paper and present it in class, and prepare an interview with individuals who are on the frontline of the drug war, such as police or attorneys. As a seminar, classroom activity will consist of discussions and debates.

ECON 57H.001: Engines of Innovation: the Entrepreneurial University in the 21st Century
SS, CI
TTH, 12:30 –1:45 PM
Buck Goldstein

Buck Goldstein is the University Entrepreneur in Residence and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics. Prior to returning to the University, Goldstein co-founded Information America, an online information company which was publicly traded and subsequently acquired by the Thomson Corporation. Subsequently, he was a partner in Mellon Ventures, the venture capital arm of Mellon Bank. He is the author, with Holden Thorp, of Engines of Innovation–The Entrepreneurial University in the 21st Century.Build-Measure-Learn: Constructing Your Own Start-Up.

This class will combine some basic principles of entrepreneurship with the newly emerging lean startup methodology. Students will be given background on entrepreneurial thinking and a hands-on workshop involving the latest thinking in executing a successful new venture. They will then be provided with a small grant to execute their idea over the course of the semester. They will Interact intensively with the instructor, outside advisors, and guest speakers, and it is hoped that some or all of the projects will become viable by the end of the course.

ECON 89.001: History of Financial Crisis, 1637-2013
HS, NA
MWF, 10:10 – 11:00 AM
John Komlos

John Komlos is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Munich (Germany). He also taught at Harvard, Duke and in Austria and Switzerland. Born in Budapest, he became a refugee during the revolution of 1956, and grew up in Chicago where he received Ph.D.s in both history and economics from the University of Chicago where Nobel-Prize winning economist Robert Fogel induced him to study the effect of economic processes on human biology. Komlos devoted most of his academic career developing this research agenda, which culminated in his founding the journal “Economics and Human Biology” in 2003.

Would you like to find out about the financial crisis of 2008?
This seminar will discuss the reasons why the crisis happened, examine critically how the government responded to the crisis, and why it has been difficult for the economy to regain its pre-crisis momentum. We will also discuss the similarities between the Meltdown and other historical financial crisis. Students will gain a broader understanding of the global economy in which we live and work. In addition, the historical perspective will enable students to gain a more thorough appreciation of the challenges that lie ahead for their generation. The aim of the seminar is not to concentrate on facts but rather to comprehend the big picture of economic processes in their social and political context in a very long-run perspective. Lots of discussion, lots of audio visual material will make this an exciting way to start your college career.

EDUCATION

EDUC 65.001: School Daze: What’s School Got to do with Getting an Education? – CANCELLED 10/29/15
TTH, 5:00 – 6:15 PM
Suzanne Allen Gulledge

Suzanne Allen Gulledge is a Clinical Professor of Teacher Education, Curriculum and Instruction, and International and Experiential Education. She was named a UNC-Chapel Hill University Engaged Scholar in 2009. International and global studies and community based service learning are among her teaching and research interests. With Ulteschi, Entrepreneurship Initiative and Center for International Studies grants she developed and continues to teach community based and study abroad courses. Through the Burch Honors Program she has developed the first School of Education teacher education program study abroad semester which will be offered in Fall, 2010 in Cape Town, South Africa. Gulledge is active on the Carolina campus in faculty governance and in interdisciplinary academic activities. She serves on the Carolina Faculty Council Executive Committee and boards of the Center for Faculty Excellence, Carolina Navigators of the Center for Global Education, APPLES Service Learning Program and Fixed Term Faculty Association. Teacher education and teacher professional development, in addition to social foundations, ethics, and social studies education, are Gulledge’s primary scholarly interests.

What does it mean to be an educated person? What function do schools serve? This seminar builds on the experiences of schooling that students bring to the university. It invites them to re-consider and de-construct what they know about education and schools as a result of those experiences. The seminar considers traditional schooling along with non-traditional and international approaches to educating youngsters. Included are provocative readings, discussions and invitations to brainstorm schooling as it relates to education. Students will be challenged to re-consider their experiences and notions about school and to examine alternatives. Students’ first-hand knowledge and experiences combined with a critical perspective will encourage innovative thinking about ways and places of learning with the aim of generating proposals for new or reformed schools and new forms of public education for the future.

ENGLISH

ENGL 52.001 Computers and English Studies
LA, CI
TTH, 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM
Daniel Anderson

Daniel Anderson has been teaching computer-assisted composition courses for 16 years. His work occupies the intersections of technology, teaching, and publication. He has developed award winning Web-based software for writing instruction and has published multiple books devoted to teaching and studying writing and literature. He has taught First Year Seminar courses at UNC–CH since the inception of the FYS program. He directs the Studio for Instructional Technology and English Studies at Carolina. His interests include teaching writing through the use of emerging communication media such as the World Wide Web and guiding students as they work together to investigate and create resources for studying literature.

This seminar explores ways that technology reshapes the study of literature and the ways writers compose. It emphasizes lessons in how to read and write about literary works, exploring how definitions of literature change as we consider not only fiction, poetry, and drama, but also music, art, and film. We also look at what it means to compose in the twenty first century, exploring blogging, podcasts, playlists, collages, videos, as well as familiar written forms. Class activities will feature some lecture, more discussion, and lots of project-based work.

ENGL 57.001: Future Perfect: Science Fictions and Social Form
LA
TTH, 8:00 – 9:15 AM
Tyler Curtain

Tyler Curtain is a theorist with the Department of English and Comparative Literature. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in theory, as well as courses in science fiction and fantasy. Professor Curtain is a member of the executive committee of the Discussion Group on Science Fiction and Utopian and Fantastic Literature of the Modern Language Association. He will be the group’s President in 2016-2017.

Will humans go extinct? If so, how? What are the ethical questions involved in human disappearance? How do humans themselves contribute to the possibilities, and what can be done to postpone the inevitable? This seminar will tackle some sobering (and, quite frankly, exciting and interesting) questions by reading cultural and scientific works that address human disappearance. We will read both science and fiction to think about the core concerns of the class. Our texts will include works ranging from Alien to the classic 1950s tale A Canticle for Leibowitz, from Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. We will ask some fundamental questions about what it means to be human, how we imagine our societies and cultures to work (and not work), and what these texts and questions might tell us about how we are to live now. Students will read novels and short stories, watch movies and TV shows, and read scientific and philosophical papers that deal with human extinction. Students will also be required to write a paper and complete an original research project at the end of term that they will share with the rest of the class.

ENGL 59.001 Black Masculinity and Femininity
LA, CI, US
MWF, 11:15 AM – 12:05 PM
GerShun Avilez

GerShun Avilez received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania, where he also earned a Graduate Certificate in Africana Studies. He has taught at Yale University and held the Frederick Douglass Post-doctoral Fellowship at the University of Rochester. He is a cultural studies scholar who specializes in contemporary African American literature and visual culture and 20th century American literature in general. His teaching extends to the literature of the Black Diaspora. Much of his scholarship explores how questions of gender and sexuality inform artistic production. He also works in the fields of political radicalism, spatial theory, and legal studies.His book Radical Aesthetics & Modern Black Nationalism is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press in 2016 as a part of “The New Black Studies” Series. The book investigates how Black nationalist rhetoric impacted African American artistic experimentation in the late 20th and 21st centuries through an examination of drama, novels, poetry film, and visual art. He is at work on a new book-length project on Black sexuality and artistic culture as well as shorter projects on (1) rethinking 20th century African American literary history and (2) temporality in contemporary drama. Throughout his work and teaching, he is committed to studying a wide variety of art forms, including, drama, fiction, non-fiction, film, poetry, visual and performance art, ethnography, and comic books.

This first year seminar will use literature, film, and popular culture to explore different expressions of masculinity and femininity in the African American and Black diasporic context. Students will evaluate how artists use gender and sexuality for social critique and artistic innovation.

ENGL 63.001: Banned Books
LA, US
TTH, 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM
Tyler Curtain

This course will focus on issues of intellectual freedom and censorship, with particular attention to the ways in which these issues are racialized.

ENGL 63H.001: Banned Books
LA, US
TTH, 3:30 – 4:45 PM
Laura Halperin

Laura Halperin is an Assistant Professor of Latina/o Literature in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, and she is affiliated with the Department of American Studies and the Curriculum in Global Studies. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Brown University and M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has experience teaching elementary school, junior high school, college, and graduate students. She currently is writing a book about representations of psychological, physical, and geopolitical harm in contemporary Latina literature. Her next book project will examine experiences Latinas/os have with the educational system in this country.

In this seminar, we will read Latina/o texts that have been banned in the United States; we will examine the rhetoric surrounding such censorship attempts; and we will focus on the relationship between the banning of the books and the constructions of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality within the works. We will pay close attention to the themes and language within the targeted books. Indeed, the bulk of the course will consist of literary analysis. Given that some of the most commonly cited reasons for censorship attempts revolve around concerns about “excessive” or “inappropriate” portrayals of violence, sexuality, or the occult, the course will be structured around these particular polemics. In the course, we will look to the contexts surrounding the censorship of the Latina/o texts that we will read and discuss. Considering that Latinas/os now comprise the largest minority population in this country, we will ask what the relationship might be between the attempts to remove Latina/o texts from grade school libraries and classrooms and the shifting demographics in the places where these books have been removed. Students will be evaluated based on a combination of written and oral work.[/expand]

The seminar will be organized as a discussion course in which active participation will be key. The class will have large group and small group discussions and debates. Students will write essays during the semester, and, at the end of the semester, they will have the option of writing a research paper or putting together a creative project.

ENGL 87.001: Jane Austen, Then and Now
VP
TTH, 2:00 – 3:15 PM
Jeanne Moskal

Jeanne Moskal is an award-winning teacher and mentor. She has authored a study of the poet William Blake and has edited the travel writings of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Moskal’s book-in-progress analyzes twentieth-century adaptations of Jane Eyre.

Pride and Prejudice, often cited as the best-loved novel in English, is the focus of this semester’s course in Austen and present-day responses to her oeuvre. We will begin with in-depth reading of Austen’s 1813 novel, with attention to its form (genre and narrative style) and to its historical and biographical contexts; we will examine recent re-workings, in fiction and in film, in light of present-day concerns and the students’ interests. Several film adaptations will be considered as part of our research into Austen’s current influence. First-time readers of Austen are welcome in the course, as are those deeply familiar with Austen’s oeuvre. Interested students are welcome to contact the instructor in advance of registration with any questions or concerns.

ENGL 87.002: Jane Austen, Then and Now – CANCELLED 1/11/2016
VP
TTH, 3:30 – 4:45 PM
Jeanne Moskal

See course description above (ENGL 87.001).

ENGL 89.002: Biography: People and Places—Chapel Hill
LA, CI
TTH, 3:30 – 4:45 PM
Jane Danielewicz

Although she is an English professor, Jane Danielewicz is curious about most fields, from biology and architecture, to history and literature. She is a passionate reader, writer, and teacher. At Berkeley, her research explored linguistics, literacy, writing, and rhetoric. As an associate professor and director of UNC’s Writing in the Disciplines Program, she explores written language, writing instruction, and creative non-fiction. Her special interest is life-writing. She was named a Hiskey Distinguished Professor, and twice received the Sitterson Teaching Award. Professor Danielewicz recently completed How to Do Things with Memoir, which discusses how memoirs expand our understanding of the world.

This course focuses on reading and writing biography, emphasizing the relationship between a person and a place that is significant to his or her life. We will concentrate on persons and places in Chapel Hill, including UNC’s campus and Carrboro. We will explore biographical forms, including books and film. You will create a final project around a person of your choosing from any time, past and present. For example, you might select someone like Pauli Murray, African-American lawyer and activist; Dean Smith, beloved coach; or the writer, Thomas Wolfe. You might choose a place, like the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, and discover a person whose life connects to it. You’ll learn the history and art of biography, including forms like video, photography, etc. along with traditional writing. In your role as biographer, you will conduct your own research, and assemble your own archive of materials to compose your biography.

ENGL 89H.001: Biography: People and Places—Chapel Hill
LA, CI
TTH, 12:30 – 1:45 PM
Jane Danielewicz

ENGL 89H.002: American Vertigo: The Contemporary American Novel and the Rise of Postwar Media
LA
TTH
9:30 – 10:45 AM
Florence Dore

Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Florence Dore joined the UNC faculty in 2010. She is the author of one book and several articles, and she was founding editor of the books series “Post45” at Stanford University Press. In 2011 she chaired a conference on literature and rock at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and is currently completing “Novel Sounds” for the series, a book on novels written in the U.S. South during the 1950s and the new popular art form known as rock and roll.From Scotty’s wandering on the streets of San Francisco in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to Oedipa Maas’s obsessive Calirfonia trek in The Crying of Lot 49, postwar filmmakers and authors frequently employ the allegory of the lost driver on the road. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 provided 25 billion dollars to create 41,000 miles of interstate highways over the next twenty years.

In this course, we will examine the contemporary problem Jack Kerouac’s On the Road famously encapsulated when it was published in 1957: what happens to literary meaning in an age of unprecedented mobility? In the early 1960s the cultural critic Marshall McLuhan argued that highways and technology were shrinking space by decreasing the amount of time between points on the globe. In such an environment, postwar critics suggested, Americans became ungrounded, and literature was becoming outmo ded as film and popular music came to dominate. This course examines the contemporary American novel in this context.

GEOGRAPHY

GEOG 65H.001: Climate Change and the Media
PL, CI
TTH, 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM
Erika Wise

Erika Wise’s research focuses on western North America’s climate and water resources in both recent times and in the prehistoric past. After earning a BS in Earth Sciences from UC- Santa Cruz, she worked at the USGS and later for an environmental consulting company. Dr. Wise became interested in Geography after some “odd” jobs (cooking on a dive boat, picking lychees, packing bananas) left her thinking about human-environment connections. She focused on climate-air quality interactions for her MA, then stumbled upon the University of Arizona’s world-renowned Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research and became a dendroclimatologist en route to her PhD.Climate change has been called both the “greatest hoax” ever perpetuated and the “most urgent threat” facing the world. While scientists produce volume after volume of consensus documents on climate change, the popular debate rages on, fueled by print and TV news, blogs, movies, and fiction. Experts, pseudo-experts, and casual observers debate causes, consequences, and remedies in every form of media.

In this seminar, we will explore the popular debate on climate change through an examination of its presentation in the media. We will cover the scientific basis of climate change, focusing on how the science is presented, distorted, and debated in the public sphere by alarmists, denialists, and everyone in between. Through reading and writing exercises, class viewings, discussions, and presentations, students will encounter many points of view, explore a variety of media sources, and develop informed perspectives on one of the defining issues of our time.

GEOLOGY

GEOL 76.001: Energy Resources for a Hungry Planet
PL
MWF, 11:15 AM – 12:05 PM
José Rial

José Rial has a Ph.D. in Geophysics from Cal Tech and a MSc. in Geology from the University of Michigan. Rial’s expertise includes mathematical modeling of natural systems, seismic wave propagation and climatology. In recent years Rial’s academic interests include the role of science and scientific discovery on global environmental issues, such as global warming, climate change and policy.

The seminar first describes today’s fundamental sources of energy: oil, natural gas and coal, how and where to find them, and the latest statistics on how long the present reserves will last. We will then explore alternative energy resources and why it is so important for society to understand that fossil fuel reserves are finite, and will be depleted in 40 years (cheap oil) or in 200 years (coal). The course stimulates student participation through class debates (e.g., Can nuclear energy become a viable and safe substitute for coal?, Is the current US energy policy a threat to national security?).

GERMANIC AND SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

GERM 63.001: Performing America
VP
MWF, 1:25 – 2:15 PM
Tin Wegel

Tin Wegel is a senior lecturer in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her academic interests lie in drama and theater performances, as well as foreign language pedagogy. Since 2003, she has staged many plays in German with students at various colleges and universities. Her last performance of Karl Kraus’ play “The last Days of Mankind” was part of this World War I Centenary Project at UNC.

The intersection of performance in a theater space and in everyday life will serve as our springboard to investigate the diversity of contemporary America. We will draw on theoretical texts on performance, performativity, and critical theories to investigate how race, class, religion, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, history, as well as life and death are performed in America today. We will also attend performances and part of the course will also be a short theater performance for a general audience.

GSLL 69.001: Laughing and Crying at the Movies: Film and Experience
VP
TTH, 12:30 – 1:45 PM
Inga Pollmann

Inga Pollmann is Assistant Professor in Film Studies in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and also currently serves as the Director of the Global Cinema Minor at UNC. Her research focuses on the history of film theory, intersections of film, science and philosophy, and the place of the moving image within aesthetic theory. As a consequence, her interests span across a variety of genres, styles, and periods, such as 1920s German cinema, melodrama, global new wave cinemas, and contemporary art cinema. She has written essays on Russian montage cinema, German abstract cinema, the interrelation of German biology and film theory in the 1920s, the question of mood and coldness in film, French film theory and evolution, and contemporary German cinema. Her current book project entitled Cinematic Vitalism: Film, Theory, and the Question of Life engages with the role of conceptions of life and vitality in German and French aesthetic theory, philosophy, and theory of biology for film theory and practice from the 1910s-60s.

In this seminar, we will consider a puzzling question: Why is it that we cry at the movies? And why do we willingly, and lustfully, expose ourselves to such an experience? Crying, just like laughing or screaming, is one of the extreme responses a movie can elicit from its audience. We will focus on the tear-inducing genre par excellence, the melodrama or “weepie,” to venture a few preliminary answers. Additionally, we will make excursions into other genres and their emotional responses to think further about the physical and psychological aspects of film spectatorship. Over the course of this seminar, students will learn the basics of film analysis and gain an overview over the history of international film drama production, and they will also consider various definitions of, and approaches to, emotion, affect, and the body. Questions that will guide our investigation include: What is an emotion? What formal elements of a film can we identify that guide emotional response? What distinguishes crying from laughing and other emotional utterances? How do we account for the social role of laughing and crying in the movie theater, its communicative and contagious aspects? What is the role of gender in emotional response? What do emotional responses to film tell us about the medium film?

GLBL 89H.001: Beg, Borrow, and Steal: The Political Economy of Aid, FDI, and Corruption
SS, GL
T, 9:30 AM– 12:00 PM
Brigitte Zimmerman

Brigitte Zimmerman is a scholar of comparative politics, focusing on the political economy of development. Her research agenda examines the relationship between citizens and political officials, with a particular emphasis on accountability in consolidating democracies. Current research addresses discrimination in petty corruption, anti-corruption policy, aid politicization, survey research methods, and the ethics of field research. To conduct this research, she partners with government institutions, international organizations, policy makers, and other scholars. She obtained her PhD in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego, and was then a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.

This class is fundamentally about global inequality. The three phenomena covered in this class – foreign aid, foreign direct investment (FDI), and corruption – are purported to affect global inequality. However, lying at the intersection of politics, economics, and sociology, these three phenomena are not unambiguously positive or negative. This course examines how politics and economics condition different countries’ path towards and experience with foreign aid, foreign investment, and corruption. In doing so, we will examine the effect of political conditions on economic outcomes and the effect of economic conditions on political outcomes. Through the exploration of the academic literature, popular (including non-Western) media, and policy briefs, students are encouraged to critically examine the prevailing views on these topics and to build the analytical and communication skills necessary to contribute to some of the most salient policy arenas facing our world today.

HISTORY

HIST 70.001: Exploring Cultural Landscapes: Chapel Hill as a Case Study
HS, CI, EE
T, 2:00 – 5:00 PM
John Sweet

Within the general field of Early American history, John Sweet’s research focuses on the dynamics of colonialism and on the interplay of religious cultures. His first book explored the encounters of Indians, Africans, and Europeans in New England and argued that the racial legacy of colonialism shaped the emergence of the American North as well as the South. He has also worked with other historians and literary scholars on the Jamestown colony and its broader cultural and international contexts. His current project is The Captive’s Tale: Venture Smith and the Roots of the American Republic.

Course explores the concept of cultural landscapes as a way of studying history and its legacies. Through a combination of field work, historical research, and analysis, students use maps, photographs, GIS resources, and archival documents to understand how–and why–people in the past shaped our surroundings today.

HIST 76.001: Understanding 1492 – CANCELLED 11/4/15
HS, WB
MWF, 10:10 – 11:00 AM
Kathryn Burns

Kathryn Burns first became interested in the colonial Andes while on a junior semester of study abroad. She has been returning to Peru ever since, especially to Lima and Cuzco. Her most recent book is about writing technologies and power in colonial Peru. She has been teaching Latin American history for over fifteen years, first at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and since 2000 in UNC’s History Department.

This seminar addresses one of the most challenging topics in American and Latin American history: how to understand what is often called simply “the conquest,” la conquista. For nineteenth-century historians writing in English and Spanish, it was a relatively clear-cut matter of epic battles and conquistadores. Spaniards won in a walkover; the “bronze race” suffered tragic defeat. Today, the conquest (or encounter, or invasion) no longer looks this way to historians. New sources, methods, and approaches have taken the field. Yet as our perspectives shift, our histories of la conquista still elicit strong feelings. Why? What’s at stake in the narration of this charged history? Whose versions of events tend to dominate? In this seminar, we will pay close attention to the sources for understanding the past, and to ways of narrating it. Students will explore the Wilson Library’s remarkable Flatow Collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chronicles, and handle documents from the Manuscript Division’s holdings from colonial Popayán. Students will be expected to write frequent responses to our sources, participate in class discussions, and craft a final essay on a topic of particular interest.

HIST 83.001: African History through Popular Music
HS, BN
TTH
2:00 – 3:15 PM
Lisa Lindsay

Lisa Lindsay has a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She teaches broadly in African history, but her research focuses primarily on the social history of West Africa, particularly Nigeria. Her first book explored changes in household arrangements and ideas about gender associated with the expansion of wage labor, particularly on the government railway, during the colonial period. She is also interested in the history of slavery, and she is writing a biography of a South Carolina ex-slave who in the 1850s migrated to his father’s place of origin in what is now Nigeria, making trans-Atlantic connections that his descendants and their American relatives maintain to this day.

The focus of this seminar is to examine popular music as a way of understanding African history from the 1930s to the present. We will read background materials on African historical developments and musical styles, do a lot of listening, and try to learn what African musicians tell us about their societies. We’ll focus in particular on what popular music can reveal about urbanism in Nigeria, politics in the Congo, and apartheid and its aftermath in South Africa. Students will be asked to research, write about, and present songs in their historical contexts; we’ll also attend some live performances as a class.

HIST 89.001: Diaries, Memoirs and Testimonies of the Holocaust
HS, NA
MWF, 3:35 – 4:25 PM
Karen Auerbach

Professor Karen Auerbach is assistant professor of history and Stuart E. Eizenstat Fellow in the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies. She is the author of The House at Ujazdowskie 16: Jewish Families in Warsaw after the Holocaust (2013) and editor of Aftermath: Genocide, Memory and History (2015). Prior to arriving at UNC, she taught at universities in Australia and England as well as at Virginia Tech and Brown University. She has lived for extended periods in Poland, where she was based at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

In ghettos and hiding places during the Holocaust, European Jews and other victims of Nazism recorded their experiences in diaries and other chronicles. Efforts to preserve individual histories continued after the war as survivors wrote memoirs and gave oral testimonies beginning in the earliest postwar years. In this course, students will read diaries, memoirs and literature as well as listen to oral histories to understand the history of the Holocaust through life narratives and to explore tensions between history and memory.

HIST 89.003: Modern Afghanistan
HS, BN
MWF, 10:10 – 11:00 AM
Eren Tasar

Eren Tasar is interested in religion and politics in the modern Islamic world. His focus is on Islam in Central Asia during Soviet rule.

The American occupation of Afghanistan after 9/11/2011, the longest war in U.S. history, continues a long pattern of great empires attempting to control the country, usually unsuccessfully. This course asks why it has been so challenging for Afghanistan’s rulers, both foreign and domestic, to build a centralized state in an historically decentralized society.

Interdisciplinary Studies

IDST 89.001: Me, Myself, and Why: Explorations in Human Identity
PH
TTH, 8:00 – 9:15 AM
Mary Domenico, Rachel Gelfand, Nick Levis, Marsha S. Collins

This course will be co-taught by Royster fellows Mary Domenico, Rachel Gelfand, and Nick Levis.

Mary Domenico (Communication) studies rhetorical theory, rhetorical criticism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory. Her research focus is on the limits of language as a means of building community and on communication ethics as a basis for political transformation.

Rachel Gelfand (American Studies) studies radio documentary, popular music, oral history, women’s history, and queer history. Her research focus is on Holocaust histories and the ways memory, family, and history intersect in the intergenerational transmissions of traumatic pasts.From an animal past to visions of a cyborg future, the question of what it means to be human has long spurred reflection and ignited controversy.

Nick Levis (Biology) studies the intersection of ecology, evolution, and development. His research focus is on investigating the environment’s role in generating and maintaining complex phenotypes through developmental plasticity by using spadefoot toad tadpoles to test genetic accommodation theory.

Marsha S. Collins is the Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education and a Professor of Comparative Literature. She received her AB from Smith College, MA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and MA and PhD from Princeton University. She is the author of books on Pío Baroja and Luis de Góngora, and articles on Cervantes, Galdós, Unamuno, Góngora, and Lope de Vega, among others. Her teaching and research focus on Early Modern European Literature, romance and pastoral, and the relationship between literature and the visual arts. Her new book, “Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance,” a comparative study of 16th-century fictional worlds in Renaissance romances, will be published in 2016.

This seminar is designed to be an interdisciplinary investigation into the various, and sometimes contradictory, ways human identity is explained. By focusing on the questions Who am I? and Why am I this way?, students will conduct an inquiry into the biological, personal, and social aspects of identity. Over the course of the semester, we will study popular and scholarly articles, films, visual arts, oral histories, media artifacts, and material culture to engage with both historical and contemporary perspectives on aspects of identity such as the human animal, gender, race, sexuality, cultural diversity, and the ethical and moral implications of identity formation. Through class discussions, writing assignments, group presentations, and student-designed creative projects, first-year students will have an opportunity to hone the active inquiry, critical thinking, and communication skills necessary for future academic endeavors.

Information and Library Science

INLS 89.001: Smart Cities
GL
TTH, 12:30 – 1:45 PM
Arcot Rajasekar

Arcot Rajasekar is a Professor in the School of Library and Information Sciences, a Chief Scientist at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and co-Director of Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A leading proponent of policy-oriented large-scale data management, Rajasekar has several research projects funded by the NSF, NARA, NIH and other funding agencies. Rajasekar has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park and has more than 100 publications in the areas of data grids, digital library, persistent archives, logic programming and artificial intelligence. His latest projects include the Datanet Federation Consortium and the Data Bridge that is building a social network platform for scientific data.

A smart city is one where the needs of a populace meet the needs of environmental sustainability. The balance between the social and environmental issues is governed by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) that power a smart city infrastructure. In this course, we learn about the influence of urban networks, smart city urban planning, energy as a catalyst of sustainable development, smart city infrastructure, sustainable transportation, flow of information and communications, smart grids, digital infrastructure and the role of data and information technology. We will discuss criteria for measuring the smartness of a city, including quality of life, citizen governance, and discuss issues that go towards the making of a future smart city. Several case studies will be presented with guest lecturers invited to present on critical thinking and practices in smart city development.

Latin American Studies

LTAM 89.001: The Cuban Revolution
HS, GL
T, 3:30 – 6:15 PM
Louis Perez

Louis Perez’s principal teaching fields include twentieth-century Latin America, the Caribbean, and Cuba. Recent publications include Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (3rd ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality and Culture (2nd ed., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society (2005); and Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Pérez has served on a number of journal editorial boards, including Inter-American Economic Affairs, Latin American Research Review, The Americas, and the American Historical Review. He is presently the series editor of “Envisioning Cuba” at the University of North Carolina Press.

LTAM 89 will explore multiple facets of the Cuban revolution and its impact in Latin America and the United States. Under the auspices of la revolución, Cubans embarked upon one of the most ambitious revolutionary projects of the twentieth century. Virtually all previously existing national institutions were abolished, modified, or otherwise adjusted in the service of an egalitarian project inscribed into the claim of national sovereignty and self-determination.But the impact of the Cuban revolution reached far beyond the island. The experience of a Third World country seeking to transform a social system, which required at the same time the need to eliminate the privileged presence of the United States, resonated in Latin America. Cuban policies–the very “model” of Cuba–posed a direct challenge to U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere, a challenge that assumed particular urgency–at the height of the Cold War–when the Cuban leadership proclaimed the Marxist-Leninist nature of the revolution and allied itself with the Soviet Union.The example of Cuba and the “romance” of revolution as a means of social change resonated in Latin America. The Cuban revolution also posed a challenge to the status quo in Latin America, and appeared to offer a way to address historic conditions of inequality, injustice, and indigence. Within months after the triumph of the Cuban revolution, guerrilla movements developed across Latin America.

MATHEMATICS

MATH 51.001: Fish Gotta Swim, Birds Gotta Fly: The Mathematics and the Mechanics of Moving
QI
TTH, 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM
Roberto Camassa

Roberto Camassa is the Kenan Distinguished Professor in the Dept of Mathematics. His Ph.D. is from Cal Tech, and his research interests include nonlinear evolution equations, mathematical modeling, fluid mechanics, and optics.

One focus of this seminar is to address the science of motion of vehicles and living organisms, in fluids such as air and water, using simple physical explanations supported with the relevant mathematical descriptions. Experimental demonstrations will be used to illustrate the concepts encountered in class, as well as to provide an insight into the art of fluid flow visualization. There are no prerequisites, and material from physics and mathematics will be introduced as needed. Understanding of the material will be reinforced with biweekly homework assignments and a final animation project. While this the course is focused on the physics and mathematics, rather than computer programming, an introduction to elementary concepts of scientific computing will be part of the course.

MATH 58.001: Math, Art, and the Human Experience
QI
MWF, 10:10 – 11:00 AM
Mark McCombs

Mark McCombs received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics from UNC-Chapel Hill. He is entering his 23rd year as a UNC faculty member and is a recent recipient of both a Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and a Students’ Undergraduate Teaching Award. He has also served as the mathematics department’s Director of Teacher Training, as well as an academic adviser in the College of Arts and Sciences. He authored the textbook (and companion website) used in Math 110 (college algebra) and supervises TAs who teach pre-calculus and calculus courses. He is especially committed to helping students discover more confidence in their own mathematical abilities. He enjoys writing, photography, film making, and UNC basketball.

This seminar is designed to engage students in an exploration of the relevance of mathematical ideas to fields typically perceived as “non-mathematical” (e.g., art, music, film, literature). Equally important will be an exploration of how these “non-mathematical” fields influence mathematical thought. Course activities and assignments have been designed to illuminate the fact that even the most complex mathematical concepts grow out of real people’s attempts to understand their world. By the end of the seminar, students should be able to

Identify and assess how mathematical ideas influence and are influenced by ideas expressed through art, music, literature, religion, etc
Compare and contrast different philosophies concerning the nature of mathematics
Articulate their own well-reasoned ideas concerning the nature of mathematics
Discuss the evolution of fundamental mathematical concepts in a historical as well as a cultural context
Discuss the work and lives of important mathematicians in relation to the “non-mathematical” work of their contemporaries
Identify and assess how their own understanding of mathematical ideas influences the way they interact with the world

Course assignments and activities will include weekly readings and short homework writing assignments (2–3 paragraphs), quizzes, and a portfolio of mathematical art (e.g., painting, origami, poetry, music). No prerequisite is required.

PHILOSOPHY

PHIL 54.001: Thinking about Time
PH, WB
TTH, 2:00 – 3:15 PM
Carla Merino-Rajme

Carla Merino-Rajme is an assistant professor in philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before coming to Chapel Hill, she was an assistant professor of philosophy at Arizona State University and a Bersoff Fellow at New York University. She works mainly in philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

In this seminar, we will discuss questions such as: What is the nature of time? Is there a fundamental asymmetry between the past and the future? Are the past and the future real? Does time pass or is it rather like another spatial dimension? Can we change the past? Is time travel possible? If so, could you travel to the past and talk to yourself? Are the different philosophical views on time compatible with our current scientific understanding? Students will analyze and produce arguments concerning these and related topics.

PHIL 75.001: Evil
PH
TTH, 9:30 – 10:45 AM
Susan Wolf

Susan Wolf is the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. Majoring in math and philosophy, she graduated from Yale in 1974. She did her graduate work at Princeton and taught at Harvard, the University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins before coming to UNC in 2002. In 2003 she received the Mellon Foundation’s award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. Professor Wolf is the author of Freedom Within Reason, a book on free will and moral responsibility, and numerous articles ranging over topics in ethic. Her recent work has focused on the relations among happiness, morality, and meaningfulness in life. In addition to philosophy, she enjoys hiking, cooking, movies, and Tarheel basketball.

What is evil? Who – if anyone – is responsible for it? How different are evil people from the rest of us? How should we respond to them? This seminar will explore the nature of evil through philosophy, nonfiction, fiction and film. Readings will include Shakespeare’s Othello, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, and Mary Midgley’s Wickedness. The seminar will involve short weekly writing assignments. In addition, students will select an independent project, presenting their findings to the class and leading a discussion on it.

PHIL 78.001 Death as a Problem for Philosophy: Metaphysical and Ethical
PH
MW, 11:15 AM – 12:30 PM
Ryan Preston-Roedder

Ryan Preston-Roedder joined the philosophy department in Fall 2008. He specializes in moral and political philosophy and philosophy of religion. He also has interests in medical ethics and philosophy and literature. His current work focuses on the moral significance of faith and trust, partiality in moral psychology and moral theory, and moral rights. Before joining the philosophy department, Ryan was a Faculty Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard.

In this course, we will explore the nature and significance of death by drawing on work in philosophy, literature, psychology, and film. The course addresses four main topics: (1) We will ask whether, and why, death is bad for the person who dies. (2) We will ask whether our grief over the deaths of people who are closest to us, for example, our parents or our romantic partners, helps determine the significance of our relationships with those people. (3) We will ask whether and how our values are shaped by the assumption that others will live on after we die. (4) Finally, we will consider the significance of what happens to our remains after we die.

PHYSICS

PHYS 53.001: Handcrafting in the Nanoworld: Building Models and Manipulating Molecules
PL
TTH, 9:30 – 10:45 AM
Michael R. Falvo

Michael R. Falvo is a Research Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He received his BS in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1991, and his PhD in physics from UNC-CH in 1997. He is a former winner of the UNC Student Undergraduate Teaching Award presented annually to three professors by the undergraduate student body, and is a member of the UNC Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars. His current research focuses is on the physics of proteins and cells. He stretches, pokes and prods nanometer scale biological systems such as viruses, biopolymer strands, and individual protein molecules to test their mechanical properties. Falvo has a long standing interest in science outreach and frequently presents workshops for the public and k-12 teachers. He has also co-authored two books on nanoscience for middle school science teachers.

The nanoworld is a strange and captivating place. It is a world of molecules vibrating trillions of times a second, quantum dots emitting rainbow colors, DNA encoding information in molecular bonds, and protein motors driving the complex machinery of the cell. At this scale, nature has unique rules and behaviors, some of which are amazing and unexpected. We are still uncovering these rules, and are only beginning to apply this new knowledge to technology. Can we build molecular machines that cure disease or clean up the environment? Can we make computers using single molecule transistors? How do viruses and other bio systems “assemble” themselves? In this seminar, we dive into the basic physics, chemistry and biology that describe the nanometer scale world. We will also try to distinguish the true promise of nanoscience from the hype. Students will engage in class discussions informed by their weekly reading of selected scientific literature. They will also participate in small group projects building physical models of nanoscale objects and phenomena, and perform calculations to gain a quantitative understanding of the physics underlying the nanoworld. No prerequisite is required for this course, but a spirit of adventure is.

PHYS 54.001: Physics of Movies
PL
TTH, 9:30 – 10:45 AM
Christian Iliadis

Christian Iliadis is a Greek who was born and raised in Germany. He obtained his diploma in physics from the University of Muenster/Germany and then moved to Notre Dame where he received his Ph.D. He spent three years in Vancouver, working in Canada’s largest nuclear physics laboratory. Since 1996, he has been Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UNC–CH, teaching a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses. His research specialty is nuclear astrophysics, which is the science of how stars generate energy and produce the elements in the Universe via nuclear fusion reactions. He also wrote a recently published textbook on this subject. His favorite hobby is soccer (or football, as it is called in the rest of the world).

In this seminar, we will analyze physics concepts by watching scenes from popular movies. The overall goal is to disentangle the complicated interplay of physics ideas in real-life situations and thereby to improve significantly our problem-solving skills. Emphasis is placed on group work rather than on traditional teaching. We will be addressing questions such as: Which scenes from movies are unphysical and which are realistic? How are physicists portrayed in movies? How does physics research influence society? Ultimately, we will gain a more fundamental understanding for physical concepts and how these concepts shape our world view. No prerequisite is required.

PUBLIC POLICY

PLCY 50.001: Environment and Labor in the Global Economy
SS, GL
TTH, 12:30 – 1:45 PM
Harvey Himberg

Harvey Himberg is Adjunct Professor of the Practice at UNC’s Department of Public Policy and an Environmental, Labor and Social Policy Consultant to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). He previously served as Director for Investment Policy at the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), where he managed environmental and social issues resulting from US corporate investment in developing and emerging countries. Prior to his career at OPIC, Dr. Himberg served as Chief of Staff and Legislative Director for a Member of Congress and as a foreign policy specialist for the US Department of Energy and the General Accountability Office. During his previous academic career he taught Political Science at the City University of New York, was a Fulbright Scholar at the Center for Mediterranean Studies in Aix-en-Provence, France and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer teacher in Tunisia. Dr. Himberg received his Ph.D. in Comparative and International Politics at the City University of New York and a B.A. from Oberlin College.

Himberg’s current research and teaching interests focus on the impacts of globalization on the natural and human environment, in particular, the comparative environmental, social and labor policies of emerging developing countries. He has authored and co-authored many World Bank and ADB publications on the environmental, social and labor policies of countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, as well as the corresponding policies of various multilateral development institutions. His most recent publication, Comparative Review of Multilateral Bank Safeguard Systems, was issued by the World Bank in May 2015.

Rapid recent globalization raises important public policy issues concerning impacts on the environment, labor, and communities. The seminar provides an opportunity to explore the implications of living in an increasingly global economy and the public policy issues that these trends pose. Among the themes to be considered are: What is “globalization?” Is it inevitable, reversible, and manageable? What are the key drivers and who are the stakeholders? The class will research and engage in the discussion about the impacts of international trade, investment, and development on natural ecosystems and the human workplace. Students will learn how to understand, articulate and debate alternative perspectives on current and iconic public policy issues such as, for example, the Keystone Pipeline and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, among many other topics. We will learn how these dynamics operate on the global, national and local levels, including in North Carolina.

PLCY 55.001: Higher Education, the College Experience, and Public Policy – CANCELLED 1/6/2016
SS
M, 2:30 – 5:00 PM
Melinda Manning

Melinda Manning has served as UNC’s Assistant Dean of Students, including involvement in a wide range of the university’s policies and activities affecting students and giving particular leadership both to policy initiatives and to individual students involved with sexual and relationship violence, mental health issues, and the student judicial system. She previously served as an Assistant Area Director in UNC Housing and Residential Education, where she taught a seven-week seminar class for resident advisor applicants. Before her law degree she also gained experience as a middle-school social studies teacher for three years, as a Teach for America recruiter, and as a Martin Luther King Fellow with Legal Services of North Carolina-Advocates for Children’s Services in Raleigh. She earned the Juris Doctor degree, the terminal degree in law, from the UNC Law School in 2001, and previously earned her B.A. in Political Science and History from UNC in 1994. She also received her MSW for the UNC School of Social Work in 2015.

This course will examine a variety of urgent questions facing American colleges and universities. Is higher education preparing students for the jobs of the future? How should students pay for school? What should be the role of college athletics? What effects do current state and federal regulations have on colleges and universities? What role will technology have on learning? Students will explore topics further through position papers, oral presentations, and the opportunity to create their own model college of the future.

PLCY 61.001: Policy Entrepreneurship and Public/Private Partnerships – CANCELLED 1/6/2016
TH, 12:30 – 3:00 PM
Zach Ambrose

Zach Ambrose, an adjunct professor of the practice, is a principal with Ambrose Strategy where he works with private sector clients to bring innovation to the public sector and with public sector clients to create public-private partnerships. His work has focused on health IT, analytics, open data clean tech, energy, education, engineering and telecommunications. Prior to founding Ambrose Strategy, Zach served as chief of staff to North Carolina’s Governor and Lt. Governor and as a senior staffer working with the North Carolina State Senate. He also served for almost five years in the US Navy as a surface warfare officer. Zach has B.S. degrees in electrical engineering and Russian from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The theme of this seminar is to define “policy entrepreneur” and examine strategies used by policy entrepreneurs to achieve policy change or innovation in the policy-making process. We will also explore models of innovative public-private partnerships in the delivery of public goods. The seminar will examine nonprofit policy entrepreneurs within policy advocacy organizations who push innovation and change in public policy. We will evaluate the ways policy and non-profit advocacy entrepreneurs advocate for their ideas and attempt to achieve lasting policy change. Students will write mock grant proposals for a public-private partnership or new policy innovation. We will host several leaders of successful public-private partnerships and other key innovative public sector and non-profit organizations.

PLCY 85H.001, Reforming America’s Schools.
TTH, 12:30 – 1:45 PM
Douglas Lauen

Dr. Lauen’s work seeks to understand the effects of educational policies, school types, and school contextual factors on student outcomes. I focus on areas that policymakers can control and that have high relevance to current educational policy debates. To date my academic research covers four areas: 1) classroom poverty composition, 2) educational accountability, 3) performance incentives, and 4) school choice. Sociological and economic theory and policy relevance guide my work, which employs rigorous quantitative research designs. My work often examines the heterogeneity of effects across socially, economically, and educationally disadvantaged student subgroups because reducing educational inequality depends on whether policies and settings have differential effects on disadvantaged and minority students.

This seminar will examine the role of schools and other institutions play in determining life chances, which educational interventions work well for economically and academically disadvantaged students, and what to do when institutions cease to work well. Students will learn how to analyze complex educational public policy problems while exploring questions of effectiveness, inequality, resource management, and politics.

PLCY 89.001: U.S. Immigration
SS, US
W, 2:30 – 5:00 PM
Krista Perreira

Krista Perreira is a health economist who studies disparities in health, education, and economic well-being and inter-relationships between family, health and social policy. Focusing on children in immigrant families, her most recent work combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies to study migration from Latin America and the health and educational consequences of migration. Through her research, she aims to develop programs and policies to improve the well-being of immigrant families and their children.

Approximately 40 million immigrants (14% of the US population) live in the United States and nearly one quarter of all children (ages 0-18) in the US are children of immigrants. Although the majority of immigrants arrive to the US from Latin America, others immigrate from Asia, Africa, and Europe. With a focus on Latin American migration to the US, this course introduces students to critical topics in immigration. Students will gain an understanding of the theories of migration, theories of acculturation and assimilation, and the ways in which policies influence the health and educational attainment of immigrant youth. Students will have an opportunity to compare and contrast U.S. immigration policies with the immigration policies of other developed countries in North America, Europe, and Asian. Students will also have an opportunity to explore their own migration histories and the personal migration stories of others.

PLCY 89.002: Global Health Policy
GL
TTH, 3:30 – 4:45 PM
Benjamin Mason Meier

Benjamin Mason Meier is an Associate Professor of Public Policy. Dr. Meier’s interdisciplinary research—at the intersection of global health, international law, and public policy—examines rights-based approaches to health. Working collaboratively across UNC’s Department of Public Policy and Gillings School of Global Public Health, Dr. Meier has written and presented extensively on the development, evolution, and application of human rights in global health. Dr. Meier received his Ph.D. in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University, his J.D. and LL.M. in International and Comparative Law from Cornell Law School, and his B.A. in Biochemistry from Cornell University.

Global health policy impacts the health and well-being of individuals and peoples throughout the world. Many determinants of health operate at a global level, and many national policies, social practices, and individual health behaviors are structured by global forces. Concern for the spread of infectious diseases, increasing rates of chronic diseases and the effectiveness of health systems to provide quality care are among the daunting challenges to health policy makers.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

POLI 52.001: Friendship in Political Thought
PH, CI
TTH, 12:30 – 1:45 PM
Susan Bickford

Susan Bickford grew up in rural Ohio, did her undergraduate work at Bryn Mawr College, and received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Her research and teaching focus on feminist political theory, the impact of conflict and inequality on democratic politics, and ancient Greek political thought. She is the author of The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship. In 2013, she made it to the regional tryouts for Jeopardy, but Alex Trebek has not yet invited her to be on the show.

From Facebook friends to BFFs, friendship is a crucial part of our lives; friendship has also been a crucial concern in the history of political thought. In this class, we will investigate what relationships have been designated “friendship” in the past, and investigate why are they of such concern to political and ethical philosophers. What is the work that “friendship” does in the political and ethical thought of ancient thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero? How – and why – do Montaigne and Emerson write about it? Where do we find the most provocative and insightful contemporary writing about friendship? Above all: what is friendship’s relation to politics and to ethical life?

POLI 63.001: Social Movements and Political Protest and Violence
SS, NA
TTH, 12:30 – 1:45 PM
Pamela Conover

Pamela Conover, Burton Craige Professor of Political Science, was educated at Emory University, and received her Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. Professor Conover teaches courses dealing with political psychology, and social movements and political protest. In the past, Professor Conover’s research has concerned the nature of political thinking, and the politics of identity and citizenship. She also coauthored the book Feminism and the New Right. Her current research is focused on partisan polarization, and rivalry, and the role of values and integrity in shaping the behavior of politicians. In her spare time, she enjoys cycling and being walked by her two golden retrievers, Izzy and Gracie.

This seminar focuses on explaining and understanding social movements and the collective political behaviors that they promote (e.g. demonstrations, riots, strikes, and eco-terrorism). Our theoretical focus will be interdisciplinary, drawing on research in political behavior, social psychology, sociology, political theory, and the law. We will discuss when and why collective action occurs, who participates, what forms it takes, and how governments respond. Substantively, we will study a variety of movements including: the Tea Party movement, the Environmental movement, the Animal Rights movement, the America Militia movement, the White Nationalist movement, and the Occupy Wall Street movement. We will use a variety of approaches and resources: class discussions, films, wiki writing, online discussions, novels, and texts. Grades will be based on class participation, a writing project, and several group wiki papers.

POLI 73H.001: Politics and Animal Life
PH
TTH, 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM
Hollie Mann

Hollie Mann teaches political theory in the Political Science department and is the departmental advisor for the major. Her research and writing explores questions related to gender and sexuality, the body in Western political thought, and animals and politics. When she isn’t teaching political theory, she spends time running in the forest with her dogs, and practicing and teaching Jivamukti yoga.

Humans and non-human animals have lived together since time immemorial, with our relationships exhibiting a range of qualities, including interdependence, hostility, indifference, and care. Despite the fact that human life is always lived in close proximity to the non-human animal world, we tend to think of non-human animals as existing outside the boundaries of political life; indeed, animal life has been, at best, a marginal topic in the field of political science. Yet increasingly, political thinkers are challenging commonly held beliefs about the political and ethical standing of animals, and they are attempting to illuminate the ways in which animal life actually animates much of political theory and politics today. In the spirit of these emerging debates, this seminar will shed light on the ways in which non-human animals have been central to the construction of meaning in the history of political thought and to our own self-understandings. Once we get this picture in clearer view, questions concerning our relationships and interactions with animals today will be pressed upon us, and together we will reconsider the view that non-human animals can be legitimately excluded from political life and thought. More specifically, we will explore the implications of including them in political life and thought and how that fact might be brought to bear on particular problems concerning our relationships with animals in late modernity.

PSYCHOLOGY

PSYC 55.001: Children’s Eyewitness Testimony – CANCELLED 10/29/15
SS
TTH, 2:00 – 3:15 PM
Peter A. Ornstein

Peter A. Ornstein received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1968 and joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1973, where he is now the F. Stuart Chapin Professor of Psychology. A former chair of the Department of Psychology, Dr. Ornstein is a developmental psychologist who has long been interested in cognitive development and its implications for understanding children’s abilities to provide testimony in legal settings. His research focuses on age-related changes in long-term memory for the details of salient personal experiences and the “socialization” of children’s memory skills. Outside of the world of research and teaching, he and his wife enjoy traveling, hiking, and wilderness canoeing.

With increasing frequency, young children are being called upon to provide evidence in legal proceedings, and often it is the testimony of children that is central to the outcome of a case being tried. Children’s testimony is sought regularly in cases that range from divorce and custody disputes in family courts to allegations of sexual abuse in criminal cases. But what is known about the abilities of children to provide accurate information in these types of legal situations? To a great extent, children’s testimony depends upon their abilities to remember previous experiences and to be able to resist the suggestions of others. In this seminar, we will discuss the relevant literature on children’s memory and cognition in the context of a treatment of specific cases – most of which involve allegations of child sexual abuse – that have come to trial. Particular emphasis will be placed on two cases, the relatively recent Little Rascals Day Care case in North Carolina, and the 300-year old Salem Witch Trials.

PSYC 61.001: Drug Addiction: Fact and Fiction
PL, CI
MWF, 10:10 – 11:00 AM
Kathryn (Kate) Reissner

Kathryn (Kate) Reissner received her PhD from the University of California, where she performed research on the neurobiology of learning and memory. Dr. Reissner went on to perform postdoctoral research at the Medical University of South Carolina, where she studied the role of glutamate transport in the development of cocaine addiction. She joined the Department of Psychology at UNC-CH as an Assistant Professor in 2014. Research in the Reissner lab is focused on the long lasting changes in the brain’s reward circuitry induced by cocaine abuse which mediate enduring vulnerability to relapse, with emphasis on neuron-astrocyte interactions.

Illicit and legal drugs make the user feel good but also promote the development of dependence and long-lasting changes in brain physiology. In this biological psychology seminar, we will take a multi-disciplinary approach to learn about the neurobiology of drug addiction with a focus on the following questions: How do we define addiction? Are media depictions of drug addiction accurate? What are the beneficial and harmful psychological effects of abused drugs? What has scientific research revealed about the neurobiology of the “brain on drugs”? Do most users become addicts? We will tackle these questions through classroom discussions/debates, lectures, movies, and writing assignments. In this communication intensive seminar, critical analysis of information about the neurobiology of addiction will be used to separate fact from fiction.

PSYC 69.001 Racism, Racial Identity, and African American Mental Health
SS, US
TTH, 9:30 – 10:45 AM
Enrique W. Neblett, Jr.

Enrique W. Neblett, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Lab Director of the African American Youth Wellness Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Michigan and completed a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the National Science Foundation at Howard University. Inspired by Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s famous “doll study,” Dr. Neblett’s research examines the association between racism-related stress and health in African American and ethnic minority youth, with a focus on racial and ethnic protective factors and mechanisms that promote youth well-being. His work has been published in prominent scholarly outlets, and he has been recognized by the Department of Psychology on numerous occasions for teaching excellence.

This seminar examines the connections among racism experiences, racial identity and African American mental health with a focus on African American children, adolescents, and young adults. We begin the seminar with an overview of foundational themes and theoretical perspectives that inform the study of racism and racial identity as they pertain to African American youth mental health. In the second part of the seminar, we use film, debate and personal reflections to inform an in-depth study of racial identity – the significance and meaning that individuals ascribe to being African American – as a protective factor in the link between racism and poor mental health outcomes for African American youth. Finally, we conclude the seminar with a discussion of current topics, controversies, and recent advances in the field. Throughout the seminar, a primary objective will be to consider diverse perspectives regarding how our knowledge and understanding of racism and racial identity has evolved over time and how the psychological experiences of African Americans can be used to promote African American mental health and wellness.

PSYC 89H.001: Critical Thinking for Psychology and Beyond: How to Use Your Brain
SS
TTH, 2:00 – 3:15 PM
Jonathan Abramowitz

Dr. Jonathan Abramowitz is Professor and Associate Chair of Psychology, and Director of the UNC Anxiety and Stress Disorders Clinic. His research focuses on developing and evaluating the effectiveness of treatments for anxiety disorders such as OCD, phobias, and panic attacks, and he has been given awards for his contributions to the field. As a psychological scientist, Dr. Abramowitz is passionate about standing up and de-bunking junk science, myths, and other false claims about psychological disorders and their treatment. He is also outspoken and takes a stand against unethical behavior on the part of mental health-related institutions and individuals.

Critical thinking means being able to spot flaws in arguments and make judgments on the basis of well-supported reasons. It fosters creativity and solution-focused behavior, and is essential for success in the classroom, in relationships with others, and for avoiding being duped by people trying to sell you what you don’t need or get you to believe what isn’t true. The field of psychology is especially vulnerable to pseudoscience—theories and treatments that are made to look scientific, but that aren’t. In this seminar you will sharpen your critical thinking skills and learn how to apply them to identify pseudoscience, especially in psychology—but not exclusively. By analyzing a number of controversial topics in psychology, you will learn how to use logic and science to draw conclusions about what you read and develop strong arguments to support or de-bunk the claims that are being made.

RELIGIOUS STUDIES

RELI 70.001: Jesus in Scholarship and Film
SS
M, 9:00 – 11:50 AM
Bart Ehrman

Bart Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies. He has taught at Carolina since 1988. He is author or editor of fourteen books, and is widely regarded as a leading expert on the New Testament and the history of the early Christian church. He is also a well-known teacher on campus, having won the Undergraduate Students Teaching Award and the Bowman and Gordon Gray Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

This seminar will examine how historians have reconstructed the life, teachings, and death of the historical Jesus. We will look at the Gospels of the New Testament, as well as references to Jesus in other writings (Roman and Jewish sources, as well as Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament). In addition, we will explore how Jesus has been portrayed in modern film, including such Biblical “epics” as The Greatest Story Ever Told, such “period pieces” as Jesus Christ Superstar, such brilliant retellings as Jesus of Montreal, and such controversial films as The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Passion of the Christ. The ultimate goals of the seminar are to see what we can say about the historical man Jesus himself and how Jesus came to be portrayed in both ancient sources and modern imagination.

RELI 78.001: Reading the Bible: Now and Then
LA, WB
TTH, 2:00 – 3:15 PM
David Lambert

David Lambert is interested in the Hebrew Bible as a textual object whose interpretation stands to tell us as much about its readers and their communities as it does about ancient Israelite origins. In that vein, he looks to bring historical critical approaches to the Hebrew Bible into closer conversation with the history of biblical interpretation.This theme comes to the fore in his forthcoming book, How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture. It considers the development of repentance as a concept around the turn of the Common Era and how it came to be naturalized as an essential component of religion through a series of reading practices that allowed nascent Jewish and Christian communities to locate repentance in Scripture. He works with a wide range of literature, and this project involves texts from throughout the corpus of the Hebrew Bible, as well as late Second Temple Judaism (Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, and Dead Sea Scrolls), Hellenistic Judaism, the New Testament, and Rabbinic literature. He is now focusing on a series of studies that aim to assess more broadly how modern Western notions of the subject have shaped biblical interpretation and, especially, translation practices.

An introduction to the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. We will look at the biblical text as modern interpreters and through the eyes of the Bible’s earliest Jewish and Christian interpreters with special attention to changing assumptions about how to read the Bible and the nature of Scripture itself.

RELI 79.001: Human Animals in Religion and Ethics
PH, GL
TTH, 2:00 – 3:15 PM
Andrea Dara Cooper

In her work, Andrea Dara Cooper emphasizes the medieval basis of modern Jewish thought, its interactions with contemporary theoretical interventions, and the intersection of religious studies and critical theory. Her current book project, based on her dissertation, focuses on representations of family and kinship in major figures of modern Jewish thought. By using family as a frame of analysis, she examines how tropes of maternity, paternity, filiation, and fraternity particularly inform the works of Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas. She considers how their philosophical approaches are shaped by the transcendence of erotic love and the effacement of gender difference. Her next research project examines the nexus of sacrifice, embodiment and animality in post-Shoah ethics. She addresses the horizon of animality in testimony and Jewish literature, illustrating the role of the human/animal opposition in figuring modern Jewish identity as a liminal state of hybridity.In both her research and teaching, she demonstrates that the study of gender is a central method of analysis in Jewish studies, as it brings to light fundamental questions of subjectivity, embodiment, agency, hermeneutics, and ethics. Her commitment to interdisciplinary research in the study of religion drives her approach to teaching religious studies.

This course investigates the figure of the human animal in religion and philosophy. What kind of animal is the human, and what separates humans from animals? We will consider how attending to distinctions between humans and animals can highlight varying ideological and religious viewpoints.

ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

ROML 56.001: Italians in Search of Harmony
LA
TTH, 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM
Ennio Rao

Ennio Rao is Professor of Italian and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Romance Languages. He earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University, concentrating in the Classics and Italian Renaissance literature. In his years at Carolina he has received a Tanner Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching and taught a wide range of courses, spanning such areas as the humanist invective, Italian chivalric literature, Renaissance theater, the history of the Italian language, and Italian dialectology. He is currently studying the revival of Epicureanism in 15th-century Italy.

This seminar explores the concept of harmony in selected Italian writers, from Dante to contemporary writers. In the 14th century, Dante dreamed of a universal empire that would assure peace on earth, thus allowing mankind to pursue knowledge and wisdom and to achieve the ultimate harmony in the next world: the natural reunion of creature and creator. Dante himself directs his readers to interpret the journey of the pilgrim in the Divine Comedy as Everyman’s quest for transcendental harmony with God. This quest for harmony is characteristic of many Italian writers, from Petrarch to Leopardi, to many contemporary poets, novelists, and film directors. Students will be reading and discussing works by Dante, Petrarch, Leopardi, Pirandello, Vittorini and Moravia, and will view films by Antonioni and Bertolucci. They will also be divided into groups and invited to produce an original work (theatrical, cinematic, literary, artistic, etc.) that illustrates the concept of harmony.

ROML 89.002: “Destination Italy”: A Traveler’s Guide to WWII Italy
HS, NA, CI
TTH, 2:00 – 3:15 PM
Marisa Escolar

A former Fulbright scholar who has studied in Rome and Bologna, Marisa Escolar’s current research interests are the interactions between US and Italian culture, as represented in literature and film in the twentieth century. In addition to her book project centered around the Allied occupation of Italy in WWII, she also works on translation, censorship and gender studies.

As Allied soldiers invaded Sicily in 1943, they landed in the same country that was one of the most sought-after destinations for Northern European and American travelers. This first-year-seminar will ask the question: what does it mean to go to war with Italy, a nation associated with art and beauty? And after victory, how do Allies and Italians represent that war —first fought as enemies, then “co-belligerents”, then friends—in visual, literary and cinematic terms? We will read military guidebooks, memoirs and short stories, watch films and examine wartime cartoons to explore how the fantasy of “destination Italy” is transformed by the devastation of war. Students will perform close readings of these texts, placing them in an array of cultural and disciplinary contexts.

ROML 89H.001: Sex, Sexuality, and the Body in Early Modern European Literature – CANCELLED 12/2/15
LA, NA
MWF, 12:20 – 1:10 PM
Lucia Binotti

Professor Lucia Binotti’s research crosses the borders between literary criticism and cultural history. She works on Spanish Renaissance material and cultural history and on the mechanisms that construct linguistic and cultural identity. She has worked on linguistic theories on the origin and development of the vernaculars, on the establishment of historiography as a discipline, and on the strategies that were used to synthesize the civic values of the Italian Renaissance into the ideological tenets of the Spanish Empire. Her new book project analyzes the discourses and rituals that constituted illicit, transgressive sexuality among early modern Spanish elites.

This seminar challenges the veiled prejudice in academic circles that considers overt eroticism to be a minor genre or mode, of interest only in terms of language and customs, but without literary merit. We will devote part of the seminar to the close reading of both canonical and lesser-known poetry and prose of the 16th and 17th century where the treatment and interpretation of sex is primary. Texts will be discussed in terms of their literary tradition (popular or cultured), sources and influences (the Arabic erotic literary tradition or classical carnal poetry such as Ovid’s and Catullus’), language, structure, rhetoric, the particular nature of their eroticism, degree of explicitness, and, especially, tone. After this exchange of ideas we discuss how each epoch, or even generation and/or movement, deals with the physical in a different way and establishes distinct limits on its expression.

SOCIOLOGY

SOCI 58.001: Globalization, Work, and Inequality – CANCELLED 12/1/15
Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative
SS, GL
TTH, 9:30 – 10:45 AM
Ted Mouw

Ted Mouw is a sociologist who studies social demography, labor markets, and inequality. He received his Ph.D. (in sociology) and M.A. (in economics) in 1999 from Michigan. He is currently working on a project on globalization and low-wage labor markets. There are three components to this project: 1) Longitudinal evidence on “dead end jobs” and working poverty in the U.S., 2) immigration and the labor market for Mexican migrants, and 3) industrialization and labor conditions in Mexico and Indonesia. He has also researched the use of job contacts to find work and racial friendship segregation in schools. After college he lived in Indonesia for two years, where he taught English, studied Indonesian and Javanese, and climbed volcanoes.

This seminar, which presents a comparative and multidisciplinary perspective on how globalization affects labor markets and inequality, will consist of two parts. First, we will discuss basic sociological and economic models of work and globalization, and then students will apply these models to three case studies: 1) “sweatshops” and the question of international labor standards, 2) industrialization and development in China and Indonesia, and 3) immigration and economic integration between the U.S. and Mexico. Students will prepare research papers on one of the three case studies. Course readings will be supplemented by the teacher’s current research on two questions: 1) What are conditions actually like for workers in Nike plants in Indonesia? (Interviews and a photo-narrative). 2) How does the labor market work for undocumented Mexican workers? (Interviews from Carrboro, NC, part of my personal research project.)

SOCI 71H.001: The Pursuit of Happiness
SS
TTH, 9:30 – 10:45 AM
Arne Kalleberg

Dr. Arne Kalleberg is a Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has Adjunct Professorships in the Kenan-Flagler Business School, the Department of Public Policy, and the Curriculum in Global Studies. He is also the Editor of Social Forces, an International Journal of Social Research.

Happiness remains a fundamental goal in most societies, despite being elusive for many people. In recent years, social scientists have become increasingly interested in the subject of happiness and its causes and consequences. Sociologists, economists, political scientists, geographers and psychologists have joined with philosophers in studying the nature of happiness and subjective well-being and its relationship to social life.

This course will examine the interplay between individual and social happiness by considering the nature and meaning of happiness in the contemporary United States as well as in other countries. We will seek to answer questions such as: What is happiness? Can we measure happiness, and if so, how? What is the relationship between biology and happiness? Between psychology and happiness? Does money buy happiness? Does happiness vary among diverse groups (racial, ethnic, religious, gender, age, and social class groups)? How does happiness differ among cultures and nations? What is (and should be) the role of happiness in formulating public policies? We will address these and other questions by: reading books and articles; class discussions and debates; viewing films; interviewing people; and collecting information using the Internet and other sources.

SOCI 89.001: Poverty, Inequality, and Health in America
SS, EE
TTH, 2:00 – 3:15 PM
Kathleen Mullan Harris

Kathleen Mullan Harris is the James Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of Public Policy. Her research focuses on social inequality and health with particular interests in family demography, the transition to adulthood, health disparities and family formation. Harris directs the 20-year NIH longitudinal Add Health Study, which is following 20,000+ teens into adulthood. Under Harris’ leadership, the study has pioneered innovative study designs and integrative multidisciplinary research to understand social, environmental, behavioral, and biological linkages in developmental and health trajectories from adolescence into adulthood. Her publications appear in a wide range of disciplinary journals. She is currently the only woman at UNC elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2014).

This First Year Seminar examines issues of poverty, social and economic inequality and health in America. Course content will focus particularly on health disparities according to patterns of poverty and inequality and according to socioeconomic disadvantage associated with single-mother families, teenage and nonmarital childbearing, child poverty, immigration, and race and ethnicity. This seminar is coupled with an Experiential Education (EE) requirement that will give students firsthand experiences with how poverty and inequality is experienced in the lives of American men, women, children, and families. Students will carry out a research project on how the poverty and inequality they observe in their community service work is related to health outcomes or health disparities. The research project thus combines the experiential education on poverty and inequality students gain in the community with the academic scholarship on health disparities from course materials and other health-related research materials specific to their research project topic.

SOCI 89.002: Race and Ethnic Relations in the U.S.
SS, US
MW, 3:35 – 4:50pm
Anthony Perez

Anthony Perez studies the measurement, meaning, and implications of race/ethnicity in the United States and abroad. His research focuses on the interplay between formal and informal conceptualizations of race and ethnicity and de facto measures of race/ethnic populations used in the Census, social surveys, and demographic data; causes of uncertainty in the reporting of race across generations and throughout the life course; and the consequences of racial uncertainty for research on inequality, race-attentive social policy, and demographic projections of past and future diversity.

It is impossible to understand the structure of American society, or the lived experiences of its people, without understanding both the meaning and consequences of race and ethnicity. Yet, while examples of what race does are well known to students interested in questions of social justice and inequality, the question of what race is receives considerably less attention. Any student familiar with U.S. society can identify myriad, often striking examples of racial inequality—from highly disproportionate rates of poverty, unemployment, and disease to racially disparate treatment at the hands of police, teachers, and neighbors. But what, exactly, is “race?” The geographic origins of our ancestors? The social categories that others perceive from our appearance? The identities we claim based on a sense of belonging or attachment to a particular culture or community? Or can race be any and all of these things, depending on the context in which individuals perceive and react to one another? These are just some of pressing questions with which students will grapple in this seminar, as we delve into the meaning and measurement of race in society, how it changes over time and space, and what it signals for the future of race/ethnic relations in the United States. In pursuit of these aims, we will incorporate a variety of instructional strategies and active learning techniques, including primary data collection and analysis, critical examination of race/ethnicity in popular culture (including music, literature, and film), and in-class group activities.

STATISTICS AND OPERATIONS RESEARCH

STOR 54.001: Adventures in Statistics
QI
TTH, 11:00 AM – 12:15 AM
Jan Hannig

Jan Hannig is a Professor in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research. His current research interests are in foundations of statistics. He and his co-authors can be partially credited with resurrection of fiducial statistics. Fiducial statistics was created in the 1930s and since inception was wrought with controversy. By mid 1960s the topic was largely dormant and stayed ignored until mid-2000s. Since it is experiencing a renaissance with several groups contributing publications in leading statistical journals. Jan is married to Dr. Shevaun Neupert a professor of Psychology at NCSU with keen interest in applied statistics. This makes for some wonderfully nerdy Saturday morning chats. They have a daughter named Klára.

The aim of this seminar is to show that contrary to the common belief, statistics can be exciting and fun. We will focus on the big picture ideas. Instead of memorizing confusing formulas, many of the technical ideas will be demonstrated by computer experiments. We will view some recent movies and discuss the role statistics plays in sports, gambling, medicine, politics, finance, etc. Then we will study randomness and discover why casino always wins. Finally we will discuss the basic principle of statistical reasoning “if it is unlikely do not believe it”, get to understand why a relatively small sample can carry a big punch and learn how to lift ourselves by our bootstraps. This seminar is not a replacement for an introductory statistics course.

STOR 64.001: A Random Walk down Wall Street
QI
TTH, 9:30 – 10:45 AM
Chuanshu Ji

Chuanshu Ji joined the Department of Statistics and Operations Research after getting his Ph.D. in 1988 from Columbia University. Ji’s research involves using statistics to quantify uncertainty and randomness in various problems in natural and social science. One example is to understand patterns of stock markets and predict their behaviors, where it becomes useful to present financial data graphically and run related computer simulation. He also teaches statistics and probability courses at undergraduate and graduate levels.

The ups and downs of many stocks, bonds, and mutual funds in the past few years have made a significant impact on our society. Accordingly, a good understanding of financial markets becomes a necessary part of our education. This seminar is intended to provide students with a multimedia platform on which they can learn some basic concepts in finance and economics, useful tools for collecting and summarizing financial data, and simple probability models for quantification of the market uncertainty. Students will actively participate in the seminar’s organization. A number of small projects will be assigned to students, supervised by the instructor. The projects include data analysis using Excel, experimentation of simple investment strategies and portfolios through “virtual trading,” discussions on the performance of those portfolios and related probability calculation. Students will present what they conduct in the assigned projects. Grades will be based on students’ performance in their homework, projects, and presentations.

Spring 2016