Fall 2018 Seminars

• Exploring Memory
  Instructor: Professor Sarah Farmer
  Enroll in: Humanities H80
  Questions about human memory are central to a wide range of disciplines. Students will explore how historians, sociologists, social psychologists, legal experts and neuroscientists understand human memory and apply their findings to understand and shape their own societies.
  Credit: GE Category IV, may substitute for one quarter of Social Science Core

• How Nations Remember
  Instructor: Professor Anke Biendarra
  Enroll in: Humanities H83
  Just like people, nations select and organize what and how they want to remember. Students in this seminar compare how specific historical events (such as slavery and the Holocaust) are memorialized in various countries and represented in public art works, museums, literature, and film.
  Credit: No GE credit at this time GE Category III, may substitute for one quarter of Social Science Core.

• What is Space
  Instructor: Professor JB Manchak
  Enroll in: LPS H81
  Historical, philosophical, scientific exploration of the concept of “space.” Questions of interest include: What kind of a thing is space? How can we know what space is like? How is space different from time?
  Credit: GE Category II, may substitute for one quarter of Science Core

Winter 2019 Seminars

• What is Disease
  Instructor: Professor Lauren Ross
  Enroll in: LPS H123
  This course introduces students to scientific “principles” underlying disease causation and explanation-viz. the criteria that scientific explanations are expected to meet and how researchers in biomedicine structure disease explanations to meet such criteria. This subject requires students to understand how scientists in this discipline “approach and solve problems” where these problems are associated with scientist’s goals of identifying what “causes” and “explains” various complicated disease traits.
• Winter ’19 Syllabus
  Credit: GE Category II, may substitute for one quarter of Science Core.

• Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics
  Instructor: Professor Jeffrey Barrett
  Enroll in: LPS H141
  An examination of the standard von Neumann-Dirac formulation of quantum mechanics. The quantum measurement problem is discussed along with several proposed solutions, including GRW, many-worlds, man-minds, and Bohm’s theory.
  Credit: No GE, may substitute for one quarter of Science Core

• • What is Time?
    Instructor: Professor Jim Weatherall
    Enroll in: LPS H125
    This seminar will examine how scientists, philosophers, and artists have thought about and tried to represent time over the last ~2500 years, by studying historical and contemporary scholarly work, literature, film, and physical theories.
    Credit: GE Category III, may substitute for one quarter of Social Science Core.

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• The Philosophy and Biology of Sex
  Instructor: Professor Cailin O’Connor
  Enroll in: LPS H91
  Covers the origins of biological sex, dynamics of sexual selection, the evolution and cultural creation of sexual behavior in humans, and the construction of gender in human societies.
  Credit: GE Categories II or III, may substitute for one quarter of Social Science Core OR Science Core (not both).

Spring 2019 Seminars

• Ethics, Technology, and Design
  Instructor: Professor Katie Salen Tekinbas
  Enroll in: IN4MATX H80 H81
  The seminar seeks to provide students with a critical framework for understanding how and why biases of many kinds are built into the digital tools we use daily. Through the study of a series of case studies drawn from the domains of machine learning, Computer Science education, engineering, social media, and criminal justice students will be challenged to reflect on the relationships between ethics, technology and design.
  Credit: GE Category II III credit, may substitute for one quarter of Science Core.

• Jurisprudence and Constitutional Law
  Instructor: Professor Kyle Stanford
  Enroll in: LPS H95
  Applies competing theories of the nature of law and legal reasoning to evaluate decisions of the U.S Supreme Court in controversial areas of constitutional law such as free speech, privacy, sexual conduct, affirmative action, and political campaign contributions.
  Credit: GE Category III credit, may substitute for one quarter of Social Science Core.

• The Impact of World War I on Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, and other Sciences
  Instructor: Professor Virginia Trimble
  Enroll in: Physics H80
  Introduction to science in 1914 and WWI. Participants in groups of two or three will pick a preferred science; find out what happened to it during and after the war; write reports and present what they learned.
  Credit: GE Category II, may substitute for one quarter of Science Core.