Writing Intensive Courses Across All Programs

Writing Intensive Courses

ANTH B303 History of Anthropological Theory
A consideration of the history of anthropological theories and the discipline of anthropology as an academic discipline that seeks to understand and explain society and culture as its subjects of study. Several vantage points on the history of anthropological theory are engaged to enact an historically charged anthropology of a disciplinary history. Anthropological theories are considered not only as a series of models, paradigms, or orientations, but as configurations of thought, technique, knowledge, and power that reflect the ever-changing relationships among the societies and cultures of the world.

ARTW B233 Writing for Radio and Podcast
This course will explore the craft of writing for audio sources by focusing on the skills, process and techniques necessary to the generation and production of radio and podcast pieces. Using the information-gathering tools of a journalist, the analytical tools of an essayist and the technical tools of a prose writer, students will study contemporary and historical radio and podcasts in the interest of creating their own pieces. The central focus of the course will be weekly visits from current radio writers, producers and on-air personalities, including local and national NPR producers, commentators and reporters. 

CITY B229 Topics in Comparative Urbanism: Colonial and Post-Colonial Cities
This is a topics course. Course content varies. Current topic description: Probing the relations of power at the heart of power and society in many cities worldwide, this class uses case studies to test urban theory, forms and practice. In order to grapple with colonialism and its aftermaths, we will focus on cities in North Africa, France, Ireland, Hong Kong, and Puerto Rico, systemically exploring research, writing and insights from systematic interdisciplinary comparisons. 

CMSC B330 Algorithms: Design and Practice
This course examines the applications of algorithms to the accomplishments of various programming tasks. The focus will be on understanding of problem-solving methods, along with the construction of algorithms, rather than emphasizing formal proving methodologies. Topics include divide and conquer, approximations for NP-Complete problems, data mining and parallel algorithms.

CMSC B340 Analysis of Algorithms
This course will cover qualitative and quantitative analysis of algorithms and their corresponding data structures from a precise mathematical point of view. Topics include: performance bounds, asymptotic and probabilistic analysis, worst case and average case behavior and correctness and complexity. Particular classes of algorithms will be studied in detail. 

EALC B200 Major Seminar: Methods and Approaches in East Asian Studies
This course introduces current and prospective majors to the scope and methods of East Asian Studies. It employs readings on East Asian history and culture as a platform for exercises in critical analysis, bibliography, cartography and the formulation of research topics and approaches. It culminates in a substantial research essay. Required of East Asian Studies majors, but open to others by permission, the course should be taken before the senior year.

ECON B313 Industrial Organization and Public Policy
The study of the interaction of buyers, sellers and government in imperfectly competitive markets.

ECON B314 The Economics of Social Policy
Introduces students to the economic rationale behind government programs and the evaluation of government programs. Topics include health insurance, social security, unemployment and disability insurance, and education. Additionally, the instructor and students will jointly select topics of special interest to the class. Emphasis will be placed on the use of statistics to evaluate social policy.

ECON B316 International Macroeconomics
Examines the theory of, and current issues in, international macroeconomics and international finance. Considers the role of international factors in macroeconomic performance; policy-making in an open economy; exchange rate systems and exchange rate behavior; international financial integration; and international financial crises.

ECON B324 The Economics of Discrimination and Inequality
Explores the causes and consequences of discrimination and inequality in economic markets. Topics include economic theories of discrimination and inequality, evidence of contemporary race- and gender-based inequality, detecting discrimination, identifying sources of racial and gender inequality, and identifying sources of overall economic inequality. Additionally, the instructor and students will jointly select supplementary topics of specific interest to the class. Possible topics include: discrimination in historical markets, disparity in legal treatments, issues of family structure, and education gaps. 

ECON B331 Human Capital Accumulation and Development
Education stands at the center of a range of important policy and methodological issues in low and high income countries alike. To what extent does human capital accumulation contribute to economic growth, reduce income inequality and increase intergenerational mobility? Why do some groups in low income economies, e.g., men and children from relatively high income families, tend to accumulate more human capital than other groups, e.g., women and children of the poor? Why have governments intervened in the market for education, and what have been the efficiency and equity consequences? 

EDUC B244 Unsettling Literacy: Praxis
These two linked courses, co-designed by teachers in the Education Program and English Department, offer the Bi-Co alongside three placement sites-- a correctional facility, a re-entry program, and a youth art and advocacy project--as comparative contexts for experiences and reflections on the meanings of “literacy”: What gives us access, to texts and selves? What are the outcomes of such educational processes? Do we imagine “learning our letters,” in Frederick Douglas’s words, as providing “the pathway from slavery to freedom,” and/or (as claimed by a contemporary criminologist) as “training good workers for a problematic system”? How might “literacy” take on different meanings in different contexts? Does it enable learners to fill roles in stratified, normalizing institutions, and/or give us increased leeway in living our lives--perhaps even opening up what educator Jean Anyon calls “radical possibilities”? 

ENGL B210 Renaissance Literature: Performances of Gender
Readings chosen to highlight the construction and performance of gender identity during the period from 1550 to 1650 and the ways in which the gender anxieties of 16th- and 17th-century men and women differ from, yet speak to, our own. Texts will include plays, poems, prose fiction, diaries, and polemical writing of the period.

ENGL B211 The Lives of Nineteenth-Century Monsters
This course explores the centrality of monstrosity to the nineteenth-century British novel. Our work will involve placing these monsters in the tradition of the Gothic in order to understand the cultural, social, and literary metaphors they represent. In some cases, we will read about monsters with hideous bodies, but our work will also include reading about monstrosity that is kept hidden from view. To aid our work—and to provide adequate protection—we will read about the sublime, the uncanny, and the other topics that monstrosity veils and exposes such as gender and sexuality. Literary texts might include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

ENGL B228 Silence: The Rhetorics of Class, Gender, Culture, Religion
This course will consider silence as a rhetorical art and political act, an imaginative space and expressive power that can serve many functions, including that of opening new possibilities among us. We will share our own experiences of silence, re-thinking them through the lenses of how it is explained in philosophy, enacted in classrooms and performed by various genders, cultures, and religions.

ENGL B230 Topics in American Drama
Considers American plays of the 20th century, reading major playwrights of the canon alongside other dramatists who were less often read and produced. Will also study later 20th century dramatists whose plays both develop and resist the complex foundation established by canonical American playwrights and how American drama reflects and responds to cultural and political shifts. Considers how modern American identity has been constructed through dramatic performance, considering both written and performed versions of these plays.

ENGL B252 Disability Studies; Disability Stories
This course will introduce students to the field of disability studies by examining depictions of disability in literature. We will discuss foundational texts in the field and consider key terms including access, ableism, medicalization, representation, and prosthesis. These critical texts will be read alongside literature, primarily from the Victorian period, that represents blindness, deafness, speech impairments, and other forms of disability. Together we will question the historical construction of disability and various bodily, mental, and communicatory norms. The course will conclude by turning to contemporary memoir and poetry to illuminate the intersections of disability studies with other identity-based fields.

ENGL B262 Survey in African American Literature
This is a topics course that allows for multiple themes to be taught. Each topic will have its own description and students may enroll for credit in the course as long as the topics vary.

ENVS B203 Environmental Humanities: Stories of Justice and Injustice
We will investigate a series of environmental domains––air, soil, water, biota, and chemical life––through traditionally humanistic methods, including close reading, primary source analysis, and narrative writing. Our material of study will range from environmental history to literature, policy documents to living water systems, superfund sites to air quality data. As environmental humanists, we will not only pay particular attention to what stories of environments have to tell us about the past, present, and future, but we will also study the ways in which storytelling itself is a mode of construction: environments shape us, but we, too, shape environments through our stories.

FREN B101 Introduction à l’analyse littéraire et culturelle I
Presentation of essential problems in literary and cultural analysis by close reading of works selected from various periods and genres and by analysis of voice and image in French writing and film from female and male authors in Metropolitan France, Africa, and other Francophone regions. Participation in discussion and practice in written and oral expression are emphasized, as are grammar review and exercises. 

FREN B260 Atelier d’écriture
Intensive practice in speaking and writing. Conversation, discussion, advanced training in grammar and stylistics. 

GEOL B203 Biosphere Through Time
We will explore how the Earth-life system has evolved through time by studying the interactions between life, climate, and tectonic processes. During the lab component of the course, we will study important fossil groups to better understand their paleoecology and roles in the Earth-life system. 

GERM B201 Advanced Training: Language, Text, Context
Emphasis on the development of conversational, writing and interpretive skills through an introductory study of German political, cultural and intellectual life and history, including public debate, institutional practices, mass media, cross-cultural currents, folklore, fashion and advertising. Taught in German. Course content may vary. 

HART B102 Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: Naturalism and the Supernatural in South Asian Art
This course examines the representations of gods, plants, humans and animals in the Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Islamic artistic traditions of India. It traces both the development of naturalistic representations, as well as departures and embellishments on naturalism in the painting, sculpture, architecture, metalwork and textiles of South Asia. The course will consider the spiritual, social, political and aesthetic motivations that led artists to choose naturalistic or supernatural forms of representation. 

HART B104 Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: The Classical Tradition
An investigation of the historical and philosophical ideas of the classical, with particular attention to the Italian Renaissance and the continuance of its formulations throughout the Westernized world. 

HART B107 Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: Self and Other in the Arts of France
A study of artists’ self-representations in the context of the philosophy and psychology of their time, with particular attention to issues of political patronage, gender and class, power and desire.

HART B108 Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: Women, Feminism, and History of Art
An investigation of the history of art since the Renaissance organized around the practice of women artists, the representation of women in art, and the visual economy of the gaze.

HART B110 Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: Identification in the Cinema
An introduction to the analysis of film through particular attention to the role of the spectator. Why do moving images compel our fascination? How exactly do film spectators relate to the people, objects, and places that appear on the screen? Wherein lies the power of images to move, attract, repel, persuade, or transform its viewers? In this course, students will be introduced to film theory through the rich and complex topic of identification. We will explore how points of view are framed in cinema, and how those viewing positions differ from those of still photography, advertising, video games, and other forms of media. Students will be encouraged to consider the role the cinematic medium plays in influencing our experience of a film: how it is not simply a film’s content, but the very form of representation that creates interactions between the spectator and the images on the screen. Film screenings include Psycho, Being John Malkovich, and others. 

HART B112 Art, Death, and the Afterlife
This course aims to explore how art was used as a symbolic form to overcome death and to assure immortality in a variety of archaeological, philosophical, religious, sociopolitical, and historical contexts. 

HIST B299 Exploring History
This course is designed to introduce history majors to the debates governing the production of historical knowledge which dominate the discipline. Although undergraduates often read history monographs as finished and “complete” projects, in fact each of these works is always deeply contested - both in terms of method and product. The goal of this course is to not only reinforce habits of critical textual reading but to provide students the tools to critically “read” the entire project of writing history. Required for History Majors and Minors. 

HIST B371 Topics in Atlantic History: The Early Modern Pirate in Fact and Fiction
This course will explore piracy in the Americas in the period 1550-1750. We will investigate the historical reality of pirates and what they did, and the manner in which pirates have entered the popular imagination through fiction and films. Pirates have been depicted as lovable rogues, anti-establishment rebels, and enlightened multiculturalists who were skilled in dealing with the indigenous and African peoples of the Americas. The course will examine the facts and the fictions surrounding these important historical actors. 

ITAL B306 Youth in 20th Century Italian Literature and Cinema
This interdisciplinary course focuses on literary texts and visual material dealing with youth and youth culture in post-fascist Italy. How is youth described in Italian culture after WWII? What does youth represent in the Italian imagination of 20th century Italy? Which language is used by the youth? While the focus in analyzing the challenges faced by youth is primarily on literature and film studies, throughout the semester the course will also touch upon sociological, cultural, and anthropological perspectives concerning the role of the family, peer relationships, prostitution, drugs, criminality and violence, diversity, gender identity, and sexuality. Students will be required to attend film screenings or view films on their own devices. 

ITAL B320 Nationalism and Freedom: The Italian Risorgimento in Foscolo, Manzoni, Leopardi
This course deals with 19th century Italian poetry and literary movement for Italian unification inspired by the realities of the new economic and political forces at work after 1815. As a manifestation of the nationalism sweeping over Europe during the nineteenth century, the Risorgimento aimed to unite Italy under one flag and one government. For many Italians, however, Risorgimento meant more than political unity. It described a movement for the renewal of Italian society and people beyond purely political aims. Among Italian patriots the common denominator was a desire for freedom from foreign control, liberalism, and constitutionalism. The course will discuss issues such as Enlightenment, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the complex relationship between history and literature in Foscolo, Manzoni, and Leopardi. This course is taught in Italian. 

PHIL B271 Minds and Machines
What is the relationship between the mind and the body? What is consciousness? Is your mind like a computer, or do some aspects of the mind resist this analogy? Is it possible to build an artificial mind? In this course, we’ll explore these questions and more, drawing on perspectives from philosophy, psychology and cognitive neuroscience. We will consider the viability of different ways of understanding the relationship between mind and body as a framework for studying the mind, as well as the distinctive issues that arise in connection with the phenomenon of consciousness. 

PHIL B330 Kant
The significance of Kant’s transcendental philosophy for thought in the 19th and 20th centuries cannot be overstated. His work is profoundly important for both the analytical and the so-called “continental” schools of thought. This course will provide a close study of Kant’s breakthrough work: The Critique of Pure Reason. We will read and discuss the text with reference to its historical context and with respect to its impact on developments in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion as well as developments in German Idealism, 20th-century phenomenology., and contemporary analytic philosophy. 

PHYS B305 Advanced Electronics Lab
This laboratory course is a survey of electronic principles and circuits useful to experimental physicists and engineers. Topics include the design and analysis of circuits using transistors, operational amplifiers, feedback and analog-to-digital conversion. Also covered is the use of electronics for automated control and measurement in experiments, and the interfacing of computers and other data acquisition instruments to experiments.

PHYS B331 Advanced Experimental Physics
This laboratory course consists of set-piece experiments as well as directed experimental projects to study a variety of phenomena in atomic, molecular, optical, nuclear, and solid state physics. The experiments and projects serve as an introduction to contemporary instrumentation and the experimental techniques used in physics research laboratories in industry and in universities. Students write papers in a format appropriate for research publications and make a presentation to the class. 

POLS B272 The Power of the People: Democratic Revolutions
We often invoke “democracy” as the very ground of political legitimacy, but there is very little agreement on what democracy means, why we might desire it, or how state institutions, law, and political culture might embody it. In this seminar we will grapple with some recent and influential accounts of democratic governance and democratic movements today. Our objective will be to develop a critical vocabulary for understanding what democracy might mean, what conditions it requires, and what “best practices” citizens committed to democracy might enlist to confront political challenges such as the structural divisions that persist among class, gender, and race; persistent inequality and influence of money and corporations; and the potential for democratic, grass-roots power as a vital ingredient to democratic flourishing.

POLS B290 Power and Resistance
What more is there to politics than power? What is the force of the “political” for specifying power as a practice or institutional form? What distinguishes power from authority, violence, coercion, and domination? How is power embedded in and generated by cultural practices, institutional arrangements, and processes of normalization? This course seeks to address questions of power and politics in the context of domination, oppression, and the arts of resistance. Our general topics will include authority, the moralization of politics, the dimensions of power, the politics of violence (and the violence of politics), language, sovereignty, emancipation, revolution, domination, normalization, governmentality, genealogy, and democratic power. Writing projects will seek to integrate analytical and reflective analyses as we pursue these questions in common.

POLS B367 China and the World: Implications of China’s Rise
In the 20th Century, China’s rise has been one of the most distinctive political affairs changing the landscape of regional and world politics. Especially, China’s breathtaking growth has challenged the foundations and limits of the market economy and political liberalization theoretically and empirically. This course examines the Chinese economic and political development and its implications for other Asian countries and the world. This course has three aims: 1) to facilitate an in-depth understanding of the Chinese Economic development model in comparison to other development models, 2) to conduct a comprehensive analysis of political and socio-economic exchanges of China and its relations with other major countries in East Asia, and 3) to construct a thorough understanding of challenges and opportunities for China from its extraordinary economic growth. 

POLS B372 Comparative Democratic Institutions
This is an advanced seminar covering issues of regime stasis and change. Particular attention will be paid to processes of democratic collapse and authoritarianization. 

PSYC B282 Laboratory in Cognitive Psychology
This laboratory course will provide hands-on experience in designing and conducting research in cognitive psychology, with an emphasis on the study of memory and cognition. Over the semester, students will have the opportunity to develop specific research skills, such as understanding how to design a study appropriate to a research question, collecting data, conducting and interpreting statistical analyses, writing about research, etc. Other goals include practicing and further developing critical thinking skills and communicating research ideas and results both verbally and in writing. Students will be exposed to behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG, ERP) techniques to study memory and cognition. The course will culminate with a final project in which students design and conduct a novel experiment, analyze the data, and prepare an APA style research report.

PSYC B283 Laboratory in Developmental Psychology
This laboratory course is designed to provide students with hands-on exposure to the principles and practices that guide scientific research on human psychological development. We will examine the crucial steps in the scientific research process, including developing research questions and hypotheses, identifying an appropriate research design, insuring measurement reliability and validity, collecting and analyzing data, and communicating results. Special attention will be given to the research topics and methodological approaches important to the interdisciplinary field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, which aims to elucidate the neurological changes underlying psychological development. Through lab activities and group projects, students will gain specific exposure to the use of neuroimaging methods to examine developmental questions. 

PSYC B284 Lab in Health Psychology
This laboratory/writing intensive/scientific inquiry quarter course will provide a hands-on experience conducting health psychology research and writing APA-style manuscripts. Students will be exposed to various aspects of the scientific process such as: literature reviews, hypothesis-generation, data collection, analysis, writing (drafting and polishing), peer-reviewing, and oral dissemination of scientific findings. The course will focus on biopsychosocial theory and challenge students to apply the theory to their own research project(s) and write papers on the results. 

PSYC B285 Laboratory in Cultural Psychology
This writing-intensive laboratory course will provide students an opportunity to learn the entire process of psychological research in a small scale. Students will formulate research questions within the area of cultural psychology, review the relevant literature, collect, code, and analyze data, and produce APA-style manuscripts. This lab course will expose students to qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method approaches to investigating research questions in cultural psychology.

PSYC B288 Laboratory in Social Psychology
This writing-intensive laboratory course will offer experience in conducting psychological research in the area of social psychology. The course involves coming up with a research question relevant to social psychology, conducting a literature review, designing and conducting research (identifying correct research method), statistical analysis (measurement and reliability, identifying and running the appropriate statistical test), interpretation of results and writing up an APA-style manuscript of a journal article in psychology. 

PSYC B289 Laboratory in Clinical Psychology
At its core, this laboratory course is designed to explore how it is that psychologists come to know (or think they know) things and how they communicate what they think they know. The class focuses on the scientific principles and practices underlying research in psychology with an emphasis on techniques and topics important to the subfield of clinical psychology. This course is intended to provide hands-on training in how to conduct research. Through lab activities and class projects, students will learn about important methodological issues and steps in the research process including how to identify important questions, measurement issues such as reliability and validity, different modes of data collection, and how to collect, analyze, and interpret data. 

PSYC B303 Portraits of Maladjustment in Classic Children’s Novels
This writing-intensive seminar (maximum enrollment = 16 students) .5 unit course deals with critical analysis of how various forms of psychological maladjustment and health are depicted in selected classic novels for children. Many such novels were written in the Victorian period. Long before developmental psychopathology was a scientific discipline, its main questions were insightfully probed by 19th and early 20th century novelists in books such as “The Secret Garden.” In this course, each book will be analyzed for the literary devices used to portray healthy adjustment and maladjustment, the implicit theories of psychological causation captured in the narratives, and the ways the novelist depicts life experiences that bring about mental health and personal growth. Each book will be discussed in its historical/literary contexts, and compared with current views drawn from psychological research. 

PSYC B375 Movies and Madness: Abnormal Psychology Through Films
This writing-intensive seminar (maximum enrollment = 16 students) deals with critical analysis of how various forms of psychopathology are depicted in films. The primary focus of the seminar will be evaluating the degree of correspondence between the cinematic presentation and current research knowledge about the disorder, taking into account the historical period in which the film was made. For example, we will discuss how accurately the symptoms of the disorder are presented and how representative the protagonist is of people who typically manifest this disorder based on current research. We will also address the theory of etiology of the disorder depicted in the film, including discussion of the relevant intellectual history in the period when the film was made and the prevailing accounts of psychopathology in that period. Another focus will be how the film portrays the course of the disorder and how it depicts treatment for the disorder. This cinematic presentation will be evaluated with respect to current research on treatment for the disorder as well as the historical context of prevailing treatment for the disorder at the time the film was made. 

RUSS B316 Russian and Soviet Short Story
This new Russian language course will explore the nature and evolution of the Russian short story from the beginning of the 19th century through the beginning of the 21st century. We will begin with the stories of Pushkin and Gogol and continue with Garshin who proved instrumental in developing the genre to its modern form. Students will then read stories by Chekhov, Bunin, Nabokov, Babel, Shukshin, Tolstaya, Pelevin — writers with distinguished voices who introduced a variety of groundbreaking themes, characters, and plots and whose art reveals the possibilities of the genre. All the readings and discussion will be in Russian. 

SOCL B303 Junior Conference: Discipline-Based Intensive Writing
This course will introduce students to a range of qualitative methods in the discipline and will require students to engage, through reading and writing, a wide range of sociological issues. The emphasis of the course will be to develop a clear, concise writing style, while maintaining a sociological focus. Substantive areas of the course will vary depending on the instructor. 

SOCL B398 Senior Conference
This capstone course for the sociology major focuses on major concepts or areas in sociology and requires students to develop their analytical and synthetic skills as they confront both theoretical and empirical materials. The Key emphasis in the course will be on students’ writing. Through a variety of assignments (of different lengths and purposes), students will practice the process (drafts) and elements (clarity and concision) of good writing. Specific topical content will vary by semester according to the expertise of the instructor and the interests of students.

SPAN B120 Introducción al análisis literario
Readings from Spanish and Spanish-American works of various periods and genres (drama, poetry, short stories). Main focus on developing analytical skills with attention to improvement of grammar. 

SPAN B243 Temas de la literatura hispana: Mitos coloniales, de la conquista al cine de hoy
This is a topic course. Current topic description: The early writings of the New World straddle between history and fantasy, fact and legend. This period is rich in chronicles that made no distinction between real and imaginary places and creatures, at a time when ambitious colonial enterprises were guided by myths (finding El Dorado, the Fountain of Youth, Paradise.) This course examines fantasies of imperial imagination that have persisted to this day by looking at both early chronicles and recent films.