Spring 2014

Course System Home Course Listing Spring 2014

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Showing 25 Results of 238

Statistics and Their Presentation — MAT2236.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Kathryn Montovan
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
Statistics is the art of finding meaning in spite of unavoidable uncertainties. Statistics is an important part of modern society -- with politicians, businessmen, economists, and all kinds of scientists depending on statistics and statistical models to estimate and confirm patterns within their data. In this course, we will focus on using basic statistical methods to
Environment Science Mathematics and Computing

Stimulus, Sensation, and the Brain: Psychophysical Investigations of Perception — BIO4126.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: David Edelman
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
How do animals extract information that is critical for survival from an often complex and ambiguous world? When an octopus sees a crab, what features and behaviors of that crab are capturing the octopus attention? How can we investigate sensory percepts in animals that cant report those percepts to us via natural language? What are the neural correlates of perception? In this
Science Mathematics and Computing

Style and Tone in Nonfiction Writing — LIT2104.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Wayne Hoffmann-Ogier
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
This introductory course focuses on the weekly writing of extended essays, including nonfiction narrative, personal essay, literary criticism, research writing, and the analytical essay. It gives particular attention to developing individual voice and command of the elements of style. The class incorporates group editing in a workshop setting with an emphasis on re-writing. It
Literature

Subject and Meaning in Painting — PAI4202.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Andrew Spence
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
Since the 1960s, art styles and trends have become increasingly diverse. This may make it easier for more artists to find acceptable venues of expression, but as the options increase, it may be more difficult for artists who are still in their formative stage of development to find their own way of expression. This course is designed for students who are starting to develop
Visual Arts

Systemic Generative Visual Investigations — CS4160.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Andrew Cencini; Guy Snover
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
What is possible when the work of art is a computational system and the means of production are robotic? This advanced computation course will lead students from abstract computational structures to physical two and three dimensional forms. The conceptual artist Sol Lewitt stated, "The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the System." Our platform
Science Mathematics and Computing Visual Arts

Text Seminar: Plato's Erotic Dialogues — PHI4128.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Karen Gover
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
In this course we will study in close detail Plato's two great dialogues on the subject of erotic love. In the first seven weeks, we will focus on The Symposium, and in the second seven weeks we will read The Phaedrus. Our engagement with the primary texts will be supplemented with readings on the history, cultural context, and interpretations of these works. In addition to the
Social Science

The Actor's Instrument — DRA2170.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Dina Janis
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
The craft of acting will be the main focus of this class. Through physical and vocal warm-up exercises, sensory exploration, improvisation, scene work, and extensive reading students will be asked to develop an awareness of their own unique instrument as actors and learn to trust their inner impulses where this is concerned. Extensive out of class preparation of specific
Drama

The Concentrated Moment: The Art of Auditioning — DRA4103.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Jenny Rohn
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
Auditions are an opportunity to develop your artistic voice and your confidence in that voice through self-critique. In this class we will work to demystify the process of auditioning and understand how to prepare and present work under challenging circumstances. We will cover cold readings, monologue and prepared scenes, with an in depth look at each step of the process, from
Drama

The Fine Art of Physical Computing — DA4261.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Robert Ransick
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
This course aims to extend our notions of the creative fine art potential of computers by exploring uses beyond standard mouse/keyboard/screen interaction. Moving away from these restrictions the course introduces students to basic electronics and programming an Arduino (microcontroller) to read sensors placed in physical objects or the environment. Projects are designed to
Visual Arts

The Hollow Form — CER2221.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Barry Bartlett
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
This objective of this class is to help students learn the breadth of handbuilding techniques in the ceramic arts that have given rise to a vast history of ideas observed using hollow forms. Unlike traditional sculptural techniques used in wood, stone and metal, ceramic forms have depended on the interior space, the void, to define both symbolic meaning and formal structure.
Visual Arts

The Jazz Age Revisited — LIT2304.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
"It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his epitaph to the Jazz Age. It was something else too: a social and literary revolution, fueled by new communications technology, music, popular entertainment, the end of racial segregation, and a creative renaissance in a neighborhood in Upper
Literature

The Key to Songs — MTH4419.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Nicholas Brooke
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
A seminar on advanced harmony, based on in-class analyses of a broad range of classical, pop, and jazz songs. Students will learn about chromaticism, pivot chords, modulation, and extended triadic harmonies, while composing songs in a variety of styles. Songwriters studied will include Mozart, Schubert, Mahler, Strauss, Weill, The Beatles, Radiohead, Gershwin, Monk, and other
Music

The Language of Material and Process through Analog/ Digital Investigation — CER4250.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Barry Bartlett; Guy Snover
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
This course will investigate the unique material nature of clay by integrating digital tools and concepts. A paradigm shift occurs when a robot replaces the hand and a 3D digital model replaces the sketch.  A Cartesian robot moves in three-dimensional space, but giving this movement purpose is still the job of an artist. We will look at applying computer-controlled robots
Visual Arts

The Magical Object - Visual Metaphor — DRA2116.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Sherry Kramer
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
There is a great difference between a prop and an object on stage that is built or filled with the dramatic forces of a play. Such objects become metaphors, they become fresh comprehensions of the world. In the theater, we believe in magic. Our gaze is focused on ordinary objects...a glass figurine, a pair of shoes, a wedding dress...and then our attention is shaped, and
Drama Visual Arts

The Science of Consciousness — BIO4123.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: David Edelman
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
Most of us have an intuitive sense of what consciousness is. It is what slips away when we fall asleep and returns when we awaken. It is the awareness of a particular word, object, or scene. It is the feeling of an internal presence. For centuries, nearly all thought about the nature of consciousness was the sole preserve of philosophers, most notably Rene Descartes, John Locke
Science Mathematics and Computing

The Scriptorium: Ekphrasis — LIT2225.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Camille Guthrie
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
Defined as a “place for writing,” our scriptorium will function as a class to explore the many manifestations of ekphrasis, which can be simply defined as an artistic description of a work of art, a rhetorical device in which one medium of art responds to another. In this writing-intensive course, we will study examples of ekphrasis—from the Classical era to Postmodernism—and
Literature

The Social Life of Crude Oil — ANT4118.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: David Bond
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
Crude oil keeps the contemporary in motion. This basic fact has become as bland a platitude as it is an unexamined process. From plastic bags to electricity, from synthetic fertilizers to the passenger plane, from heat for our homes to fuel for our cars, our world is cultivated, packaged, transported, and consumed in the general momentum of hydrocarbon expenditures. These well
Social Science Environment

The Textual City — SPA4704.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Jonathan Pitcher
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
This course will chart the development of identity within the postcolonial Latin American city, focusing on (though by no means limited to) Buenos Aires as a touchstone case. The latter will be read both literally and as a guiding metaphor, as a reality ordered by ideas. We will use interdisciplinary theoretical models as discursive markers, selected from history, architecture,
CAPA Languages

The Visual Art of China — CHI4496.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Ginger Lin
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
Whether it is the serenity of a classical Chinese landscape, the heroism of a CCP propaganda poster, or the humor of "The history of Chinese painting and the history of modern western art washed in the washing machine for two minutes", art is always somehow a reflection of the culture. In this class we will explore the ways in which art expresses culture. Each class or every
Languages

The Web as Artistic Platform — DA2110.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Robert Ransick
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
This course is an introduction to creative practices within digital technologies specifically focused on Internet based fine art projects. A broad survey of web-based digital arts is examined in tandem with an overview of tools necessary to create your own work. These include HTML, CSS, Photoshop, content management systems, and a basic introduction to JavaScript. Students
Visual Arts

Theories of Revolution — SPA4119.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Jonathan Pitcher
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
Over the past two centuries, in an apparently perpetual movement towards democratic independence, Latin America has confronted ruptures in tradition and experimented with a variety of revolutionary discourses to project its multiple pasts into the future. This course will read the postcolonial back into the European and US epistemai, and vice-versa, exploring how Latin
CAPA Languages

This is Not a Novel: Experimental American Fiction — LIT2211.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Days & Time:
Credits: 4
In this course, we will examine the attempts of various American writers to come up with alternatives to the conventions of realist narrative fiction that have dominated American literary history. We will read writers from the last half-century that have employed with modernist and postmodern techniques as metafiction, resistance of closure, authorial intrusion, collage,
Literature

Through Syntax to Style: A Grammar of Writing — LIT2169.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: John Gould
Days & Time:
Credits: 2
"Syntax" is the aspect of grammar concerned with the relationships of words in a language, with how they fit together to create meaning.  By exploring various English syntactical structures, we will discover a variety of ways to combine the same words to say slightly different things.  The course will rely heavily on the linguistic work of Noam Chomsky.  We will
Literature

Topics in Applied Philosophy: Privacy — PHI2126.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Paul Voice
Days & Time:
Credits: 2
Privacy has long been regarded as important and yet claims to privacy have been frequently challenged and often overridden by political, economic, and technological considerations. Do we have a right to privacy? If so, what is its philosophical justification and what essential human goods and capacities does it protect? In what circumstances and for what reasons can we be asked
Social Science