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In this course we will examine the role of music as a vehicle for political and social change in Africa. Our focus will be music-making throughout the continent of Africa during the nationalist struggles that resulted in independent African states and how musicians responded (and continue to respond) to the persistent challenges faced by those post-colonial states.

“Music is something that you can’t see, and painting is something that you can’t hear...so they balance each other’.” (1)

Contemporary efforts to confront our most pressing ecological problems are characterized by a tension between the global realities of these problems and the territorial borders and logics that define sovereign nation-states. This course will explore this tension in three parts. First, we will engage with a variety of theoretical and conceptual debates introduced by scholars of global environmental politics — a heterodox field that draws insights from international relations theory, international political economy, ecological economics, and environmental sociology (among others).

This course will explore the construction and experience of gender and sexuality in the Middle East through a performative lens. Drawing on research in ethnomusicology, queer and gender studies, anthropology and Middle Eastern history, the course will examine performance (music, dance, theater, poetry and more) as a process of representation, assertion, and sometimes transgression of sexuality and gender identities. This course will delve into the ways that performance, gender, and sexuality relate to ethnicity, nationalism, modernity, colonialism, and religion.

For students doing work-study or internships, we will focus on three core areas of professionalization. First, each week will journal our work weeks, discussing and sharing our work experiences in a round-table. Second, we will build our professionalization skills, especially networking (in person and on LinkedIn), resume writing, and doing practice interviews. Finally, we will work on writing 5-year plans, to help us figure out where we’d like to be a few years after graduation. More specifically

The large-scale consumer web has been defined by epochs. The first epoch was defined by the user as consumer: large companies created content which was consumed by the masses. The second web epoch (web 2.0) has been defined by consumer creators, large companies own and deliver content created by users to other users (Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, …). The third web epoch is—if you believe the hype—to be defined by self-ownership of content.

This course will serve as an introduction to working with circuits in a lab setting. We will learn about the relatively simple rules necessary for working with analog circuits and how those rules can be used to build objects of growing complexity. We will then move on to understanding how to build circuits that can measure properties of and interact with their surroundings.

In this wide-ranging introduction to the study of international politics, we will be exploring how states and non-state actors negotiate their interactions in an increasingly interconnected, interdependent and globalized world.

How do we organize data to solve complex problems efficiently? This course studies the fundamental structures and algorithms that form the cornerstone of computational problem-solving. Building upon the programming foundations established in CS1, we will explore how algorithmic thinking and sophisticated data organization enables us to tackle increasingly challenging computational problems.

Have you ever wondered what a computer is and how it actually works?  In this course, we’ll answer the hardware half of this question.

Together with calculus, linear algebra is one of the foundations of higher-level mathematics and its applications. This is NOT just the algebra you know from high school. There are several perspectives one can take on linear algebra: it is a method for handling large systems of linear equations, it is a theory of linear geometry (including in dimensions larger than three), it is matrix algebra, and it is a theoretical structure that appears throughout mathematics, physics, computer science, and statistics.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mathematics underwent a vast expansion, into new, exciting, and increasingly counter-intuitive realms. The subject risked mystification and mutual incomprehensibility between experts in different sub-fields. In the first part of the twentieth century, a group of French mathematicians, under the pseudonym Bourbaki, undertook an ultimately successful program to use the foundation of set theory to put all of mathematics onto a common conceptual and logical foundation.

This course explores the life, works, and revolutionary contributions of Harry Partch (1901–1974), one of the most original and influential American composers of the 20th century. Partch was a pioneer of microtonal music and developed a unique 43-tone scale, which led him to construct his own instruments to realize his visionary compositions. Students will examine Partch’s unconventional approach to tuning, his rejection of equal temperament, and his philosophy of music as an integrated theatrical and corporeal experience.