Courses

• UHC AS 101: The Pluto Saga: How do you become a planet and stay a planet?
  The demotion of Pluto's status is used to explore the scientific, cultural, political, and religious implications of evidence in the 21st Century; the roles of visualization of Nature treated by observatory use and museum visits; writing and quantitative skills building.
• UHC BI 101: Climate Change in Massachusetts
  Henry David Thoreau spent decades observing and recording the natural history of Concord and other sites in Massachusetts. This course will place his work within the context of modern climate change research. Readings will include both Thoreau's works as well as research papers comparing the observations of Thoreau and other historical data sets with modern observations. In order to gain an appreciation of the process whereby science is communicated to the public, attention will also be given to the way in which these scientific papers have been presented in the magazines and newspapers. Class meetings will take place at the sites where Thoreau's research was carried out, including Walden Pond, the Minute Man National Historical Site, the Great Meadow Wildlife Sanctuary, and the Estabrook Woods. Other sites to be visited will include the Blue Hills Observatory (origin of the oldest continuous weather records in the U.S.), the Concord Free Library and the Thoreau Institute (where Thoreau documents are held), the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain (where old photographs and plant specimens are housed), Manomet Bird Observatory (on a day when birds are being banded), Mt. Auburn Cemetery (where large numbers of bird watchers track bird movements), and the Massachusetts State Laboratory (where mosquito numbers are tracked).
• UHC BI 102: Biological Design for Sustainability
  The science of sustainability is probably the most difficult, technically demanding, and ultimately rewarding synthetic discipline in the world today. It requires us to marry biology with philosophy, economics, anthropology, geography, and earth science in order to become knowledgeable, wise, and effective as clinical ecologists. Students in this seminar will learn to link human uses with ecological processes through the concept of ecosystem services. They will work together to define the boundaries of workable solutions by creating computer models that capture the dynamics of linked human-natural systems
• UHC HI 101: War for the Greater Middle East
  This seminar will explore an alternative to the conventional grand narrative of twentieth century political history that, rather than focusing on Great Power competition for dominance in Eurasia, emphasizes the interaction between the West and the peoples of the Islamic world. In terms of chronology, the course will recount events since 1914. In terms of scope, it will focus on three specific zones of conflict: the Persian Gulf (emphasizing Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran; Palestine (that is, Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza); and Afghanistan and Pakistan.
• UHC MU 101: Music as Social Experience
  Drawing on a variety of theoretical perspectives, this seminar investigates the ways in which musical practice serves as a reflection of, and model for, social ideas and understandings. Specific topics include gender relationships in Bizet’s Carmen, the spiritual efficacy of Tibetan Buddhist chant, dystopia in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, and the politics of Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock performance.
• UHC PY 101: Energy
  Ours is an energy-intensive society. American energy consumption per capita is now over ten times what it was when our nation was founded, and the rest of the world is following our example. This is leading to increasingly severe worldwide problems such as competition for scarce resources, pollution, congestion and, most likely, global climate change. Many governments and industries are aware of these issues and numerous attempts at remediation (some sensible and some not) have been proposed or adopted. The goals of this seminar are to explain the underlying physical principles related to the production and consumption of energy and to use this knowledge to explore and to discuss matters such as energy conservation, the so-called hydrogen economy, electric cars, nuclear power (both fission and fusion), carbon sequestration, and the feasibility of various alternative energy sources.
• UHC RH 101: Serious Comix: Graphic Narratives and History
  This course explores the use of comics (a form that literally co-mixes or mingles words and images) to represent devastating events in history. Assigned texts include book-length works that use words and images to depict the events of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Iranian Revolution, the Bosnian War, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11. In particular, the course investigates the ways that comics, a form traditionally associated with childish or unserious content, nonetheless lends itself to the depiction of individual and collective trauma. Students will read broadly and critically in the rapidly expanding comics field, as well as experiment with the construction of graphic narratives of their own.
• UHC RN 101: Moses
  This seminar will examine the history of the reception and the modus vitae embodied by the great figure of the Exodus story and will wrestle with attempts to construe a Moses for our time. Its goals include: a) gaining a basic familiarity with major ancient, medieval, and modern engagements with biblical tradition; b) engaging in close reading of texts that deal with interpretive issues such as truth and manifestation, esoteric meaning and exoteric form; c) evaluating modern moralistic, sentimentalist, and scholarly approaches to pre-modern revealed traditions; d) engaging with modern secular literary and artistic adaptations of the Moses figure.
• UHC SM 101: The Secret Lives of Corporations
  Corporations are an integral part of our society and are highly influential in political, environmental and social arenas. We have all heard of oil spills, toxic dumping, and sweatshops, but the problems are deeper than these symptoms and are not widely understood. In this course you will learn the basic structure and functions of corporations as well as some of the darker secrets behind corporate practices. We then explore the “new transparency movement” made possible by information technology, and the new market mechanism of ethical consumption it has spawned. Learn how collective consumer buying power is affecting which companies are more successful than others.
• UHC ST 111: First-Year Studio 1
  This first course in a two course sequence complements the other elements of the UHC curriculum by providing first-year students with a structured, curricular setting in which they can develop their abilities in writing, communication, and mathematics as well as their understanding of research methods and ethics. In the writing-and-communication component of the course, which meets weekly in the fall semester, students develop their abilities in written, visual, and verbal communication by sharing, discussing, and working on appropriate projects from other courses or co-curricular activities. Students receive explicit instruction in argumentation, prose style, and citation conventions, as well as an introduction to the library and the use of online catalogues and databases.
• UHC UC 101: Property
  Could you own the ocean? If you alter a song written by someone else, when (if ever) should it become your property? If you let land lie fallow when others are needy, do they have a right to use it? Should a harmless crossing of a property boundary be considered wrongful? These are some of the sorts of questions and problems involved in thinking about property, one of the most pervasive, important, contested, and slippery concepts in our world. This course will approach the concept of property from three main perspectives: the history of ideas about it, philosophical disputes about it, and current legal issues involving it.
• UHC VA 101: Art for the City
  Public works of art provide enduring and powerful means of communication. In this research seminar students will examine contemporary practices of creating public art in the city. The course will investigate how public art addresses significant social, political, and moral issues of our time. Students will investigate public art in the city of both a temporary and permanent nature as the main body of research in this course
• UHC XL 101: Global Shakespeares
  Close reading of four Shakespeare plays along with some of the international adaptations and rewritings they have inspired. Focus on the Shakespeare "brand" as well as postcolonial, feminist, and nationalist responses to Shakespeare in various countries, periods, and genres.

Note that this information may change at any time.

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