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 EC 101: Financial Crises: Past, Present, and Future
  The course will focus on six big problems -- the financial system, the healthcare system, the retirement system, the tax system, the environment, and inequality in a serial fashion. Each topic will feature several introductory lectures, group discussions, presentations by outside speakers, and the presentation of reform proposals by teams of students. There will be a heavy emphasis on international comparisons. The analysis of the specific topics will be proceeded with a general discussion of the status of the U.S. economy, its long-term fiscal policy, it's history of declining rates of saving and investment, its competitive position in the world, its environmental pressures, and its growing economic and social inequality.
• UHC EK 101: Engineering Light
  Engineers solve practical technical problems using an ever-evolving toolkit of modern technology. One of the most significant engineering advances of all time is optical imaging, the use of light-based technology to create representations of objects. In this course, students will learn how engineers make instruments that resolve structures as small as atoms, and as far away as the center of the galaxy. We will explore the common principles behind imaging instruments, and will probe new engineering advances that make it possible to see through "opaque" materials, to construct an invisibility cloak, and to seek earth-like extrasolar planets. Students will develop an understanding for challenges associated with microscopes that image deep within tissue for medical diagnosis and treatment, or night-vision goggles that allow seeing in the dark. The class includes lectures, interactive classroom activities, and hands-on laboratory exercises.
• UHC EN 101: Literature and Hunger
  The course will pursue the themes of hunger, the consumption of food, the formation of community, and relation to the sacred, through a sequence of readings in the Western Tradition. By reading classic works (The Odyssey the Book of Genesis, selections from the Divine Comedy, sonnets of Shakespeare, Paradise Lost) and modern works by Kafka, Mallarmé, Louise Glück, Frank Bidart, and M.F.K. Fisher, we will see how different philosophies (Greek pantheism, Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and modern atheism) have imagined the acceptance or rejection of love, life and the sacred in terms of the symbolism of food. Class work will include close analysis of literary works, even those in translation; intensive critical writing and revision; and secondary readings in literary criticism, anthropology, theology, and psychology.
• UHC FT 101: The Camera as an Agent for Social Change
  Each student in this seminar will research, write and produce a short film (five to ten minutes) about a social issue. The completed films will be launched on YouTube and Vimeo and linked to the most popular social media sites. Each film will seek to change the way people perceive that issue and will highlight ways in which positive changes can occur. No previous filmmaking skills are necessary; students will receive training as part of the course.
• UHC HC 301: Inst & Invtn 1
  
• 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 HI 102: The Culture of World War I
  The Culture of World War I approaches this watershed moment in European history through works of literature, music, and art. The course's three chronological divisions: the lead-up to war, the experience of war, and its aftermath will include representative works from prominent composers, artists, novelists, and poets. Principal historical themes of the course are: the widespread conviction that war would cleanse and regenerate Europe; the brutally inglorious reality of trench conditions, chemical weapons, and the destruction of cultural patrimony; the ideals combatants held and the effects of events upon them; and the cultural landscape after the war. A textbook will ground discussions in events. Additional readings will include excerpts from memoirs, essays, interviews, and analyses.
• UHC HS 101: Cognition, Emotion and the Brain
  Cognition and emotion were classically thought to be represented separately in the brain but recent advances in brain research contradict this notion. Signals from brain pathways underlying emotion influence high-order brain association areas associated with cognition. In this seminar we will discuss evidence for the neural basis underlying the synthesis of cognition and emotion for decision and action, and dissociation of this process in several psychiatric diseases, including schizophrenia, autism and depression.
• UHC MA 101: Investigations in Number Theory
  Prerequisites are a solid background in high school algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, a healthy sense of curiosity about mathematical ideas, and a willingness to ask questions and work hard to answer them. Mathematical topics include: the fundamental theorem of arithmetic; elementary ring theory; unique factorization into irreducible elements, examples and counterexamples; probabilistic methods in the theory of prime numbers; the Riemann Hypothesis and why it matters. Strategies of mathematical investigation, including experimentation and observation, and the use of language as tool for investigation, will be a central theme of this seminar.
• UHC PH 101: The Artificial Heart and American Health Care
  American healthcare reflects four deeply-ingrained American characteristics: it is individualistic, technology-driven, death-denying, and wasteful. These characteristics make "reforming" American health care extremely contentious. No medical technology is as emblematic of American health care and culture as the artificial heart. An exploration of its 40 year history as reflected in American medicine, public health, law, bioethics, human rights, bioengineering, and economics helps explain both how the American "system" of health care works and why it is so difficult to change.
• UHC PH 102: Shifting Boundaries: Autism in the 21st Century
  In its fifth edition, forthcoming in 2014, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) may eliminate Asperger Syndrome as a separate diagnosis and subsume its features under the broader umbrella of Autism Spectrum Disorder. This likely change is proving highly controversial. Scientists disagree on whether different autism subtypes lend themselves to shared biomedical investigation; policy makers disagree on whether the educational, medical and social needs of persons with autism may be better served by a general label or by particularized diagnostic categories. This seminar adopts the current debate on the definition of autism as a privileged stand-point from which to explore the interconnection of society, science, and law in the 21st century.
• 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 RS 102: The Dreyfus Affair: Second Act or Dress Rehearsal?
  This seminar will focus on the history, literature, and art of the Dreyfus Affair, the near civil war to which France was brought at the end of the nineteenth century by the struggle to reverse the guilty verdict against an innocent officer, of Jewish origin, delivered in a secret military trial for treason. It will study the emergence of the European "intellectual" during the Affair and the birth of political Zionism, widely regarded as one of its offshoots. An effort will be made to situate the Affair in two interpretive contexts: was it the second act in a two-act drama that began with the scandal attending France's failed attempt, before the United States stepped in, to build a Panama Canal, or was it, with its anti-semitic riots in every major French city in 1898, a "dress rehearsal" for the Holocaust? On the horizon: an assessment of recent efforts to interpret the situation of American detainees in Guantánamo in light of the ordeal of Dreyfus, imprisoned not that far away on Devil's Island.
• 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 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 102: Beauty, Eros, Death
  Beauty fascinates and unsettles. In literature and the arts, the beautiful can ennoble and elevate, but beauty's refinement may also turn bloodless, artificial, even depraved. Erotic attraction to beautiful bodies, also sometimes exalting, can by contrast become all too red-blooded and degenerate into sexual obsession. And why do works of art so often link erotic love to tragic death? Do beauty and eros point toward true fulfillment in life -- and is that fulfillment mysteriously linked to mortality? -- or are the promises of beauty and desire just seductive lies masking a truth about existence that we cannot bear to face? These perennial questions are nowhere explored at greater cultural density than in the great short work of modern literature at the center of this seminar's inquiry into beauty, desire and extinction: Thomas Mann's 1912 novella Death in Venice. Mann's story sets into counterpoint an extraordinary array of prior mythic, literary, philosophical, musical, psychological, historical, biographical and visual inquiries into aesthetics, (homo)eroticism and mortality from Ancient Greece up through Mann's own era. Studying these many works, from the drama of Euripides and the philosophy of Plato up through Wagner's operas, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, and early photography of the male nude, together with "Death in Venice" itself and two films and an opera based on it, we will probe enduring questions about the nature and cultural expression of art, life, sexuality and mortality.

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