Courses

• CAS GE 560: Energy Transitions
  Survey of energy transitions including animal power to wood to coal to petroleum to electricity; analysis of socioeconomic, political, technological, and environmental causes of energy transitions, and future energy transitions resulting from fossil fuel depletion, climate change, and sustainable development.
• CAS GE 578: Marine Geographic Information Science
  Introduction to marine geographic information systems and spatial analysis for conservation, management, and marine landscape ecology. Comparative examples from Gulf of Maine and tropics. Solve problems in coastal zoning and marine park design, whale and coral reef conservation. Also offered as CAS BI 578.
• CAS GE 585: Ecological Forecasting and Informatics
  The statistics and informatics of model-data fusion and forecasting: data management, workflows, Bayesian statistics, uncertainty analysis, fusing multiple data sources, assessing model performance, scenario development, decision analysis, and data assimilation. Case studies highlight ecological forecasting across a range of subdisciplines.
• CAS GE 594: Global Environmental Negotiation and Policy
  Key concepts, actors, concerns, and issues related to the process of negotiating global environmental policies. Overview of the international system and environmental problems; an international negotiation simulation; case studies of global agreements on ozone depletion, climate change, desertification, and biodiversity, among others. Meets with CAS IR 594.
• CAS GE 597: Development and Environment in Latin America
  Provides an empirically based understanding of the social and environmental aspects of economic development in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) for purposes of analyzing the numerous trade and development policies that nations in LAC are currently considering. Also offered as CAS IR 597.
• CAS GE 598: Key Debates and Emerging Research in Land Change Science
  Topics change each semester. Students may enroll up to four times for credit. Introduces key debates in land change science and new research contributing to these debates. Features speakers from several departments and centers at Boston University as well as visiting scholars. Students develop their own research proposals.
• CAS GE 599: Science, Politics, and Climate Change
  Applies a science and technology studies perspective to climate change science and policy. Examines the relationships between scientific and political systems at global, national, and local levels. Also offered as CAS IR 599.
• CAS HI 101: The Dawn of Europe: Antiquity to the Renaissance
  Ancient and medieval Europe was a world of empires, kingdoms, and religious factions in conflict with each other. This course explores the ideologies, institutions, and texts that shaped these civilizations and continue to hold meaning in the modern world.
• CAS HI 102: The Emergence of Modern Europe: Renaissance to the Present
  What is Europe? This course explores the emergence of Europe as an idea and place. Draws on literature and art from Machiavelli to Russian ballet to explain Europe's changing meaning; focuses on nation- and state-building to explain Europe's shifting boundaries.
• CAS HI 151: The Emerging United States to 1865
  Explores how the United States, at first only a series of borderland outposts, became a sprawling national republic. Investigates factors that brought Americans together and those that tore them apart, as they struggled passionately over racial, religious, and sectional values.
• CAS HI 152: The United States since 1865
  After the Civil War, Americans created a new urbanizing and industrializing landscape, flush with immigrants, growing class conflict, and racial divisions. This course explores how, through times of prosperity, depression, and war, Americans transformed the United States into one of the world's leading nations.
• CAS HI 175: World History to 1500
  Explores historical and environmental factors influencing how cultures take shape and impact each other. Examines early global connections and conflicts between people of different continents as well as between humans, other species, the natural environment, and planet as a whole.
• CAS HI 176: World History after 1500
  Examines the religious encounters, economic rivalries, and military battles produced by European imperialism in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia since 1500. Analyzes how European colonialism came to dominate the world and nationalist movements succeeded in gaining independence.
• CAS HI 190: History of Boston: Community and Conflict
  Students work with centuries-old objects, manuscripts, letters, and diaries in reconstructing Boston's past. The course covers witchcraft in America, immigration, and race in depth, with out-of-class visits to museums, churches, and neighborhoods in the city.
• CAS HI 191: What Is Europe?
  Explores key moments in history when cultural contact prompted Europeans to reconsider how they defined themselves culturally and geographically. Lectures and discussions are combined with trips to local museums/archives to analyze the material remains of this process of self-definition.
• CAS HI 200: The Historian's Craft
  Required workshop for majors, normally taken in the sophomore year. Gives students the opportunity to analyze original sources and engage with leading works of historical scholarship. Explores how historians reconstruct and interpret the past using creativity, deduction, and contextual analysis.
• CAS HI 201: History of Medieval Europe
  Traces the evolution of medieval civilization from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries. Emphasizes three main themes: the political and social development of western Europe, the evolution of Latin Christianity, and the role of popular culture. This course cannot be taken for credit in addition to the course with the same title that was previously numbered CAS HI 203.
• CAS HI 203: Magic, Science, and Religion
  Boundaries and relationships between magic, science, and religion from late antiquity through the European Enlightenment. Topics include transformation of pagan traditions, distinctions between learned and popular traditions, Scientific Revolution, and changing assumptions about God and Nature. Also offered as CAS RN 242.
• CAS HI 204: History of the Crusades
  The origin and development of the Crusade movement in Western Christendom: the first four Crusades, their cause and results; crusader finance, preaching, and military recruitment; changing focus of Crusade movements from the Holy Land to other areas.
• CAS HI 208: Renaissance Europe
  The main political, socioeconomic, intellectual, and artistic currents in Italy (c. 1350-1530) and northwestern Europe (c. 1500-1560); emphasis on leading thinkers (Petrarch, Bruni, Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, and Montaigne) as creators of the modern Western mind.

Back to full list of College of Arts & Sciences