AS.001 (AS First Year Writing Seminars)

What is “the common good”? How do individuals consider this idea, this question, and how are societies led, or misled, by its pursuit? Together, we will explore sources from a range of perspectives: What does Aristotle’s theory of the common good teach us? Or the Federalist Papers, the design of Baltimore’s public transportation system, meritocracy in higher education, the perniciousness of pandemics, proliferation of nuclear weapons, restorative justice, or intimate love? Drawing from film, journal articles, literature, and other sources—authors/creators include Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Bong Joon-ho, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Sandel, and more—this First-Year Seminar is as much about how we ask and interrogate challenging, timeless questions as it is about the answers themselves. Engaging our material and each other, we will work together to hone the habits of scholarly inquiry essential to this practice: reading, writing, talking. The seminar will culminate in a final, collaborative research project that seeks to map, and manifest, versions of the common good.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Johns Hopkins invented the modern hospital along with modern medical education. This seminar will explore the history of the hospital from its monastic origins to its current form, with particular attention to how hospital design has reflected and reinforced ways of thinking about health, disease and medical treatment. We will also consider specialized hospitals and clinics, for the mentally ill, for particular diseases, for women and children, among other topics.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Japan is a world leader in biomimetic robotics. Japanese society enthusiastically embraces robotic nurses, robotic guides, robotic waiters, robotic pets, and even robotic girlfriends. What are the origins of the Japanese love of robots? What role did robotics engineers play in creating the image of loveable robots? What societal fears do Japanese robots assuage and what hopes do they foster? In the course of the semester, students will learn about the evolution of Japanese robotics, and explore the implications of this evolution to humans’ relationship with robots. While learning about Japanese robots, students will acquire skills necessary for college-level education, including how to write an email to a professor, how to organize and manage digital tools, how to navigate the information resources, and how to develop, complete, and present research projects. This course will equip students with skills essential to their success in college and beyond.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore instances of contact between different world cultures and pre-modern and modern science (16th-20th c.). The premise of the course is the understanding that in addition to the cultural, religious and political negotiations that took place during cross-cultural encounters, science also underwent a similar process. We understand science expansively, as the study of nature and the production of knowledge about it embedded in a particular cultural context. The historical episodes we will discuss are selections of instances where agents of the West—missionaries, explorers, businessmen, colonists, scientists—established prolonged contact with non-western cultures and engaged in conversations about their worldviews. Some cases considered include Jesuits in the Chinese imperial court, Spanish missionaries among the Maya, and English explorers in the Pacific islands.

Area: Humanities, Natural Sciences

This First-Year Seminar is designed to introduce students to the fundamental physical and chemical origins of color and how we perceive them - from the vivid palette provided by the natural world to the brightly colored clothing we wear. Beginning with the basic principles of light and color, we will embark on an interdisciplinary investigation of color, including, but not limited to: color chemistry; color in biology; the physiology of the eye; how color affects human psychology; the history of color and light; and the use of color in art. Discover the physical and chemical explanations behind several noteworthy phenomena such as sunsets, color-blindness, rainbows, fireworks, chameleons and the Aurora Borealis.

Area: Natural Sciences

In this First-Year Seminar, we will seek to answer questions including: could you forge Beskar? What would it take to make a light saber? Is "Image, enhance" really possible? What is possible today? What might be possible in the future? And, what may never be possible, as it violates the laws of nature as we know them? We will take an empiricist approach, gathering data on the needed properties via screenings and related research, and then applying physical principles to reveal feasibility.

Area: Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences

A legal fiction is a fact assumed or created by courts to help reach a decision. In this First-Year Seminar, we study how legal fictions and fictions about law work in order to examine the possibilities and limits of fiction’s (legal) power. Drawing from legal and literary thought, as well as plays, short stories, cases, and legal commentary, we critically explore the capacity of words to reveal (or conjure) some fundamental features of our shared worlds and discuss their impact in contemporary debates about justice. The course is designed with first-year students in mind and requires no prior knowledge of law.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore what it means to think and write across multiple cultures in the contemporary world. What do we gain and/or lose when we think and write crossing cultural boundaries? How do knowledge and experience of two or more cultures help us think and act critically, creatively, and ethically? What does plurality of cultures mean to universal discourses such as science and technology? How can cultural differences help or hamper our efforts to tackle global problems like climate change? These are some of the guiding questions that we will investigate together in this course by examining novels, essays, autobiographies, travelogues, philosophical writings, and films that engage with multiplicity of cultures between East Asia -- especially China, Japan, and Korea – and the West as well as within East Asia.

Area: Humanities

To the human imagination, the heart is more than a muscle and thumping pump keeping us alive. From the Renaissance to the present, writers have helped us make sense of our bodies, in health and in illness or pain. The history of the heart, meanwhile, starts in Antiquity, where it shapes our beliefs about life. One of our aims will be to trace the historical, cultural, and subjective meanings our minds have given to this “sublime engine.” The other will be to discover how our scientifically inquisitive minds, backed up with technical skills and technological devices such as the stethoscope, have found new ways to take care of this volatile organ. Our materials will involve a constellation of texts in medical history, modern fiction in the form of poems and short-stories, and recent scientific prose on such topics as heart transplants, heart-monitoring implants, xenotransplants as well as heartbreaks.

Area: Humanities

This First-Year Seminar will explore the neuroscience of choice. In addition to exploring the neurobiology of choice, we will dabble with philosophical ideas of free will and determinism. We will also touch on questions related to culpability. For example, are people who break the law but suffer from brain damage responsible for their actions? Sound interesting? Well, why stop there? Let’s sit back, eat some popcorn and take a look at how popular culture depicts the neuroscience of choice in the movies. Yes, with your help, we can do it all – but will you choose to???

Area: Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This First-Year Seminar invites you to think about reading as a cognitive process, a cultural obsession, and a history of revolutions. We will consider the act of reading from a range of perspectives (cognitive science, literary, political, and sociological) and examine artefacts of reading culture (manuscripts, books as material objects, the screens that dominate contemporary life…). We will activate these perspectives in order to grapple with the values associated with reading – moral panics and political virtues, ideas of isolation and community, shifting concepts individual and public. Sources will range from Kant’s "What is Enlightenment?" to RadioLab podcasts, to hands-on work with materials in the MSEL's Special Collections.

Area: Humanities

Why do we listen to music? What use is it? Does it have medical applications? How can it improve our lives? This First-Year Seminar looks at the various ways that music can change the world. WMD is for musician and non-musician alike. It is designed for students with all sorts of musical tastes and academic interests. It also challenges the usual “top down” approach of most courses, where the professor decides all the material that will be studied and leads all the class discussions. While I do assign certain texts and lead certain discussions, the students also determine much of what we study and lead many of our discussions. This means that sometimes you will be in the position of teacher and guide the rest of us to an understanding of your perspective. By honing your research skills, you will introduce us to your interests through many different media: film, essay, podcast, scientific paper, musical composition, etc. If you are a doctor in the making, you may diagnose the health benefits of music on Alzheimer’s patients. If you are a dancer, you might ask how music-inspired movement strengthens society. Future scientists can wonder at music’s ability to solve problems, and future philosophers can ponder music as a path to the good life. Meanwhile, musicians themselves might ask how music benefits its creators in contrast to its consumers, and whether they can control how their art gets used. Our listening will be similarly broad: from folk to popular, classical to jazz, and any other variety of sound you can convince us is musical. But the ultimate goal of this seminar and its diversity is not just to ask what music does for us as individuals and to pursue those isolated areas of interest. It is also to hone the foundational ability of communication: to read and to write for, to talk and to listen to our colleagues.

Area: Humanities

Most Jews in America today are descendants of Ashkenazi Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to the thousand-year history and culture of Ashkenazi Jews through their vernacular, Yiddish. How did Ashkenazi Jews maintain a distinct identity, even while borrowing cultural forms from their non-Jewish neighbors? How did Jews in the modern period challenge tradition and create new forms of Jewish identity? How did Eastern European immigrants adapt to life in America? In addition to studying a wide range of texts—including fiction, poetry, memoir, song, and film—students will learn how to read the Yiddish alphabet, and will explore food culture by preparing Ashkenazi Jewish dishes. No prior knowledge of Yiddish is necessary for this course.

Area: Humanities

In this First-Year Seminar we will examine the poetic artistry of American song, from Tin-Pan Alley and Broadway tunes to Folk songs, Billboard’s Top 40, and Hip Hop. Our focus will be on the linguistic art of song – the meaning(s), rhythm, timbre, and pitch found in words alone. Taught in a workshop format, the course will encourage students to read lyrics as poetry and then write their own.

Area: Humanities

The idea that the “personal” is “political” finds no greater example than in the politics of reproduction. From inheritance laws, the rights of the offspring of enslaved peoples, or policies to reduce (or increase) fertility, the modern nation state has had a great deal to say about the use and produce of human bodies. In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine how formal and informal institutions have governed reproductive practices over the past 200 years. We will look at how family structures and economic development map onto fertility, and at how technological innovations in fertility control (including birth control and IVF) have influenced women's economic and political participation. We will also consider whether reproductive policies have differential impacts for LGBTQ households. Finally, we examine the “dark side” of reproductive policies -- not only sterilization campaigns but also the treatment of sex workers and sex-selective abortion -- to understand how state policies have divided households based on race, class, and occupation.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Most people think the strongest kind of evidence in a criminal case is a confident eyewitness. Most students think re-reading textbook materials or class notes is the best way to prepare for an exam. And all too many people think that measles vaccines cause autism. All three of these ideas are wrong. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore what modern psychology has uncovered about how our intuitions concerning human nature deceive us, and lead to incorrect ideas such as the ones just mentioned. We will discuss a wide variety of topics including “the attention economy,” groupthink, and subliminal perception.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

The ordinary, the common, the everyday: why does literary realism consider the experiences of the average individual to be worthy of serious contemplation? In this First-Year Seminar, we will read closely a set of novels by Flaubert, Mann, Dickens, Zola, and Tolstoy from the period in which the development of realism reaches its climax. These novels transform the conventions for the representation of lives of lower and middle class subjects, revealing such lives as capable of prompting reflection upon deep and serious questions of human existence.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.300.429 are not able to take AS.001.116.

Area: Humanities

This First-Year Seminar focuses on the lives of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin and the depictions of their lives in film during the 20th century. The seminar provides both an introduction to film analysis and music history biography. In the last module, we will examine the canon of Western art music composers and consider historiographical issues along lines of gender, race, and other American demographics within this inherited tradition--all toward a collaborative final project.

Area: Humanities

This First-Year Seminars asks how social and technological change are related by reading speculative fiction together with secondary sources from the humanities and social sciences. The imagined worlds we will examine feature technologies that intervene in biological reproduction, and technologies that affect the division of labor by which society reproduces itself, allowing us to probe the relationship between technology, gender, and work. By analyzing imagined worlds conjured by speculative thinkers, we will ask how fictional works mediate between imagination and reality. Students will also experiment with speculative methods—including games, creative writing exercises, and critical design—to probe the social and ethical dimensions of emerging technologies. Potential texts include short fiction by Octavia Butler, T. C. Boyle, Isaac Asimov, Alice Sheldon, and N.K. Jemisin, as well as Boots Riley’s 2018 film Sorry to Bother You.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

What is the fundamental character of nature? Do all living systems share an underlying logic? What is left to explore? Can I really take this seminar even if I don’t have a background in science or math? Yes you can! In this seminar we are going to emulate the Greeks; without the benefit of the technological and mathematical armamentarium at our disposal today, driven simply by curiosity and their imagination, they identified fundamental questions and laid the foundation for modern science. Much of their insight has stood the test of time. We will examine the nature of nature by asking deep questions about the world around us and by examining phenomena we all experience in our daily lives. Our conversations will illustrate continuity and connectivity between aspects of nature that are usually treated separately. You might even discover through our conversations that science and religion, and scientific and humanistic inquiry, are more similar than you might think. Our seminar is organized around weekly conversations informed by different kinds of sources: popular science writing, fiction, poetry, newspaper articles, and movies. We will even do experiments in my lab (no lab or science experience necessary) to examine the secret of life.

Area: Humanities, Natural Sciences

Which ideas, movements, problems, and conflicts define the contemporary United States—and where did they come from? In this First Year Seminar we’ll study the history of this country over the last three decades to try to answer those questions. Using a range of written and visual materials, we’ll investigate the history behind concepts like “globalization,” “the free market,” “identity politics,” “culture wars,” and the “War on Terror,” and discuss the causes and consequences of the debates they provoked in this period. We’ll also assess what’s appealing and challenging about studying the very recent past and using it to interpret our present.

Area: Humanities

This First-Year Seminar will focus on the figure of Socrates. Socrates wrote nothing, so we depend on others for our knowledge of him. We will examine the ways he is portrayed by several different authors, including Plato. We will also examine some other ideas around in his time - some of which were pretty radical - and consider how he may have reacted to them. Finally, we will examine his influence on later thought.

Area: Humanities

This First-Year Seminar introduces students to the intellectual life of the university by considering some of the riches of contemporary global cinema. After a brief introduction each week, you will watch the assigned film and read some texts to deepen your sense of how to analyze it and think about broader matters the director has taken on. During in-class discussion, we will consider what makes a particular film noteworthy, what the director seems to think about his/her national context, and how local issues intersect with broader questions about the human condition. How does the past shape us? What is justice? What is political action? Who are we responsible to? We will also consider aesthetics. What is a good director? How do we know we are watching good acting (especially when reading subtitles?) What impact do cinematography and editing have on our perception of a film? How do film makers speak to and quote one another?

Area: Humanities

Trying to make sense of words I have written. But how do we do we do it? How do mere shapes and lines on the page suddenly begin to mean something? Is our brain wired for reading? Apart from our eyes, are other parts of the body involved? When did humans start to write and read? These are the kinds of questions we’ll pursue. This First-Year Seminar will explore two distinctive perspectives: one literary, the other is scientific. We'll divide our attention between the study of chapters and articles that present scientific findings about how we read and a practical exploration of a novel. Literary works tax our brains in multiple ways and our example will show why and how. Maylis de Kerangal's medical fiction The Heart will serve as our case study. The book and scenes from its adaptation for the screen will enable us to experience the power of fiction as it transports us into an enhanced reality made of images and words. We'll see how written words are able to redirect our attention in ways that make us more perceptive about a "real" world of human interactions. Slowed down and staged in the book, the life-stories, fateful accidents, and heroic gestures that make up a medical universe can paradoxically bring us closer the life and death decisions that begin in the ER.

Area: Humanities

Monuments and memorials traditionally serve as placeholders of memory, inviting viewers to remember and reflect. They aim to speak both to their own moment and to posterity, keeping the past present for the future. Yet what they say—and don’t say—is highly contested. Recent controversies in Baltimore, across the US, and throughout the world have dramatized their problematic power and volatility and demand our thoughtful attention. Drawing on examples from antiquity to the present, this interdisciplinary First-Year Seminar explores monuments and memorials as political, cultural, social, and aesthetic expressions, and examines the ways they operate within and beyond the historical moment in which they were created. Current debates will be considered along with the ancient Roman practice of damnatio memoriae; iconoclasm; and alternative or counter-monuments that intentionally subvert the traditional commemorative lexicon. Particular attention will be given to monuments in Baltimore, with on-site classes whenever possible.

Area: Humanities

Should children accept the match their parents make for them, or at least choose a partner their parents approve of? Is marriage a pillar of traditional society, or a passport to new ways of thinking and being? How do questions of love and marriage help us to understand changes in Jewish life and identity in the modern period? In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine these questions in a broad range of stories, plays, and films spanning Europe and America, including the American movie Fiddler on the Roof and the stories on which it is based by Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem.

Area: Humanities

How does public opinion shape electoral behavior and the contours of democracy in the United States, and how have these relationships changed as techniques for measuring public opinion have evolved since the early twentieth century? To consider this question, the course introduces alternative perspectives on the features of a healthy democracy, including both historical perspectives and current arguments. Interweaved with this material, the course examines how public opinion is measured and interpreted by private pollsters, survey researchers, and data journalists. Emphasis is placed on the alternative claims that opposing analysts adopt, as well as how the technologies of data collection and analysis shape the permissibility of conclusions. Students will learn to interpret public opinion patterns, which requires a brief presentation of basic concepts from survey sampling, including what to make of the polling industry’s most boring concept: margin of error.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Sound plays a rich and complex role in our everyday lives and in our various forms of media art. In the past thirty years, sound studies has become a new addition to the study of the human senses, as well as the relationship of these senses to history, aesthetics, epistemology, culture, and art. How do we listen to the world around us? To different media? In this First-Year Seminar, we explore listening to the lived environment, to music, and to multimedia sound art ranging from performance art to cinema. The nexus of questions surrounding listening opens us up to a host of new texts and approaches: those of acoustic ecology, or how we experience sound via the lived and natural environment; those of the relationship between the senses and our emotions; those of the nature of musical listening; and those of the art world as it engages with sound. This seminar is a mixture of sound theory and practice. We will read, debate, and bring in examples. Students will create their own projects, both written and sonic. No prior experience in sound theory or sound practice are required.

Area: Humanities

An exploration of the occurrence and potential effects of poisons in the environment, from naturally occurring ones such as arsenic to those that may be introduced by mankind such as nuclear waste.

Area: Natural Sciences

In this unique, 1-credit First-Year Seminar, we discuss evolutionary psychology—the idea that the mind can be understood as an adaptation to our ancestral environment by means of natural selection. Topics range from nature vs. nurture and freewill vs. determinism to the exploration of how evolutionary principles speak to broad social issues such sexuality, gender, social class, and violence.

Area: Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course offers an introduction to anthropological perspectives on technology. We begin the human body as our most basic technology, and survey various tradecraft (fire and animal domestication, time-keeping, inscription, sailing) that have adapted us to diverse environments. We then examine the consequences of industrial technology, with its emphasis on automation, standardization and scaling. Finally, we turn to the rise of information technology such as social media, and the ways it has transformed senses of communication and place. Throughout we attend to the complex interplay of technological power and social organization.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

In this First-Year Seminar, we examine inequalities in income, wealth, and working conditions in the United States today. What do the historical trends look like and how do economists explain them? Is economic inequality a significant problem? If so, why? And what tools do we have in the policy arsenal to address it? We will draw on diverse sources, including economics readings, op-eds, podcasts, and short vignettes from literature to motivate our weekly discussions. Students will have the opportunity to present group research and lead class discussions drawing on the economic concepts developed in class. At the end of the semester, students will complete an individual research project exploring some aspect of current inequality, inspired by their own selection from literature, poetry, music, or film.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

As a public good, public schooling is often the focus of attempts at purposeful change. Politicians, for example, make policies for fixing schools (public) that never would be entertained for fixing families (private). Parents also make demands of schools, as do a host of other interested parties. Together these stakeholders make up part of the external environment to which schools adapt. But the institutional agents of schooling have interests too—e.g., teachers’ unions, associations of school administrators, the faculty of schools of education—and they too often try to shape the direction of school reform. This First-Year Seminar examines timely, often controversial, issues of education policy and practice through a sociological lens. We will address these topics with discussions of a documentary film on the history of American public schools, readings in contemporary social science, and our own research into specific policy debates.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Modeled after Johns Hopkin’s longstanding Great Books course, this Freshman seminar offers a more focused selection of texts to allow in-depth reading and discussion, with greater attention to historical context. Texts will include: The Odyssey, Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, written by himself, with excerpts from additional slave narratives. In-class lectures and discussions will be supplemented by occasional guest lectures and exhibits from the archives of Eisenhower Libraries. Prior attendance in Great Books at Hopkins is not required; upper class students who have previously taken Great Books may be admitted with permission of instructor.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Freedom of speech is a core value for democracies -- and for universities, in which the freedom to challenge accepted beliefs is essential to advancing knowledge. The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and of the press, as do the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the European Convention on Human Rights. But like other rights, my right to freedom of speech may conflict with yours, or with other important rights or societal objectives. As a result, freedom of speech cannot be (and in practice never is) unlimited. In this First-Year Seminar, we will be asking why freedom of speech has been accorded such importance, and how and why it might legitimately be limited, in politics, in business, in everyday life, and in universities, looking both at the United States and at other liberal democracies. Topics will include asking what should count as speech beyond the mere utterance of words; appropriate protections or limitations for hate speech and other offensive speech and for falsehoods; where the boundary between legitimate protest and unlawful infringement on the rights of others should be drawn; whether free speech includes an affirmative right to be informed, or an affirmative right to be let alone; appropriate regulations for social media; and campus speech codes.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Cults, communes, and conspiracies are unusual social and ideological organizations. How should we understand their origins, structure, and functioning? In our First-Year Seminar, we will assess the value of alternative explanatory concepts from the social sciences, such as charismatic leadership, organizational ecology, network structure, status competition, social influence, and belief propagation. We will then interpret cases in comparative perspective, asking, for example, how cults differ from religious sects, how communes differ from political movements, and how organized crime groups differ from legal businesses.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

What don’t we do with words? Even silence makes manifest the power of speech. This First-Year Seminar will introduce you to some of the ways that power has been described and thought about. In addition to studying arguments that connect the power of speech to what it means to be human, we will explore various attempts both to protect and limit speech, taking into consideration not only how we do things with words but how words affect us. Topics that will be covered include freedom of speech, censorship, hate speech, silence, and storytelling. We will read texts in philosophy, politics, law, and literature, and we will watch at least one film.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Did you know that we can explain various aspects of Brazil and Brazilian society such as race, politics and national identity through studying its national sport? Futebol offers a unique perspective on politics, race and citizenship in Brazil. This First-Year Seminar seeks to understand Brazilian culture through the historic national pastime of futebol. In addition to the main textbooks chosen for the seminar, by reading a variety of texts from newspapers, academic journals, fiction and film, students will be able to find their own approach to understanding the phenomenon of futebol within the social and political traditions of Brazil.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken AS.211.294 are not eligible to take AS.001.138.

Area: Humanities

This First-Year Seminar explores the intersection between medicine and film, looking at how medicine, medical providers, and narratives of illness and health are depicted in cinematic works. Some of the questions that the seminar pursues are: What are some of the medical issues that filmmakers focus on? How did the cinematic portrayal of medicine change over time? What role do these films play in shaping public perceptions of medicine, medical providers, and medical institutions? By watching a number of films throughout the semester and reading some accompanying texts, students will develop deeper knowledge both of the history of medicine in cinema and the tools that cinema offers to the telling medical stories.

Area: Humanities

Science and scientists often bear the brunt of public displeasure over current events. Recent debates over CoVID (the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, masks, and isolation), climate change, and many other controversies raise questions about the reliability of scientific results and what it means to conduct research. What is and what is not scientific? How can non-scientists determine whether a scientific result is "right?" In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore what scientists do -- the practices of science -- and how they set standards of knowledge. Discussions will be organized around current pressing topics, including: What does it mean to "follow the science" or "do your own research" in the age of COVID? Will science save us from the ravages of climate change? Who or what has ultimate authority over the direction of scientific advances? When are new scientific announcements important new results and when are they just click bait hype? Who pays for science and should we care? What is meant by replication and is it bad if it doesn't happen? How does scientific publication work and what issues have arisen? Why do scientists often get bad press, and is it fair?

Area: Natural Sciences

Mathematics is so much more that simply the language of science, or a set of techniques for solving quantitative-based problems. In fact, it is not a science at all, but an art, a construct of the imagination that not only provides structure to the reality of the world, but also gives form to anything and everything we can possibly imagine. Many of its fundamental principles and methods of employment are shared by artists of all types, from musicians to painters, sculptors, and poets. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore these principles and methods shared by mathematicians and artists, like the notions of abstraction, metaphor, and pattern, the aesthetic quality both mathematicians and artists give to their work, the geometry of representation and visualization, the imagination as a tool of discovery and structure, and the use of mathematics in art, as well as the use of art in mathematics. Along the way, we will talk to artists and mathematicians, and hopefully visit the studios and galleries of each.

Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences

This First-Year Seminar considers what we can learn about democratic societies by thinking of them as complex physical systems. We will discuss voting and social choice theories and their relationship to renormalization and emergence; organization and segregation in complex systems: power laws, inequality, and polarization; and the dynamics of information and opinions: networks, bubbles, filters, and phase transitions.

Area: Humanities, Natural Sciences

In this First-Year Seminar we will explore the long and mostly untold story behind the most revolutionary discoveries of modern physics—quantum mechanics and relativity—a story written, astonishingly, in the languages of poetry, fiction, and philosophy. Shuttling between twentieth-century Germany and Argentina by way of eighteenth-century Prussia, with stopovers in Plato’s Greece and Dante’s Italy, we will pursue the age-old riddle of how the human mind interacts with the physical world; tangle with theologians as they ponder the nature of free will; interrogate cosmologists as they attempt to grasp the shape the universe; and, finally, explores the implications of these profound problems for our understanding of reality today.

Area: Humanities

What does it mean to live and to write in more than one language? This is a particularly charged question in today’s globalized world. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore texts and films produced by multilingual writers and directors, who reflect on the experiences of the multilingual subject; their concerns range from the turmoil of living between identities and cultures, to the playful experience of daily life and existence opened up through thinking and working in multiple languages. Main questions will include: In what ways do languages influence how writers write? How does the presence of multiple languages in a text structure a reading experience and for whom? How do texts by multilingual writers destabilize conceptions of national literature? While some texts we will read were originally composed in English, the majority were written by multilingual writers in other languages. Finally, therefore, we will address what it means to read translated into English texts that were, in some sense, already produced “in translation.”

Area: Humanities

Long overshadowed by the American and French Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now widely recognized as one of the most important events in modern history. The most radical of the Atlantic Revolutions, it began with a massive uprising of the enslaved against the institution of slavery and culminated in the independence of the nation of Haiti. This First-Year Seminar will examine the origins, course, and legacy of the Revolution, addressing such issues as colonialism, racism, slavery, emancipation, human rights, and national sovereignty – issues that continue to shape the contemporary world.

Area: Humanities

Using both seminal and contemporary readings as a foundation, we will explore the foundations of cognition and how they support human cognitive development, focusing on how ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ collaborate to shape development of the human mind. This semester, we will read at least three, and possibly four books, along with supplementary readings, as appropriate. Our focus will be on understanding the roles of nature and nurture in the context of typical and atypical development, including an understanding of how knowledge about objects, language, number, and other minds all emerge during human development, from infancy to adulthood, in typically and atypically developing individuals.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Middle East is home to some of the world’s earliest and most important literature. In this First-Year Seminar, students will read in translation a selection of texts from different traditions that flourished in the pre-Islamic Middle East. Sample readings include the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld, and the battle between David and Goliath from the Hebrew Bible. As we read, we will consider why ancient Middle Eastern literature may be more relevant to our own present moment than ever before.

Area: Humanities

This First-Year Seminar focuses on the cultures of dining and drinking in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, with excursions into the foodways of other ancient societies abutting the Mediterranean basin. We will investigate the social practices and values that are associated with conviviality in these societies, and how such practices and values change over time. We will consider the kinds of communities that these practices construct, and how and to what extent different kinds of people are included, excluded, or placed in a social hierarchy by their participation in these practices. Special attention will be given to feasting as represented in the Homeric poems, especially the Odyssey; to the Archaic and Classical Greek symposion; and to the Roman convivium and other dining forms extending to late Antiquity. Fueling our investigation and underpinning our discussions will be a wide variety of ancient Greek and Roman texts (to be read in English translation); images and representations of ancient dining in diverse visual media, including Greek vase painting, Roman wall painting, and mosaics; and archaeological evidence for the spaces, settings, and implements of ancient dining and drinking. Throughout, we will engage with key scholarship on aspects of this topic. The seminar includes visits to the Walters Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, all of which house objects that illuminate our inquiry. It may also involve screenings of films or clips featuring modern imaginative reconstructions of ancient dining events.

Area: Humanities

Social science is the scholarly study of society and social behavior. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to the social sciences by studying poverty in America through the lens of economics and other social sciences, including sociology and anthropology. The quantitative approach taken by economics will be compared and contrasted with qualitative approaches. Illustrations of how the lives of the poor are led as depicted in ethnographic studies, movies, and literature will be studied to learn how integrated perspectives can be formed. Students will learn how to read scholarly articles with a critical eye, to speak about their interpretations of the material, and to write short critical essays. Students will also be introduced to quantitative analysis using graphs and tables. Group projects will be required. Guest lecturers bringing non-economics perspectives will visit the class.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This First-Year Seminar offers an opportunity to think through the nature of political power, political institutions, and political ambition. We make our way through a single book: Robert Caro, Master of the Senate, an account of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s dozen years in the US Senate, from 1949 to 1961. Through lively discussion centered around this completely riveting text, the class will explore central questions in politics (democratic and non-democratic) that reverberate far beyond the bygone world of the midcentury Senate.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Popular sovereignty — the idea that the people rule themselves — has been heralded as one of the preeminent innovations of the modern world. And over the course of the last two hundred or so years, a rising tide of nations committed themselves to the principles of popular sovereignty. Yet in recent years, the inevitability, soundness, and very viability of "rule by the people" has come into question. On the one hand, popular uprisings around the globe have rejected the decisions and practices of governing elites on the grounds that they are out of touch with the people’s needs. On the other hand, these uprisings have resurrected and strengthened authoritarian practices and have facilitated the erosion of liberal rights long considered instrumental to preserving democracy. The result — turmoil, unrest, and uncertainty about what the future holds — is evident from Venezuela to England, Turkey to the United States. Can popular sovereignty survive? In what form will the people rule, and at what cost?This First-Year Seminar is an investigation into the idea and practice of popular sovereignty in the contemporary United States. We will explore this topic by actively consulting theory and empirical research in the social sciences. We will supplement this with our own research on the 2022 election, media coverage of issues, popular attitudes about democracy, and popular representation in government and by interest/advocacy groups.Additionally, this class is organized as a collaboration between two first-year seminars: one at Johns Hopkins, the other at Williams College. Over the course of the semester, the two seminars will meet frequently via videoconference to share research and discuss readings and ideas. This is intended to broaden the perspectives brought to bear on our investigation generally and, specifically, to allow each group to share real time research on the politics of the region in which their respective institutions are located.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

The past is littered with discoveries that have altered the course of civilization. In this First-Year Seminar, we will take a deep dive into chemical discoveries that changed history, discussing how they work as well as their impact on society. Topics will range from dirt warfare, to the link between gun powder and workers’ rights, to how cats biochemically domesticated humans.

Area: Humanities, Natural Sciences

We often think of bacteria in the context of dangerous or annoying infections. However, bacteria themselves can be infected by even smaller and more abundant entities: viruses called bacteriophages. This First-Year Seminar will combine readings and discussion of the fundamental biology of phages and their role in controlling populations of bacteria, with lab work to discover new phages from the Johns Hopkins campus. Phages identified in this class will be added to the Science Education Alliance’s archive which is comprised of phages from over 100 academic institutions worldwide and is a resource for phage biologists and physicians directly involved in developing phages as a treatment for disease.

Area: Natural Sciences

Corporations are all around us. They interact with us every day in ways minute and profound. We work with them and for them. They have rights and freedoms, for instance, to speech and religious expression. They seem to have intentions, desires, voices, and goals. Yet, they can’t take a walk or feel the wind or smell the earth. If they do harm, they are notoriously hard to punish. When they come to an end, no one writes an obituary. This First-Year Seminar will query whether a corporation is a person across a range of sources and perspectives, including from law, politics, philosophy, literature, and popular culture. Can a corporation be a person? Who should decide and on what basis? What are the implications for our understanding of rights, agency, and morality and for pressing global issues such as climate change? And what are the implications for our own understanding of ourselves as “a person”?

Area: Humanities

Inextricably bound with self-identity, human language and cognition remains a research area with more questions than answers. Can we think without language? What are the differences in neural mechanisms of language and cognition? How and why does the pediatric human brain acquire language at exponential rates while taking a lifetime to acquire cognition? What is the role of language and cognition in self-identity? Are we still ourselves without language, without memories? In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine the recursive nature of language, cognition, and self through the lenses of neurology, psychology, sociology, linguistics, and cognitive science. We will learn how language and cognition develops and changes across the human lifespan through case study examination of the lived experiences of individuals with cognitive-communication disorders, such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, aphasia, agnosia, and Alzheimer’s disease. We will end our semester by exploring how the interplay between language, cognition, and self makes us distinctively human and how those lessons apply to the field of artificial intelligence. Perhaps most importantly, this seminar provides students an invitation to actively reflect on their own language, cognition, and development of self.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

How does a notary’s son trained as a painter gain expertise in the construction of machines and acquire knowledge of the principles of optics, human anatomy, the flight of birds, the dynamics of air and water? How did an artist/engineer who brought few projects to completion come to have such a huge impact on later generations? This First-Year Seminar will focus critically on the myth of Leonardo’s singularity while showing his achievements to be characteristic of the artisanal culture of his time.

Area: Humanities

In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine the roles of love, fear, anger, and hope in our lives. We’ll ask questions about their value, danger, and appropriateness or inappropriateness in our lives at both the individual level and the level of political life. Some examples of questions we’ll consider are these: Should we love those who have wronged us? Is enjoying a horror movie morally problematic? How is fear used in political rhetoric and how should we respond to it? Is anger acceptable, or perhaps even necessary, in protest? Is love necessary for meaningful social change? When and how is hope justifiable and useful? We’ll also draw connections between these emotions and engage with related concepts such as forgiveness and trust. While our engagement with these concepts will be primarily through philosophy, we will also consider works of art and think about the value of portraying and evoking these emotions through various forms of art. Students can expect to read philosophical texts, journalism, occasional fiction and poetry, and to watch at least one horror film, among the sources for the course. Possible authors include Berit Brogaard, Noël Carroll, Myisha Cherry, Raja Halwani, Stephen King, Adrienne Martin, Martha Nussbaum, Edgar Allan Poe, Jason Stanley, and Desmond Tutu. We will take at least one field trip to a location in Baltimore during the semester. Students will emerge from this course with a more nuanced understanding of these powerful and often controversial emotions, and the ability to talk about them in an academic and public context.

Area: Humanities

Sites of racial conflict, from Palestine to Baltimore, have been compared to South African Apartheid. This First-Year Seminar examines the creation of a totalizing system of racial segregation and exploitation in twentieth century South Africa, and how it can help us understand histories of race elsewhere in the world, including our own city.

Area: Humanities

This First-Year Seminar will cover multiple topics related to what we know about how the brain allows one to learn new facts and skills and to remember the daily events of our lives. We will cover such topics as classical conditioning (e.g., Pavlov’s Dogs), operant conditioning (e.g., how to train your dog), how we remember events in our lives (e.g., when you received your acceptance to JHU), how memory can go wrong (e.g., fallibility of eyewitness testimony), how artificial intelligence and deep learning are similar and dissimilar to the brain, and how memory is affected in aging and in diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Area: Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences

We are living through a crisis in how we take in information. Bombarded by information of all sorts coming at us on phones, tablets, and computer screens, it can be difficult to make sense of it all and harder still to determine whether something is true or false, authentic or inauthentic. The scale and speed of the change in media that we are undergoing is unprecedented in human history. Nevertheless, people in the past have faced moments of crisis – moments when writing seemed unreliable, when the format of written information changed, and when new publication formats forced reevaluations of the nature of truth. This First-Year Seminar will take us from Greco-Roman antiquity to the modern age, with stops along the way in the European Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment. We will read selected texts that illuminate the place of writing, books, and the search for truth, think about the structure of libraries in the western Middle Ages and Renaissance, do extensive hands-on work with rare books, and visit other repositories of information, all toward the end of evaluating how the history of books and information can help us in our current quest to make sense of our world.

Area: Humanities

This First-Year Seminar is designed around what is on stage in Baltimore this fall. We will attend several plays, both professional productions at theatres in the city and student productions at JHU. We will pay attention to the interpretation of plays on the page, and to the ways that scripts materialize as performances on the stage. We will place these performances in the context of larger theatre histories, studying great plays from the age of Shakespeare to contemporary American theatre. No acting required – just the desire to explore the theatre of today.

Area: Humanities

This First-Year Seminar carefully considers the lives and works of two globally famous Black Baltimoreans: the abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), and the premier jazz vocalist Billie Holiday (1915-1959). While we will explore key writings and performances of their work, the course also wants to use their historical lives in Baltimore to enrich our knowledge of the city and archival resources that reveal its past. During the semester we will consult a variety of primary resources like newspapers, novels, photographs, rare documents, correspondence, and recorded sound to investigate the complex and intraracial world of Baltimore in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the questions we will be considering: How did the city’s black abolitionist and religious networks contribute to Frederick Douglass’s evolution as a journalist and politician? What was the role of Chesapeake Bay black musical culture—ragtime, marching bands, banjo and fiddle ditties, and riverboat music—in the creation of Billie Holiday’s unique stylistic expression and singing? In what manner did Baltimore’s racial segregation and racism define her life and art? Students are required to visit three archival repositories during scheduled in-class trips, including a visit to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The final project is an archive-laden digital story map.

Area: Humanities

From the women who created the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to the "Because of Her" working group across the Smithsonian’s museums, this First-Year Seminar investigates the hidden women of many distinct social positions, racial and ethnic identities whose labor shaped the museums we know today and considers how museums tell the stories of women, including transgender women, in the arts, sciences, and history.

Area: Humanities

This First-Year Seminar will explore seminal ideas in macroevolutionary theory through both classic and cutting-edge studies. Topics would include the relationship between evolution and development, how fossils shape our understanding of biological systems, and the logical basis of evolutionary inference. Students will also gain an appreciation for the historical development of these ideas and their application in modern science and beyond.

Area: Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Music, Art, Theater, Novels, Autobiographies, and Material Culture all expanded dramatically in Britain in the long eighteenth century (c. 1714-1830), creating a culture celebrating ‘happiness’, 'beauty', and the 'pleasures of the imagination'. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to themselves experiencing and discussing these exciting cultural forms, with students attending and watching plays and movies from plays, discussing Jane Austen novels as read and as filmed, reading and discussing an Afro-British autobiography, listening to performances of different kinds of music, and discussing works of art and architecture both in the classroom and in the museum.

Area: Humanities

Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus and its surroundings is a wonderful green space in the middle of Baltimore City. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to both the visible and cryptic organisms living above- and belowground. A combination of observational and sampling techniques will be used to demonstrate how ecologists collect data about plants, insects, and other organisms. In the classroom, these field observations, combined with reading material will be used to discuss global environmental issues including climate change on biodiversity, invasive species, and human impacts on the landscape. By the end of the course students will be able to generate research questions based upon field observations and appreciate the diverse life forms both in Earth and in our backyard. Students should be prepared to spend many hours outside.

Area: Natural Sciences

This First-Year Seminar looks at the deeper psychological motivations of the American electorate. We begin by discussing the meaning of democracy and establishing a common understanding of American democracy specifically, placing the current moment into historical and international context. We then gradually dismantle the "folk theory" of democracy that assumes all voters are rational and economically-minded. Instead, we apply theories from social psychology to understand some essential questions about voter behavior. Why do people vote? How do they understand politics? How are their feelings and judgments affected by their own identities, biases, information sources, and by the messages they hear from leaders? Why have Americans grown so polarized? What role do racial and gender-based prejudice play? Is American politics headed toward a more violent future? We use evidence-based research from political science, sociology, and psychology to answer these questions.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Using maps from the 17th century to the present, students in this First-Year Seminar will explore the historical and contemporary landscape of their new hometown -- Baltimore. These primary sources will show how Baltimore was invented and developed in popular imagination to become the most vital port on the US Eastern Seaboard, but also a symbol American post-industrial decline. Students will have the chance to map how they see Baltimore, by learning and applying Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and converting geospatial data into visual stories. With the goal of fostering a deeper understanding of this complex city, and a student’s place in it, the class will include explorations outside of the classroom. The course will culminate with the creation of a small exhibit whose content and venue will be decided upon mutually by students during the course of the semester.

Area: Humanities

What do French views on culture, society, and politics tell us about ourselves? France is frequently misunderstood and criticized in US media, yet books and articles touting various aspects of a “French” lifestyle are bestsellers. French media, for its part, commonly engages in US-bashing, yet the popularity and influence of American culture there are undeniable. Why have many prominent Black American writers sought refuge in France, while many French intellectuals have chosen to bring their academic work to American universities, including The Johns Hopkins University? A cross-cultural examination will allow this First-Year Seminar to bring to light many aspects of the complex relationship between these two countries that are historical allies yet ofttimes rivals. We will explore and discuss food, language, cinema, diplomacy, and health, as well as conceptions of friendship, family, identity, and social justice. Course includes a meal at a French restaurant, a museum visit, film screening, and guest speakers.

Area: Humanities

“This, therefore, is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror of life.” Samuel Johnson’s judgment applies particularly well to Shakespeare's account of politics. This First-Year Seminar will explore how Shakespeare depicts the acquisition of power, its exercise, and its voluntary or forcible relinquishment. Through a close reading of whole plays and selected scenes and speeches it will examine political education, intrigue, conspiracy, coups, demagoguery, politically motivated assassination, the theater of violence, rhetoric, insurrection, the launching of war, civil-military relations, and ghosts, among other topics. Combines lectures and discussion with close reading of texts, analytic memos, and assignments such as the composing of a contemporary soliloquy. This course will be taught at JHU’s SAIS campus in Washington, DC. All transportation costs are included as part of the course. Private shuttle transportation provided to/from campus.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Few topics are more pressing to contemporary society as the right to privacy, in the face of both state and corporate and state surveillance. But the idea of a "right to privacy" has not always been with us. As E. L. Godkin put it in 1890, "Privacy is a distinctly modern product." Indeed, even 300 years ago, many of our own expectations of privacy would have been unheard of. This First-Year Seminar looks at the relation of privacy to modernity, through the lenses of literature, law, and social practices. How can works of art and thought from the past help us understand our own present?

Area: Humanities

If Shakespeare were alive today, he would be writing for TV. So would Jane Austen. With the advent of cable networks, DVDs, the internet, and live streaming, TV—once considered a “vast wasteland”—has become the most dynamic and creative medium for storytelling, attracting a host of talented writers, directors, and actors. This First-Year Seminar explores the innovative narrative strategies, structures, and character studies that transformed that wasteland into extraordinarily fertile terrain and ushered in a new Golden Age of TV.

Area: Humanities

From the early 20th century, Chinese society underwent a turbulent process of modern transformation. Industrialization, urbanization, and democratization challenged previous gender and family norms. Meanwhile, at exactly this time, the Chinese film industry flourished, especially in the modern metropolis of Shanghai. Women and family provided a useful microcosm through which to explore national questions related to revolution, war, and modernity. They also entertained a public eager for new leisure pursuits. Popular feature films not only recorded but also interpreted and helped shape family and gender roles. Using filmic representations as the main material this First-Year Seminar will survey the "family question" (and "the woman question") in 20th century China

Area: Humanities

The plays of William Shakespeare contain many musical cues. In Hamlet, Ophelia expresses herself through song when she is unable to through speech. In The Tempest, the spirit Ariel lures the shipwrecked Ferdinand to the shore by singing a song. In this First-Year Seminar, we will think through the role of music in Shakespeare’s plays, reading Hamlet, The Tempest, Othello, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream with attention to the sonic worlds they create. In addition, we will explore the various musical works that these plays have inspired, from the Broadway rock musical Rockabye Hamlet to the Mexican film Huapango (an adaptation of Othello) to Benjamin Britten’s operatic treatment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Area: Humanities

This First-Year-Seminar covers concepts of biology taught through the lens of microbes and antibiotic resistance. Using environmental samples, students actively engage in the hunt for novel antimicrobials. Broader concepts include the meaning of disease, how that meaning has changed over time, and the implications of widespread antibiotic resistance for society. This is a research-based project lab course in which students participate as part of an international consortium of undergraduates at other colleges. Students will isolate and characterize antibiotic-producing bacteria from the environment using modern molecular biological techniques. This seminar is open to all students, regardless of major. No prior lab experience necessary.

Area: Natural Sciences

Over the past decade, cities have become more important than ever before. Protests against policing, against increasing inequality, as well as attempts to rollback societal shifts all have the city as its core. While some suggest these struggles represent larger struggles over the relationship between labor and capital, Black Radical thinkers connect these struggles to anti-black racism. In the wake of one world challenging movement – Black Lives Matter – and one world altering crisis – the Covid-19 pandemic - this First-Year Seminar will reflect critically on these two traditions of thinking about the city by using Baltimore as a case study. This class will be taught alongside similar courses at other universities, offering students a deep dive into Baltimore.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Does it matter what we read? Of course. But how? And how does what we read and hear shape our lives, particularly in democracy? This First-Year Seminar explores these questions across broad categories: social sciences; public writing of all kinds (for children and adults); and the sciences. For instance, we will explore how teachers’ words of encouragement affect children across demographics, and what the implications are for future civic participation. We’ll ask what happens when a victim of hate crime publicly forgives the perpetrator, how poems and stories shape life choices, and how cognitive neuroscience can contribute to social justice. Our inquiry will be rooted in intellectual life at Homewood, ranging from Earth & Planetary Sciences research to SNF Agora Institute events. We will close with a symposium reflecting our debates and discoveries.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

How did the Greeks, Romans, and other ancient Mediterranean peoples understand human difference and diversity? How did they form their senses of self in relation to others and articulate kinship and commonalities across ethnic lines? Did skin color, birthplace, language, and lineage matter in constructing social hierarchies? How did their concepts of class and citizenship, beauty and belonging, differ from ours? Did they have anything akin to modern constructions of race and racism, blackness and whiteness, the ‘west’ and the ‘rest’? If not, when and why were such ideas invented, and how was Greco-Roman culture conscripted in their support? Finally and crucially, what can we do to make “classics” today more equitable, inclusive, and accurate to the multicultural reality of the ancient Mediterranean? This First-Year Seminar examines these questions, and many more, through the literature, art, and history of ancient Greece and Rome, with forays into Egypt, Persia, Judea, and northern Europe. It will introduce you to the diversity of the ancient Mediterranean world, hone your ability to critically interpret and discuss art, literature, and scholarship, and explore how systems of categorizing human difference have historically served power. This course will give you a wider historical lens through which to understand race, racecraft, the “classics,” and “Western civilization,” revealing all to be dynamic and historically situated discourses that have been used to exert authority, to include or exclude, and to build communities. It will also build student community and comfort discussing sensitive subjects through a combination of field trips, guest lectures, movie nights, and communal meals.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.040.212 are not eligible to take AS.001.179.

Area: Humanities

This First-Year Seminar will take us on an exploratory journey through the history of our Moon, both as a physical body in its own right and as a formative presence in the cultural imagination. As we examine theories about the Moon’s nature and role in the cosmos - from antiquity to our modern period, and from science to make-believe - we will delve deep into perplexing questions such as the relationship between scientific and imaginative thought, the role played by conspiracy-theory and hoax in our society, the origins of speculation about extraterrestrial life, and what it means to map and write the history of other worlds... This seminar will include sessions of practical observation of the Moon from the JHU Observatory.

Area: Humanities

Beyond scientific and technological advances in the classification and treatment of disease, beyond complex hospital and health delivery systems, beyond the immensity of the medical world itself there is a human world of experience that tells its stories in various ways. Patients, doctors, nurses and related healthcare providers inhabit this shared environment of intense personal experience, giving rise to various accounts: memoirs, autobiographies, blogs, websites and interviews that provide us with a rich resource for understanding the culture of medicine and the world of the sick. In this First-Year Seminar, we explore some of these accounts by reading from books and personal memoirs of patients and practitioners, looking at films and photographs, listening to interviews and discussing what we learn from such accounts and how they shape our understanding of the many worlds of health and medicine. As a complement to the scientific study of human biology and disease, this seminar offers the incoming student an introduction to a broad literacy in medicine, disease and human biology, focusing on the importance of individuals by exploring the records of their experiences and the ways in which they are made available to us.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This First-Year Seminar will explore diverse aspects of how we see and fail to see the world. We’ll discuss questions such as: What can we learn about vision from illusions and hallucinations? What explains why we sometimes miss things even though we’re looking right at them? Does what we believe and desire affect what we see? What happens to our visual experience when the brain is damaged, for example in conditions such as “blindsight,” “neglect” and “visual form agnosia”? And: Is there such a thing as subliminal or unconscious perception? Though primarily psychological, the course will draw on other disciplines, especially the philosophy of perception. We’ll also think about some of the ways visual artists and magicians exploit the workings of our visual systems to achieve their aims. This will likely involve at least one outing to a local art gallery to look for examples of what we’ve learned, an in-class screening, and hopefully a guest speaker or two.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

What do we mean when we say that something or someone is “religious?” Our First-Year Seminar unpacks this question through a comparative approach, and pays special attention to the ways in which this term has been applied to the study of Islamic cultures and Muslim experience. Through an exploration of the categories of experience, creativity and the individual, we offer a less presumptuous and more open-ended way of imagining the many things it may mean to be religious.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This First-Year Seminar is designed for students of all backgrounds to provide a mathematical introduction to social choice theory, weighted voting systems, apportionment methods, and gerrymandering. In the search for ideal ways to make certain kinds of political decisions, a lot of wasted effort could be averted if mathematics could determine that finding such an ideal were actually possible in the first place. The seminar will analyze data from recent US elections as well as provide historical context to modern discussions in politics, culminating in a mathematical analysis of the US Electoral College. Case studies, future implications, and comparisons to other governing bodies outside the US will be used to apply the theory of the course. Students will use Microsoft Excel to analyze data sets. There are no mathematical prerequisites for this course.

Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences

This First-Year Seminar will explore how some important results in physics and astronomy are discovered, their transformative implications to the basic understanding of nature and their impact on the progress of society. Students will explore how simple rules obtained from the lab or in idealized settings imply the complex behaviors and dynamics observed in the natural world, and how they back-reaction on society. The seminar will explore the motivations for doing scientific research in various context, and how they relate to the application of scientific discoveries. An example of topic that will be explored is General Relativity, a subject that emerged purely from theoretical considerations by Einstein which have revolutionized our basic understanding of the physical world and have reshaped the fields of physics and astronomy. On the other hand, General Relativity is necessary for satellite timing which revolutionized communication in human society. Another example is the basic physics experiments and research that lead to the invention of the transistor and the ensuing revolution of the information age. The students will explore the value of scientific thinking and its necessity in building a more robust society that can effectively serve its citizens. We will have regular visits and talks from leading researchers throughout the Hopkins ecosphere. This will help guide the in-class discussions.

Area: Natural Sciences

In the age of Molecular Biology, DNA sequencing allows the identification of genes. Biochemical assays allow the measurement of gene expression. Reverse transcriptase and PCR are used to determine the RNA made by activated genes. These tools and others enable the study of disease organisms on the molecular level and the ways in which they attack the human body. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to the disease tuberculosis, to human innate and adaptive immune systems, and to the molecular biology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, an intracellular pathogen which infects humans and manipulates the human immune response to escape detection and elimination. We will explore tuberculosis by discussing excerpts from books such as The White Plague by Rene and Jean Dubos, The Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif, The Aetiology of Tuberculosis by Robert Koch, and Fever by John Fuller; by watching and responding to videos and, later in the course, presentations of research papers about M. tuberculosis pathogenesis and treatment; and by growing our own cultures of Mycobacterium smegmatum, M. tb’s harmless relative. Millions worldwide have tuberculosis, and this seminar examines it as a case study in the measures that are being used to control the spread of an epidemic disease.

Area: Natural Sciences

In this First-Year Seminar students will develop an understanding of the ways in which gender structures health and well being through adulthood and later life. The experience of sexual minorities and the ntersection of gender with class and ethnicity will also be discussed. Students will be expected to participate actively and lead discussions on specific topics.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Can we gain knowledge of reality, or is everything a matter of opinion? Does it matter? Why do we want (or need) knowledge anyway? Questions like this have been the stock in trade of philosophical skeptics throughout the entire history of our Western philosophical tradition. This First-Year Seminar will involve close readings of some classic works on the topic of skepticism with a view to understanding some of the main arguments for (and against) skepticism: how they work and how they may have changed over time. Readings include selections from Sextus Empiricus, Descartes, Hume and Wittgenstein.

Area: Humanities

Advertising pervades our culture; interactions with advertising are an unavoidable fact of modern life. This class uses tools from linguistics and cognitive science to analyze these interactions, and understand the impact of advertising on its viewers. A central theme is to treat ads as communicative acts, and explore the consequences -- what can theories of communication (from linguistics, psychology, and philosophy) tell us about ads? How do ads use central features of human cognition to accomplish their aims? Do ads manipulate, and if so, how successfully? The theories of communication we explore include Gricean pragmatics, theories of speech acts, linguistic theories of presuppositions, and more. Students will collect, analyze, and discuss advertisements in all mediums.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Poisons aren't what they seem. Sometimes they look like food. Sometimes they look like drugs. From cinnabar to cinnamon, from dragon blood to goat bezoars, poisons result from careful human construction, collection, and creation. They are objects of early chemistry. Far from killing us, poisons have been central to the history of medicine. Physicians in the past and present monitor dosage, drug combination, and drug preparation to mitigate poison toxicity while still maintaining drugs' therapeutic potencies. Knowledge about poisons, in other words, quietly undergirds most of human civilization. Poisons are what keep us alive. Or not.This First-Year Seminar comes to understand poisons in three ways. First, it takes on individual poisons (mercury, opium, among others) to introduce major themes in the history of science and science studies. Second, it engages with global perspectives in the history of medicine to understand how poisons were deployed, refined, and neutralized around the world. Third, it introduces frameworks in the philosophy of chemistry to analyze the social, conceptual, and practical demands on empiricism. Together, these three perspectives will shift students’ perspectives on poisons from objects that kill to critiquing them as objects that are intimately tied to ideas of cure.

Area: Humanities, Natural Sciences

What is poetry? And why don't we like it? Can poetry save the world? Can it save us? This First-Year seminar will explore what makes poetry turn ordinary language into something extraordinary, something necessary to our world. The course will involve reading poetry aloud, thinking about poetry in its many purposes, places, and forms, and you will be clapping, blogging, creating video and written projects about these. You'll attend poetry slams in Baltimore, visit bookstores, make some poetry, and most of all, talk and think aloud about language and its powers. Three assignments, spaced across term (75%), attendance/participation (25%).

Area: Humanities

This First-year Seminar will study the direction of time, pointing from past to future. It will primarily be based on the physics of entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, covering aspects of statistical mechanics, probability, and cosmology. But it will also touch on how time's arrow manifests itself in the macroscopic world, including questions of memory, prediction, aging, and causality.

Area: Humanities, Natural Sciences

This First-Year Seminar will delve into the surprising ways chemistry weaves its way through our day-to-day living. We will discuss topics that cover a variety of useful applications of Chemistry, from chemistry in medicine to chemistry in cooking and more. We will undertake several lab experiments to enhance our learning and to enable a better appreciation of the discussion material presented. No prior knowledge of Chemistry is needed.

Area: Humanities, Natural Sciences

Love is mad, love is obsessive, love can be painful or tragic, or an experience to be treasured forever. That's what books have taught us, by giving poetic souls a chance to imagine and develop romantic ideas – on paper. These books have in turn inspired films, or in earlier days, great operas. As a historian of ideas and a specialist of narrative with a keen interest in bodies, illness, and gender, I will explore with you in this First-Year Seminar a few favorite love stories. Each is chosen because it helps us uncover a universe of romantic feelings, often in conflict with social conventions (as in Romeo and Juliet for example). We meet once a week for two and half hours with a break in the middle. This format enables in-depth explorations of our texts, which will often be done in teamwork. We start with reading medium-length books, so be prepared to spend time engrossed in a novel. Later units of the course will involve film and opera. Among the readings for this class: The Legend of Tristan and Isolde, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther; Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice; Jeanette Winterson's, Written on the Body.

Area: Humanities

A famous, very experienced clinician used the phrase "The Soul of Care," signaling that medicine is not merely about fixing bodies. He wants to remind us that scientific knowledge involves mastery as well as empathy. "Narrative medicine" as this domain is called, assumes that the close study of stories can play a decisive role in preparing doctors for the challenging humanistic aspects of their profession. We focus in this First-Year Seminar on stories connected to medical cases, stories that can take us beyond medical questions to deeper issues connected to the human condition. Our seminar will be centered on discussions, often prepared in teams, based on your attentive close reading and research. The aim is to exercise your observational skills and imagination. What is at stake, medically and humanly speaking, is our capacity to uncover problems, dilemmas, ethical questions woven into texts that take us into the worlds of doctors and patients. Readings will involve a combination of modern and contemporary short stories, some of them more obviously fictional than others, some of them geographically or culturally more remote. Part of our study will also involve one longer text, namely When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, and a small "anthology" of documents of a preparatory kind. We'll have at least one guest speaker, and also see a film together.

Area: Humanities

In this course, we will examine the concealment of scientific knowledge from the Scientific Revolution to present day. Although science is regularly described as a public good, it has often been a private affair. Why have various scientists, institutions, governments, and media outlets chosen to restrict the flow of scientific knowledge? How have their efforts fared in practice, and what factors explain their successes or failures? More generally, how does our picture of modern science change if we highlight work done behind closed doors? This First-Year Seminar will explore these questions through case studies on alchemy, trade secrecy, nuclear physics, and climate change denial. Students will work with formerly classified sources during several weeks of the term.

In times of pandemic, trade war, and restrictions on the export of strategic technologies, it has become common to predict the ‘death of globalization.’ Such predictions are hardly new, however, and neither are the protectionist technology policies that are currently in vogue. In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine how technology historically has both helped connect people in different parts of the world and contributed to division and inequality at national and global levels. Focusing on the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, we will pay special attention to the impact of transportation and ICT technologies ranging from the telegraph and container ship to the airplane and the internet. But we will also consider the consequences of globalization and technological change in areas such as mining and agriculture, taking into account the perspectives of a variety of actors including multinational enterprises, governments, standard-setting scientists and engineers, and the anti-globalization movement. The local effects of globalization will be discussed on a class trip to the Baltimore Museum of Industry, and students will have the opportunity to develop a research project on a topic of special interest to them in consultation with the instructor. Course readings will be made available on Canvas; they include both original historical sources and studies by historians and social scientists.

Animals have evolved a vast array of sensory systems that support a rich repertoire of natural behaviors. Some animals live in dark environments and use tactile, chemical, electrical and auditory sensors that allow them to operate in the absence of light. Other animals rely heavily on vision and take advantage of colors that humans cannot see. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore extraordinary adaptations of sensory systems in animals that live on land and under water. Our focus will be on sensory systems that guide navigation and foraging behaviors in species as diverse as star-nosed moles, weakly electric fish, honeybees, and echolocating bats. As we delve into understanding the extraordinary sensory systems of selected species, we will also consider how these animals have inspired literary and visual artists. We aim to introduce students to a rich interdisciplinary experience that opens their eyes to new areas of inquiry as they take advantage of local resources, such as the National Aquarium, Baltimore Zoo, Wyman Park, Peabody School of Art, and Baltimore Museum of Art.

Area: Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This First-Year Seminar combines current state of the art issues in Cosmology, Astrophysics and Biology around the Scientific American level. Discusses the history of thought on these issues ranging from Aristotle, Lucretius, Galileo, Newton, Einstein…to the Hubble and JWST era. For the last part of the seminar, we will consider existential issues for humanity in our Universe. Excellent books to read to start thinking about this are by Toby Ord: Precipice and Martin Rees: (1) The Future of Humanity and (2) If Science is to Save us. Our discussions and investigations will likely lead us toward many interesting and innovative paths.

Area: Natural Sciences

The current paradigm for understanding addiction is a brain disease of compulsion, investigated in large part through animal models. Yet addiction in humans has dimensions of meaning and suffering alike that cannot be captured by neuroscience or modelled in animals. This First-Year Seminar explores addiction by combining what we know from addiction science with what we know from philosophy and the humanities, as well as therapy, journalism, film, and autobiographical narratives. We will work to understand the puzzle of why people use drugs in ways that can come to destroy their lives through these various lenses and without recourse to stigma, dogma, or dehumanization. This interdisciplinary course will develop students' skills in reading, analytic thinking, and writing; we will also visit an animal lab.

Area: Humanities

When thinking of Italy, food is one of the first things that come to mind. But what is beyond a lavishly decked table? What are the questions that can be explored through food and its practices in Italy, but also in Italian communities around the world? This First-Year Seminar explores the relationship between food and the formation of identity through the lenses of migration, gender, race, ideology, nationalism, and diaspora. The seminar will analyze literature on food studies at the crossroads with anthropological, sociopolitical questions. We’ll discuss the relationship with memory, as well as with cultural reproduction in immigrant communities and the tension with a critical discourse around political propaganda on the notion of authenticity in contemporary Italy. Other topics include the formation of taste in conjunction with sociopolitical modes of exclusion and social class, through history, but also exemplified in films. For instance, the class will be presented with movies and readings on Roman-Jewish culinary traditions, its diasporic experience, and the contemporary cultural appropriation. The screening of the movie Big Night, on the other hand, will provide an opportunity to approach a reading through a phenomenological apparatus, and analyze the impact of Italian cinema on American and Italian American culture. A guest speaker will be invited to present their scholarship, followed by a discussion.

Area: Humanities

How should a just society come to terms with persistent inequalities? France, the country of liberty, equality and fraternity, that offered sanctuary from US racism to such figures as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Miles Davis and legalized same-sex marriages two years before the US did, is now deeply divided. This First-Year Seminar explores the tensions and contradictions between the universalist and color-blind ideals of the French republic and the realities of discrimination in contemporary French society. Topics studied include the status of the concept of race in political discourse; the law forbidding signs of religious belief in the public schools and responses to it; how American initiatives like Black Lives Matter, #metoo and critical gender studies have both sparked French activism and political movements and generated a powerful backlash; and what Americans can learn about how to fight injustice—and how not to—from the French. We will look at a wide variety of texts, including writings by activists, historians, and journalists, along with sociologies of the police and young adult novels, and will listen to popular French music and watch a number of contemporary French films.

Area: Humanities

From game theory to gamification, games have become a central part of everyday life. More and more, in fields as diverse as economics, entertainment, and education, the game has become the principal model for interpreting and interacting with the social world, and with ourselves. This First-Year Seminar will look at the history of games in the modern world, with an eye to understanding their increasing prominence in the 20th and 21st centuries. What social and technological changes brought about this shift? And yes -- we will play, and seek to analyze, some games as well (both analog and digital).

Area: Humanities

What makes one person a saint and another a sinner? By looking at saints' lives, painting, court cases, and theological treatises, this First-Year Seminar engages with Christian ideas about holiness and heresy, sin and virtue, revealing the complexity of theology and lived religious experience. Since visual culture is a key component to understanding premodern religious culture, the class will embark on a field trip to the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC) to discuss several important paintings in the collection. We will also work with manuscripts and printed materials in the library's Special Collections.

Area: Humanities

"Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning." (Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, Apocalypse Now). These iconic words, uttered in an iconic film inspired by an iconic novel, invite us to think of the smell of war as a pleasurable experience, indeed, a joy. But what about the mere joy of watching a film, listening to music, viewing a painting or reading a poem about war? In this First-Year Seminar, we will ask ourselves what is the place of war in our cultural imagination? What attracts us to the “heart of darkness” and how and why does popular culture make this violent experience aesthetically pleasurable? We will cover various media, such as films, television shows, visual art, music and literature from various countries in an attempt to answer these questions and others. The seminar eschews a chronological approach organized around major historical wars in favor of a conceptual framework. As we will see, the creative impulse extends far beyond the representation of historical and particular events reaching deep into the realms of memory and trauma, hate and love, heroism and fear, cruelty and empathy. We will discuss the author/ filmmaker/ artist’s perspectives and methods and will engage in questions of ethics and moral choices in relation to the cultural artifacts we examine. Our main focus will be modern representations of war, but we will also discuss earlier periods and cultures for the sake of comparison. For projects, students will have the option to choose their topics, works, media and format (analytical paper, creative writing, a short documentary, creative film or a short podcast).

Area: Humanities

What is feminism and what does it have to do with media culture? This question will be investigated in reference to such historical movements as the suffrage movement and current movements such as #metoo. We will also highlight the extent to which media technology might intrinsically help feminism, as could be argued with film animation and science fiction writing; or, rather, cases in which technologies hinder feminism, as when the pressures of social media negatively impact the social development of young women, particularly affecting the vulnerability of the female body.

Area: Humanities

In a moment in time in which our very democracy at risk, this First-Year Seminar will investigate why democratic erosion is occurring, its ramifications, and how to address it. Led by Scott Warren, the co-founder and former CEO of Generation Citizen, a national civics education organization, and a current Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute, this seminar will be heavily discussion-based, relate to current events, and will explore the dynamics and interplay between the realities of democracy in the US and around the world, social entrepreneurship, social change, and policy. This course aims to introduce students to some of the most important issues and debates surrounding democratic consolidation and erosion around the world. Students will study different case studies of democratic erosion and social transformation (or proposed social transformation) from across the United States and world. We will also explore how movements across the world in response to authoritarianism and anti-democratic sentiment are driving the themes explored in the course.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Every person has a life to live, but what is this thing, “a life”, that every person has? To begin with, it’s just the temporally extended existence of the person, the proverbial three score and ten. But a person’s life is more than that, because it follows a natural progression of life-stages, from childhood to adolescence to middle age to senescence. And it’s even more still, since it is partly the creation of the person living it, who can plan it, evaluate it, anticipate its future, and remember its past. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore these and other aspects of a person’s life through works of literature and philosophy. What makes you the same person throughout the different stages of your life? How does the passage of time color your perception of life? What makes for a good life? A meaningful life? Should you be grateful for having been born or dismayed at having to die?

Area: Humanities

What would a just form of democracy look like in a highly diverse society? What policies and laws should the state adopt to counter long-standing injustices, and how do they fit--or conflict--with the univeralist ideals on which liberal democracy is founded? In this course, we will try to answer these questions by discussing different philosophical views on topics from equity to free speech, and from cultural appropriation to lived experience.

Area: Humanities

In this seminar we’ll explore the many ways that contemporary poets tell stories, make music, and create meaning. We’ll read a wide range of contemporary lyric poems, and every week you’ll have the opportunity to apply what you’ve learned in fun, low-pressure writing exercises. (No previous poetry-writing experience required!) Planned activities include classroom visits by contemporary poets as well as off-campus trips to poetry readings around town.

Area: Humanities

In this course we will ask why maps and mapping technologies have become useful – some would say central – to the pursuit of new knowledge. Do they clarify, simplify, amplify, organize, reveal unexpected connections, point the way forward, or severely complicate our thoughts and send us back to the drawing board? We will learn/review some GIS basics, and those among you with previous experience in these technologies will be welcome to contribute ideas and share skills (no previous experience is required). Over the course of the semester students will pursue their own group projects, developed in class discussions and visits to various mapping technology hubs around Hopkins, such as Geospatial Data and GIS technologies at Milton S. Eisenhower Library, brain mapping technologies at Biomedical Engineering, and approaches to mapping the heavens at the Space Telescope Science Institute. We will also ground ourselves in the Humanities by reading The Odyssey of Homer (trans. James Lattimore, any edition) and testing out various mapping techniques on the intersecting adventures of Odysseus, his son Telemachus, and his wife Penelope. A series of short close reading assignments on selected passages from The Odyssey will help to refine analytical and writing skills, and a final group or personal project report on a topic of your choice will address the (very) general subject of “How maps enhance, change, clarify or complicate ideas.

Area: Humanities

Despite its association with distant regions and time periods, Islamic art has a flourishing presence in today’s America, represented by rich museum collections, modern buildings designed in historical styles, and vibrant scholarly networks. This seminar explores how we, from the vantage point of twenty-first-century Baltimore, might experience works of Islamic art in ways that are informed by their own cultural contexts while also acknowledging the challenges involved in bridging this gap. We will spend much of the course engaging with objects and architecture in person, with visits planned to the recently reinstalled Islamic galleries at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. You will be invited to handle artifacts in person and to try your hand at calligraphy, one of the most distinctive and esteemed Islamic artforms. In the classroom setting, we will read and discuss translations of primary sources written by historical practitioners and consumers of Islamic art, along with examples of modern scholarship that seek to understand the Islamic tradition from a variety of perspectives. As well as learning about such perspectives, you will be encouraged to develop and share—in presentations and written assignments—your own ideas about Islamic art, building on the close, firsthand encounters that run throughout the seminar.

Area: Humanities

In this course we will read and analyze contemporary and historical literature about food. We will read prose and poetry by writers such as Toni Morrison, Chang Rae Lee, Naomi Shihab Nye, Wendell Barry, Gary Soto, Lee Young Li, and many more. Assignments will include creative writing exercises that draw from both research and personal experience.

Area: Humanities

From cellphones to electric cars, hydrogen cars, and windmills critical metals are needed. Will there be enough and where will they come from? We will discuss questions surrounding the exploration and ownership of metallic resources and their exploitation. Who benefits? Who is adversely affected? To address these questions, we look at individual critical metals and their exploitation in a variety of countries.Experiential investigations of critical metals will take place each Monday to provide material for weekly discussion each Wednesday.Some materials includeBackground knowledge:Craig, J. R., Vaughan, D. J. and Skinner, B. J. (2011) "Earth Resources and the Environment". Prentice Hall, 4th Edn., 508 pp.For investigations: Numerous papers in the literature such asSkinner, B. J. (1976). "Second iron age ahead." Amer. Sci. 64(3): 258-269.Gordon, R. B. et al. (2006). "Metal stocks and sustainability." Proc. Nat. Acad.Sciences 103(5): 1209-1214.Sullivan, D. E. (2006). Recycled cell phones-a treasure trove of valuable metals, Geological Survey (US) fact sheet https://doi.org/10.3133/fs20063097 .Sverdrup, H. U. et al. (2019). "On the long-term sustainability of copper, zincand lead supply, using a system dynamics model." Resources, Conservation & Recycling: X 4: 100007.Plötz, P. (2022). "Hydrogen technology is unlikely to play a major role in sustainable road transport." Nature Electronics 5(1): 8-10.

Area: Natural Sciences

How does language get entangled in our cultural and social understandings? How do we learn to locate a person correctly in a particular social class or ethnicity? This course aims to show the ways in which language is at the center of our daily interactions and our institutions. We will learn conceptual tools to examine the ways in which writers and leaders attempt to persuade their publics in important matters such as climate change, party politics, and religious differences.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This First-Year Seminar course will explore biological and philosophical changes in 21st century childbearing conditions, and the relationship of emerging technology, politics and legislation to these changes. Among the topics to be discussed are the impact on male and female infertility of assisted reproductive technologies, including in vitro fertilization and intracytoplasmic sperm injection; how genetic technologies can be used to modify sperm, eggs and embryos and the associated risks, benefits, ethics and politics; how, when and whether stem cells obtained from in vitro fertilization “leftovers” can be used; whether abortion should be allowed, disallowed, or allowed only under particular circumstances such as when there are fetal anomalies or danger to the woman; old and new approaches to female and male contraception; and more. The ways in which these new approaches are perceived by the general public and by politicians, and how these perceptions affect the use of the new approaches, will be explored. Thus, in addition to the science, this First-Year Seminar will focus on when, how, and by whom decisions are made regarding reproduction.

Area: Natural Sciences

Our class will explore how religious and spiritual communities have understood and practiced music as a healing and reparative force, with a particular focus on Sufi spirituality and the living South Asian musical tradition of khayal. Khayal is both a vocal practice and a system of spiritual self-development, and singers are trained to activate the healing that resides in sound. We will take this journey through essays, film, music, meditative listening, and conversations with musicians as well as practitioners of reparative and healing education in the arts. Students will also have the opportunity to participate in an ethnographic project on music and healing with artists and creators in Pakistan.

Area: Humanities

What does it mean to “create”? Who is the “creator” of a beloved comic book or a best-selling song and by what standard(s) is that determined? What rights, if any, does “creation” convey legally, or even morally? In this First-Year Seminar, we’ll take an in-depth, interactive, inside look under the hood of intellectual property rights and the battles that shape the multi-billion-dollar global entertainment industry. Reading sections of Supreme Court and lower Federal Court decisions, as well as relevant outside articles, we will explore (allegedly) stolen award-winning films and hit songs, understand why zombies eat copyright for breakfast, investigate why artists behind iconic Marvel and D.C. superheroes believe their rights—and staggering sums of profit—got zapped far across the multiverse, and much, much more. The seminar will involve weekly readings and/or screenings, and will culminate in a final project where you, the class, will serve as the (mock) jury on a real copyright infringement case involving three of the most popular, diverse and wealthiest entertainers of all time.

Area: Humanities

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, and robotics are central to futuristic visions of fast, optimized medical treatment. This First-Year Seminar examines technology’s promises: who benefits from, and who pays the price for, the automation of care in a profit-driven system? How does the clinical goal of improving health relate to industry demands for cost savings and revenue growth? Automation can entrench inequality, both for patients and for healthcare workers. Authors such as Ruha Benjamin, Frank Pasquale, and S. Scott Graham guide us beyond the “promises and perils” to a critical understanding of how technology can become geared into systems of racial capitalism.

Set against the background of the Cold War and highlighting the soundtrack of Stranger Things Season IV, this class asks students to bring their own playlist of five songs from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. In the course of the semester we will use these lists as a springboard to compile a final playlist that reflects the values and lived realities of the class. Some of the questions that will guide our evaluation of the song-texts are: What is the relationship between our taste and what we find beautiful? Can we find something ugly and repellent beautiful? How do the songs that we promote impact our society's understanding of what is good and important? Readings will include excerpts from Lessing, Hume, D. Albright, J. Chang and their critics.

Why are we drawn to female figures such as Medusa and Mystique? How do representations of women, especially in paintings, film and theater, mediate our understanding of who or what is desirable, dangerous and powerful? In this course we will practice reading visual cues from female figures, taken from history, pop culture, and visits to the BMA, in order to explore the relationship between fiction and reality, and to ask questions about how art depicts women. Course texts include Kant, Kingston, Cass, Paglia and Friedan. Figures for study include Antigone, Medea, Salome, and Bong Joon-ho's Mother.