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In 2015 Stanford's Cantor Arts Center acquired New York Corner (1913), an early painting by the celebrated American artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967). In honor of the acquisition, this seminar will explore Hopper's paintings in detail but with a twist. In each class meeting we will pair Hopper's paintings with the work of another artist or, in some cases, a filmmaker or novelist. The work of these other figures, all notable in their own right, will be given equal if not greater emphasis in each seminar meeting. In classroom discussion, our goal will be to build a rich description of Hopper's art and to understand something of the times when he painted (especially the late 1920s through the late 1950s). If you have wanted to learn how to look closely at a work of art, and how to interpret film and literature with equal depth doing so in intensive conversation with the professor and your peers this is the class for you. Some of the questions we will address: What is an artist?; What is an artist's career?; What does it mean for an artist (or anyone) to develop a lifelong vision of American culture, of American places, of American life?; What is a place (as opposed to a space)?; Is making a painting (or speaking or writing about a painting) a meaningful act in the world?; What does it mean (for Hopper, for any of us) to emerge out of a coherent tradition?; What is high art?; What is popular art?; What are the strengths and limitations of each?

The world-famous landscapes of East Africa, including Serengeti National Park, Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and the Rift Valley lakes of Tanzania form the backdrop for this special course on protected area conservation and its impacts on local people. The course is designed to explore the pros and cons of parks and protected areas as they affect flora, fauna, and human inhabitants, and to address the dilemma of how to achieve conservation in a manner that creates local community benefits and promotes social justice. We will use a case study approach to ask: (1) What approach to protected area (PA) conservation has been taken in each case? Who are the key proponents and what are their main social and ecological objectives? (2) How successful has the protected area been at achieving its conservation goals? (3) What are the benefits of the PA to people and who receives them? (4) What are the costs of the PA to people and who pays them? (5) Where benefits are not commensurate to costs, what, if anything, is being done to address the imbalance? How well is it working? (6) Are there alternative conservation models that would make the interests of parks and people more compatible, and reduce the tradeoffs between them? What is needed to operationalize these alternative models, and how do they incentivize conservation behavior among local residents?nThis course includes an intensive 12-day expedition to Tanzania to observe firsthand the dilemmas of parks and peoples we have discussed in class. We are scheduled to visit Tarangire, Lake Manyara, Mt. Meru, and Serengeti National Parks, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and nearby Maasai villages. Both on campus and in Tanzania, the course emphasizes student contributions and presentations. Students are required to read one or two books a month over the summer, and to come to campus in the fall well-prepared to discuss each one, including co-leading the discussion of one of the readings. Students are also expected to carry out literature research on a particular conservation dilemma in East Africa that is of interest to them for the final assignment of the seminar, a 6- to 8-page paper, and to present the main findings of that paper during evening seminars as we travel in East AfricanNote: Students will arrive on campus and will be housed at Stanford until we leave for the travel portion of the course. A group of 20-some Stanford alumni will join us for the last 2 days on campus and for the travel portion of the course.

Do you speak Arabic at home? Are you studying Arabic at Stanford? Have you done a year of Arabic study elsewhere? If you answer yes to any one of these questions then "Arabic in America: Culture and People" might be for you. Our intensive course is designed to improve your command of Arabic while living in an active community of Arabic speakers and learners. We will be talking about films, poetry, politics, religion, gender and much more--all the while practicing how to talk to people, read newspapers, recite poetry, write emails, all with the goal of communicating better in Arabic. Our immersive experience will include: mosques and churches in the Bay Area and beyond, cultural festivals, research in the Hoover Archive, film, music, food, culture, and politics. Whether it is a trip to the beach or a classroom session on Arabic gender and sexuality, we will be talking in Arabic. All Arabic is welcome, from Morrocan or Iraqi colloquial (and everywhere in between) to Quranic recitation and Classical poetry.

In 2015 Stanford's Cantor Arts Center acquired New York Corner (1913), an early painting by the celebrated American artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967). In honor of the acquisition, this seminar will explore Hopper's paintings in detail but with a twist. In each class meeting we will pair Hopper's paintings with the work of another artist or, in some cases, a filmmaker or novelist. The work of these other figures, all notable in their own right, will be given equal if not greater emphasis in each seminar meeting. In classroom discussion, our goal will be to build a rich description of Hopper's art and to understand something of the times when he painted (especially the late 1920s through the late 1950s). If you have wanted to learn how to look closely at a work of art, and how to interpret film and literature with equal depth doing so in intensive conversation with the professor and your peers this is the class for you. Some of the questions we will address: What is an artist?; What is an artist's career?; What does it mean for an artist (or anyone) to develop a lifelong vision of American culture, of American places, of American life?; What is a place (as opposed to a space)?; Is making a painting (or speaking or writing about a painting) a meaningful act in the world?; What does it mean (for Hopper, for any of us) to emerge out of a coherent tradition?; What is high art?; What is popular art?; What are the strengths and limitations of each?

Monterey Bay is home to the nation¿s largest marine sanctuary and also home to Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station. This course, based at Hopkins, explores the spectacular biology of Monterey Bay and the artistic and political history of the region. We will conduct investigations across all of these contexts toward an inclusive understanding of ¿place¿, ultimately to lead us to explore our own lives in relation to the natural world, historical and cultural milieu, and the direction of our individual life path.n The location at the entry point to the Big Sur Coast of California provides a unique outdoor laboratory in which to study the biology of the bay and the adjacent coastal lands. It is also an area with a deep cultural, literary and artistic history. We will meet marine biologists, experts in the literary history of Cannery Row and the writings of John Steinbeck, local artists and photographers, experts in the neuroscience of creativity, as well as people who are very much involved in the forces and fluxes that steer modern culture. This rich and immersive approach provides students a rare opportunity to reflect on their relationships to nature, culture, and their own individual goals.nThe course emphasizes interactions and discussions. We will be together all of the time, either at our base at the Belden House in Pacific Grove, hiking and camping in Big Sur¿s pristine Big Creek Reserve on the rocky coast, and traveling to the Tassajara Mountain Zen Center in the Ventana wilderness for several days. This is not an ordinary academic experience, instead it is an adventure of a personal, intellectual, spiritual and physical kind. We welcome people with wide interests; artists, poets, writers, engineers, scientists and musicians. Mostly we invite people with an open mind and a sense of adventure. nStudents are expected to have read the several books provided as introductory material before the course begins, and each is also expected to become our local expert in an area such as plant identification, bird identification, poetry, weather prediction, photography, history, ethnography, etc. The course requires an individual research project of your choice on a topic related to the general theme. Final reports will be presented at the last meeting of the group and may involve any medium, including written, oral, and performance media.n Note: This course will be held at the Hopkins Marine Station in the Monterey region, and housing will be provided nearby. Transportation from campus to the housing site will be provided once students arrive to campus on Monday, September 4 (Labor Day). Transportation to campus from the Belden House in Pacific Grove will be provided on Saturday, September 23.

This seminar will explore the nature of and coupling between water and energy resources in the Pacific Northwest, using the Columbia River as our case study. We will explore the hydrologic, meteorologic, and geologic basis of water and energy resources, and the practical, social, environmental, economic, and political issues surrounding their development in the West. The Columbia River and its watershed provide a revealing prototype for examining these issues. A transnational, multi-state river with the largest residual populations of anadromous salmonids in the continental US, it provides a substantial fraction of the electrical energy produced in the Northwest (the Grand Coulee dam powerhouse on the Columbia is the largest-capacity hydropower facility in the US), it is a major bulk commodity transportation link to the interior West via its barge navigation system, it provides the water diversions supporting a large area of irrigated agriculture in Washington and Idaho, and its watershed is home to significant sources of solar and wind energy. We will use the Columbia to study water and energy resources, and especially their coupling, in the context of rapid climate change, ecosystem impacts, economics, and public policy. We will begin with a week of classroom study and discussion on campus, preparing for the field portion of the seminar. We will then travel to the Columbia basin, spending approximately 10 days visiting a number of water and energy facilities across the watershed, e.g., solar, wind, and natural gas power plants; dams and reservoirs with their powerhouses, fish passage facilities, navigation locks, and flood-mitigation systems; an irrigation project; operation centers; and offices of regulatory agencies. We will meet with relevant policy experts and public officials, along with some of the stakeholders in the basin. Over the summer students will be responsible for assigned readings from several sources, including monographs, online materials, and recent news articles. During the trip, students will work in small groups to analyze and assess one aspect of the coupling between water and energy resources in the Northwest. The seminar will culminate in presentations on these analyses. Travel expenses during the seminar will be provided (except incidentals) by the Bill Lane Center for the American West and Sophomore College.

There is growing interest in the intersection of art and science, whether from artists adapting technology to suit their visions or from scientists and engineers seeking to explain various visual effects. To take advantage of possible creative sparks at the art/science interface, it is necessary for fuzzies and techies to have some knowledge of the language used by the other side. This interface will be explored through examining approaches used by an artist and an engineer in the context of the materials science of cultural objects. In-class lectures, hands-on studio practice, and field trips will be used to illustrate these different perspectives. At the heart of the scientific approach is the notion that a cultural object, e.g., a painting, is a physical entity comprising materials with different physical properties and different responses to environmental stresses presented by light, heat, and water. In support of this outlook, in-class lectures and discussions will focus on the basic concepts of color, optics, mechanics, composite structures, and response of the object to environmental stress, and we will visit Bay Area museums to see how artists employ such techniques. The hands-on studio experience is designed to increase students' confidence and develop their appreciation of differences in materials. It is not necessary to have any artistic training, only a willingness to experiment. The in-class studio projects will include working with line and shadow; color, binders, and mordants; global sources of pigments; substrates and writing; and material failure. Students will make one technical presentation on a topic in one of the five areas relevant to a painting: color, optics, mechanics, composites, and stress response. In addition, they will prepare one essay on the issues surrounding the intersection of art and science. Finally, they will complete a project related to one of the thematic areas covered in the hands-on studio sessions and make a final oral presentation describing their project.

The 2006 film Pursuit of Happyness, an unabashed celebration of the American Dream, was enthusiastically embraced by Chinese audiences. It seems that the pursuit of happiness has become truly globalized, even as the American Dream is slipping away for many. Are Americans still convinced that their conception of happiness is a self-evident truth and a universal gospel? Is there anything that Americans might learn about what it means to live a good life from not only the distant past, but also cultures in which happiness is envisioned and sought after very differently? This course takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the question of happiness and invites undergraduate students to reflect on its relationship to virtue, wisdom, health, love, pleasure, prosperity, justice, and solidarity. Giving equal weight to Chinese and Western sources, it seeks to defamiliarize some of the most deeply held ideas and values in American society through the lens of crosscultural inquiry. During the summer, students will read a selection of novels, memoirs, and reflections by philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists. In September, we will review these texts and place them alongside movies, short fiction, news stories, and social commentary while we interrogate the chimera of happiness. In addition, we will experiment with meditation, short-form life writing (including mock-obituaries!), and service-learning.

What makes for a good life in a zoo? For that matter, what makes a good zoo? The psychological and physical wellbeing of the animals? The contribution to research, conservation, and education? The guest experience? Students will learn first-hand how animal welfare science provides an evidence-based approach to optimize and balance each of these demands so that "good welfare is good business." Through a unique experience at San Francisco Zoo students will learn how to apply principles of animal behavior to design environmental enrichments which benefit both the animals and the complex mission of a zoo. Students will be guided through the process of assessing an exhibit from the point of view of the animal's behavior and wellbeing, educational opportunities, and guest experience; developing an enrichment plan; designing and building enrichments for the animals; interacting with the public as docents; and assessing the overall effectiveness of a new enrichment; before finally presenting their work at a "mini-conference." The course will be taught with an emphasis on self-guided learning, student-led class time, hands-on experience, and service-learning. Most days will begin with students presenting what they have learned the previous day to the class, followed by student-led discussion, preparation time for the day's activities, and then time out in the zoo. The course will be taught by Dr. Garner (whose introductory seminar in Animal Behavior is strongly recommended, though not required) and Dr. Watters (Vice President of Animal Wellness and Animal Behavior, San Francisco Zoological Society). [This is a SOPHOMORE COLLEGE course. Visit soco.stanford.edu for full details.]