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Seeing is believing! This seminar course will introduce breakthrough imaging technologies from super resolution fluorescence microscopes for imaging single molecules in living cells to tomography imaging for visualizing the happenings deep inside our bodies. You will learn about their applications in probing physiology, biology and biochemistry for biological research and medical diagnosis. You will have the opportunity to tour an imaging facility and perform hands-on laboratory imaging.

This course examines the chemistry relevant to food and drink preparation, both in homes and in restaurants, which makes what we consume more pleasurable. Good cooking is more often considered an art rather than a science, but a small bit of understanding goes a long way to make the preparation and consumption of food and drink more enjoyable. The intention is to have demonstrations and tastings as a part of every class meeting. We will examine some rather familiar items in this course: eggs, dairy products, meats, breads, vegetables, pastries, and carbonated beverages. We shall playfully explore the chemistry that turns food into meals. A high-school chemistry background is assumed; bring to class a good appetite and a healthy curiosity.

The seminar introduces students to major themes connected to the immigrant experience, including identity, education, assimilation, transnationalism, political membership, and intergroup relations. There will also be some attention given to research methodology. The seminar addresses these themes through reading ethnographies that document the everyday experience of immigrants and immigrant communities, broadly defined, in the United States. The course readings primarily come from more contemporary ethnographic research, but it will also include a sampling of ethnographies that examine the experience of previous waves of immigrants. Student participation will include in-class discussions of readings, short written responses to readings, and a final paper in which students draw on original ethnographic research that they conduct during the quarter. By the end of the quarter, students will be able to identify the social, political, and economic forces that shape the immigrant experience. More importantly, students will understand HOW these forces enter the immigrant experience in everyday life.

The seminar examines concepts and models of heroism in three paradigmatic ancient traditions: China, Greece, and Rome. Our inquiry is guided by the following questions: What qualities and experiences define someone as a hero? If heroism is not all about excellence, brilliance and glory, what makes heroes exceptional and inspiring figures? How does courage relate to other virtues such as integrity, loyalty, fortitude, and self-sacrifice? Is heroism compatible with fear, shame, and humiliation? How do heroes become what they are, what role do education and imitation play? Is courage a gendered virtue? Does the ethical importance of heroism rest on the fact that heroes are typically confronted with extraordinary choices about life and death, honor and ignominy, freedom and suffering, and survival and immortality? Finally, how do different cultures shape and enrich our answers to the above questions?

Rising inequality is a defining feature of our time. How long has economic inequality existed, and when, how and why has the gap between haves and have-nots widened or narrowed over the course of history? This seminar takes a very long-term view of these questions. It is designed to help you appreciate dynamics and complexities that are often obscured by partisan controversies and short-term perspectives, and to provide solid historical background for a better understanding of a growing societal concern.

Preference to freshmen. Sappho's surviving fragments in English; traditions referring to or fantasizing about her disputed life. How her poetry and legend inspired women authors and male poets such as Swinburne, Baudelaire, and Pound. Paintings inspired by Sappho in ancient and modern times, and composers who put her poetry to music.

Given the importance of art to all aspects of their lives, the Greeks had reason to respect their artists. Yet potters, painters and even sculptors possessed little social standing. Why did the Greeks value the work of craftsmen but not the men themselves? Why did Herodotus dismiss those who worked with their hands as "mechanics?" What prompted Homer to claim that "there is no greater glory for a man than what he achieves with his own hands," provided that he was throwing a discus and not a vase on a wheel? Painted pottery was essential to the religious and secular lives of the Greeks. Libations to the gods and to the dead required vessels from which to pour them. Economic prosperity depended on the export of wine and oil in durable clay containers. At home, depictions of gods and heroes on vases reinforced Greek values and helped parents to educate their children. Vases depicting Dionysian excess were produced for elite symposia, from which those who potted and painted them were excluded. Sculptors were less lowly but still regarded as "mechanics," with soft bodies and soft minds (Xenophon), "indifferent to higher things" (Plutarch). The seminar addresses such issues as we work to acknowledge our own privilege and biases. Students will read and discuss texts, write response papers and present slide lectures on aspects of the artist's profession.

The technological keys to the growth of civilization that enabled the creation of complex societies and enhanced human cognition. The role of cognition in shaping history and the role of history in shaping cognition. Global perspective, emphasizing the Western tradition and its ancient Greek roots.

More than excavating ancient sites and managing collections of old things, Archaeology is a way of experiencing the world: imagining past lives through ruins and remains; telling the story of a prehistoric village through the remains of the site and its artifacts; dealing with the return of childhood memories; designing a museum for a community. The archaeological imagination is a creative capacity mobilized when we experience traces and vestiges of the past, when we gather, classify, conserve and restore, when we work with such remains to deliver stories, reconstructions, accounts, explanations, or whatever. This class will explore such a wide archaeological perspective in novels, poetry, fantasy literature, the arts, movies, online gaming, and through some key debates in contemporary archaeology about human origins, the spread of urban life, the rise and fall of ancient empires.