Undergraduate Courses

The term “digital” has gained strong conceptual purchase and political urgency in recent decades. This course introduces students to the different ways scholars have theorized digitality and associated phenomena such as computing, code, information, cybernetics, networks, and the virtual. Drawing on classic and contemporary texts in philosophy, history of science, political economy, and critical digital studies, we explore how digital modes of rationality at once enliven and constrain human experience, creativity, social life, and political structures.

• Department: Media, Culture, and Communication

This course introduces students to the purposes, theories, & methods of a family of approaches to social science research variously called ethnographic, qualitative, case study, naturalistic, or interpretive. Throughout this course, we will draw on resources in anthropology & sociology to explore issues that are central to understanding the epistemology & methodology of interpretive inquiry. The purposes of this course are to: (a) examine the nature, purposes, theories, & methods of qualitative inquiry; (b) introduce several approaches to qualitative inquiry; & (c) learn how to assess the quality & trustworthiness of qualitative inquiry.

• Department: Teaching and Learning

Focus on particular topics allows students to broaden skills and expression. Topics vary from semester to semester and are chosen as a result of both faculty and student interest.

• Department: Art and Art Professions

Focus on particular topics allows students to broaden skills and expression. Topics vary from semester to semester and are chosen as a result of both faculty and student interest.

• Department: Art and Art Professions

Focus on particular topics allows students to broaden skills and expression. Topics vary from semester to semester and are chosen as a result of both faculty and student interest.

• Department: Art and Art Professions

Focus on a particular topic allows students to broaden skills and expression. Past topics have included animation, 3-D modeling, interactive design, digital printing in large format, and advanced PhotoShop. Topics are chosen as a result of faculty and student interest.

• Department: Art and Art Professions

Focus on particular topics available allows students to broaden skills and expression. Past topics have included the figure, the landscape, pastels, and charcoal. Topics are chosen as a result of both faculty and student interest.

• Department: Art and Art Professions

• Department: Art and Art Professions

• Department: Art and Art Professions

• Department: Art and Art Professions

This course seeks to investigate what history, & particularly recent history, tells us about the role of art in contemporary culture. We will look at the concept of the avant-garde & the notion of “criticality” that dominates the current art system & how that shapes art making, education, patronage, dissemination, & canonization. Mostly, we will ask ourselves questions like, what, if any, is the artist’s (& writer’s) responsibility as a producer of culture? What role does art play in global culture? How do politics affect aesthetics?

Not Available.

Course topics will vary from semester to semester.

• Department: Art and Art Professions

Social Studies as a field is reviewed historically and its theoretical base is analyzed. Examines the nature of socialization inherent in different concepts of knowledge and introduces the problems of selecting, organizing, and teaching various approaches to history and the social sciences

• Department: Teaching and Learning

This course will introduce social studies majors to the history of historical scholarship (historiography) on the American past. Reviewing the philosophical, political, and methodological shifts in American historical scholarship, the course focuses on debates among historians about the key political events, leaders, social institutions, and protest movements in U.S. history. Learning about the contested nature of historical discourse will enable prospective social studies teachers to teach students that history consists of more than names and dates, that history is a discipline involving critical thinking about, and diverse interpretations of, the past.

• Department: Teaching and Learning

Introduces students to the African philosophy of Ubuntu, which priorities shared humanity and collective consciousness across public and private life. Students define and analyze Ubuntu in the context of South Africa and the US, and examine individualism and collectivism, forgiveness and reconciliation and their implications for nation-building. Students experiment with concepts of Ubuntu in collaboration with students in South Africa and apply these concepts to contemporary social problems. Meets Steinhardt Core requirements for Texts & Ideas.

• Department: Administration, Leadership, and Technology
• Liberal Arts Core: Texts and Ideas

The best art teacher is life and experience and visiting a new place is the best way to see with new eyes. The aim of this course is to incorporate art into your daily life and Berlin into your art work. Using creativity as a vehicle for personal transformation and exploring your fears, fantasies, Ideas and reactions to the society we live in, you will be required to complete three projects. This is an interdisciplinary studio course with required readings, discussions, films and field trips. Students are encouraged to work in any medium of choice; painting, photography, video, performance, sculpture, etc.

• Department: Art and Art Professions

Not Available.

This course explores why student protest has surged repeatedly on 21st century campuses and how American universities became lightning rods for criticism from both the Left and the Right. Topics include student movements against racial and gender discrimination, nativism student debt, exploitation of labor, the concentration of wealth, Euro-centric curriculum, and the rise graduate student labor unionization. Student struggles over academic freedom, corporatization, and academia’s globalization, the commercialization of intercollegiate athletics, academic boycotts, divestment, and campus governance will also be assessed. These campus conflicts will be set into historical perspective, probing their roots in earlier struggles over the nature, mission, uses, and failures of the 21st century university, illuminating the changes, continuities, progress, and setbacks in American higher education and its student movements. Right wing student activists and their off campus allies will also be studied, as will the fate of free speech on campus in the politically polarized world of 21st Century America.

• Department: Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities

This course explores the political, social, cultural, and economic development of Latinx communities in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and elsewhere across the United States. By exploring relational and comparative histories of Latinas/os, we address such themes as migration, labor, race, and empire. We also examine the movement of Latinas and Latinos within and between the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. We use a variety of primary and secondary sources and texts to illuminate various dimensions of the Latino past.

• Department: Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities