How America Became a Right-Wing Nation: Lessons from the 1970s

How America Became a Right-Wing Nation: Lessons from the 1970s

Attend In Person OR Online The decade of the 1970s represented a turning point in US politics, which shifted in a rightward direction toward free market economics at the domestic level, combined with more militaristic and interventionist policies overseas. The course...
Great Thinkers of the Muslim World, 600-1300

Great Thinkers of the Muslim World, 600-1300

Over the past 1,400 years, numerous Muslims have contributed to the rich intellectual traditions of Islam. These thinkers explored theology, philosophy, mysticism, and science. Yet few of them are known today by educated Americans. This seminar aims to introduce a...
Supreme Court & Precedent

Supreme Court & Precedent

This course continues the exploration of the United States Supreme Court and its role in deciding fundamental social questions. After an introductory class on the Court, we will focus on landmark cases involving race in education, abortion, Second Amendment, and...
Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation of Pollination

Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation of Pollination

All organisms reproduce – among them, plants reproduce in the most diverse ways. In some plant species, all individuals are the same sex; some have two sexes, and others have three or even four sexes. Reproduction occurs via flowers ranging from the size of a pinhead...
The Continuing Impact of the Vietnam War

The Continuing Impact of the Vietnam War

We will look back over the half-century since the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam to consider its impact on three groups: the veterans who fought there, the Vietnamese people who fled to the U.S., and those who were radicalized by the war on the left and right. The...
Introduction to Mexican-American Popular Culture

Introduction to Mexican-American Popular Culture

We are immersed in popular culture during most of our waking hours. It is on the radio, television, our computers, and smartphones that we access the Internet and streets and highways in the form of advertisements and billboards. It is in newspapers, movie theaters,...
The Operas of Verdi

The Operas of Verdi

The year 2023 commemorates the 210th anniversary of the birth of Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), and in this course, we consider his achievements as an opera composer. An overview of Verdi’s life and career takes up the initial class session, including the musical...
RE-RELEASE – Introduction to Hindu Mythology

RE-RELEASE – Introduction to Hindu Mythology

Images of Hinduism and Hindu deities have been integrated into our collective imagination as part of American popular culture. From the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love, photos of the Beatles seated alongside Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the goddess on the cover...
RE-RELEASE – Caravaggio

RE-RELEASE – Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was both a beloved and rejected painter of the Baroque era. His paintings, which often included realistic figures, theatrical lighting, and dark, obscure settings activated a deep sense of spiritual contemplation for many....
Religion, Gods, and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt

Religion, Gods, and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt

This course will survey the fundamentals of ancient Egyptian religion, from the Predynastic period (ca. 4000 BC) to the end of the New Kingdom (ca. 1000 BC). Material will be covered both diachronically and synchronically. This course offers an examination of...
The History of the World Written in Tree-Rings

The History of the World Written in Tree-Rings

This course will focus on the scientific field of dendrochronology (from dendron=tree and chronos=time), or tree-ring science, and what it can tell us about the past, present and future. We will explore the fascinating history of how the science was developed by a...
Dostoevsky’s Demons: Satire and Prophecy

Dostoevsky’s Demons: Satire and Prophecy

Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872) – according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1970 – “are crawling across the whole world in front of our very eyes, infesting countries where they could not have been dreamed of” and “announcing their determination to shake and destroy...
Science and its Neighbors

Science and its Neighbors

This seminar is a critical examination of the many areas which lie near science but which are not (for the most part) science, often called “marginal science” or “pseudoscience.” We will begin by examining scientific method and discovery science, falsifiability, and...