Related Courses

Spring 2010

Economics 103 (01): Introductory Microeconomics
Studies the tools of microeconomic analysis and their applications. Supply and demand for products and for factors of production; production functions and costs; performance of the United States economy in producing and distributing products; and international trade.

J. Hartley

Economics 202 (01): East Asian Economic Development
This 200-level course investigates a particular topic in economics at some depth without presupposing prior knowledge of economics. Many students may find one or more of these courses useful complements to majors and minors other than economics. This course provides an overview of economic development in East Asia. The complex interplay of public policy, global competition, and domestic economic relationships in China, Japan, and Korea will serve as the core subject matter of the course, though patterns of economic development in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore will also be discussed. Special attention is given to conditions under which regional economies have successfully blended elements of import-substituting industrialization with export-oriented growth. The course will conclude with a discussion of the impact of the regional economic crisis, the current wave of reforms, and the potential for future growth and development.

S. Gabriel

Economics 335 (01): Advanced Corporate Finance
This course allows students who have taken Corporate Finance (Economics 215) to pursue more advanced topics in the field. Among the topics to be covered are hedging, options and derivatives, agency theory, behavioral finance, costs of financial distress, asset pricing for state-owned enterprises, and theories of corporate control and regulation. More detailed description...

S. Gabriel

Economics 338 (01): Money and Banking.
Monetary theory and policy. Overview of financial markets and institutions. Explores the nature of money and the effects of changing money supply on the economy, theories of money demand, the various methods by which monetary policy can be conducted and the advantages and disadvantages of each, methods of banking regulation and the attendant problems that arise, and important episodes in monetary history (e.g., the Great Depression).

J. Hartley

Education 205 (01): Whiteness, Racism, and Inequality in Schools and Society
(Community-based learning course; writing-intensive course)
What is race? Who decides? What does it mean to be white? How is the ideology of whiteness maintained? We will explore these and related questions as we examine the ways in which whiteness and racism are enacted in schools, have historically interfered with the educational attainment of children of color, and have led to the mis-education of white children. Readings and assignments will examine dynamics of dominance and how the construction of racial identities influences the lives of teachers and students in classrooms. We will also consider theories of multicultural education and antiracist pedagogies as strategies for addressing racial and other inequities in schools.

S. Lawrence

Education 333 (01): Practicum Seminar on Teaching and Learning: Middle and Secondary Education
This weekly seminar provides students with opportunities to design and discuss case studies involving adolescents in middle and secondary school settings, review researched-based models of instruction, and classroom management, and engage in dialogue with professionals regarding numerous aspects of teaching and student learning. Additional topics covered include reviewing the legal obligations of teachers, addressing the needs of students with disabilities, English language learners, and developing effective communication between home and school.

S. Lawrence

English 254 (01): Postcolonialism/Postructuralism
(Critical Social Thought 254)
This course will bring together theorists from different traditions--postcolonial studies and European philosophy--who share a common project: (1) to identify the conceptual limits of modern or "Western" thought, and (2) to practice thinking beyond those limits. Their thought-experiments include imagining history beyond progress, politics beyond the state-system, and being beyond the self. We may read Cesaire, Said, Galeano, Spivak, and Mbembe, and Foucault, Derrida, Badiou, Rancière, and Agamben. We will try to pay as close attention to the texts in front of us as they do to their own subjects, in order to analyze the form of their thought and so to reflect critically on our own.

S. Ahmed

>English 344 (01):Projects in Critical Thought
This course will explore the work of a range of the most important cultural theorists of the last 50 years and consider what they can contribute to the analysis of all forms of cultural works, both past and present. We will be particularly interested in writers who attempt to construct models that seek to explain everything, who in their intellectual projects try to think the totality. This semester we will be focusing on Western Marxism, particularly in relation to cultural theory.

N. Alderman

English 391 (01): The Idea of World Literature
The idea of a world literature speaks to our deepest cosmopolitan desires, to inhabit a space no longer fragmented by political divisions. Its roots reach back to eighteenth-century Britain, when non-European works began to enter European studies. The idea of a world literature originated, then, at the same time that European states consolidated their world rule. Studying eighteenth-century figures (e.g., Dryden Pope, Voltaire, Goethe), translations from Indian and Arabic sources (e.g., The Thousand and One Nights), and subsequent theory (Auerbach, Said, Moretti, Damrosch, Casanova), we will consider how comparative literary study reads the different worlds hidden within our apparently-one world.

S. Ahmed

Geography 106 (01): Global Societies
This introductory course in human geography examines social, economic,cultural and political spaces in a global context. In order to understand the making of our world, we examine processes like globalization, liberalism and neo-liberalism, conservativeism and neo-conservativeism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, politics, cultures, migrations, and wars.

W. Ahmed

Geography 312 (01): Resource and Conflict
(Speaking- and writing-intensive course)
This seminar is geared to unravel the political economy of resources,particularly energy, water, and agricultural resources, and in turn,understand the material basis of conflicts. Since most resources are place specific, we examine how globalization of consumption of resources has produced contestations, including wars. Material basis to explain causality of conflict, will in turn, challenge simplistic notions like ~Lus¹ versus ~Lthem,¹ ³Jihad versus McWorld² and ³clash of civilizations,² to explain contemporary conflicts. We will also examine how we are implicated in the production of resource wars on account of our life-style and consumption.

W. Ahmed

Gender Studies 201 (01): Methods and Practices in Feminist Scholarship
How do scholars produce knowledge? What can we learn from differences and similarities in the research process of a novelist, a biologist, an historian, a sociologist, and a film critic? Who decides what counts as knowledge? We will examine a range of methods from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, including visual analysis, archival exploration, interviewing, and ethnography, as we consider the specific advantages (and potential limitations) of diverse disciplinary approaches for feminist inquiry. We will take up numerous practical questions as well as larger methodological and ethical debates. This course provides a foundation for advanced work in the major.

C. Croegaert

Gender Studies 333 (02): Advanced Seminar
Topic: Sweet Cruelty: Anti-Humanism and Gay Writing
Advanced seminars address topics in gender studies within and across various disciplines, hence prerequisites vary. Written application is required for admission to all advanced seminars in the department. Please see below for specific requirements, the location of the application, and the deadline for submission. If not otherwise noted, applications for preregistration are due by the end of the academic advising period. In some but not all cases, late applications may also be reviewed at the start of the new semester. (Speaking- and writing-intensive course; taught in English; Spanish 330, Italian 361, French 321, Gender Studies 333) Much of twentieth-century gay writing in Latin America is characterized by an estheticist celebration of anti-humanism, which has often clashed with left-wing progressive politics in these countries. But how does a "gay style" come about? What is its genealogy? How does it identify itself, and what does such an identity mean politically and historically? In this seminar, we will study a number of writers from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Perú, and Uruguay, and examine their roots in French and Italian anti-humanist authors from Baudelaire, Lautréamont, and Rimbaud to Genet and Pasolini. We will also read a few key texts in queer theory.

C. Gundermann

Gender Studies 333 (06): Advanced Seminar
Gender, Migration, and the Ends of the State
Advanced seminars address topics in gender studies within and across various disciplines, hence prerequisites vary. Written application is required for admission to all advanced seminars in the department. Please see below for specific requirements, the location of the application, and the deadline for submission. If not otherwise noted, applications for preregistration are due by the end of the academic advising period. In some but not all cases, late applications may also be reviewed at the start of the new semester. (Anthropology 316) This course examines contemporary global population movements through the lens of gender studies and anthropology. We will consider forms of subject-making--such as citizenship--through labor, kinship, and sexuality in North Africa, Southern Europe, South Asia and the United States. We will be especially attentive to symbols of group identity linked to race, ethnicity, nation, and language. Students will engage critically with theories of transnational migration, globalization, governmentality, neoliberalism, and imperialism.

C. Croegaert

Latin American Studies 260 (01): Afro-Latin America: From Slavery to Invisibility
(History 287fs)
Exploration of the history of Afro-Latin American populations since Independence within and outside the nation-state. We will question why and how to study those whose governments define them not as peoples of African descent but as part of a mixed-race majority of Hispanic cultural heritage, who themselves may often have supported this policy, and who may have had compelling reasons to avoid official scrutiny. Readings include early twentieth-century Latin American racialist theorizing; research using census, economic, criminal, and marriage records; autobiographical works, and analysis of race in textual and musical representations of peoples, regions, and nations.

L. Gudmundson

Latin American Studies 388 (01): Postmodernism and Latin America
(History 388f)
For many the "discovery" of America opened the modern era. Its closing may also have been foretold in Latin America's confounding of diverse theories of modernization and development in recent times. This seminar will introduce the student to a number of both classic and more recent works on Latin America (in English) that advance along postmodernist lines, ranging from cultural contact and conflict, language, meaning, and power in the sixteenth century, to the invention of national identities in the nineteenth century, to discourses of ethnicity, class, gender, and reason in the twentieth century.

L. Gudmundson

Philosophy 202 (01): Philosophical Foundations of Western Thought: The Modern Period
Investigates the development of Western philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the writings of Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant. Focus on the apparent conflict between modern natural science and traditional religion as sources of knowledge and belief. Topics include the nature and extent of human knowledge, the nature of the mind, the existence of God, and the possibility of human freedom.

T. Wartenberg

Philosophy 375 (01): Philosophy of Film
An examination of different theoretical issues concerning the nature of film and film viewing. Topics vary yearly. (Film Studies 390-02) Recently, philosophers have argued that films resemble philosophy in their use of thought experiments. But the role of thought experiments in philosophy is itself contested. The seminar will investigate how thought experiments are used in science and philosophy in order to determine whether films and, more generally, art can legitimately claim that their presentation of thought experiments connects them to philosophy. Some previous acquaintance with philosophy highly recommended.

T. Wartenberg

Politics 111: The Self and Political Thought
What is the relationship between personal experience and political thought? How do political thinkers grasp and convey the connections between self and political society? Our seminar will probe the links between heart and mind in political philosophy by reading and discussing the biographies, memoirs, fiction, and theories of figures who have left their mark on the history of political thought.

J. Cocks

Politics 212: Modern Political Thought
The political writings of Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Rousseau, Burke, Hegel, and Marx in the context of a sustained critique of liberal individualism (natural rights and utilitarianism) and an examination of radical egalitarian, conservative, and revolutionary alternatives. Recurring issues include law and liberty, the fragility of the good life, "human nature" arguments in politics, contrasting understandings or justifications of "private" property, and the claims by Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx, after having dismissed all predecessors as mistaken or superficial or both, to have refounded and then completed the enterprise of political theory.

J. Cocks

Politics 233 (01): Invitation to Feminist Theory
Gender Studies 221)
This course explores the overlapping dualities of the feminine and the masculine, the private and the public, the home and the world. We examine different forms of power over the body; the ways gender and sexual identities reinforce or challenge the established order; and the cultural determinants of "women's emancipation." We emphasize the politics of feminism, dealing with themes that include culture, democracy, and the particularly political role of theory and on theoretical attempts to grasp the complex ties and tensions between sex, gender, and power.

E. Markovits

Politics 348 (01): Colloquium in Politics: Community Development
(Community-based learning course)
The course engages students in the theories, debates, and strategies regarding the revitalization of inner-city communities. Examines what roles business, government, and nonprofit, community-based organizations (the "third sector") play in developing "blighted" neighborhoods. Topics include economic development, affordable housing, equal and accessible social services, and political empowerment. Features speakers from related fields of community development. Students conduct research projects generated by community-based organizations in Holyoke and Springfield. Focuses on helping students integrate knowledge derived from class discussions, speakers, and their research experience.

P. Smith

Politics 361 (01): Politics & Rhetoric
(Writing-intensive course)
People have long accused politicians of using rhetoric to pander to audiences and get what they want regardless of the truth. But politics, especially democratic politics, depends on the persuasive force of communication to persuade and motivate others. What is the relationship between speech and politics? Can we have political communication without rhetoric? How can citizens use speech to improve democracy? What are the political effects of different rhetorical styles? How can speech help communities deal with conflict? The course will focus on these questions, moving from classical writings on rhetoric to contemporary democratic political theory.

E. Markovits

Psychology 200 (01): Research Methods in Psychology
This course provides an introduction to the skills necessary for becoming good producers and consumers of psychological research. Students learn to develop research questions, survey related literature, design rigorous and ethically sound studies, and collect, analyze, and interpret quantitative and qualitative data. Students build on their computer skills relevant for psychological research and learn to read and critique original empirical journal articles. The course culminates in an original, collaborative research project, a final paper, and oral presentation.

A. Douglas

Psychology 326 (01): Laboratory in Personality and Abnormal Psychology
This course is an introduction to research methods in abnormal and personality psychology. Students will work as a class to collect data using quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Students will be expected to collect survey- and questionnaire-based data as well as engage in some interviewing projects. We will consider the various stages of research including literature review, design, ethical considerations, data collection, and analysis (qualitative and quantitative), and consider the statistical inference or implications of our findings. The course focuses on the impact of stress and coping on the lives of individuals, identity, their relationships, and psychological adjustment.

A. Douglas

Sociology 123 (01): Introduction to Sociology
This course uses a sociological framework to examine the nature and structure of modern industrial societies. To identify central trends in society and culture, this course covers several basic themes, such as social inequality and social interaction, that have appeared repeatedly in the works of major social thinkers.

K. Tucker

Sociology 333 (01): Contemporary Social Theory
In this critical survey of the main theoretical perspectives in contemporary sociology, we focus specifically on structural functionalism, symbolic interactionism, critical theory, feminism, and postmodernism. Besides gaining familiarity with these alternative perspectives, we try to identify the main axes of theoretical dispute in sociology and discuss the problems of evaluating and resolving conflict between theories.

K. Tucker

Statistics 341 (01): Linear Statistical Models
Mathematical concepts from linear algebra and n-dimensional Euclidean geometry, together with statistical concepts of estimation and hypothesis testing, are developed and used to construct a unifying theory for two classes of applied methods: analysis of variance and regression analysis. The theory is developed in three stages: least squares and orthogonal projections; moment assumptions and the Gauss-Markov theorem; and the normal distribution and F-tests.

G. Cobb