Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE)

Open, Seminar—Fall

Although 19th-century art in the United States encompassed a wide range of stylistic movements––Impressionism, Realism, Romanticism, Tonalism, the Hudson River School, and Folk Art, among them––many artists shared a common fascination: water. Dangerous oceans, seductive shorelines, and industrial man-made waterways emerged as recurring subjects. While artists used images of maritime scenes to negotiate new understandings of the bounds of a new nation, water also offered possibilities for visualizing a fluid, borderless world that could connect regions, religions, ecosystems, and temporalities. Drawing on the emerging field of the Blue Humanities—an interdisciplinary approach that explores the cultural and historical significance of water—this seminar will examine how artists represented seas, rivers, ports, and coastal environments. Adding to traditional narratives of American art, we will explore how artists used waterways to examine the US’ relationship to Africa, Asia, Europe, and Central and South America. Topics will include painted waterscapes, port scenes, and ship portraits, including Childe Hassam’s impressionist dedication to fixing the “moment” long-traveling waters touched New England shores, Winslow Homer’s realist interpretation of transoceanic migration and inequity, and Fitz H. Lane’s romantic rendering of US ships triumphing over perilous, international seas. Our discussions will be augmented by attending to diverse makers working outside of traditional fine art, including within the material cultures of maritime trade, from pearls to shell souvenirs and carved whalebone; folk depictions of mariners and their relationship to constructions of race, gender, and sexuality at sea; popular visual cultures of enslavement, migration, and displacement across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds; military representations of naval warfare, imperialism, and resistance; and print illustrations of technologies that transformed global mobility, including steamships, canals, and underwater telegraph cables. Through artworks, readings, and museum visits in New York City and the Hudson River Valley, students will engage with historical and contemporary scholarship on water, fluidity, mobility, and interconnectedness. Together, we will investigate the history of 19th-century art from the perspective of the oceans, rivers, and waterways that linked artists to the wider world.

Faculty

• Suzie Oppenheimer

First-Year Studies—Year

Ecology is a scientific discipline that studies interactions between living organisms and their environments, as well as processes governing how species are distributed, how they interact, and how nutrients and energy cycle through ecosystems. Although we may think of these processes occurring in “natural” areas with little-to-no human development, all of these processes still take place in environments heavily modified by humans, such as cities. This course will cover fundamental concepts in the discipline of ecology and then further explore how these patterns and processes are altered (sometimes dramatically) in urban environments. We will use examples from our local environment—the New York City metropolitan area—to understand ecological concepts in light of urbanization. The fall semester will include a biweekly outdoor lab session at local parks and field stations. Special attention will be paid to the ecology of local streams and rivers, including field trips and work involving the Sarah Lawrence Center for the Urban River at Beczak. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences. 

Faculty

• Michelle Hersh

Open, Seminar—Fall

The ocean covers more than two-thirds of Earth’s surface today and has harbored the origin of life and the vast majority of life today. It is also profoundly transformed by environmental change, both past and present. This seminar will examine how marine communities have responded to the great disturbances of geological time: mass extinctions, intervals of rapid warming and cooling, ocean acidification, and changing ocean current systems. Students will refine their research, analytical, and writing skills by combining paleontological evidence and observations of the modern system. Interactive lectures and discussions in the beginning weeks will introduce shared background information. After that, each class meeting will start with a targeted lecture on a selected group of marine organisms or an event in Earth’s history, and will end with a student-led discussion on a primary research paper related to the target topic. Conference projects will center on a literature synthesis, hands-on data analysis, or research proposal on a relevant topic of choice. No background experience in biology is required.

Faculty

• Yue Deng

Open, Seminar—Fall

Vertebrates inhabit nearly every environment on Earth, from the deepest oceans to the highest mountains, yet they all face many of the same fundamental biological challenges. They must obtain energy, move through their environments, maintain internal balance, perceive and respond to the world around them, reproduce, and survive changing environmental conditions. Throughout evolutionary history, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals have evolved remarkably different solutions to these shared challenges. Rather than surveying vertebrates one taxonomic group at a time, this seminar will take a comparative approach to vertebrate biology by exploring the common biological problems that all vertebrates must solve. Using examples from across the vertebrate tree of life, we will examine how anatomy, physiology, behavior, ecology, and evolution interact to shape the extraordinary diversity of vertebrate life. Topics will include energy acquisition, locomotion, homeostasis, sensory biology, behavior, reproduction, environmental adaptation, ecological interactions, and the impacts of global environmental change. Readings will combine textbook chapters from Vertebrate Life with primary scientific literature, popular science writing (including selections from An Immense World), documentaries, and other multimedia resources. Through seminar discussions, individual conferences, and student-led presentations, students will develop the skills to interpret scientific research, think comparatively across taxa, and communicate biological ideas effectively.

Faculty

• Akhila Gopal

Open, Lecture—Fall

What biological processes led to the development of the incredible diversity of life that we see on Earth today? The process of evolution, or a change in the inherited traits in a population over time, is fundamental to our understanding of biology and the history of life on Earth. This course will introduce students to the field of evolutionary biology. We will interpret evidence from the fossil record, molecular genetics, systematics, and empirical studies to deepen our understanding of evolutionary mechanisms. Topics covered will include the genetic basis of evolution, phylogenetics, natural selection, adaptation, speciation, coevolution, and the evolution of behavior and life-history traits. Students will attend one weekly lecture and one weekly seminar where scientific papers in evolutionary biology will be discussed in small groups.

Faculty

• Michelle Hersh

Open, Seminar—Fall

This course will be an introduction to botany with emphasis on learning plant taxonomy in the field. Readings and lectures will cover aspects of plant science including anatomy, physiology, taxonomy, food science, and ethnobotany, highlighting the importance of plants in human life. Throughout the semester, students will explore our native local flora and develop a familiarity with important plant families, genera, and species found in our area. Field walks on campus will utilize taxonomic keys to develop proficiency in botanical identification of herbaceous and woody plants, and apply techniques of plant preservation for preparing herbarium specimens. Students will also document an important ethnobotanically-utilized plant species as part of a semester-long research project.

Faculty

• Adam Negrin

Open, Seminar—Spring

Biodiversity loss. Climate change. Habitat fragmentation. Invasive species. Global ecosystems are being altered in dramatic ways due to human activities. To address these challenges, we first need to understand them scientifically. This course will explore the impacts of global environmental change through the lens of the biological sciences. Will rising global temperatures lead to unexpected species interactions, like hybridization between polar bears and grizzly bears? How are invasive predators like Burmese pythons in Florida affecting mammal populations? How does the extensive use of fertilizers upstream in a large river affect biological communities downstream? How has overfishing altered marine biodiversity? How could urbanization and habitat loss alter the risk of disease spillover from wildlife to humans? We will use scientific journal articles and other primary sources to address these kinds of questions in this seminar course. 

Faculty

• Akhila Gopal

Open, Seminar—Spring

This course will be an introduction to our world of plants, people, and culture. During this course, students will study the fundamentals of botany and taxonomy to discover how people have utilized plants for food, beverage, medicine, materials, and natural products. Lectures will present core botanical science and nomenclature to survey plants utilized across the world and understand the significance of biodiversity, foodways, and the preservation of cultural and traditional knowledge. Throughout the semester, students will read and discuss ethnobotanical papers and develop a familiarity with important plant families. Field walks on campus will utilize taxonomic keys for botanical identification of useful medicinal and edible native plants. A semester-long research project will explore a plant product or process, incorporating learned botanical fundamentals from the course to present a novel synthesis of ethnobotanical data and theory in a written paper and oral presentation.

Faculty

• Adam Negrin

First-Year Studies—Year

The 2024 Presidential Election result will have far-reaching implications for economic, social, and environmental policies. It will also be significant in terms of the future of American democracy and social wellbeing. In this course, we will situate current economic and political challenges in a theoretical and historical context by drawing on insights from difference schools of thought in economics as well as other disciplines such as law, politics, sociology, and history. Some of the key questions to be addressed are as follows: How can the central debates in political economy help us understand some of the unprecedented challenges we face, such as new gilded age style wealth concentration and power, economic insecurity, and the climate crisis? Why is the study of history a central methodological priority for many economists and why not so for others? Why do people distinguish between “regulation” and laissez-faire and is this a false dichotomy? What is the history of industrial and social policy in the United States and other countries? How do we understand the relationship between political and corporate power and the “rule of law” with regard to market outcomes? What is Project 2025 and how can we understand its theoretical basis and implications? These and others will be some of the questions that we will be tackling throughout the course of the year, thereby ensuring that students develop a solid foundation to the fundamental debates in economic theory and policy and understand the key role of methodology in the study of political economy. Finally, the goal is to ensure that students develop the ability to critically engage scholarly work in economics. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• Jamee Moudud

Open, Small Lecture—Year

This course on business history will situate business in its social and political contexts. At the core of the course is the argument that the economy is embedded in the political society and is thus subject to historical change. The study of business cannot be separated from politics and political struggle, which determine how society is legally constructed in any given moment in history. Thus, what is of often called “private enterprise” sits on a contextually determined set of power relations which shape and are in turn shaped by current legal institutions. Challenging the idea, common to conventional discourse, that economies can be more or less regulated, this course will focus on the politics of business regulation, which in some contexts has produced socially progressive outcomes and in others regressive ones. Regulation is ubiquitous and subject to variation given changed circumstances due say to an economic crisis, new technologies, global competition, socio-political pressures etc. In this course, the nature and politics of business regulation will be studied in different national and historical contexts, involving countries in the Global South (e.g. Mauritius, Chile, Brazil, the Indian state of Kerala, South Africa etc.) and the Global North (e.g. United States, Sweden, Germany, etc.). It will address a wide range of topics that include: (a) slavery, cotton, banking, and property rights in early American industrialization; (b) legal struggles between corporations and society over constitutional rights (e.g. what brought about the landmark Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. FEC (2010)?); (c) corporations and colonialism (e.g. the British East India Company, the Virginia Company, etc.); (d) business regulation during the post-Civil War Reconstruction Period; (e) late industrialization and social well being; (f) using the United States and Sweden as case studies, the construction of welfare states and workers’ attempts to secure social and economic rights; and (g) the history of the relationship between business associations and anti-democratic politics, including the links between Silicon Valley technolibertarians and digital capitalism (i.e. artificial intelligence and crypto currencies). At a theoretical level, the study of business history will be grounded in debates in microeconomics, theories of business investment and pricing, and the relationship between law, politics, history, and economics. This course will be of interest to students who wish to understand contemporary social and political challenges in a theoretically and historically informed way.

Faculty

• Jamee Moudud

Open, Lecture—Fall

The Earth’s climate has changed dramatically throughout its approximately 4.5 billion-year history, but the recent warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases poses a unique threat to humanity and many natural ecosystems. This course will cover the basic climate and earth system science needed to understand human-caused global warming. We will learn about the history of Earth’s climate and the diverse methods that scientists use to understand how and why it is changing. We will also explore current issues in climate-change science and how they are commonly miscommunicated or misrepresented in popular media.

Faculty

• Bernice Rosenzweig

Open, Small Lecture—Spring

Climate change is the greatest environmental challenge currently facing humanity. If allowed to continue unabated, its future impacts will be catastrophic for both natural ecosystems and human society. But while some climate change is “locked in” due to past greenhouse gas emissions, there is still time to develop infrastructure systems and environmental management policies to avoid many of the worst potential impacts. In this course, we will explore the concept of “ecological resilience” and how it can be applied to environmental management challenges such as climate change. We will then focus on the science underlying climate change mitigation strategies, covering topics such as decarbonized energy systems, smart growth and green building, along with the ways that climate change mitigation and adaptation together can influence resilience. We will also learn about how natural and social scientists collaborate to develop projections of climate-changed futures and study resilience. This course will meet as a weekly lecture with a weekly seminar. During seminar, students will have the opportunity to work together on a “visioning” project to develop a plausible scenario of a hopeful, climate resilient future.

Faculty

• Bernice Rosenzweig

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

As the desire to engage in individual and collective efforts toward sustainable and climate-change mitigating solutions increases, this workshop offers an opportunity for students to explore the multiple ways in which “sustainability” can be fostered and developed at an institution like Sarah Lawrence College. Students will work in small groups on a variety of projects and produce research and educational material that can lead to concrete and actionable proposals for the College and our community to consider. Students will determine their own areas of interest and research, from energy and water-usage monitoring to composting solutions, recycling/reusing and consumer sobriety, landscaping choices, pollinators and natural diversity, food growing, natural and human history of the land, and community collaborations, to name a few. As part of their project efforts, students will engage with College administrators who are actively working toward sustainable solutions, as well as students, staff, and faculty groups such as the Warren Green vegetable garden, the Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collective on the Environment (SLICE), and the Sustainability Committee. We will also explore the possibility of writing grants in coordination with other actors at the College. Most of the course work will happen during class time. Skills in areas of any expertise are welcome, from environmental science to writing to visual and studio arts—but any interest in issues of sustainability and a strong sense of dedication will suffice.

Faculty

• Eric Leveau

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

How do we understand humans and their relationship to nature—and how do these understandings shape the ways we design our societies, relate to each other and the natural world, and imagine our world into the future? This lecture course will introduce political theory through environmental questions, focusing on two central themes. First: how does introducing a concern for “the Earth” or “ecology” deepen, and often complicate, our understanding of key political concepts like justice, freedom, democracy, and power? Second: how do the perspectives and methods of political theory relate to those of other disciplines—ecology, climate science, history, anthropology—which approach similar questions in very different ways? We will begin by examining what political theory is and exploring how different understandings of human nature and the natural world have shaped political thinking across traditions. We will then explore how environmental concerns reshape core political questions about governance, collective action, and social change—and how we might imagine and practice political futures within planetary limits.

Faculty

• Ben Mylius

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

How do humans respond to existential threats? This seminar will examine psychological and political patterns that emerge during crises—environmental catastrophe, economic collapse, pandemics, and rapid technological change. We will explore how fear shapes desires for certainty, belonging, and control; how communities form through inclusion and exclusion; and how perceived existential threats reshape relationships between individuals, groups, authority, and the broader-than-human world. Drawing on psychology, political theory, and environmental studies, we will consider some of what is known or hypothesized about destructive and constructive individual and collective responses to crises. Some of our topics may include: mortality salience, terror management theory, in-group/out-group dynamics, scapegoating and purification fantasies, imagined histories, the appeal of hierarchy under threat (including toward the natural world), the feedback loops that intensify these patterns, and alternative forms of belonging and solidarity. The course will emphasize collaborative inquiry: we are all trying to understand what humans are capable of in dark times, including recognizing these patterns in ourselves and exploring how we might work with rather than against our shared vulnerability in the present.

Faculty

• Ben Mylius

Open, Small Lecture—Spring

As the desire to engage in individual and collective efforts toward sustainable and climate-change mitigating solutions increases, this workshop offers an opportunity for students to explore the multiple ways in which “sustainability” can be fostered and developed at an institution like Sarah Lawrence College. Students will work in small groups on a variety of projects and produce research and educational material that can lead to concrete and actionable proposals for the College and our community to consider. Students will determine their own areas of interest and research, from energy and water-usage monitoring to composting solutions, recycling/reusing and consumer sobriety, landscaping choices, pollinators and natural diversity, food growing, natural and human history of the land, and community collaborations, to name a few. As part of their project efforts, students will engage with College administrators who are actively working toward sustainable solutions, as well as students, staff, and faculty groups such as the Warren Green vegetable garden, the Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collective on the Environment (SLICE), and the Sustainability Committee. We will also explore the possibility of writing grants in coordination with other actors at the College. Most of the course work will happen during class time. Skills in areas of any expertise are welcome, from environmental science to writing to visual and studio arts—but any interest in issues of sustainability and a strong sense of dedication will suffice.

Faculty

• Eric Leveau

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

What is environmental writing, and what politics, ethics, and visions of human-nature relations does it embody? This seminar will examine canonical and contemporary environmental writing through close reading, tracing the genre’s evolution from 19th century Romanticism through contemporary multispecies and Indigenous perspectives. We will read broadly chronologically, beginning with foundational texts like Thoreau and Muir, moving through Leopold's land ethic and Carson's environmental advocacy, and continuing into contemporary voices that challenge and expand the tradition. As we read, we will ask: How do different writers imagine the human place in nature? What narrative forms and voices has the genre privileged, and what has been excluded? Whose relationship to “nature” gets to count as a part of the genre? How has environmental writing responded to ecological crisis, and what futures does it make imaginable? Through close reading and discussion, we will develop skills in literary analysis while examining environmental writing as a political and ethical practice. The course will investigate both the beauty of the genre and its limitations, attending to questions of access, social position, and the changing meanings of “nature” itself. Topics may include: Romantic and transcendentalist traditions; conservation and the land ethic; environmental advocacy and Silent Spring; solitude and contemplation; Indigenous perspectives and reciprocity; multispecies writing; place and belonging; the politics of wilderness; and environmental justice.

Faculty

• Ben Mylius

Sophomore and Above, Small Lecture—Spring

What is technology, and how does it shape our relationship with nature—especially amid environmental crisis? These questions might sound abstract, but they are central to how we understand the causes of environmental issues and the kinds of responses we think are possible. Some environmental thinkers see technology as the source of all our ecological and social problems; others see it as the solution to them. In order to evaluate these positions, let alone identify our own, we need to understand what different thinkers mean by technology, how deep down its mediation goes, and why it is so often framed as either the cause of our problems or a silver bullet fix. In this course, we will approach these questions by broadening what counts as technology. We start with familiar examples: things like solar, or artificial intelligence (AI). But then we ask what happens to our thinking as we expand the category. How does our view of “environmental problems” change if we imagine agriculture as a form of technology? Or writing? Or even language itself? Drawing on work from environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and philosophy, we will explore perspectives that see technology as fundamental to human existence, perspectives that see it as alienating or destructive, and perspectives that see it as enabling care and attention. Our goal will be, working together, to understand how different ways of thinking about technology open or foreclose different responses to environmental crisis. Lectures will introduce conceptual frameworks through readings, discussion, and collaborative exercises. Group conferences will provide opportunities for students to examine specific technologies, building practical skills in technological analysis and developing their own perspectives. Some of our topics may include: philosophy of technology; perception and mediation; writing and symbolic thought; AI and computational systems; technologies; Indigenous technological traditions; separation and embeddedness.

Faculty

• Ben Mylius

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

How have films and other modern media shaped our ideas about nature, the planet, and the world around us? What do Technicolor images of the countryside, underwater musical numbers, and experimental films made of moths teach us about the nature of cinema? This seminar will explore film as a utopian medium for capturing, romanticizing, and recreating nature in an age of rising buildings and disappearing stars. At the same time, we will approach film as a machine that exploits and disrupts natural environments, turning the Earth into raw material to promote nationalist myths, launch new technologies, and naturalize industrial transitions. Focusing primarily on United States and European film, the course will have three main themes: film technology and nature, modern imaginaries of sea and space, and the country and the city. Alongside weekly screenings, we will read an interdisciplinary array of scholars in the humanities who have influenced recent eco-critical approaches to film history and analysis.

Faculty

• Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen

First-Year Studies—Year

As our societies address the challenges of climate change, it is important that we explore the implications of the concept of “nature” in the Western and Judeo-Christian tradition. In this course, we will read literary classics—such as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison, among many others—and examine how they represent the environment, animals and the natural world in ways that directly shape our own perception of nature. We will take different approaches by comparing, for example, stories of world creation from Indigenous nations with narratives taken from the Bible and Greek and Roman texts, or exploring the combination of Celtic magic and Christian symbolism in medieval Arthurian romances, or examining how the aesthetic concept of the sublime is present in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as well as in the written account of the Lewis and Clark expedition up the Missouri River. Going in different directions, we will analyze how feminism developed new ways of relating to nature as counter-narratives to masculine domination, explore the questions of science, machines and technology, or examine how writers and philosophers have integrated animals in their thinking as a way to move beyond the “human-ist” understanding of nature inherited from European Renaissance. In previous iterations of this first-year studies course, students have developed a variety of personal projects: from how flowers are featured in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, or how a community farm in the Bronx challenges outdated urban-planning decisions, to the depiction of nature in Hayao Miyazaki’s films or in Jane Austen’s novels. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside weekly small group activities.

Faculty

• Eric Leveau

Open, Seminar—Fall

This course will put Dostoevsky at the center of a genre that we will define only partly in terms of detectives and clues and more essentially as an exploration of ways of knowing. We will start with the most canonical of nineteenth-century detectives as we make the case that Sherlock Holmes’s method is not “deductive,” but “abductive” as Peircean semiotics would have it; in Holmes’s own words, “[i]t is the scientific use of the imagination.” From Conan Doyle we will turn to a reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “tales of ratiocination” as anything but. We will then read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1881) in the context of the contemporary British tradition that Dostoevsky knew well, including Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868). We will end the semester with a brief excursion into the sense of place that also marks the genre. While twentieth-century detective fiction is particularly striking in this regard, from Poe’s Paris, Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg, and Collins’s English country house, we will go straight to the highly atmospheric rendering of two more recent spaces of detecting, one real and the other imaginary. In Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of Your Dead (2009), 2018 Nobel Prize Winner Olga Tokarczuk tells a story of the unstable borderland between Poland and the Czech Republic where the real author lives. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Michael Chabon’s stunning achievement is not least a fully realized, but entirely invented Yiddish-speaking Sitka, Alaska.

Faculty

• Melissa Frazier

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

Our existence lies in a perpetual state of change. An apple falls from a tree, clouds move across expansive farmland blocking out the sun for days, meanwhile satellites zip around the Earth transmitting and receiving signals to our cell phones. The calculus was invented to develop a language to accurately describe the motion and change happening all around us. The ancient Greeks began a detailed study of change but they were hesitant to wrestle with the infinite and so it was not until the 17th century that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, among others, tamed the infinite and gave birth to this extremely successful branch of mathematics. Though just a few hundred years old, the calculus has become an indispensable research tool in both the natural and social sciences. Our study will begin with the central concept of the limit and proceed to explore the dual processes of differentiation and integration. Numerous applications of the theory will be examined. Weekly group conferences will be conducted in hands-on workshop mode. This small lecture is intended for students interested in advanced study in mathematics or sciences, students preparing for careers in the health sciences or engineering, and any student wishing to broaden and enrich the life of the mind.

Faculty

• Daniel King

Open, Lecture—Fall

Variance, correlation coefficient, regression analysis, statistical significance, and margin of error. You’ve heard these terms and other statistical phrases bantered about before, and you’ve seen them interspersed in news reports and research articles. But what do they mean? How are they used? And why are they so important? Serving as an introduction to the concepts, techniques, and reasoning central to the understanding of data, this lecture course will focus on the fundamental methods of statistical analysis used to gain insight into diverse areas of human interest. The use, misuse, and abuse of statistics will be the central focus of the course, and specific topics of exploration will be drawn from experimental design theory, sampling theory, data analysis, and statistical inference. Applications will be considered in current events, business, psychology, politics, medicine, and many other areas of the natural and social sciences. Calculator and spreadsheet software will be used extensively in this course, but no prior experience with these technologies is assumed. Group conferences, conducted in workshop mode, will serve to reinforce student understanding of the course material. This lecture is recommended for anybody wishing to be a better-informed consumer of data and strongly recommended for those planning to pursue advanced undergraduate or graduate research in the natural sciences or social sciences.

Faculty

• Daniel King

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

Rarely is a quantity of interest—tomorrow’s temperature, unemployment rates across Europe, the cost of a spring break flight to Fort Lauderdale—a simple function of just one primary variable. Reality, for better or worse, is multivariable. This course will introduce an array of topics and tools used in the mathematical analysis of multivariable functions. The intertwined theories of vectors, matrices, and differential equations and their applications will be the central themes of exploration. Specific topics to be covered will include the algebra and geometry of vectors in two, three, and higher dimensions; dot and cross products and their applications; equations of lines and planes in higher dimensions; solutions to systems of linear equations using Gaussian elimination; theory and applications of determinants, inverses and eigenvectors; volumes of three-dimensional solids via integration; spherical and cylindrical coordinate systems; and methods of visualizing and constructing solutions to differential equations of various types. Conference work will involve an investigation of some mathematically-themed subject of the student’s choosing.

Faculty

• Melvin Irizarry-Gelpi

Open, Small Lecture—Spring

Calculus is the mathematical gift that keeps on giving—thank you, Newton and company! In this course, students will expand their knowledge of limits, derivatives, and integrals with concepts and techniques that will enable them to solve many important problems in mathematics and the sciences. Topics will include differentiation review, integration review, integration with non-polynomial functions, applications of integration (finding area, volume, length, center of mass, moment of inertia, probability), advanced techniques for integration (substitution, integration-by-parts, partial fractions), infinite sequences, infinite series, convergent and divergent sums, power series, differential equations and modeling dynamical systems, and, time permitting, parametric equations of a curve and polar coordinates. Weekly group conferences will be conducted in hands-on workshop mode. This course is intended for students interested in advanced study in mathematics or sciences, students preparing for careers in the health sciences or engineering, and any student wishing to broaden and enrich the life of the mind.

Faculty

• Melvin Irizarry-Gelpi

Open, Component—Spring

How do human voices express our basic, most fundamental needs and desires? How do our voices also provoke immediate feelings and responses? And how do voices become ideologies—such as having or silencing a voice—that then shape the meanings of our voices? In this seminar, we will use these questions to forge a path towards better understanding the role of the human voice in climate justice. We will begin the course with canonical sources that link music with social justice. Then, we will engage recent research from sound studies, voice studies, media studies, vocal anthropology, ecomusicology, and ethnomusicology that reorients the voice and its sonic elements as a dynamically agentive and transformative force intertwined with history and culture. We will then apply our new understanding of the voice to better describe, analyze, and interpret vocal art that enables us to hear a new relationship with our environment. Throughout the semester, we will index a range of approaches, themes, and persuasive strategies of these activist, vocal interventions addressing climate change in order to articulate and clarify the role of music and sound in climate justice. Class topics and themes may include the speech-song continuum, phonetic variation and prosody, Bollywood playback singing, indigeneity and vocality, vocal mimesis, Tuvan throat singing, multivocality, vocal constructions of place and the environment, and others. No prior experience in music is necessary.

Faculty

• Niko Higgins

Open, Seminar—Spring

How do human voices express our basic, most fundamental needs and desires? How do our voices also provoke immediate feelings and responses? And how do voices become ideologies—such as having or silencing a voice—that then shape the meanings of our voices? In this seminar, we will use these questions to forge a path towards better understanding the role of the human voice in climate justice. We will begin the course with canonical sources that link music with social justice. Then, we will engage recent research from sound studies, voice studies, media studies, vocal anthropology, ecomusicology, and ethnomusicology that reorients the voice and its sonic elements as a dynamically agentive and transformative force intertwined with history and culture. We will then apply our new understanding of the voice to better describe, analyze, and interpret vocal art that enables us to hear a new relationship with our environment. Throughout the semester, we will index a range of approaches, themes, and persuasive strategies of these activist, vocal interventions addressing climate change in order to articulate and clarify the role of music and sound in climate justice. Class topics and themes may include the speech-song continuum, phonetic variation and prosody, Bollywood playback singing, indigeneity and vocality, vocal mimesis, Tuvan throat singing, multivocality, vocal constructions of place and the environment, and others. No prior experience in music is necessary.

Faculty

• Niko Higgins

Open, Seminar—Fall

This seminar is intended as a broad survey of the different branches of psychology, with an examination of their underlying principles and organizing major theories from a “critical” perspective. A critical perspective suggests an integration of “normative” perspectives on behavior and mental processes with an empirically informed analysis of societal, cultural, and structural effects such as social categorization of race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and social class on these matters. We will begin with a brief history of psychology as a science, unpacking the benefits and the costs of a positivistic scientific approach to the study of behavior, moving through neural, sensing, and perceiving approaches to self, then development, cognition, personality, and ending with the definition and treatment of psychological disorders. Conference work can focus on deeper analyses within a particular area of psychology of interest to students.

Faculty

• Linwood J. Lewis

Open, Seminar—Spring

How do we stay motivated, resilient, and effective in a world shaped by environmental crisis, uncertainty, stress, and rapid change? This seminar will introduce "positive sustainability," an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of human flourishing and ecological responsibility. The field is distinguished by three defining characteristics: a positive orientation toward a positive orientation toward creating conditions for people and nature to thrive, a both-and logic linking ecological responsibility with human flourishing, and a focus on sustaining engagement over time. The course will take a practical approach that connects personal well-being, leadership, and environmental action. We will examine how individuals, communities, organizations, and public institutions respond to social and environmental challenges. The goal will be to cultivate skills students can use in any area of their lives: hope, optimism, self-regulation, meaning, strengths-based leadership, teamwork, emotional resilience, critical thinking, and the ability to turn concern into action. The course is designed to be experiential, student-centered, and fun. Students will participate in field trips, outdoor learning, group exercises, debates, mindfulness and strengths activities, and a personal "eco-impact thriving" project based on their own interests. Readings will draw on positive psychology, environmental psychology, public policy, and sustainability scholarship, including work by Albert Bandura; Edward Deci and Richard Ryan; C. R. Snyder and Maria Ojala; Martin Seligman; Kirk Brown and Tim Kasser; and Dorit Kerret and colleagues. Students will consider when positive approaches support agency and cooperation and when they risk obscuring inequality, power, structural constraints, or ecological limits. Seminar meetings will combine discussion, concise lectures, reflective writing, small-group inquiry, field observation, and structured practice. Students will map their spheres of influence, compare ecological footprint tools, identify cognitive biases, practice strengths spotting and hope-pathway planning, examine sustainability trade-offs, and complete short applied assignments that connect course concepts to their lives, institutions, and communities. For conference work, each student will develop a semester-long "eco-impact thriving" (EIT) project through individual, one-on-one biweekly meetings with the instructor. Students will identify a both-and opportunity that could advance ecological responsibility and human well-being within a setting they can genuinely influence; translate concern into specific behaviors or leverage points; test small steps and multiple pathways; and revise their approach as they learn. Conference projects may take the form of a campus or workplace initiative, policy brief, educational resource, community program, organizational prototype, digital tool, small empirical study, or reflective field-based inquiry. By the end of the course, students will be able to analyze sustainability challenges critically; design evidence-informed, psychologically sustainable pathways for action; and use practical tools to lead change, collaborate with others, prevent burnout, and identify opportunities for positive impact in their future workplaces, communities, and lives. This introductory, open-level seminar requires no prerequisites or prior knowledge.

Faculty

• Dorit Kerret

Open, Seminar—Year

What kinds of social worlds emerge when people are expected to live temporarily for years or decades? Across the contemporary world, refugees, undocumented migrants, and other displaced populations inhabit spaces organized around waiting, in camps, detention regimes, asylum systems, informal settlements, and humanitarian infrastructures. Yet these are not only sites of crisis. They are places where families form, schools struggle to operate, economies stabilize, and political movements grow, even in environments designed to prevent permanence. This seminar will examine displacement not simply as movement across borders but as a reorganization of time, legality, belonging, and everyday coexistence. We will explore how people become categorized as “temporary”—asylum seekers, guest workers, foreign laborers, seasonal migrants—and what this status does to their lives, rights, and futures. The course will situate migration within broader global realities: more than a billion people move internally or internationally, while climate change, conflict, and economic restructuring continue to produce new forms of displacement and precariousness. We will ask how states manage mobility, why certain populations become national “problems,” and how migrants craft livable worlds within administrative uncertainty. Readings will introduce key theoretical approaches to citizenship, governance, and mobility, including Hannah Arendt on statelessness and the “right to have rights,” Giorgio Agamben on exception and camp rule, Michel Foucault on discipline and regulation, and Aihwa Ong on flexible citizenship and graduated sovereignty. Ethnographic and urban scholarship from Liisa Malkki, Didier Fassin, Miriam Ticktin, Peter Nyers, Asef Bayat, and Ananya Roy anchor these ideas in everyday practice, while literary and climate perspectives—including Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement—push us to think beyond policy frameworks toward imagination, narrative, and planetary change. We will also examine how displacement is represented across media—photography, film, fiction, and interactive worlds—and how societies are responding to an era increasingly defined by hyper-diversity and permanent precarity. The seminar will be writing-intensive and research-oriented. Students will practice observation and analytic writing throughout the semester and develop a conference project based on an original research question related to migration, bordering practices, or urban coexistence. Students will be encouraged to experiment with unconventional forms of analysis and storytelling that grapple with vulnerability, temporariness, and being out-of-place in the contemporary world.

Faculty

• Parthiban Muniandy

Open, Seminar—Year

This course is designed for students with prior exposure to Spanish who seek a faster-paced alternative to Beginning Spanish (SPAN 3001). Using a communicative, discussion-based, and hands-on classroom methodology, students will strengthen foundational grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation while developing oral and written communication skills, descriptive precision, and analytical abilities in Spanish. As students become familiar with key concepts such as “artivism” and “climate advocacy,” the course will introduce Spanish language and culture through authentic sources, including songs, graphic journalism, fashion practices, visual art, performance, and collective projects. Students will examine Andean sustainable weaving traditions and circular fashion through artisan networks such as the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco; collective visual projects focused on biodiversity preservation in the Amazon; and graphic journalism addressing environmental contaminants in the Caribbean. The course will also explore artistic responses to extractivism that foreground water rights, gender, and Indigenous sovereignty, such as installations by Carolina Caycedo, performances by Mapuche artist Seba Calfuqueo, and hip-hop lyrics by Aztec artist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez. Students will engage with primary and secondary sources before class and use class time for guided discussion, collaborative activities, and applied language practice. The course will also require attendance to two relevant public-facing activities (e.g.: museum, conference, convention, etc.), documented through a structured logbook and brief in-class presentation. While there are no individual conferences with the instructor, students are required to attend weekly individual meetings with a Spanish language assistant, in addition to the two weekly class sessions and the biweekly group conference meeting.

Faculty

• Javiera Irribarren Ortiz

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Fall

This course is designed for students who have reached a solid foundation in their Spanish language skills but have not yet fully applied context-based communicative practices. Using a discussion-based and hands-on methodology, students will strengthen oral and written communication, expand vocabulary, and refine grammar while developing descriptive precision, analytical skills, and critical thinking in Spanish. The “El Dorado” myth emerged from the colonial search for vast treasures in the Americas, imagining a land of limitless gold and wealth. As described by René Zavaleta (1986), it reflects a vision of magical surplus that justified and sustained unequal extraction–consumption relationships, later reframed as “the curse of abundance” by Alberto Acosta (2009). The course will situate “El Dorado” within broader global imaginaries, including Atlantis, Lemuria, The Land of Mu, and Aztlán, the ancestral homeland of Chicanx cultural imagination. Students will engage with diverse sources, including short stories, myths, comics, films, sculpture, and paintings. Among other cases, they will study Caesar’s City of Trapalandia, colonial-era sites reputedly filled with gold and silver at the end of the world; the “Tesoro del Inca” myth, recounting gold allegedly hidden by Atahualpa Yupanqui in Llanganates Hill, Ecuador; and the Afro-Caribbean myth of Mami Wata, represented as a mermaid-savior and symbol of fortune. Students will analyze narration, description, comparison, and argumentation while developing critical perspectives on extractivism, colonial legacies, and socioecological justice. They will also engage with primary and secondary sources before each session and use class time for guided discussion, collaborative activities, and applied language practice. Throughout the semester and in biweekly conference meetings, they will also complete creative and research-based multimedia projects that foster multiliteracy and public humanities skills. The course will require attendance to one relevant public-facing activity (e.g.: museum, conference, convention, etc.), documented through a structured logbook and brief in-class presentation. In addition to class meetings, students will participate in weekly conversation sessions with a language assistant.

Faculty

• Javiera Irribarren Ortiz

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Spring

This course is designed for students who have reached a solid foundation in their Spanish language skills but have not yet fully applied context-based communicative practices. Using a discussion-based and hands-on methodology, students will strengthen their oral and written communication, expand vocabulary, and refine grammar while developing descriptive precision, analytical skills, and critical thinking in Spanish. Throughout the semester, we will examine the rise of manga aesthetics in Latin American comics, tracing early influences from 1990s animation and the spread facilitated by digital platforms such as Webtoon. Students will explore works across genres, including “shōjo” (for adolescent women), “shōnen” (for adolescent men), “BL” (focused on male-male relationships), and “mecha” (robot-centered action stories). Latin American productions blend Japanese manga, United States adventure and superhero traditions, and French-Belgian influences, while incorporating mestizo, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant cosmologies shaped by colonial and migration histories. Case studies from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Peru will illustrate regional trends, with students analyzing narrative, visual style, and cultural context to understand how these works negotiate identity, genre, and cultural memory across Latin America. Students will analyze narration, description, comparison, and argumentation while developing critical perspectives on semiotics methods, sequential art, and global entanglements. They will also engage with primary and secondary sources before each session and use class time for guided discussion, collaborative activities, and applied language practice. Throughout the semester and in biweekly conference meetings, students will also complete creative and research-based multimedia projects that foster multiliteracy and public humanities skills. The course will require attendance to one relevant public-facing activity (e.g.: museum, conference, convention, etc.), documented through a structured logbook and brief in-class presentation. In addition to class meetings, students will participate in weekly conversation sessions with a language assistant.

Faculty

• Javiera Irribarren Ortiz

Advanced, Seminar—Fall

Since their conceptions, Latin American and Caribbean societies have been accompanied by the looming presence of disasters. Throughout the centuries, literature from this region has abounded with earthquakes, hurricanes, and other environmental devastations, indicating an enduring preoccupation regarding these catastrophes among its intellectuals and artists. Far from being natural and singular events, these tragedies rather reveal the legacies of key colonial systematic structures and some corresponding failures of nation-building projects. At the same time, these literary works render visible intellectual and artistic efforts made to learn from and remember past catastrophes, as well as to imagine sustainable, ecological futures. This discussion-based seminar will delve into this dialogue. Throughout the semester, we will read and analyze enriching narratives originally written by Latin American and Caribbean thinkers. Although our conversations will be held exclusively in Spanish, the texts will represent the linguistic varieties in this region of the world in translation. Our discussion of these texts will be enriched by fundamental theoretical contributions from critical disasters studies, ecocriticism, decolonial thought, and memory studies. Designed for students who have previously completed Intermediate/Advanced Spanish (SPAN 3873), the course also invites those who are interested in the topic to take the Spanish placement test and interview with the instructor to ensure that it is the correct level for them. Students will improve their close reading and critical thinking skills through reading and written assignments. This seminar will contain an individual conference project.

Faculty

• Danielle Dorvil

Open, Studio—Spring

This design studio will examine current environmental pressures in the margins of the Bronx River in relation to inhabitation, including homelessness, transient living, appropriation, and commonality. Layers of mobility infrastructure and industrial uses parallel to rivers in urban environments often exacerbate their isolation from residential neighborhoods. Recreational programs are frequently paired with existing or new educational facilities; however, housing for the most vulnerable population is not integrated into these visions. Working on a site adjacent to the Bronx River, students will explore convergences that challenge conventional definitions of inhabitation, amplifying intersections between natural landscapes and shelter. This architectural design studio will develop foundational design skills through conceptual inquiry and iterative design experimentation. Students will work both individually and in groups, integrating analog methods with advanced digital tools.

Faculty

• Marina Correia

Open, Concept—Spring

This course will offer an introduction to fundamental discourses on the relationship between city and nature from the 20th and 21st centuries, bridging design, history, and theory. We will examine interpretations of “green” and other topics such as infrastructure, geography, and inhabitation. Case studies at both architectural and urban scales—including the cities of Los Angeles, Paris, New York, and Rio de Janeiro—will be integrated throughout the course. The objective is to situate students in the contemporary city and its recent history by engaging with its fields of opportunities (innovative, unique contemporary potentials) as well as its gaps, latent absences, and concealed inequalities. The course methodology will emphasize active participation through weekly readings and discussions. Coursework will interweave theory and design through the production of essays and drawings, supported by digital drawing workshops and presentations.

Faculty

• Marina Correia

Open, Studio—Fall

This design studio will investigate foundational design principles through the concept of transition, focusing on the exchange between built and natural environments. It will address this relationship in both physical and social dimensions, through a lens of ecology that involves individual and collective appropriation. The course will be structured into two modules that progress from the fundamental to the complex. In the first half of the semester, students will engage with typical elements of transition in architecture, such as windows, doors, and corridors to develop an architectural analysis that is at once documental (working with projective standards, scale, line weights, and precision) and experimental (explores the abstract potential of form to derive alternative interpretations of elemental types). The second half of the course will investigate transitions at an urban scale, focusing on types such as the street and the square. The studio’s pedagogical approach relies on conceptual inquiry and iterative design experimentation. Students will work both individually and in groups, integrating analog methods with advanced digital tools.

Faculty

• Marina Correia

Open, Concept—Spring

This course will explore how artists use digital tools and ecological observation to translate the natural world into images, sounds, systems, and experiences. Students will consider nature as a source of patterns, signals, rhythms, structures, and forms of intelligence, while asking how technology changes what we notice, measure, imagine, and represent. Through readings, screenings, discussions, field observation, and short studio exercises, students will examine artists working with environmental data, field recording, mapping, sound, simulation, projection, responsive systems, and speculative ecological narratives. Projects may include sound walks, visual field notes, digital collages, diagrams, maps, scores, or proposals for interactive and immersive works. Over the semester, students will build a personal archive of ecological research and develop a final project or proposal that translates a natural phenomenon through artistic, digital, or electronic means.

Faculty

• Sophia Sobers

Open, Studio—Spring

This sculpture course will familiarize students with tools and methods in woodworking, metalwork, and clay. This practical knowledge will be put into a series of assignments considering interspecies design and using skills as a sculptor to make functional form with outdoor sculpture and ecological stewardship in mind. In this course, we will look at artists who work on constructed material form and public sculpture. We will also look at the merging of landscape architecture and gardens toward a holistic approach to building site-specific sculpture and ideate toward a proposal for public works. 

Faculty

• Jessica Segall

Open, Concept—Spring

Over the last 50 years, ecofeminist artists have used means such as photography, performance, and community engagement as a way to approach ecological crises, using the body as a site of resistance, kinship, and violence. Methods such as deep listening, endurance performance, slow cinema, foraging and gathering, cartography, and communal urban gardens are just a few of the approaches of ecofeminist artists. These artworks address ecological issues of sustainability, extraction, and marginalization that impress both upon vulnerable bodies and the nonhuman world. Many of these works fall within an economy of care, which we will examine as gendered and racialized work. This course is an art class, with an emphasis on reading and discussion. This course will research and discuss artists whose work combines feminist and ecological themes. We will look, listen, and read seminal works of artists, with a focus on primary sources such as artist and theorist writings, artwork, and interviews—and with a goal in mind to synthesize and respond to this subject in our own works. Each week will introduce a new topic or category of ecofeminist methodology. Each week will include a discussion board and a thematic exercise. The course will culminate in a final project.

Faculty

• Jessica Segall

Open, Seminar—Spring

This course will be an opportunity to write from life, in any genre, from overheard conversations, beloved landscapes, old photographs, memories, and events happening around us, public and private, in dormitories, families, commuter trains and cars, on our phones, laptops, in nature, shops, laundromats, campus walks, classrooms and dinner tables. We will carry notebooks at times and use our notes as the start of weekly pieces, and we will transform short practice pieces into a longer work for conference work. Students will be asked to bring in and present writing that is meaningful to them and connect it to our focus.

Faculty

• Myra Goldberg