This course may be offered through online synchronous instruction.

Matrices, vector spaces, linear transformations, inner products, determinants. Eigenvectors. QR factorization. Quadratic forms and Rayleigh's principle. Jordan canonical form, applications. Linear functionals.

Matrices, vector spaces, linear transformations, inner products, determinants. Eigenvectors. QR factorization. Quadratic forms and Rayleigh's principle. Jordan canonical form, applications. Linear functionals.

“Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither premodern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it. This confrontation requires (or produces) a fundamental change in the way we know and make knowledge, in our mode of production” -Avery Gordon Do you believe in ghosts? What if I told you the ghosts we are looking for in this course inhabit not houses, but texts? The specters we will hunt for together lurk not around the foundations of a haunted house but in literary and filmic texts, which, arguably, constitute the foundation of our cultural understanding. The existence of ghosts disrupts our understanding of the fixity of the present by introducing a tenuous figure from the past, thereby undermining a system of temporal relations which would permit us to disregard the past’s impact on the present day. A ghost thus demands our attention, as readers and viewers, calling upon us to question what we think we know about the world around us. Who/what can be a ghost? What does it mean for a text to be haunted? What do we make of a collective haunting, when the affected is not just an individual but a larger group, an imagined community like the nation? To what ends does a ghost haunt, and what does it mean for a haunting to end? In this course we will examine narratives representing life and death, memory and oblivion, and the gray space in-between. This is a writing-intensive course that fosters skills in literary analysis, including close reading, critical thinking, and articulate writing. In this class, you will use your critical reflections on the texts as starting points for writing several papers, including one research paper. Essential to the writing process will be workshopping one another’s work through peer review. You will also complete shorter weekly reading responses and assignments devoted to specific elements of essay writing. This course fulfills the university’s second-semester Reading and Composition requirement. Reading/Viewing list: Primary: Antonio Moresco, Distant Light Luigi Pirandello, Right You Are (If You Think You Are) Igiaba Scego, My Home is Where I Am Julio Llamazares, The Yellow Rain Film: Bernardo Bertolucci, The Spider’s Stratagem Coco, Pixar Animation Studios Secondary: Selections from The Spectralities Reader, Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Pereen

The Italian popular imagination has been haunted by spirits, demons, and myriad creatures that continue to both frighten and entertain. Yet tales of the supernatural can also engage some of the most profound human inquiries such as mortality, grief, commemoration, spirituality, ethics, human imagination, and the violations of "proper" societal behavior. This course examines the many forms of supernatural belief traditions that people express through traditional genres and popular media in Italy. From folk tales to films, we will look at a wide survey of the various employments of the supernatural tale across Italy's complex geography and belated identity- formation. Key concepts will be the issues of belief and visibility: in this case, the conviction that experiences of the supernatural are genuine, and have important implications about life after death, as well as the existence of spirits, magic, and related topics. In addition to a foundational survey knowledge of some of the earliest works of Italian literature and oral history, we will discuss how the introduction of modern technology has shaped to both resist, satirize, and indulge in the paranormal into the 20th and 21st centuries and how that has affected some literary output. Through specific case studies, we will explore the forms supernatural tradition and belief take in everyday life, and develop models for understanding how supernatural belief relates to other aspects of worldview and culture and highlight the diverse ways in which supernatural storytelling can function in our lives. Ultimately, we will also examine functions of place-based supernatural narratives to discuss how this type of storytelling can be mobilized to make powerful claims and change the contours of our everyday reality. This is a reading and composition course that fulfills the University's R5B requirement. Students of this course will develop an understanding of the potentials of authorial power and rhetorical strategies that storytellers use to convince or manipulate the beliefs and emotions of their readers, and will interrogate the literary and cultural meanings of these uncanny encounters through a close study of primary and secondary texts. We will be focused equally and simultaneously on the interrelated skills of close reading and intensive writing. All course materials will be made available on bcourses, and will include: Dario Argento’s Suspiria Italo Calvino’s collection of fairytales Petronius’ Satyricon Cesare Lombroso’s investigation of Italian medium Eusapia Palladino

What does it mean to think “rationally” and without feeling? Does language coded as “objective” guarantee dissociation from the emotional realm? This class explores what has long been considered a neat-and-tidy distinction between reason and emotion, investigating how “negative” feelings and stereotypes have historically made their way into the rational world of science. Our site of investigation will be the Italian cultural landscape from the late-nineteenth century to the present, where we will practice reading scientific and non-literary texts alongside the fictional works that dominated their historical moment. These comparative readings will ask us to consider the relationship between language and the body: how do myths of gender, sexuality, and race—concepts fabricated in fictional worlds—become enshrined as indisputable scientific “fact”? As we navigate written works varying in form and language, weekly reflections will ask us to critically examine the boundaries between science and the social, as well as what (and who) we grant authority to function as our sources of knowledge. This course is designed to fulfill the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement. As a writing-intensive course, our goal will be to strengthen our close reading and critical writing skills, including the evaluation of secondary sources and criticism. Assignments will include personal reflections, short blog posts, and peer review exercises, culminating in the production of a research paper. Works will include, but are not limited to: Scientific writings by Cesare Lombroso and Alfredo Niceforo Ugo Tarchetti, Fosca Leonardo Sciascia, The Day of the Owl Angela and Luciana Giussani’s comic series, Diabolik Giuliano Montaldo’s film The Gold Rimmed Glasses (1987) Antonio Tabucchi, Indian Nocturne

“Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither premodern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it. This confrontation requires (or produces) a fundamental change in the way we know and make knowledge, in our mode of production” -Avery Gordon Do you believe in ghosts? What if I told you the ghosts we are looking for in this course inhabit not houses, but texts? The specters we will hunt for together lurk not around the foundations of a haunted house but in literary and filmic texts, which, arguably, constitute the foundation of our cultural understanding. The existence of ghosts disrupts our understanding of the fixity of the present by introducing a tenuous figure from the past, thereby undermining a system of temporal relations which would permit us to disregard the past’s impact on the present day. A ghost thus demands our attention, as readers and viewers, calling upon us to question what we think we know about the world around us. Who/what can be a ghost? What does it mean for a text to be haunted? What do we make of a collective haunting, when the affected is not just an individual but a larger group, an imagined community like the nation? To what ends does a ghost haunt, and what does it mean for a haunting to end? In this course we will examine narratives representing life and death, memory and oblivion, and the gray space in-between. This is a writing-intensive course that fosters skills in literary analysis, including close reading, critical thinking, and articulate writing. In this class, you will use your critical reflections on the texts as starting points for writing several papers, including one research paper. Essential to the writing process will be workshopping one another’s work through peer review. You will also complete shorter weekly reading responses and assignments devoted to specific elements of essay writing. This course fulfills the university’s second-semester Reading and Composition requirement. Reading/Viewing list: Primary: Antonio Moresco, Distant Light Luigi Pirandello, Right You Are (If You Think You Are) Igiaba Scego, My Home is Where I Am Julio Llamazares, The Yellow Rain Film: Bernardo Bertolucci, The Spider’s Stratagem Coco, Pixar Animation Studios Secondary: Selections from The Spectralities Reader, Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Pereen

History 7B explores the making of a modern and globalized America by providing an introduction to the history of the United States between 1865 and the present. Lectures, Readings and Sections Assignments will call attention to the role of democracy in the nation’s history, and to the political, economic, and social freedoms and their limitations. We will consider the​ larger set of practices and ideals by which ordinary people have participated in the public life of the nation. ​How have different multiple perspectives on what it means to be an American shaped the nation’s history since the mid-nineteenth century? How has the right to participate in democratic institutions further defined political freedom and its limitations? What have societal and gendered expectations such as “the American Dream” meant for an increasingly diverse population? How and why have the power of the Courts, Congress, and the Presidency shifted? What role has freedom of the press played in that story? In what ways have transformations in the U.S. economy altered how Americans work and where they live? What forms of political culture have Americans practiced and what does this tell us about the American experience? We will explore, amongst others, the debates around the role of government and civil liberties; the shifting political ideologies of liberalism and conservatism; how the U.S. emerged as a world power in the twentieth century; systemic racism; freedom movements; the culture wars; and globalization. Instructor bio: Sandra Weathers Smith is a faculty member of the History Department at The Spence School and a Lecturer in U.S. History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching interests include cultural history, urban history, immigration, civil rights, and political culture. Sandra earned her doctorate in American History from U.C. Berkeley, where she also served as a U.C. Faculty (postdoctoral) Fellow. She worked as Senior Researcher for theater artist, Anna Deavere Smith, and the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue.

Fascism was a form of rule created in Europe in the 1920s, when world communism was rising and liberalism steeply declining, when racist thinking pervaded all politics, and fears of decadence and secularization and loss of status melded within a new quality, promoting salvation through recovery of lost wholeness. Fascist governments enacted policies through violent and confident self-assertion of a “leader” and uniformed followers. This course seeks to untangle the paradoxical developments that drove exclusionary and inclusionary politics that in turn galvanized mass murder, genocide, and crimes against humanity. Students will examine key periods and themes, including: the origins of anti-Judaism, antisemitism, “scientific” racism, and othering; violence, colonialism, and World War One; the rise of Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco; the economics of mass murder; and the radicalization of nationalism in Europe and beyond. Instructor bio: Dr. Alexis Herr has dedicated her life to combating genocide and atrocity. This passion has motivated her educational and professional pursuits and translates into a strong desire to prevent human rights violations. Ms. Herr received a doctorate in Holocaust History from the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University, and currently lectures at the University of San Francisco and University of California, Berkeley. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards including the Saul Kagan Claims Conference Postdoctoral Fellowship (2017-2018), the European Historical Research Infrastructure Fellowship (2017), the Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellowship in Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC (2016), and the Saul Kagan Claims Conference Dissertation Fellowship (2012-2014). She is the author of The Holocaust and Compensated Compliance in Italy: Fossoli di Carpi, 1942 – 1952 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and the editor of Rwanda: The Essential Reference Guide (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2018) and Sudan: The Essential Reference Guide (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2020).

The twentieth century was the most devastating in the history of Europe. This course surveys the major developments that led to the wars and revolutions for which the century is famous. It stresses the supreme importance of the commanding actors on the political stage as the century unfolded—Lenin and Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, Churchill and de Gaulle, Walesa and Thatcher and Gorbachev, and focuses on the differing approaches to European relations taken by American presidents from Wilson to Joe Biden. The course will seek to squeeze every ounce of drama out of the century's most famous—and infamous—events: Europe's last summer—the incredible days of July 1914; the slaughter of World War I; the rise of Communism, Fascism, and Nazism; Munich; the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939; the decimation of World War II; the bombing of London and Dresden; the destruction of the European Jewry; the German invasion of Russia; D-Day, the suicide of Hitler, the origins and development of the Cold War; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the revolutions of 1989; the disintegration of the Soviet Union; the collapse of Yugoslavia; the first and second Gulf wars; and the current crises in central Europe, especially that between Russia and Ukraine. All this and more we will explore through books, documents and, not least, films and documentaries. Instructor bio: David Wetzel has been a lecturer in the Berkeley Department of History since 2003. In 2012 he was one of seven Berkeley faculty members listed among America's best professors in a book published by The Princeton Review. He specializes in the international relations of modern Europe, and is author, most recently, with William Carr of A History of Germany since 1800 (2022). He received his PhD from the University of Chicago. For more information, please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wetzel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogD3g3TYUi0