Engaging with sports is a fundamentally aesthetic enterprise. Like theater or dance, sports are performative, embodied. Like novels or films, sports produce narrative structures—in fact, much of our attachments to sports, I would argue, is grounded in those narratives. Like painting or the plastic arts, sports generate crystallizations: particular moments, spatial arrangements of time. And like contemporary life in general, sports provide the beginning of so much discourse: talking and tweeting and writing. In this course, we’ll think about sportswriting as an inclusive genre of writing and aesthetic habitus. Writing about sports certainly counts as sportswriting: novels, essays, journalism, poems. Likewise the writing done by athletes, which is often and unusually bad, but for interesting reasons. Also writing that might not, at first, appear to be about sports at all, but which has been structurally, formally, or otherwise influenced by sports. This means that, over the course of the term, we will do sportswriting, and we’ll also write about sportswriting (to appreciate, critique, contextualize it), and we’ll write alongside sportswriting (as we examine the particular political, cultural, aesthetic, and personal contexts that give it meaning, that help establish what these texts are and what they mean and what they do). Likewise, our definitions of both sports and writing will be generous and amoebic. If something strikes you as a sport, it probably is—and if you want it to be a sport for the purposes of a piece of writing, then the writing itself can make it so. Chess, yoga, debate, speedrunning Super Mario Bros—these might all qualify. Similarly, we’ll read novels and short stories and poems; we’ll watch films, we’ll scrutinize journalism and essays and memoir. But we might also take a look at video essays, tweets, photography, painting—maybe even a TikTok. Because ours is an R&C course, it’s meant to offer you a set of tools—a metaphor you’ll probably hear a lot that really means you’re going to learn ways, methods, and techniques of thinking and writing. Literally: carpenters (I assume) learn various ways to plane and cut wood. A more germane example: a midfielder must master both the basic techniques (the first touch, the pass, the volley) and also develop a style (N’golo Kante and Luka Modric do not play the same way, despite the fact that they’re both midfielders.) I’d like us to do both: to become more proficient writers, to get the basic steps down, and also construct a sense of our own voices, a way of writing, a signature. To these ends, we’ll practice ways to approach close and critical reading, rhetorical analysis, academic and argumentative writing. Importantly, good writing does not occur when a prefabricated form has been mastered, when a set of repeatable moves have been memorized. Good writing, solid essays, strong voice, creative argumentation—all these come about through experimentation, failure, collaboration, a willingness to feel and stumble around inside the process of writing. For this reason, this course prioritizes the development of your writing practice, in the sense of any creative, vocational, spiritual, or otherwise serious and expressive practice. We’ll approach writing holistically: as an academic skill, yes, but also a method of self-expression, a practice to hone, and a way of better understanding the problems and artworks we care about. Our writing will be agile; it will reach various audiences. We will combine academic curiosity, intellectual rigor, cultural affinity, personal history, and aesthetic deftness. In other words: we’ll learn to write well by becoming writers. Over our term together, we’ll build towards a final research-intensive essay, which is true of all R1B courses. As we approach that assignment, we’ll complete smaller acts of writing that will prepare us. Significantly, grading in this course reflects the importance of writing as a diachronic process, with a dedication to revision, rethinking, and reconsideration. The work of an essay (or any other form!) begins well before you sit down and open a blank document. It begins in exploration and reflection and discussion and smaller acts of writing. We’ll move through these steps together. The writing we do will always have a purpose. Your writing and thinking matter, and we’ll treat it, as such, seriously.

What is Hollywood from the point of view of those who live and work there? For Mike Davis, to be in the proximity of Hollywood “is to sever connection with national reality, to lose historical and experiential footing, to surrender critical distance, and to submerge oneself in spectacle and fraud.” In a city built to sustain America’s entertainment industry, one must live alongside the fantasies and spectacles that this country sells itself. However, the flip side of fantasy, as anyone who has ever lived in Los Angeles knows, is a grittier reality: an unglamourous infrastructure behind the scenes. In his 1939 novel, The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West expresses this bizarre point of view through the eyes of an east-coast transplant and set painter who finds himself entangled with an aspiring actress so “artificial” that he cannot look away: “Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play. From in front, the stupid lines and grotesque situations would have made him squirm with annoyance, but because he saw the perspiring stagehands and the wires that held up the tawdry summerhouse with its tangle of paper flowers, he accepted everything and was anxious for it to succeed.” In this class, we will think about novels, almost-novels, reportage, films, and TV shows which try to understand the cliché-ridden enigma of Hollywood. We will take its so-called Golden Age as our starting point, proceeding to disparate outposts of cultural self-reflection and expression—from essays and novels about 1970s Hollywood (James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Eve Babitz) to TV shows about character actresses trying to sustain their careers (Kathy Griffin, Valerie Cherish, Tiffany “New York” Pollard). Rather than simply reaffirming the common knowledge that Hollywood is a fake place run by fake people, we will try to understand why someone like West's main character reacts so desperately to his behind-the-scenes look at one of Hollywood's many grotesque spectacles: “he accepted everything and was anxious for it to succeed.” What are the various delusions that keep Hollywood alive, and why do some people root for its success precisely because of its “spectacle and fraud”?

This course teaches you to use the tools of applied historical thinking and Science, Technology, and Society (STS) to recognize, analyze, and shape the human contexts and ethics of data. It addresses key topics such as doing ethical data science amid shifting definitions of human subjects, consent, and privacy; the changing relationship between data, democracy, and law; the role of data analytics in how corporations and governments provide public goods such as health and security to citizens; sensors, machine learning and artificial intelligence and changing landscapes of labor, industry, and city life. It prepares you to engage as a knowledgeable and responsible citizen and professional in the varied arenas of our datafied world.

“The forest was the only refuge for those who had no place…” -Trifonia Melibea Obono, La Bastarda “If you endeavor to trace in your mind the image of a tree in general, you never attain to your end. In spite of all you can do, you will have to see it as great or little, bare or leafy, light or dark, and were you capable of seeing nothing in it but what is common to all trees, it would no longer be like a tree at all.” -Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on Inequality” Whether figured as the classical ‘locus amoenus’ (a pleasant place), as a vast and pristine cradle for Rousseau’s man prior to society, or as a dangerous hiding place for would-be wrongdoers and things that go bump in the night, forests frequently serve as literary and conceptual boundaries. In this course, we will pay special attention to how authors narrate the literary space of the forest to evoke such limit zones, between culture and nature, for example. We will also consider how representations of those who dwell within the forest relate to questions of gender, race, class, and normative modes of living. What lurks beyond the tree line, at the edge of civilization, beyond the here and now of dominant ways of being human? Finally, so as not to miss the trees for the forest, we will examine works of art that zoom-in on the details of trees in order to expand or alter conventional ways of perceiving the world. In the same manner, this course will approach close-reading and writing as significant tools for pushing conceptual boundaries and expanding perception. As this class fulfills the university’s requirement for Reading and Composition, this is a writing-intensive course that will work toward developing an essential skill: the academic research essay and/or project. Students will become familiar with various stages and tools in the research process, including outlining, annotated bibliographies, and citation practices.

This course will provide advanced students in cognitive science and computer science with the skills to develop computational models of human cognition, giving insight into how people solve challenging computational problems, as well as how to bring computers closer to human performance. The course will explore three ways in which researchers have attempted to formalize cognition -- symbolic approaches, neural networks, and probability and statistics -- considering the strengths and weaknesses of each.

This course introduces the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. Lectures and readings will survey research from artificial intelligence, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and neuroscience, and will cover topics such as the nature of knowledge, thinking, remembering, vision, imagery, language, and consciousness. Sections will demonstrate some of the major methodologies.

This course will review various theories that explore the relationship between environmental drivers and socio-economic outcomes as they relate to the Latinx community. In addition, the course will use case studies to illustrate methodological approaches and topic specific impacts of environmental conditions on socioeconomic outcomes. Topics such as climate change adaptation, agricultural labor chemical exposure, access to clean water, the impact of education on environmental outcomes and others areas will be explored. Environmental equity and justice will permeate and are fundamentally integrated in all topics as they address the Latinx communities.

A survey of Mexican and Chicano art from Mesoamerican period to contemporary Chicano art. Special focus on the mural movements and the relationship between artistic production and the development of Chicano symbols and cultural production.

For the last 30 years, the themes of identity and liberation have dominated the social ethic and religious thought of subaltern subjectivities in the Americas. The centrality of these ideas respond to the increasing awareness of and opposition to the legacies of the history of conquest, colonization, racism, and sexism in the region. In this course, we are going to study the intellectual production of various ethnic groups in the Americas, particularly Latinas and Latinos in the 20th century, in order to clarify the ties between concerns for cultural and religious identity and the articulation of alternative ethical and political visions.

In what many commentators have labeled the 'psychedelic renaissance' of our contemporary, we have seen increasing openness to the therapeutic and mind-opening capacity of psychotropic medicines and the visions and hallucinations that they offer us. Of course, access to other worlds beyond our own is nothing new. Various cultures, artists and mystics have long held those with the capacity to reach the imperceptible as important, sacred and influential figures in the community. This writing intensive course begins by asking the question as to whether the recent popularity of psychotropic and psychedelic healing might allow us to ask different questions about the long history of hallucinations and visions that sometimes come to us against our will. As such, centering on case studies in the Irish and Celtic context (but expanding to various parts of the world) this course will ask students to consider discourses surrounding madness and schizophrenia and state/medical responses to them; the importance of divine visions and apparitions in cultures across the world; the history of psychedelic movements in the US and beyond; how one can represent and write about hallucinatory and visionary experiences through artistic and literary means; and quite a bit more. In wrestling with these questions students will write a few argumentative essays leading up to a final research paper on a topic of their choice.