Labor, Inequality, and the Informal Economy

The artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries redefined the significance of the painted surface in the rapidly changing Parisian art world, pitting traditionalists against newcomers who would turn the art world upside down. Through lecture and slide illustrations, explore the lives and works of artists within the Impressionist, Post-Impressionist,...

This class will take place online. Registered students will receive login instructions. Learn how to identify this unique order of insects as they take to the skies in early summer. Study their biology, behavior, habitat associations, and conservation efforts currently underway.

Frantz Fanon—psychiatrist, political theorist, poet, and revolutionary—was one of the twentieth century’s foremost theorists of race, colonialism, and decolonization. His writings became a touchstone of the global anti-colonial struggle of the 1960s, and they continue to inspire scholars and activists to this day.  To what extent do Fanon’s...

The landscape of early 20th-century U.S. capitalism often resembled, quite literally, a battlefield. Before the widespread recognition of the right to strike and collectively bargain, when employers routinely sicced police and armed Pinkertons on gathering workers, labor activism took a form that, to contemporary eyes, perhaps appears irrational,...

Understanding how people interact with a product and factors that influence their decision-making process is integral to User Experience Design. This makes psychology a relevant and very helpful background to have for UX Designers. In this class we'll discuss why considering 'how we think' is such an important part of the design process. The class...

Love, Literature, and Destruction: an Introduction to Marguerite Duras Novelist, playwright, and experimental filmmaker, Marguerite Duras resists easy categorization. Despite endless attempts by critics and scholars to claim her for emerging genres and movements, it may be easier to say what she was not: she was not part of the nouveau roman...

At age 37, Richard Wagner—composer, exile, and failed revolutionary—set to work on the project that would consume the next 25 years of his life. By its completion, it had grown into arguably the most ambitious artwork of the 19th century: the monumental cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, a fifteen-hour operatic tetralogy of unprecedented scope and...

“For the philosopher,” writes Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project, “the most interesting thing about fashion is its extraordinary anticipations.” In other words, fashion is, in itself, an avant-garde: it shows us what the world will be like before that world has fully arrived. Its uncanny relation to the new is by no means the only...

Introduction to Kierkegaard: Doubt, Anxiety, and the Human Condition For his exploration of concepts such as subjectivity, anxiety, and absurdity, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is frequently regarded as the father of existentialism. In this four-week course, we will undertake a rigorous introduction to Kierkegaard’s thought by focusing...

This class will take place online. Registered students will receive login instructions. Drawing from sources as far back as Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical treatise from 1550 BCE, as well as stories from his own experience as an emergency physician, Dr. Morrison will offer a brief history of medicinal plants and an overview of plant-based treatments...