Psychology

This community-partnership course will focus on the health of humans living within physical, social, and psychological urban spaces. We will use a constructivist, multidisciplinary, multilevel lens to examine the interrelationship between humans and the natural and built environment, to explore the impact of social-group (ethnic, racial, sexuality/gender) membership on person/environment interactions, and to explore an overview of theoretical and research issues in the psychological study of health and illness across the lifespan. We will examine theoretical perspectives in the psychology of health, health cognition, illness prevention, stress, and coping with illness. We will also highlight research, methods, and applied issues. This class is appropriate for those interested in a variety of health careers or for anyone interested in city life. The community-partnership/service-learning component is an important part of this class; for one morning or afternoon per week, students will work in local community agencies to promote health-adaptive, person-environment interactions within our community. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and group conferences that will include discussion of the nature of academic work, and research, reading, writing, and editing skills. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences. This course required on-campus arrival for pre-orientation.

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore child and adolescent development through a cross-cultural lens. Focusing on case studies from diverse communities around the world, we will look at the influence of cultural processes on how children learn, play, and grow. Our core readings will analyze psychological processes related to attachment and parenting, cognition and perception, social and emotional development, language acquisition, and moral development. We will ask questions like the following: Why are children in Sri Lanka fed by hand by their mothers until middle childhood, and how does this shape their relations to others through the course of life? How does an Inuit toddler come to learn moral lessons through scripted play with adults, and how does such learning prepare them to navigate a challenging social and geographic environment? Is it true that Maya children do not do pretend play at all? How does a unique family role influence the formation of identity for Latinx youth in the United States? How are unequal childhoods shaped by social exclusion and discrimination on the basis of race, class, gender, and immigration status? Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, our course material will draw from developmental psychology, human development, cultural psychology, and psychological anthropology and will include peer-reviewed journal articles and books, as well as films that address core issues in a range of geographic and sociocultural contexts. Students will conduct conference projects related to the central topics of our course.  Fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center is optional.

Our subject will be the worlds of childhood. In this course, we will implement different psychological theories to highlight different aspects of those worlds. Freud, Erikson, Bowlby, and Stern will provide perspectives on emotional development. Skinner, Bandura, Piaget, and Vygotsky will present various approaches to the problems of learning and cognition. Chess and Kagan will take up the issue of temperament and its interaction with experience. Chomsky and others will deal with the development of language. Bronfenbrenner and his colleagues will emphasize the importance of considering the contexts of children’s development in family, school, community, and culture. We will also look at some systematic studies that developmental psychologists have carried out to confirm, test, and critique various theories: studies of parent-infant relationships, the development of cognition and language, and the emergence of intersubjectivity. In several of these domains, studies done in cultures other than our own will cast light on the question of universality versus cultural specificity in development. Another major way of learning the worlds of childhood is via direct experience with children. In this course, all students will do fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center (ECC). At times, the course will draw on students' written ECC observations to support or critique theoretical concepts. The fieldwork will also provide the basis for developing conference work. Typically, conference projects will combine student interests, library readings, and fieldwork observations. Children’s friendships, what makes children laugh, the functions of language, and a case study of a single child are included among the many diverse topics of past student projects. With the permission of the head teacher, creating an activity for the children at ECC in music, dance, or science may be possible as a conference work option.

What makes linguistic communication possible? Do other primates "talk"? How do we understand messages from one another despite uncertainty and noise? In this course, we will consider central questions about language: Are we the only ones who have it? When did we learn it? How does artificial intelligence mimic it? This course will start with an introduction to comparative research with other species (nonhuman primates, whales, and insects), allowing students to consider many possible forms of communication. Next, we will look at humans. What can studies with babies and children tell us about the nature of our communication system? Finally, we will explore how large language models, such as ChatGPT, produce text that might look and feel like human writing. What have these models learned, and how should we study them? Students should come prepared to engage with the topic of communication from multiple perspectives, including empirical/scientific and critical. Through weekly small-group conferences, students will develop projects that relate the course to their collective interests, such as learning and communicating in Toki Pona (a philosophical artistic-constructed language), researching the limits of artificial intelligence language models, observing and analyzing children’s communication, or designing a behavioral intervention study that implements and evaluates different communication practices.

In recent decades, dialogues among architects, designers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have markedly increased in frequency, leading to the creation of a new field of interdisciplinary study: neuroarchitecture. The formation of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in 2002 intensified and facilitated these communications across disciplinary boundaries. The architecture-neuroscience conversation is productive in both directions. Advances in contemporary understanding of the neural dynamics of constructive perception can inform architects; for example, mapping of neural pathways can provide points of access to the variety of largely unconscious processes that contribute to humans’ responses to the built environment. On the other hand, consideration of the complexities and specificities of buildings created by architects, engineers, and builders encourages neuroscientists and psychologists to advance their understandings of how a host of cognitive and emotional processes are integrated. The study of the responses of brains and bodies to buildings brings together work on sensory perception, attention, emotion, imagination, memory, planning, spatial navigation, aesthetics, and language. We will listen in on these lively architecture-neuroscience conversations by sampling from the wealth of new cross-disciplinary writings, such as Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander’s Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment and Michael Arbib’s When Brains Meet Buildings: A Conversation Between Neuroscience and Architecture. A vital component of this course will be furthering the conversation by applying the concepts discussed in our readings to our own lived experience of the built environment. Many of the examples presented in weekly lectures will come from the instructor's experiences with the cities of New York and Edinburgh. The examples that students bring to our weekly seminars will draw on their own lived experience of diverse environments. Throughout the semester, we will explore how the design of healthy, sustainable buildings can enhance well-being.

When is sex not a natural act? Every time a human engages in sexual activity. In sex, what is done by whom, with whom, where, when, why, and with what has very little to do with biology. Human sexuality poses a significant challenge in theory. The study of its disparate elements (biological, social, and individual/psychological) is inherently an interdisciplinary undertaking; from anthropologists to zoologists, all angles of study add something to our understanding of sexual behaviors and meanings. From an intersectional perspective, in this course, we will study sexualities in social contexts across the lifespan, from infancy to old age. Race, ethnicity, gender, and social class, among other identities, impact sexuality both individually and structurally. Within each period, we will examine biological, social, and psychological factors that inform the experience of sexuality for individuals. We will also examine broader aspects of sexuality, including sexual health and sexual abuse. Conference projects may range from empirical research to a bibliographic research project.

Care and caregiving are aspects of daily life; furthermore, each of us depends upon care and caregiving at various times throughout our lives. Yet, care remains hidden and devalued in our current sociopolitical climate, with women continuing to provide a majority of care. In this course, we will look at care both as an orientation and as an activity provided by family and friends to people with disabilities and older adults. Utilizing Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory as a framework, we will explore the multilevel experiences of family caregivers. Specifically, the course will focus on caregiving triads in all their diversity, as well as paid caregivers and care receivers living with a variety of chronic illnesses. This course will take an interdisciplinary approach and introduce students to the various literature on family caregiving. From psychology to public health, we will consider care as a reciprocal process that ebbs and flows throughout the course of life. We will read across disciplines from feminist theory, critical disabilities studies, psychology, and public health, as well as look at how care is portrayed in popular culture, film, and books. Students will learn about multilevel interventions, such as individual and policy responses geared toward supporting family caregivers, as well as organizations and social movements dedicated to creating better conditions of care for all.

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. —William James, 1887, Habit

We all want happy lives filled with meaning and satisfaction. Yet, for many of us, happiness can be difficult to obtain with regularity or to sustain over a long period of time. Happiness is more than a feeling; rather, it is a state of well-being that should last a lifetime. Like exercising to improve physical health, it takes sustained cognitive effort to improve our mental health and engage in practices to promote well-being. We can look to evidence from the fields of psychology and neuroscience that tells us that we are mentally unprepared to: 1) predict what will make us happy, and 2) engage in behaviors that are known to make us happier. This course will cover the psychological and brain-based factors for why happiness feels so fleeting and what we can do to build better and more effective habits that have been shown to lead to longer-term maintenance of a positive mood and well-being. Students will read foundational work in the field of positive psychology by Martin Seligman, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Edward Diener, Daniel Kahneman, and others. We will also discuss studies in neuroscience that show how behavioral interventions in positive psychology can impact the brain’s structure and function—just like building stronger muscles during exercise. Through small-group conferences, students will apply evidence-based practices, such as bringing order and organization to their daily lives, expressing gratitude, and building social bonds (i.e., “cross training” for the mind) in activities called “Rewirements.” For the final project, called “Unlearning Yourself,” students will learn to undo or replace a detrimental habit (e.g., overspending, social-media use, poor sleep hygiene, complaining, or procrastinating) by establishing a plan to cultivate evidence-based practices for sustained well-being. By the end of this course, students will have gained the ability to sift through the ever-booming literature on positive psychology and neuroscience to identify the practices that work best for them, along with an appreciation for the notion that finding and keeping happiness and well-being requires intentional practice and maintenance. Students should come prepared to engage in meaningful self-work. 

This course will analyze children’s media, specifically preschool media through middle school, using cognitive and developmental psychology theory and methods. We will examine specific educational television programs with regard to cognitive and social developmental issues related to family life, peer relationships, and education issues. Because media has an enormous impact on children’s behavior, this has increasingly become a subject of interest among researchers and the public. This course will address that interest by applying cognitive and developmental psychological research and theories for the development and production of educational media. In addition, the course will help identify essential elements that determine the positive and negative qualities of media for children. Finally, the course will examine and evaluate how psychological theories and frameworks can guide the successful production of children’s media (e.g., social cognitive theory). Projects and assignments will include weekly class discussions on peer-reviewed journal articles, watching television programs, group preschool television pitchbook preparation, child observations interacting with screens, and media artifact critiques, as assigned.  

How does the human mind represent the world? How do these representations vary across people? Could using a different language change how we experience time—or even how we see color? Seemingly straightforward concepts such as “in” versus “on” mean different things in different cultures; and words such as “two” and “three” may not be linguistically universal. Indeed, this very course description makes culturally-specific assumptions about psychology and implicitly assumes objectivity. At the same time, humans seem to share many central experiences, such as perceiving events, creating categories, and recalling the past. In this course, we will draw on research from psycholinguistics, cognitive development, and cultural psychology to learn cognitive science in a larger context. Critically, we will consider how these fields have been affected by a focus on Western, white, industrialized experiences. The course will investigate the broader social and ethical consequences of these assumed perspectives and explore insights and challenges that emerge when we step out of them. We will draw on primary and secondary sources, including scientific research articles, literature, and recordings. Students will develop projects in conference work that combine their interests with the course content, such as designing an experiment to test cross-linguistic effects on visual attention, analyzing vocabulary from languages other than English, or developing proposals to redesign existing experiments using culturally-informed practices.

Psychological trauma has been described as unspeakable, so cognitively disorganizing and intense that it is difficult to put into words the experience and the emotions that it evokes. Yet, the language that survivors use to describe their traumas provides insight into the psychology impact of trauma and the process of recovery. This course will begin with an overview of theories of trauma, resilience, and post-traumatic growth, as well as an introduction to the study of trauma narratives and how language reflects emotional and cognitive functioning. We will then explore different aspects of the cognitive, emotional, and biological impact of undergoing a trauma and how these changes are reflected in the language that trauma survivors use as they speak and write about their experiences. We will consider works by experts on trauma and language, including Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, and James Pennebaker, as well as current research in the field of trauma and trauma narratives. Through these readings, we will address topics such as what makes an experience traumatic, how representations of trauma in popular culture color our perceptions of trauma and recovery, the role of resilience and growth following a trauma, and what we can learn from attending to the content and structure of language. This course will be of interest to students who are curious about how the words we use reflect our cognitive and emotional functioning, especially for students interested in pursuing topics such as these at an advanced or graduate level. 

We humans tend to find other people the most interesting “objects” in our lives—and for good reason. As infants, we are completely dependent upon other people for our very survival; and throughout our lives, other people serve as the social bedrock of our existence. We are a social species, one that derives “fitness” through our abilities to read the social terrain and to figure out social meaning in our interactions with others. There are a range of timely questions to address: How do we do this, and how does it develop throughout childhood? Are we “hardwired” in some ways to feel what other people are feeling? What about the special case of childhood autism? How do our emotions interact with our cognitions about the social world to affect our views of self and other and our future social lives? What would cause us to have a relatively good or poor “emotional IQ,” and what are the consequences? What are the roles of family and childhood friends in this process? These are some of the issues the course will address. The opportunity will be available for hands-on fieldwork with children so as to observe children puzzling over people in real life.

Play provides us with an amazing and informative lens for observing the development and complex inner lives of young children. Yet, play is being threatened by increasing amounts of time spent on technology and a growing societal focus on scheduled activities and academic goals. This course will offer an introduction to the many fascinating aspects of play, including the importance of unstructured free play, how play shapes the brain, sensory processing and self-regulation in play, outdoor play, cultural contexts of play, and humor development in play. Through readings, video illustrations, and discussion of student fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center, we will explore the many ways in which play contributes to the complex social, cognitive, emotional, and imaginative lives of children. This course will provide a foundation for Early Therapeutic Approaches for Young Children and Families (PSYC 7220). Fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center is required for this course.

Your heart beats faster, your palms sweat, and your pupils dilate—all at once. Is this because you are exercising? Or did someone on whom you have a crush just walk into the room? Psychophysiology is the experimental study of these bodily, or peripheral, signals, which are theorized to be important “readouts” of a person’s mood (e.g., fear, happiness, anger). In this course, students will gain a foundational understanding of the psychological concepts of emotions, the biological processes that give rise to peripheral autonomic arousal (automatic bodily activation), and how these responses are naturally regulated by the brain and body in an attempt to reach homeostasis (internal stability). In fall, we will explore major theories of emotion and conceptual aspects of the “mind-body” connection, including the James-Lange theory, Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion, Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis, and Thayer and Lane's neurovisceral integration model, among others. In spring, we will read scientific articles in the field of human psychophysiology, which deals with measuring bodily functions in various contexts, as well as case studies of individuals with brain damage—specifically in brain areas such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (from work by Antonio Damasio and others) and the insula (from work by Sahib Khalsa and others). Students will also engage in hands-on labs to collect psychophysiological data (e.g., heart rate, respiration, electrodermal activity to measure sweating, pupillary responses). For fall conference projects, students will write an in-depth literature review on a topic of their choice, relating emotions to the measurements of various bodily responses. In spring, students will propose a research study that addresses a gap in the literature that they explored in fall and present their proposed research study at the Sarah Lawrence College Science and Math Poster Symposium at the end of the semester. This course may appeal to students interested in scientific studies of emotions, clinical psychology, neuroscience, neuropsychology, physiology, and conducting hands-on lab-based work.

By the time you read this course description, you have most likely learned more than 40,000 English words. That is at least an average of six words per day—and many more if you are multilingual. How is this possible? Were you born with this ability, or did you learn it? This course will be about how humans come to develop language so early and so quickly among striking environmental variation. For example, caregivers in the United States often alter and repeat their words when talking to children, while caregivers in other communities speak almost exclusively to other adults. And yet, children in both settings successfully learn language on similar timescales. How is this possible? At the same time, no two children are exactly alike. The course will explore how the spectrum of neurodiversity sets many learners on their own developmental and communicative path. We will centrally consider how language learning must be flexible to modalities by learning about babies in deaf communities who rapidly learn to comprehend and produce sign. Crucially, we will always begin by looking at data and methods: How do you actually measure a neonate’s language abilities? Or an adults? Each week, we will try out some of these experimental methods, such as artificial-language learning, and work with ministudies to collect our own data. The conference project will ask students to propose their own theory of the kind of learning mechanism that can operate under such diverse inputs. The existing proposals will be evaluated to generate critiques and improvements. The course will bring these ideas beyond the seminar room, drawing connections to second-language learning in adults, early-childhood education, and social and economic structures. Conference projects will root novel theoretical proposals of language learning in data and will be developed in conversation with existing theories of nature versus nurture, domain-specificity, and modality.

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. — John Berger

Psychologists and neuroscientists have long been interested in measuring and explaining the phenomena of visual perception. In this course, we will study how the visual brain encodes basic aspects of perception—such as color, form, depth, motion, shape, and space—and how they are organized into coherent percepts, or gestalts. The main goal will be to explore how the study of visual neuroscience and art can inform each other. One of our guides in these explorations will be the groundbreaking gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, who was a pioneer in the psychology of art. The more recent and equally innovative text by the neuroscientist Eric Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, will provide our entry into the subject of neuroaesthetics. Throughout our visual journey, we will seek connections between perceptual phenomena and what is known about brain processing of visual information. This is a course for people who enjoy reflecting on why we see things as we do. It should hold particular interest for students of the visual arts who are curious about scientific explanations of the phenomena that they explore in their art, as well as students of the brain who want to study an application of visual neuroscience.

What does it mean to live a flourishing life? This is one of the most fundamental questions of human existence. This course will explore this fundamental question through an engagement with the universal human experiences of care, aging, and death. Together, we will dive into the centrality of caregiving to the human experience and identify and explore normative claims around care, aging, and death. Specifically, we will explore issues of avoidance, dependence, and interdependence, as we collectively think about the role of care in our lives across the lifespan—but especially leading up to the final stages of life. In dominant US culture, notions of individualism prevail—often leading to the conceptualization of caregiving as a burden. But who decided that the care of other humans is a burden? Or that an unburdened life is one most worth living? Who is to say that we would prefer or be better off to be “unburdened” from the most important relationships in our lives? Collectively, we will consider more life-affirming, meaningful, and pluralistic ideas about care, as well as consider who is most served by current mainstream normative claims. Finally, the course will look at the ways these ideas are being resisted. Guest speakers will help explore how individuals have replied to questions concerning how one lives life well.

This interdisciplinary course will address mental health in diverse cultural contexts, drawing upon a range of case studies to illuminate the causes, symptoms, diagnosis, course, and treatment of mental illness across the globe. The course will open by exploring questions of the classification of mental illness to address whether Western psychiatric categories apply across different local contexts. We will explore the globalization of American understandings of the psyche, the exportation of Western mental disorders, and the impact of psychiatric imperialism in places like Sri Lanka, Zanzibar, Oaxaca, and Japan. Through readings of peer-reviewed articles and current research in cultural psychology, clinical psychology, psychological anthropology, psychiatric anthropology, and medical anthropology, we will explore conditions such as depression and anxiety, schizophrenia, autism, susto, and mal de ojo to understand the entanglements of psychological experience, culture, morality, sociality, and care. We will explore how diagnostic processes and psychiatric care are, at times, differentially applied in the United States according to a client’s race, ethnicity, class, or gender. Finally, we will also explore the complexities of recovery or healing, addressing puzzles such as why certain mental disorders are considered to be lifelong, chronic, and severe in some parts of the world but are interpreted as temporary, fleeting, and manageable elsewhere—and how such expectations influence people’s ability to experience wellness or (re)integration into family, work, and society. Several key authors will join us as invited guest speakers to talk about their current work. Students will conduct conference projects related to the central topics of our course.

Mindfulness can be described as the awareness that arises from paying attention to the present moment in a nonjudgmental way. For thousands of years, mindfulness has been cultivated through the practice of meditation. More recently, developments in neuroimaging technologies have allowed scientists to explore the brain changes that result from the pursuit of this ancient practice, laying the foundations of the new field of contemplative neuroscience. Study of the neurology of mindfulness meditation provides a useful lens for study of the brain in general, because so many aspects of psychological functioning are affected by the practice. Topics will include: attention, perception, emotion and its regulation, mental imaging, habit, and consciousness. Students interested in the scientific study of the mind and body may be interested in this course. An important component of the course will be the personal cultivation of a mindfulness practice; to support this goal, one of the two weekly course meetings will be devoted to a mindful movement practice.

Students will delve into the fundamentals of social media from both creator and user perspectives. This course will offer an interdisciplinary approach, examining the history and evolution of social-media platforms and their impact on cognition, mental health, and knowledge acquisition. Through a combination of psychological journal articles and mass-communication resources, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of how social media influences and shapes contemporary life, making them feel knowledgeable and informed. Topics covered will include influencer culture, the 2024 election, and the effects of social media on children and adolescents, among other topics. In group projects, students will design influencer pages from conception to execution, incorporating lessons on strategic content creation, audience engagement, and ethical considerations. By integrating theory with practical application, this course will offer a nuanced view of social media’s role in modern society and will equip students with the skills to effectively navigate and contribute to this dynamic digital landscape and study its effects on its use and digital safety.

We have never known as much about the minds of children as we do now. Using the same tools, our understanding of adult cognition has also led us to surprising conclusions: Babies are often better than adults at distinguishing faces of other races, and toddlers perform spontaneous scientific experiments with their toys. This research has also raised questions: Why do adept adult readers seem to skip over entire words? Can we simultaneously entertain multiple possible interpretations of the sentences that we see and hear? And, as the movie Frozen forces us to consider: How do we finish each other’s sandwiches? In this course, students will learn about classical and cutting-edge methods for studying learning and reasoning. This course will be a deep dive into multiple measures of behavior, starting with measurements of looking behaviors (e.g., real-time eye tracking, habituation paradigms, head-turn methods), reading time, reaction time measures, and naturalistic tasks and interviews with toddlers and children. We will also review the promise of neural methods (fNIRS, fMRI, EEG), as well as their constraints. For each of these methods, we will explore how they shape ongoing debates about how best to design experiments, analyze data, and build inclusive theories that reflect human variation. In conference projects, using one of the studied behavioral methods, students will design an experiment to test their own research question, revise the proposal after peer review, and analyze and present their findings in an APA-style scientific paper. During lab sessions and conference meetings, students will learn to use their chosen behavioral method, implement the experiment, and collect preliminary data. By the end of the course, students will have a strong understanding of several central research methods in psychology, their own perspective of the strengths and limitations of different approaches, and the tools to critically evaluate and communicate about published findings.

This course will explore several therapeutic approaches for young children and their families, with a particular emphasis on the theory and technique of play therapy. While this course will focus most on Child-Centered Play Therapy (CCPT), we will also look at the methodology of other types of approaches, such as filial therapy, cognitive behavioral play therapy, and DIR/Floortime therapy. In addition, course material will highlight cultural considerations, therapeutic work with parents and caregivers, challenges in treatment, self-reflection, self-regulation, sensory processing, interoception, and analysis of clinical case studies. Readings, class discussions, group play-based activities, and video illustrations will provide students with both a theoretical and introductory clinical basis for play-based therapeutic work with young children in early intervention approaches.

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore child and adolescent development through a cross-cultural lens. Focusing on case studies from diverse communities around the world, we will look at the influence of cultural processes on how children learn, play, and grow. Our core readings will analyze psychological processes related to attachment and parenting, cognition and perception, social and emotional development, language acquisition, and moral development. We will ask questions like the following: Why are children in Sri Lanka fed by hand by their mothers until middle childhood, and how does this shape their relations to others through the course of life? How does an Inuit toddler come to learn moral lessons through scripted play with adults, and how does such learning prepare them to navigate a challenging social and geographic environment? Is it true that Maya children do not do pretend play at all? How does a unique family role influence the formation of identity for Latinx youth in the United States? How are unequal childhoods shaped by social exclusion and discrimination on the basis of race, class, gender, and immigration status? Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, our course material will draw from developmental psychology, human development, cultural psychology, and psychological anthropology and will include peer-reviewed journal articles and books, as well as films that address core issues in a range of geographic and sociocultural contexts. Students will conduct conference projects related to the central topics of our course. Fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center is optional.

This interdisciplinary course will address mental health in diverse cultural contexts, drawing upon a range of case studies to illuminate the causes, symptoms, diagnosis, course, and treatment of mental illness across the globe. The course will open by exploring questions of the classification of mental illness to address whether Western psychiatric categories apply across different local contexts. We will explore the globalization of American understandings of the psyche, the exportation of Western mental disorders, and the impact of psychiatric imperialism in places like Sri Lanka, Zanzibar, Oaxaca, and Japan. Through readings of peer-reviewed articles and current research in cultural psychology, clinical psychology, psychological anthropology, psychiatric anthropology, and medical anthropology, students will explore conditions such as depression and anxiety, schizophrenia, autism, susto, and mal de ojo to understand the entanglements of psychological experience, culture, morality, sociality, and care. We will explore how diagnostic processes and psychiatric care are, at times, differentially applied in the United States according to a client’s race, ethnicity, class, or gender. Finally, we will also explore the complexities of recovery or healing, addressing puzzles such as why certain mental disorders are considered to be lifelong, chronic, and severe in some parts of the world but are interpreted as temporary, fleeting, and manageable elsewhere—and how such expectations influence people’s ability to experience wellness or (re)integration into family, work, and society. Several key authors will join us as invited guest speakers to talk about their current work. Students will conduct conference projects related to the central topics of our course.

There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarity. —Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is one of the most important thinkers and writers of the 20th century. His many writings and innovative concepts, which continue to be discussed and debated today, are of pressing relevance for the contemporary moment, marked as it is by themes of technological and aesthetic transformations, political violence, and histories of exile and displacement. The purpose of this intensive seminar will be to delve into the textures of Benjamin’s life—from his childhood years in Berlin to his final days in France and Spain—while considering the diverse and intricate formations of Benjamin’s thought and writing. For this inquiry, we will be drawing from a number of biographical, historiographic, political, literary, and anthropological lines of analysis to gain an incisive sense of his groundbreaking writings on film and photography, literature and translation, concepts of history, and the politics of culture. Along the way, we will connect Benjamin’s thought to other significant writers and philosophers, including Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. We will focus on a number of key texts authored by Benjamin, including Berlin Childhood around 1900, The Arcades Project, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “The Task of the Translator,” “The Storyteller,” and “On the Concept of History.” In engaging with these and other challenging texts and giving thought to Benjamin’s life and death more generally, students will develop a richly informed understanding of the life and thought of this singularly compelling person while coming to terms with the haunted histories of the 20th and 21st centuries.

This course will be about how we perceive objects, sites, and spaces in the world. We will look closely at how modern and contemporary critics and artists have defined the medium of sculpture in relation to the body, light, and touch; the pedestal, the museum, the monument, and the public sphere; commodities and everyday objects; and photography, video, and film. We will begin with how theorists and writers described sculptural perception in the Enlightenment and beyond, consider the legacies of neoclassicism and the fraught status of sculpture in modernism, and conclude our story with large-scale installations in contemporary art. Along the way, we will explore sculptors remaking the category of sculpture by upsetting expectations for a stable object and blurring the boundaries between public monument and private encounter; using reproducible media to display their objects in the public realm; and making objects that incorporated commodities, functional things, bodies, raw matter, and detritus. The course will touch on discourses of neoclassicism, modernism, race and cultural memory, surrealism, minimalism, site-specificity, installation, feminism, and participatory art. Exploring a range of focused case studies—whenever possible through works in person—this course will ask what a 20th-century sculpture was and how it operated in the public realm. This lecture-seminar hybrid will also entail field trips to area museums.

At the biological core of all life on Earth is the gene. The unique combination of genes in each individual ultimately forms the basis for that person's physical appearance, metabolic capacity, thought processes, and behavior. Therefore, in order to understand how life develops and functions, it is critical to understand what genes are, how they work, and how they are passed on from parents to offspring. In this course, we will begin by investigating the theories of inheritance first put forth by Mendel, then progress to our current concepts of how genes are transmitted through individuals, families, and whole populations. We will also examine chromosome structure and the mechanisms and molecular functions of genes and DNA within cells, as well as how mutations in DNA can lead to physical abnormalities and diseases such as Trisomy 21, hemophilia, or others. Finally, we will discuss the role of genetics in influencing complex phenotypes such as behavior or traits such as intelligence. Classes will be supplemented with weekly lab work.

In recent years, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has made astonishing technical progress and has begun to assume an increasingly widespread and important role in society. AI systems can now (at least to some extent) drive cars; recognize human faces, speech, and gestures; diagnose diseases; control autonomous robots; converse fluently in English; instantly translate text from one language to another; beat world-champion human players at chess, Go, and other games; and perform many other amazing feats that just a few decades ago were only possible within the realm of science fiction. This progress has led to extravagant expectations, claims, hopes, and fears about the future of AI technology and its potential impact on society. In this course, we will attempt to peer beyond the hype and to come to grips with both the promise and the peril of AI. We will consider AI from many angles, including historical, philosophical, ethical, and public-policy perspectives. We will also examine many of the technical concepts and achievements of the field in detail, as well as its many failures and setbacks. Throughout the course, students will be asked to read texts, write responses, do follow-up research, and participate in classroom discussions. This is not a programming course, and no background in computer programming is expected or required.

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) is concerned with reproducing in computers the abilities of human intelligence. In recent years, exciting new approaches to AI have been developed, inspired by a wide range of biological processes and structures that are capable of self-organization, adaptation, and learning. These sources of inspiration include biological evolution, neurophysiology, and animal behavior. This course is an in-depth introduction to the algorithms and methodologies of biologically-inspired AI and is intended for students with prior programming experience. We will focus primarily on machine-learning techniques—including genetic algorithms, reinforcement learning, artificial neural networks, and deep learning—from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. Throughout the course, we will use the Python programming language to implement and experiment with these algorithms in detail. Students will have many opportunities for extended exploration through open-ended, hands-on lab exercises and conference work.

When we encounter dancing, what are we seeing, experiencing, and understanding? How do current representations of dance reflect, perpetuate, and/or disrupt familiar assumptions about personal and social realities? Embedded historical ideas and enforcements based on race, economic class, gender, social/sexual orientation, nationality/regional affiliation, and more are threaded through our daily lives. Performing arts inside and outside of popular culture often reinforce dominant cultural ideas and feelings. Can they also propose or inspire alternatives? In fall, we will view samples of dancing in film, video, digital media, television programs, and commercials, as well as live performance. These viewings—along with reading selected texts from the fields of dance and performance, literary criticism, feminist theory, queer theory, and cultural studies—will form the basis of class discussions and exercises. In spring, we will shift focus to viewing still images and live action, with readings from additional fields, including art criticism and neuroscience, as well as fine-tuning approaches to writing about our subject matter. Students will complete several class assignments each semester, as well as develop one or more substantial lines of inquiry for conference work. Conference projects may draw upon multiple disciplines, including those within humanities and creative arts. The central aim of this course will be to cultivate informed discussion and to produce new knowledge, increasing both individual and collective capabilities. We will use academic research, along with personal experience, to advance our recognition of dance as an elemental art form and as a potentially important orientation in adjacent studies. In both fall and spring, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences.

In this course, we will explore the power dynamics behind images and how they shape the way we see and experience the world. Drawing on John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, we will examine how visuals—whether in art, film, or everyday life—are never neutral but, rather, always tied to politics. We will dive into works like Harun Farocki’s An Image, Tony Cooke’s Disco Inferno, Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, Jean-Luc Godard’s radical cinema, and Brechtian approaches to audiovisual composition. Through these films and ideas, we will see how artists and filmmakers use images to challenge the status quo, resist dominant ideologies, and spark political change. With screenings and discussions, we will sharpen the ability to critically analyze the images that surround us and understand how they influence both political consciousness and personal identity. This course is a thought-provoking investigation into how images can manipulate, provoke, invent, and sometimes resist the political forces at play in our world.

In recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in the unique role and power of memory in public life. Historians have sought to understand the innumerable ways that collective memory has been constructed, experienced, used, abused, debated, and reshaped. This course will focus on the rich literature on historical memory within the field of modern Middle Eastern history in order to explore a number of key questions: What is the relationship between history and memory? How are historical events interpreted and rendered socially meaningful? How is public knowledge about the past shaped and propagated? How and why—and in what contexts—do particular ways of seeing and remembering the past become attached to various political projects? Particular attention will be paid to the following topics: the role of memory in the Palestine-Israel “conflict”; postcolonial state-building and “official memory”; debates over national remembering, forgetting, and reconstruction following the Lebanese Civil War; Middle Eastern diaspora formation and exilic identity; the myth of a “golden age” of Arab nationalism; Turkish nostalgia for the Ottoman imperial past; and the role of museums, holidays, and other commemorative practices in the construction of the national past across the region. Throughout the course, we will attend to the complex interplay between individual and collective memory (and “countermemory”), particularly as this has played out in several formulations of Middle Eastern nationalism. 

This lecture will focus on the interpretation and appreciation of the most influential lyric poetry written in English in the tumultuous decades between the French Revolution and the Reform Act of 1832. Over the course of two generations, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats invented a new kind of autobiographical poem that largely internalized the myths they had inherited from literary and religious traditions. The poet’s inward, subjective experience became the inescapable subject of the poem—a legacy that continues to this day. We will explore ways in which the English Romantic poets responded to the political impasse of their historical moment and created poems out of their arguments with themselves, as well as their arguments with one another. The preeminent goal will be to understand each poet’s unique contributions to the language.

What kind of work is care work? Is it a form of labor? Love? Is caretaking a social or individual responsibility? And who pays for it? This course will question the role of caretaking in modern societies through a range of literary and sociological texts. We will begin with the premise that caretaking is both fundamental to a functioning society and also grossly devalued. This devaluation is marked by the poor pay associated with caretaking professions, as well as the gendering and racializing of caretaking responsibilities. This course will draw on recent writing in disability studies, gender studies, political theory, and ethnic studies—as well as literary works including novels, poems, comics, and memoirs—to consider the experience of the men and women performing care work and those who require their care. We will discuss terms, such as “self-care,” which have become commonplace but that we often encounter as marketing concepts that have been stripped of their origins. This course will aim to situate the concept of caring into historical, political, and aesthetic contexts. Readings and assignments will encourage students to imagine the future of care work in a changing society. This course will involve community engagement with the Wartburg Adult Care Community in Mount Vernon, New York.

Variance, correlation coefficient, regression analysis, statistical significance, and margin of error—these terms and other statistical phrases have been bantered about before and seen 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 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. Statistical software will be introduced and used extensively in this course, but no prior experience with spreadsheet technology is assumed. Group conferences, conducted in workshop mode, will serve to reinforce student understanding of the course material. This course is recommended for any student 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. 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often regarded as a foundational figure in the development of the Western ideal of authenticity—the belief that a moral life entails uncompromising loyalty to one’s true self. Rousseau dedicated his life to the pursuit of a formula in which authenticity could serve as a path to happiness. And yet, time and again, he found himself entangled in paradoxes that were not merely philosophical but vividly reflected in his own life. His educational theory is a cornerstone of modern humanistic educational thought, yet he entrusted all five of his children to a public foundling hospital shortly after birth. He denounced popular entertainment but authored the best-selling novel of the 18th century. He professed deep Christian faith, while his books were burned as heretical. He argued that romantic love is an essential part of human existence while spending his final years in near-total solitude. This seminar welcomes anyone interested in modern philosophy, theories of the self, and the fragile threshold where bold ideas encounter human vulnerability. Rousseau was not only a thinker of inner conflict, he was also a political revolutionary whose writings have been interpreted as foundational to modern communism, liberal democracy, and even totalitarianism. His influence stretches across the ideological spectrum, making him a key figure for understanding both the promises and the perils of modernity.

Who does not love Frog and Toad? Have you ever wanted to write something like it—or perhaps like Charlotte’s Web or A Snowy Day? Why do our favorites from childhood work so well and so universally? We will begin by reading books we know and books we missed, discussing what makes them so beloved. We will look at read-to books, early readers, instructional books for children, rude books, chapter books, and books about friendship—with the potential of also examining young adult literature and what successful children’s history and biography might look like. We will discuss the place of the visual, the careful and conscious use of language, and notions of appropriateness for various age levels. Invariably, the course will discuss childhood—students' own and as part of an ever-changing set of social theories. We will try writing picture books, early readers, friendship stories, and nursery rhymes such as Mother Goose poems. Class sessions will be both lecture and conversational, and group conferences will involve reviewing our writing. Conference work will involve making a children’s book of any kind, on any level.

Stories are immensely complex mechanisms. When talking about how they work, we often confine our discussion to their most straightforward elements: the relationship between conflict and suspense, for example, or between verisimilitude and believability. But stories also derive a substantial proportion of their meaning and force from elements not so easily pinned down: from the potency of their images, from their surprising and suggestive juxtapositions, or from other qualities more easily apprehended by the unconscious than by the conscious mind. During the first half of the semester, students will read and discuss dreamlike narratives with the goal of understanding how the patently impossible can be made to feel as if it is actually happening, what sort of truths are rendered through unreality, and how authors can open themselves to the promptings of the unconscious and become alert to the complex interactions of images and narrative gestures. As part of the process, students will write two- to three-page imitations of the works discussed in class. The second half of the semester will be devoted to workshopping students’ own stories.  

In this generative creative-writing course, we will study the way child narrators and child protagonists are made real on the page through a close reading of authors such as Jesmyn Ward, Jeanette Winterson, Joy Williams, Ha Jin, Mariana Enríquez, Sandra Cisneros, Truman Capote, and others. Through experimentation and play, we will write short fiction pieces featuring different child narrators and protagonists. Intended output will consist of a portfolio of exercises, including at least one completed story. This course is suitable for students curious about creative writing and fiction but who do not know where to begin, as well as for committed creative writers looking for a lab to try something new and outside the box of a traditional workshop. 

This course is for students who want to break free from the conventions of the traditional essay and memoir and discover a broader range of narrative and stylistic possibilities available to nonfiction writers. During the first half of the semester, students will read and discuss examples of formally innovative nonfiction that will serve as the inspiration for brief assignments. Completed assignments will also be read aloud and discussed each week. During the second half of the semester, students will workshop longer pieces, which they will have written in consultation with the instructor as a part of their conference work. Required texts will include: The Next American Essay, edited by John D’Agata, and Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra; all other readings will be accessible in a photocopied handout. 

This course will use the family, broadly defined, as the prism through which we analyze and write memoir. Open to writers and non-writers alike, students will learn the craft and tools to write their own 15-page memoir narrative.