What is “the common good”? How do individuals consider this idea, this question, and how are societies led, or misled, by its pursuit? Together, we will explore sources from a range of perspectives: What does Aristotle’s theory of the common good teach us? Or the Federalist Papers, the design of Baltimore’s public transportation system, meritocracy in higher education, the perniciousness of pandemics, proliferation of nuclear weapons, restorative justice, or intimate love? Drawing from film, journal articles, literature, and other sources—authors/creators include Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Bong Joon-ho, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Sandel, and more—this First-Year Seminar is as much about how we ask and interrogate challenging, timeless questions as it is about the answers themselves. Engaging our material and each other, we will work together to hone the habits of scholarly inquiry essential to this practice: reading, writing, talking. The seminar will culminate in a final, collaborative research project that seeks to map, and manifest, versions of the common good.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Watters, Aliza
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

This First-Year Seminar is designed to introduce students to the fundamental physical and chemical origins of color and how we perceive them - from the vivid palette provided by the natural world to the brightly colored clothing we wear. Beginning with the basic principles of light and color, we will embark on an interdisciplinary investigation of color, including, but not limited to: color chemistry; color in biology; the physiology of the eye; how color affects human psychology; the history of color and light; and the use of color in art. Discover the physical and chemical explanations behind several noteworthy phenomena such as sunsets, color-blindness, rainbows, fireworks, chameleons and the Aurora Borealis.

• Days/Times: MW 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Young, Jamie
• Room: Greenhouse 113
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

In this First-Year Seminar, we will seek to answer questions including: could you forge Beskar? What would it take to make a light saber? Is "Image, enhance" really possible? What is possible today? What might be possible in the future? And, what may never be possible, as it violates the laws of nature as we know them? We will take an empiricist approach, gathering data on the needed properties via screenings and related research, and then applying physical principles to reveal feasibility.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: McQueen, Tyrel
• Room: Bloomberg 259
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

This First-Year Seminar will explore the neuroscience of choice. In addition to exploring the neurobiology of choice, we will dabble with philosophical ideas of free will and determinism. We will also touch on questions related to culpability. For example, are people who break the law but suffer from brain damage responsible for their actions? Sound interesting? Well, why stop there? Let’s sit back, eat some popcorn and take a look at how popular culture depicts the neuroscience of choice in the movies. Yes, with your help, we can do it all – but will you choose to???

• Days/Times: MW 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Trageser, Jason
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

This First-Year Seminar invites you to think about reading as a cognitive process, a cultural obsession, and a history of revolutions. We will consider the act of reading from a range of perspectives (cognitive science, literary, political, and sociological) and examine artefacts of reading culture (manuscripts, books as material objects, the screens that dominate contemporary life…). We will activate these perspectives in order to grapple with the values associated with reading – moral panics and political virtues, ideas of isolation and community, shifting concepts individual and public. Sources will range from Kant’s "What is Enlightenment?" to RadioLab podcasts, to hands-on work with materials in the MSEL's Special Collections.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Barry, Kelly L
• Room: BLC 4040
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Why do we listen to music? What use is it? Does it have medical applications? How can it improve our lives? This First-Year Seminar looks at the various ways that music can change the world. WMD is for musician and non-musician alike. It is designed for students with all sorts of musical tastes and academic interests. It also challenges the usual “top down” approach of most courses, where the professor decides all the material that will be studied and leads all the class discussions. While I do assign certain texts and lead certain discussions, the students also determine much of what we study and lead many of our discussions. This means that sometimes you will be in the position of teacher and guide the rest of us to an understanding of your perspective. By honing your research skills, you will introduce us to your interests through many different media: film, essay, podcast, scientific paper, musical composition, etc. If you are a doctor in the making, you may diagnose the health benefits of music on Alzheimer’s patients. If you are a dancer, you might ask how music-inspired movement strengthens society. Future scientists can wonder at music’s ability to solve problems, and future philosophers can ponder music as a path to the good life. Meanwhile, musicians themselves might ask how music benefits its creators in contrast to its consumers, and whether they can control how their art gets used. Our listening will be similarly broad: from folk to popular, classical to jazz, and any other variety of sound you can convince us is musical. But the ultimate goal of this seminar and its diversity is not just to ask what music does for us as individuals and to pursue those isolated areas of interest. It is also to hone the foundational ability of communication: to read and to write for, to talk and to listen to our colleagues.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Foster, Daniel Harmon
• Room: Krieger Laverty
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Most people think the strongest kind of evidence in a criminal case is a confident eyewitness. Most students think re-reading textbook materials or class notes is the best way to prepare for an exam. And all too many people think that measles vaccines cause autism. All three of these ideas are wrong. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore what modern psychology has uncovered about how our intuitions concerning human nature deceive us, and lead to incorrect ideas such as the ones just mentioned. We will discuss a wide variety of topics including “the attention economy,” groupthink, and subliminal perception.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Egeth, Howard E
• Room: Krieger 308
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

This First-Year Seminar focuses on the lives of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin and the depictions of their lives in film during the 20th century. The seminar provides both an introduction to film analysis and music history biography. In the last module, we will examine the canon of Western art music composers and consider historiographical issues along lines of gender, race, and other American demographics within this inherited tradition--all toward a collaborative final project.

• Days/Times: MW 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Ahn, Suhnne
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

What is the fundamental character of nature? Do all living systems share an underlying logic? What is left to explore? Can I really take this seminar even if I don’t have a background in science or math? Yes you can! In this seminar we are going to emulate the Greeks; without the benefit of the technological and mathematical armamentarium at our disposal today, driven simply by curiosity and their imagination, they identified fundamental questions and laid the foundation for modern science. Much of their insight has stood the test of time. We will examine the nature of nature by asking deep questions about the world around us and by examining phenomena we all experience in our daily lives. Our conversations will illustrate continuity and connectivity between aspects of nature that are usually treated separately. You might even discover through our conversations that science and religion, and scientific and humanistic inquiry, are more similar than you might think. Our seminar is organized around weekly conversations informed by different kinds of sources: popular science writing, fiction, poetry, newspaper articles, and movies. We will even do experiments in my lab (no lab or science experience necessary) to examine the secret of life.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Garcia-Moreno, Bertrand
• Room: Jenkins 107
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Which ideas, movements, problems, and conflicts define the contemporary United States—and where did they come from? In this First Year Seminar we’ll study the history of this country over the last three decades to try to answer those questions. Using a range of written and visual materials, we’ll investigate the history behind concepts like “globalization,” “the free market,” “identity politics,” “culture wars,” and the “War on Terror,” and discuss the causes and consequences of the debates they provoked in this period. We’ll also assess what’s appealing and challenging about studying the very recent past and using it to interpret our present.

• Days/Times: TTh 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Brann, Allon Yagoda
• Room: BLC 4040
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

In this First-Year Seminar, we examine inequalities in income, wealth, and working conditions in the United States today. What do the historical trends look like and how do economists explain them? Is economic inequality a significant problem? If so, why? And what tools do we have in the policy arsenal to address it? We will draw on diverse sources, including economics readings, op-eds, podcasts, and short vignettes from literature to motivate our weekly discussions. Students will have the opportunity to present group research and lead class discussions drawing on the economic concepts developed in class. At the end of the semester, students will complete an individual research project exploring some aspect of current inequality, inspired by their own selection from literature, poetry, music, or film.

• Days/Times: W 9:00AM - 11:30AM
• Instructor: Morgan, Barbara Anne
• Room: Greenhouse 113
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

As a public good, public schooling is often the focus of attempts at purposeful change. Politicians, for example, make policies for fixing schools (public) that never would be entertained for fixing families (private). Parents also make demands of schools, as do a host of other interested parties. Together these stakeholders make up part of the external environment to which schools adapt. But the institutional agents of schooling have interests too—e.g., teachers’ unions, associations of school administrators, the faculty of schools of education—and they too often try to shape the direction of school reform. This First-Year Seminar examines timely, often controversial, issues of education policy and practice through a sociological lens. We will address these topics with discussions of a documentary film on the history of American public schools, readings in contemporary social science, and our own research into specific policy debates.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Burdick-Will, Julia Burdick
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Freedom of speech is a core value for democracies -- and for universities, in which the freedom to challenge accepted beliefs is essential to advancing knowledge. The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and of the press, as do the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the European Convention on Human Rights. But like other rights, my right to freedom of speech may conflict with yours, or with other important rights or societal objectives. As a result, freedom of speech cannot be (and in practice never is) unlimited. In this First-Year Seminar, we will be asking why freedom of speech has been accorded such importance, and how and why it might legitimately be limited, in politics, in business, in everyday life, and in universities, looking both at the United States and at other liberal democracies. Topics will include asking what should count as speech beyond the mere utterance of words; appropriate protections or limitations for hate speech and other offensive speech and for falsehoods; where the boundary between legitimate protest and unlawful infringement on the rights of others should be drawn; whether free speech includes an affirmative right to be informed, or an affirmative right to be let alone; appropriate regulations for social media; and campus speech codes.

• Days/Times: MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Katz, Richard Stephen
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Cults, communes, and conspiracies are unusual social and ideological organizations. How should we understand their origins, structure, and functioning? In our First-Year Seminar, we will assess the value of alternative explanatory concepts from the social sciences, such as charismatic leadership, organizational ecology, network structure, status competition, social influence, and belief propagation. We will then interpret cases in comparative perspective, asking, for example, how cults differ from religious sects, how communes differ from political movements, and how organized crime groups differ from legal businesses.

• Days/Times: T 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Morgan, Stephen L
• Room: Krieger Laverty
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Mathematics is so much more that simply the language of science, or a set of techniques for solving quantitative-based problems. In fact, it is not a science at all, but an art, a construct of the imagination that not only provides structure to the reality of the world, but also gives form to anything and everything we can possibly imagine. Many of its fundamental principles and methods of employment are shared by artists of all types, from musicians to painters, sculptors, and poets. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore these principles and methods shared by mathematicians and artists, like the notions of abstraction, metaphor, and pattern, the aesthetic quality both mathematicians and artists give to their work, the geometry of representation and visualization, the imagination as a tool of discovery and structure, and the use of mathematics in art, as well as the use of art in mathematics. Along the way, we will talk to artists and mathematicians, and hopefully visit the studios and galleries of each.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Brown, Richard
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

In this First-Year Seminar we will explore the long and mostly untold story behind the most revolutionary discoveries of modern physics—quantum mechanics and relativity—a story written, astonishingly, in the languages of poetry, fiction, and philosophy. Shuttling between twentieth-century Germany and Argentina by way of eighteenth-century Prussia, with stopovers in Plato’s Greece and Dante’s Italy, we will pursue the age-old riddle of how the human mind interacts with the physical world; tangle with theologians as they ponder the nature of free will; interrogate cosmologists as they attempt to grasp the shape the universe; and, finally, explores the implications of these profound problems for our understanding of reality today.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Egginton, William
• Room: Mergenthaler 431
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

What does it mean to live and to write in more than one language? This is a particularly charged question in today’s globalized world. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore texts and films produced by multilingual writers and directors, who reflect on the experiences of the multilingual subject; their concerns range from the turmoil of living between identities and cultures, to the playful experience of daily life and existence opened up through thinking and working in multiple languages. Main questions will include: In what ways do languages influence how writers write? How does the presence of multiple languages in a text structure a reading experience and for whom? How do texts by multilingual writers destabilize conceptions of national literature? While some texts we will read were originally composed in English, the majority were written by multilingual writers in other languages. Finally, therefore, we will address what it means to read translated into English texts that were, in some sense, already produced “in translation.”

• Days/Times: MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Haubenreich, Jacob
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Long overshadowed by the American and French Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now widely recognized as one of the most important events in modern history. The most radical of the Atlantic Revolutions, it began with a massive uprising of the enslaved against the institution of slavery and culminated in the independence of the nation of Haiti. This First-Year Seminar will examine the origins, course, and legacy of the Revolution, addressing such issues as colonialism, racism, slavery, emancipation, human rights, and national sovereignty – issues that continue to shape the contemporary world.

• Days/Times: TTh 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Kwass, Michael
• Room: Greenhouse 113
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Social science is the scholarly study of society and social behavior. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to the social sciences by studying poverty in America through the lens of economics and other social sciences, including sociology and anthropology. The quantitative approach taken by economics will be compared and contrasted with qualitative approaches. Illustrations of how the lives of the poor are led as depicted in ethnographic studies, movies, and literature will be studied to learn how integrated perspectives can be formed. Students will learn how to read scholarly articles with a critical eye, to speak about their interpretations of the material, and to write short critical essays. Students will also be introduced to quantitative analysis using graphs and tables. Group projects will be required. Guest lecturers bringing non-economics perspectives will visit the class.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Moffitt, Robert A
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

The past is littered with discoveries that have altered the course of civilization. In this First-Year Seminar, we will take a deep dive into chemical discoveries that changed history, discussing how they work as well as their impact on society. Topics will range from dirt warfare, to the link between gun powder and workers’ rights, to how cats biochemically domesticated humans.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Hill, Eric
• Room: Krieger Laverty
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

We often think of bacteria in the context of dangerous or annoying infections. However, bacteria themselves can be infected by even smaller and more abundant entities: viruses called bacteriophages. This First-Year Seminar will combine readings and discussion of the fundamental biology of phages and their role in controlling populations of bacteria, with lab work to discover new phages from the Johns Hopkins campus. Phages identified in this class will be added to the Science Education Alliance’s archive which is comprised of phages from over 100 academic institutions worldwide and is a resource for phage biologists and physicians directly involved in developing phages as a treatment for disease.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Fisher, Emily J
• Room: UG Teaching Lab (UTL) G72
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Corporations are all around us. They interact with us every day in ways minute and profound. We work with them and for them. They have rights and freedoms, for instance, to speech and religious expression. They seem to have intentions, desires, voices, and goals. Yet, they can’t take a walk or feel the wind or smell the earth. If they do harm, they are notoriously hard to punish. When they come to an end, no one writes an obituary. This First-Year Seminar will query whether a corporation is a person across a range of sources and perspectives, including from law, politics, philosophy, literature, and popular culture. Can a corporation be a person? Who should decide and on what basis? What are the implications for our understanding of rights, agency, and morality and for pressing global issues such as climate change? And what are the implications for our own understanding of ourselves as “a person”?

• Days/Times: T 10:30AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: O'Connor, Marisa T
• Room: Greenhouse 113
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Inextricably bound with self-identity, human language and cognition remains a research area with more questions than answers. Can we think without language? What are the differences in neural mechanisms of language and cognition? How and why does the pediatric human brain acquire language at exponential rates while taking a lifetime to acquire cognition? What is the role of language and cognition in self-identity? Are we still ourselves without language, without memories? In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine the recursive nature of language, cognition, and self through the lenses of neurology, psychology, sociology, linguistics, and cognitive science. We will learn how language and cognition develops and changes across the human lifespan through case study examination of the lived experiences of individuals with cognitive-communication disorders, such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, aphasia, agnosia, and Alzheimer’s disease. We will end our semester by exploring how the interplay between language, cognition, and self makes us distinctively human and how those lessons apply to the field of artificial intelligence. Perhaps most importantly, this seminar provides students an invitation to actively reflect on their own language, cognition, and development of self.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Schreck, Janet Simon
• Room: Greenhouse 113
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine the roles of love, fear, anger, and hope in our lives. We’ll ask questions about their value, danger, and appropriateness or inappropriateness in our lives at both the individual level and the level of political life. Some examples of questions we’ll consider are these: Should we love those who have wronged us? Is enjoying a horror movie morally problematic? How is fear used in political rhetoric and how should we respond to it? Is anger acceptable, or perhaps even necessary, in protest? Is love necessary for meaningful social change? When and how is hope justifiable and useful? We’ll also draw connections between these emotions and engage with related concepts such as forgiveness and trust. While our engagement with these concepts will be primarily through philosophy, we will also consider works of art and think about the value of portraying and evoking these emotions through various forms of art. Students can expect to read philosophical texts, journalism, occasional fiction and poetry, and to watch at least one horror film, among the sources for the course. Possible authors include Berit Brogaard, Noël Carroll, Myisha Cherry, Raja Halwani, Stephen King, Adrienne Martin, Martha Nussbaum, Edgar Allan Poe, Jason Stanley, and Desmond Tutu. We will take at least one field trip to a location in Baltimore during the semester. Students will emerge from this course with a more nuanced understanding of these powerful and often controversial emotions, and the ability to talk about them in an academic and public context.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Koullas, Sandy Gillian
• Room: Greenhouse 113
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

We are living through a crisis in how we take in information. Bombarded by information of all sorts coming at us on phones, tablets, and computer screens, it can be difficult to make sense of it all and harder still to determine whether something is true or false, authentic or inauthentic. The scale and speed of the change in media that we are undergoing is unprecedented in human history. Nevertheless, people in the past have faced moments of crisis – moments when writing seemed unreliable, when the format of written information changed, and when new publication formats forced reevaluations of the nature of truth. This First-Year Seminar will take us from Greco-Roman antiquity to the modern age, with stops along the way in the European Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment. We will read selected texts that illuminate the place of writing, books, and the search for truth, think about the structure of libraries in the western Middle Ages and Renaissance, do extensive hands-on work with rare books, and visit other repositories of information, all toward the end of evaluating how the history of books and information can help us in our current quest to make sense of our world.

• Days/Times: T 2:00PM - 4:30PM
• Instructor: Celenza, Chris
• Room: BLC 2030
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

This First-Year Seminar is designed around what is on stage in Baltimore this fall. We will attend several plays, both professional productions at theatres in the city and student productions at JHU. We will pay attention to the interpretation of plays on the page, and to the ways that scripts materialize as performances on the stage. We will place these performances in the context of larger theatre histories, studying great plays from the age of Shakespeare to contemporary American theatre. No acting required – just the desire to explore the theatre of today.

• Days/Times: MW 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Stoll, Abraham D
• Room: Krieger Laverty
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

This First-Year Seminar will explore seminal ideas in macroevolutionary theory through both classic and cutting-edge studies. Topics would include the relationship between evolution and development, how fossils shape our understanding of biological systems, and the logical basis of evolutionary inference. Students will also gain an appreciation for the historical development of these ideas and their application in modern science and beyond.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Balanoff, Amy M
• Room: Krieger Laverty
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Music, Art, Theater, Novels, Autobiographies, and Material Culture all expanded dramatically in Britain in the long eighteenth century (c. 1714-1830), creating a culture celebrating ‘happiness’, 'beauty', and the 'pleasures of the imagination'. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to themselves experiencing and discussing these exciting cultural forms, with students attending and watching plays and movies from plays, discussing Jane Austen novels as read and as filmed, reading and discussing an Afro-British autobiography, listening to performances of different kinds of music, and discussing works of art and architecture both in the classroom and in the museum.

• Days/Times: Th 9:00AM - 11:30AM
• Instructor: Marshall, John W
• Room: Gilman 308
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus and its surroundings is a wonderful green space in the middle of Baltimore City. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to both the visible and cryptic organisms living above- and belowground. A combination of observational and sampling techniques will be used to demonstrate how ecologists collect data about plants, insects, and other organisms. In the classroom, these field observations, combined with reading material will be used to discuss global environmental issues including climate change on biodiversity, invasive species, and human impacts on the landscape. By the end of the course students will be able to generate research questions based upon field observations and appreciate the diverse life forms both in Earth and in our backyard. Students should be prepared to spend many hours outside.

• Days/Times: MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Szlavecz, Katalin
• Room: Gilman 413
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

This First-Year Seminar looks at the deeper psychological motivations of the American electorate. We begin by discussing the meaning of democracy and establishing a common understanding of American democracy specifically, placing the current moment into historical and international context. We then gradually dismantle the "folk theory" of democracy that assumes all voters are rational and economically-minded. Instead, we apply theories from social psychology to understand some essential questions about voter behavior. Why do people vote? How do they understand politics? How are their feelings and judgments affected by their own identities, biases, information sources, and by the messages they hear from leaders? Why have Americans grown so polarized? What role do racial and gender-based prejudice play? Is American politics headed toward a more violent future? We use evidence-based research from political science, sociology, and psychology to answer these questions.

• Days/Times: M 4:00PM - 6:30PM
• Instructor: Mason, Lily Hall
• Room: Wyman Park N325F
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

If Shakespeare were alive today, he would be writing for TV. So would Jane Austen. With the advent of cable networks, DVDs, the internet, and live streaming, TV—once considered a “vast wasteland”—has become the most dynamic and creative medium for storytelling, attracting a host of talented writers, directors, and actors. This First-Year Seminar explores the innovative narrative strategies, structures, and character studies that transformed that wasteland into extraordinarily fertile terrain and ushered in a new Golden Age of TV.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Jewiss, Virginia C
• Room: Mergenthaler 431
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

From the early 20th century, Chinese society underwent a turbulent process of modern transformation. Industrialization, urbanization, and democratization challenged previous gender and family norms. Meanwhile, at exactly this time, the Chinese film industry flourished, especially in the modern metropolis of Shanghai. Women and family provided a useful microcosm through which to explore national questions related to revolution, war, and modernity. They also entertained a public eager for new leisure pursuits. Popular feature films not only recorded but also interpreted and helped shape family and gender roles. Using filmic representations as the main material this First-Year Seminar will survey the "family question" (and "the woman question") in 20th century China

• Days/Times: T 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Staff
• Room: Gilman 413
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

This First-Year-Seminar covers concepts of biology taught through the lens of microbes and antibiotic resistance. Using environmental samples, students actively engage in the hunt for novel antimicrobials. Broader concepts include the meaning of disease, how that meaning has changed over time, and the implications of widespread antibiotic resistance for society. This is a research-based project lab course in which students participate as part of an international consortium of undergraduates at other colleges. Students will isolate and characterize antibiotic-producing bacteria from the environment using modern molecular biological techniques. This seminar is open to all students, regardless of major. No prior lab experience necessary.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Broderick, Nichole
• Room: UG Teaching Lab (UTL) G72
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

How did the Greeks, Romans, and other ancient Mediterranean peoples understand human difference and diversity? How did they form their senses of self in relation to others and articulate kinship and commonalities across ethnic lines? Did skin color, birthplace, language, and lineage matter in constructing social hierarchies? How did their concepts of class and citizenship, beauty and belonging, differ from ours? Did they have anything akin to modern constructions of race and racism, blackness and whiteness, the ‘west’ and the ‘rest’? If not, when and why were such ideas invented, and how was Greco-Roman culture conscripted in their support? Finally and crucially, what can we do to make “classics” today more equitable, inclusive, and accurate to the multicultural reality of the ancient Mediterranean? This First-Year Seminar examines these questions, and many more, through the literature, art, and history of ancient Greece and Rome, with forays into Egypt, Persia, Judea, and northern Europe. It will introduce you to the diversity of the ancient Mediterranean world, hone your ability to critically interpret and discuss art, literature, and scholarship, and explore how systems of categorizing human difference have historically served power. This course will give you a wider historical lens through which to understand race, racecraft, the “classics,” and “Western civilization,” revealing all to be dynamic and historically situated discourses that have been used to exert authority, to include or exclude, and to build communities. It will also build student community and comfort discussing sensitive subjects through a combination of field trips, guest lectures, movie nights, and communal meals.

• Days/Times: MW 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Pandey, Nandini
• Room: Gilman 108
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Beyond scientific and technological advances in the classification and treatment of disease, beyond complex hospital and health delivery systems, beyond the immensity of the medical world itself there is a human world of experience that tells its stories in various ways. Patients, doctors, nurses and related healthcare providers inhabit this shared environment of intense personal experience, giving rise to various accounts: memoirs, autobiographies, blogs, websites and interviews that provide us with a rich resource for understanding the culture of medicine and the world of the sick. In this First-Year Seminar, we explore some of these accounts by reading from books and personal memoirs of patients and practitioners, looking at films and photographs, listening to interviews and discussing what we learn from such accounts and how they shape our understanding of the many worlds of health and medicine. As a complement to the scientific study of human biology and disease, this seminar offers the incoming student an introduction to a broad literacy in medicine, disease and human biology, focusing on the importance of individuals by exploring the records of their experiences and the ways in which they are made available to us.

• Days/Times: T 9:00AM - 11:30AM
• Instructor: Mostwin, Jacek Lech
• Room: Jenkins 102
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

This First-Year Seminar will explore diverse aspects of how we see and fail to see the world. We’ll discuss questions such as: What can we learn about vision from illusions and hallucinations? What explains why we sometimes miss things even though we’re looking right at them? Does what we believe and desire affect what we see? What happens to our visual experience when the brain is damaged, for example in conditions such as “blindsight,” “neglect” and “visual form agnosia”? And: Is there such a thing as subliminal or unconscious perception? Though primarily psychological, the course will draw on other disciplines, especially the philosophy of perception. We’ll also think about some of the ways visual artists and magicians exploit the workings of our visual systems to achieve their aims. This will likely involve at least one outing to a local art gallery to look for examples of what we’ve learned, an in-class screening, and hopefully a guest speaker or two.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Phillips, Ian B
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

This First-Year Seminar is designed for students of all backgrounds to provide a mathematical introduction to social choice theory, weighted voting systems, apportionment methods, and gerrymandering. In the search for ideal ways to make certain kinds of political decisions, a lot of wasted effort could be averted if mathematics could determine that finding such an ideal were actually possible in the first place. The seminar will analyze data from recent US elections as well as provide historical context to modern discussions in politics, culminating in a mathematical analysis of the US Electoral College. Case studies, future implications, and comparisons to other governing bodies outside the US will be used to apply the theory of the course. Students will use Microsoft Excel to analyze data sets. There are no mathematical prerequisites for this course.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Cutrone, Joseph W
• Room: Krieger Laverty
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is an extremely successful intracellular bacterial pathogen able to manipulate phagocytic cells and its own metabolism to survive within a host. The molecular mechanisms of this survival and resistance to antibiotics will be studied. First years only.

• Days/Times: MW 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Horner, Robert D
• Room: UG Teaching Lab (UTL) 189
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

What is poetry? And why don't we like it? Can poetry save the world? Can it save us? This First-Year seminar will explore what makes poetry turn ordinary language into something extraordinary, something necessary to our world. The course will involve reading poetry aloud, thinking about poetry in its many purposes, places, and forms, and you will be clapping, blogging, creating video and written projects about these. You'll attend poetry slams in Baltimore, visit bookstores, make some poetry, and most of all, talk and think aloud about language and its powers. Three assignments, spaced across term (75%), attendance/participation (25%).

• Days/Times: T 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Achinstein, Sharon
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

This First-year Seminar will study the direction of time, pointing from past to future. It will primarily be based on the physics of entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, covering aspects of statistical mechanics, probability, and cosmology. But it will also touch on how time's arrow manifests itself in the macroscopic world, including questions of memory, prediction, aging, and causality.

• Days/Times: MW 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Carroll, Sean Michael
• Room: Bloomberg 259
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

This First-Year Seminar will delve into the surprising ways chemistry weaves its way through our day-to-day living. We will discuss topics that cover a variety of useful applications of Chemistry, from chemistry in medicine to chemistry in cooking and more. We will undertake several lab experiments to enhance our learning and to enable a better appreciation of the discussion material presented. No prior knowledge of Chemistry is needed.

• Days/Times: Th 10:30AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: D'Souza, Larissa N
• Room: UG Teaching Lab (UTL) 186
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Love is mad, love is obsessive, love can be painful or tragic, or an experience to be treasured forever. That's what books have taught us, by giving poetic souls a chance to imagine and develop romantic ideas – on paper. These books have in turn inspired films, or in earlier days, great operas. As a historian of ideas and a specialist of narrative with a keen interest in bodies, illness, and gender, I will explore with you in this First-Year Seminar a few favorite love stories. Each is chosen because it helps us uncover a universe of romantic feelings, often in conflict with social conventions (as in Romeo and Juliet for example). We meet once a week for two and half hours with a break in the middle. This format enables in-depth explorations of our texts, which will often be done in teamwork. We start with reading medium-length books, so be prepared to spend time engrossed in a novel. Later units of the course will involve film and opera. Among the readings for this class: The Legend of Tristan and Isolde, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther; Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice; Jeanette Winterson's, Written on the Body.

• Days/Times: T 4:15PM - 6:45PM
• Instructor: Ender, Evelyne
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

A famous, very experienced clinician used the phrase "The Soul of Care," signaling that medicine is not merely about fixing bodies. He wants to remind us that scientific knowledge involves mastery as well as empathy. "Narrative medicine" as this domain is called, assumes that the close study of stories can play a decisive role in preparing doctors for the challenging humanistic aspects of their profession. We focus in this First-Year Seminar on stories connected to medical cases, stories that can take us beyond medical questions to deeper issues connected to the human condition. Our seminar will be centered on discussions, often prepared in teams, based on your attentive close reading and research. The aim is to exercise your observational skills and imagination. What is at stake, medically and humanly speaking, is our capacity to uncover problems, dilemmas, ethical questions woven into texts that take us into the worlds of doctors and patients. Readings will involve a combination of modern and contemporary short stories, some of them more obviously fictional than others, some of them geographically or culturally more remote. Part of our study will also involve one longer text, namely When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, and a small "anthology" of documents of a preparatory kind. We'll have at least one guest speaker, and also see a film together.

• Days/Times: MW 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Ender, Evelyne
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

In this course, we will examine the concealment of scientific knowledge from the Scientific Revolution to present day. Although science is regularly described as a public good, it has often been a private affair. Why have various scientists, institutions, governments, and media outlets chosen to restrict the flow of scientific knowledge? How have their efforts fared in practice, and what factors explain their successes or failures? More generally, how does our picture of modern science change if we highlight work done behind closed doors? This First-Year Seminar will explore these questions through case studies on alchemy, trade secrecy, nuclear physics, and climate change denial. Students will work with formerly classified sources during several weeks of the term.

• Days/Times: MW 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: McManus, Alison L
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

In times of pandemic, trade war, and restrictions on the export of strategic technologies, it has become common to predict the ‘death of globalization.’ Such predictions are hardly new, however, and neither are the protectionist technology policies that are currently in vogue. In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine how technology historically has both helped connect people in different parts of the world and contributed to division and inequality at national and global levels. Focusing on the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, we will pay special attention to the impact of transportation and ICT technologies ranging from the telegraph and container ship to the airplane and the internet. But we will also consider the consequences of globalization and technological change in areas such as mining and agriculture, taking into account the perspectives of a variety of actors including multinational enterprises, governments, standard-setting scientists and engineers, and the anti-globalization movement. The local effects of globalization will be discussed on a class trip to the Baltimore Museum of Industry, and students will have the opportunity to develop a research project on a topic of special interest to them in consultation with the instructor. Course readings will be made available on Canvas; they include both original historical sources and studies by historians and social scientists.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Mercelis, Joris Hans Angele
• Room: Gilman 300
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Animals have evolved a vast array of sensory systems that support a rich repertoire of natural behaviors. Some animals live in dark environments and use tactile, chemical, electrical and auditory sensors that allow them to operate in the absence of light. Other animals rely heavily on vision and take advantage of colors that humans cannot see. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore extraordinary adaptations of sensory systems in animals that live on land and under water. Our focus will be on sensory systems that guide navigation and foraging behaviors in species as diverse as star-nosed moles, weakly electric fish, honeybees, and echolocating bats. As we delve into understanding the extraordinary sensory systems of selected species, we will also consider how these animals have inspired literary and visual artists. We aim to introduce students to a rich interdisciplinary experience that opens their eyes to new areas of inquiry as they take advantage of local resources, such as the National Aquarium, Baltimore Zoo, Wyman Park, Peabody Institute, and Baltimore Museum of Art.

• Days/Times: T 4:00PM - 6:30PM
• Instructor: Moss, Cynthia; Russell, Arthur J
• Room: Ames 217
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

This First-Year Seminar combines current state of the art issues in Cosmology, Astrophysics and Biology around the Scientific American level. Discusses the history of thought on these issues ranging from Aristotle, Lucretius, Galileo, Newton, Einstein…to the Hubble and JWST era. For the last part of the seminar, we will consider existential issues for humanity in our Universe. Excellent books to read to start thinking about this are by Toby Ord: Precipice and Martin Rees: (1) The Future of Humanity and (2) If Science is to Save us. Our discussions and investigations will likely lead us toward many interesting and innovative paths.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Norman, Colin
• Room: Bloomberg 259
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

The current paradigm for understanding addiction is a brain disease of compulsion, investigated in large part through animal models. Yet addiction in humans has dimensions of meaning and suffering alike that cannot be captured by neuroscience or modelled in animals. This First-Year Seminar explores addiction by combining what we know from addiction science with what we know from philosophy and the humanities, as well as therapy, journalism, film, and autobiographical narratives. We will work to understand the puzzle of why people use drugs in ways that can come to destroy their lives through these various lenses and without recourse to stigma, dogma, or dehumanization. This interdisciplinary course will develop students' skills in reading, analytic thinking, and writing; we will also visit an animal lab.

• Days/Times: T 1:15PM - 3:45PM
• Instructor: Pickard, Hanna
• Room: Gilman 288
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

When thinking of Italy, food is one of the first things that come to mind. But what is beyond a lavishly decked table? What are the questions that can be explored through food and its practices in Italy, but also in Italian communities around the world? This First-Year Seminar explores the relationship between food and the formation of identity through the lenses of migration, gender, race, ideology, nationalism, and diaspora. The seminar will analyze literature on food studies at the crossroads with anthropological, sociopolitical questions. We’ll discuss the relationship with memory, as well as with cultural reproduction in immigrant communities and the tension with a critical discourse around political propaganda on the notion of authenticity in contemporary Italy. Other topics include the formation of taste in conjunction with sociopolitical modes of exclusion and social class, through history, but also exemplified in films. For instance, the class will be presented with movies and readings on Roman-Jewish culinary traditions, its diasporic experience, and the contemporary cultural appropriation. The screening of the movie Big Night, on the other hand, will provide an opportunity to approach a reading through a phenomenological apparatus, and analyze the impact of Italian cinema on American and Italian American culture. A guest speaker will be invited to present their scholarship, followed by a discussion.

• Days/Times: MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Proietti, Leonardo
• Room: Greenhouse 113
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

How should a just society come to terms with persistent inequalities? France, the country of liberty, equality and fraternity, that offered sanctuary from US racism to such figures as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Miles Davis and legalized same-sex marriages two years before the US did, is now deeply divided. This First-Year Seminar explores the tensions and contradictions between the universalist and color-blind ideals of the French republic and the realities of discrimination in contemporary French society. Topics studied include the status of the concept of race in political discourse; the law forbidding signs of religious belief in the public schools and responses to it; how American initiatives like Black Lives Matter, #metoo and critical gender studies have both sparked French activism and political movements and generated a powerful backlash; and what Americans can learn about how to fight injustice—and how not to—from the French. We will look at a wide variety of texts, including writings by activists, historians, and journalists, along with sociologies of the police and young adult novels, and will listen to popular French music and watch a number of contemporary French films.

• Days/Times: MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Roos, Suzanne
• Room: Gilman 413
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

From game theory to gamification, games have become a central part of everyday life. More and more, in fields as diverse as economics, entertainment, and education, the game has become the principal model for interpreting and interacting with the social world, and with ourselves. This First-Year Seminar will look at the history of games in the modern world, with an eye to understanding their increasing prominence in the 20th and 21st centuries. What social and technological changes brought about this shift? And yes -- we will play, and seek to analyze, some games as well (both analog and digital).

• Days/Times: MW 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

What makes one person a saint and another a sinner? By looking at saints' lives, painting, court cases, and theological treatises, this First-Year Seminar engages with Christian ideas about holiness and heresy, sin and virtue, revealing the complexity of theology and lived religious experience. Since visual culture is a key component to understanding premodern religious culture, the class will embark on a field trip to the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC) to discuss several important paintings in the collection. We will also work with manuscripts and printed materials in the library's Special Collections.

• Days/Times: M 10:30AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: Rowe, Erin
• Room: Greenhouse 113
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

"Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning." (Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, Apocalypse Now). These iconic words, uttered in an iconic film inspired by an iconic novel, invite us to think of the smell of war as a pleasurable experience, indeed, a joy. But what about the mere joy of watching a film, listening to music, viewing a painting or reading a poem about war? In this First-Year Seminar, we will ask ourselves what is the place of war in our cultural imagination? What attracts us to the “heart of darkness” and how and why does popular culture make this violent experience aesthetically pleasurable? We will cover various media, such as films, television shows, visual art, music and literature from various countries in an attempt to answer these questions and others. The seminar eschews a chronological approach organized around major historical wars in favor of a conceptual framework. As we will see, the creative impulse extends far beyond the representation of historical and particular events reaching deep into the realms of memory and trauma, hate and love, heroism and fear, cruelty and empathy. We will discuss the author/ filmmaker/ artist’s perspectives and methods and will engage in questions of ethics and moral choices in relation to the cultural artifacts we examine. Our main focus will be modern representations of war, but we will also discuss earlier periods and cultures for the sake of comparison. For projects, students will have the option to choose their topics, works, media and format (analytical paper, creative writing, a short documentary, creative film or a short podcast).

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Stahl, Neta
• Room: Krieger Laverty
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

What is feminism and what does it have to do with media culture? This question will be investigated in reference to such historical movements as the suffrage movement and current movements such as #metoo. We will also highlight the extent to which media technology might intrinsically help feminism, as could be argued with film animation and science fiction writing; or, rather, cases in which technologies hinder feminism, as when the pressures of social media negatively impact the social development of young women, particularly affecting the vulnerability of the female body.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Wegenstein, Bernadette
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

In a moment in time in which our very democracy at risk, this First-Year Seminar will investigate why democratic erosion is occurring, its ramifications, and how to address it. Led by Scott Warren, the co-founder and former CEO of Generation Citizen, a national civics education organization, and a current Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute, this seminar will be heavily discussion-based, relate to current events, and will explore the dynamics and interplay between the realities of democracy in the US and around the world, social entrepreneurship, social change, and policy. This course aims to introduce students to some of the most important issues and debates surrounding democratic consolidation and erosion around the world. Students will study different case studies of democratic erosion and social transformation (or proposed social transformation) from across the United States and world. We will also explore how movements across the world in response to authoritarianism and anti-democratic sentiment are driving the themes explored in the course.

• Days/Times: M 4:15PM - 6:45PM
• Instructor: Warren, Scott L
• Room: Krieger Laverty
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Every person has a life to live, but what is this thing, “a life”, that every person has? To begin with, it’s just the temporally extended existence of the person, the proverbial three score and ten. But a person’s life is more than that, because it follows a natural progression of life-stages, from childhood to adolescence to middle age to senescence. And it’s even more still, since it is partly the creation of the person living it, who can plan it, evaluate it, anticipate its future, and remember its past. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore these and other aspects of a person’s life through works of literature and philosophy. What makes you the same person throughout the different stages of your life? How does the passage of time color your perception of life? What makes for a good life? A meaningful life? Should you be grateful for having been born or dismayed at having to die?

• Days/Times: MW 10:00AM - 11:15AM
• Instructor: Velleman, David David
• Room: Gilman 413
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

What would a just form of democracy look like in a highly diverse society? What policies and laws should the state adopt to counter long-standing injustices, and how do they fit--or conflict--with the univeralist ideals on which liberal democracy is founded? In this course, we will try to answer these questions by discussing different philosophical views on topics from equity to free speech, and from cultural appropriation to lived experience.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Mounk, Yascha B
• Room: Gilman 413
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

In this seminar we’ll explore the many ways that contemporary poets tell stories, make music, and create meaning. We’ll read a wide range of contemporary lyric poems, and every week you’ll have the opportunity to apply what you’ve learned in fun, low-pressure writing exercises. (No previous poetry-writing experience required!) Planned activities include classroom visits by contemporary poets as well as off-campus trips to poetry readings around town.

• Days/Times: Th 10:30AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: Arthur, James P
• Room: Gilman 138D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

In this course we will ask why maps and mapping technologies have become useful – some would say central – to the pursuit of new knowledge. Do they clarify, simplify, amplify, organize, reveal unexpected connections, point the way forward, or severely complicate our thoughts and send us back to the drawing board? We will learn/review some GIS basics, and those among you with previous experience in these technologies will be welcome to contribute ideas and share skills (no previous experience is required). Over the course of the semester students will pursue their own group projects, developed in class discussions and visits to various mapping technology hubs around Hopkins, such as Geospatial Data and GIS technologies at Milton S. Eisenhower Library, brain mapping technologies at Biomedical Engineering, and approaches to mapping the heavens at the Space Telescope Science Institute. We will also ground ourselves in the Humanities by reading The Odyssey of Homer (trans. James Lattimore, any edition) and testing out various mapping techniques on the intersecting adventures of Odysseus, his son Telemachus, and his wife Penelope. A series of short close reading assignments on selected passages from The Odyssey will help to refine analytical and writing skills, and a final group or personal project report on a topic of your choice will address the (very) general subject of “How maps enhance, change, clarify or complicate ideas.

• Days/Times: W 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Patton, Elizabeth
• Room: Krieger Laverty
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Despite its association with distant regions and time periods, Islamic art has a flourishing presence in today’s America, represented by rich museum collections, modern buildings designed in historical styles, and vibrant scholarly networks. This seminar explores how we, from the vantage point of twenty-first-century Baltimore, might experience works of Islamic art in ways that are informed by their own cultural contexts while also acknowledging the challenges involved in bridging this gap. We will spend much of the course engaging with objects and architecture in person, with visits planned to the recently reinstalled Islamic galleries at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. You will be invited to handle artifacts in person and to try your hand at calligraphy, one of the most distinctive and esteemed Islamic artforms. In the classroom setting, we will read and discuss translations of primary sources written by historical practitioners and consumers of Islamic art, along with examples of modern scholarship that seek to understand the Islamic tradition from a variety of perspectives. As well as learning about such perspectives, you will be encouraged to develop and share—in presentations and written assignments—your own ideas about Islamic art, building on the close, firsthand encounters that run throughout the seminar.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Rustem, Unver
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

In this course we will read and analyze contemporary and historical literature about food. We will read prose and poetry by writers such as Toni Morrison, Chang Rae Lee, Naomi Shihab Nye, Wendell Barry, Gary Soto, Lee Young Li, and many more. Assignments will include creative writing exercises that draw from both research and personal experience.

• Days/Times: T 10:30AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: Snider, Bruce H
• Room: Gilman 138D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

From cellphones to electric cars, hydrogen cars, and windmills critical metals are needed. Will there be enough and where will they come from? We will discuss questions surrounding the exploration and ownership of metallic resources and their exploitation. Who benefits? Who is adversely affected? To address these questions, we look at individual critical metals and their exploitation in a variety of countries. Experiential investigations of critical metals will take place each Monday to provide material for weekly discussion each Wednesday. Some materials include Background knowledge: Craig, J. R., Vaughan, D. J. and Skinner, B. J. (2011) "Earth Resources and the Environment". Prentice Hall, 4th Edn., 508 pp. For investigations: Numerous papers in the literature such as Skinner, B. J. (1976). "Second iron age ahead." Amer. Sci. 64(3): 258-269. Gordon, R. B. et al. (2006). "Metal stocks and sustainability." Proc. Nat. Acad. Sciences 103(5): 1209-1214. Sullivan, D. E. (2006). Recycled cell phones-a treasure trove of valuable metals, Geological Survey (US) fact sheet https://doi.org/10.3133/fs20063097 . Sverdrup, H. U. et al. (2019). "On the long-term sustainability of copper, zinc and lead supply, using a system dynamics model." Resources, Conservation & Recycling: X 4: 100007. Plötz, P. (2022). "Hydrogen technology is unlikely to play a major role in sustainable road transport." Nature Electronics 5(1): 8-10.

• Days/Times: MW 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Sverjensky, Dimitri
• Room: Olin 204
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

How does language get entangled in our cultural and social understandings? How do we learn to locate a person correctly in a particular social class or ethnicity? This course aims to show the ways in which language is at the center of our daily interactions and our institutions. We will learn conceptual tools to examine the ways in which writers and leaders attempt to persuade their publics in important matters such as climate change, party politics, and religious differences.

• Days/Times: Th 10:30AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: Haeri, Niloofar
• Room: Greenhouse 113
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

Today's complex global issues, such as health, energy, or education, cannot be understood nor addressed from a single perspective or specialty. And yet too often, we are guided only by our own sets of assumptions and can lose track of what other areas of expertise embrace, value, and even achieve. Developing an interdisciplinary outlook is therefore crucial to helping students develop the skills that will enable them to lead future generations towards a better understanding of humankind and what it needs. In this First-Year Seminar, we will open a dialogue between disciplines in the sciences and in the humanities. Each class will be set up as a forum for discussion, bringing in specialists from a range of different disciplines, including Biology, Music, Mathematics, Literature, Public Health, and more. Together we will examine key word concepts from multiple perspectives, such as “time,” “image,” “money”, “positive,” “breaking point” and additional concepts determined by students. To support our examinations, we will read excerpts of works by scientific thinkers (Stephen Jay Gould, John Dewey, Paul Feyerabend, Albert Einstein, Bill Nye), fictional authors (Melville, Harper Lee, Shakespeare), films (Playtime, Gattaca, Interstellar) and documentaries (Brooklyn Bridge, Eiffel, Panama Canal). In addition to class discussions, we will pursue our investigations in other settings around the Baltimore and Washington D.C. area, such as the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Peabody Library, The Evergreen Museum, the Museum of Industry, and the Smithsonian. Here too, students will be encouraged to come up with their own suggestions. At the conclusion of the this First-Year Seminar, students will have learned to depart from conventional patterns of reasoning tied to specific areas of study and develop “out of the box” critical thinking skills to face our challenging, and continually changing, modern world.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Cook-Gailloud, Kristin
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

In 1952, British mathematician, biologist, cryptographer, and proto-computer scientist Alan Turing was prosecuted for “gross indecency,” ending his career. While Turing received a posthumous pardon in 2013, his persecution has left a long shadow on the visibility of LGBTQ+ people in science and engineering. What can we uncover about the contributions that LGBTQ+ people past and present have made to STEM? What can we learn about efforts to build greater inclusion for people with diverse genders and sexualities? What queer futures can we imagine? Students will hear from professionals and scholars from a variety of disciplines as we open STEM’s closet.

• Days/Times: TTh 3:45PM - 5:00PM
• Instructor: Falk, Michael L; Woolway, D Genevieve
• Room: Malone 128
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

While the COVID-19 pandemic may have produced an explosion of hoaxes and conspiracy theories unprecedented in modern times, inaccurate public conceptions of science are common across human history. In this seminar, we will examine historical examples to understand how misinformation spreads and identify its consequences for public trust in science. We will also analyze effective scientific communication from multiple genres, including popular scientific magazines, newspaper articles, journal articles, podcasts, and TED Talks, to discover what makes technical communication successful. Students will explore techniques they can use to combat scientific misinformation as well as communicate about significant issues in their own personal, academic, and professional lives. Open to all majors; no expertise required.

• Days/Times: MW 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Hilliard, Amanda Dawn
• Room: Bloomberg 168
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

The combination of engineering-design and the Social Sciences and the Humanities is not recent. In this combination, design stops being only a craft as it takes a strategic role for achieving change and innovation. This relationship began with the use of applied ethnographic tools for the development of interaction design (IxD/ UX) in software development: it has since transcended the computer towards the redefinition of social interactions. This course intends to set the theoretical and applied methodologies of cultural anthropology in combination with tangible design strategies. The tools portrayed will focus on making sense of social phenomena in relation with healthcare. AnthroDesign has the potential to provide a more ethical framework as well as relevant tools with which to deal explore developments that involve legal and ethical concerns deeply rooted in sociopolitical issues and human rights. In this journey, we will look through the eyes of an anthropologist and take actions with the hands of the designer.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Miranda Mendoza, Constanza
• Room: Shriver Hall 104
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12

From alternate facts to disinformation to evidence-based medicine, many in modern society argue that progress relies on decisions based on “evidence” to find “truth”, although approaches to weighing evidence vary greatly. This course will explore concepts related to the identification and evaluation of evidence, analyzing and contrasting approaches in different fields of study including law, regulatory science, laboratory science, and medical research. Students will learn to apply critical analytical skills when considering evidence presented by others, including “experts”, and to appreciate the challenges and pitfalls of making their own “best case”. Course work will consist of readings and viewings, small-group presentations, in-class discussions, and very short written submissions. Some material will include technical discussion of topics including statistics, data analysis, and experimental design, although no specific prerequisites will be required.

• Days/Times: MW 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Shade, Dave
• Room: Ames 218
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12