Добро пожаловать! Welcome to Explorations in Russian Language and Culture! In this course, you will learn the foundational structures of Russian. You’ll learn to read, write, and type in Cyrillic (Кириллица). By the end, you’ll be able to converse and write in basic Russian about yourself, your family, and daily life. Additionally, the course explores Russian culture. You’ll learn about daily life in Russia. You’ll also have a better understanding of its vast geography and diverse peoples. Lastly, the class will dedicate time to the exploration of important historical and political events that shaped Soviet and modern Russia.

What does fashion say about societal values, mores, culture, politics, and power structures? How do these concepts vary globally and over time? How does fashion speak to materiality and embodiment? How do we articulate our bodies and our selves—and how do we represent the body? When is fashion self-expressive, empowering, or just “fun”, and when is it restrictive or imposed? In this seminar, we consider fashion internationally, dress as an experience of the senses, cultural exchanges, fashion as free expression and as constraint (including some of the darker sides of fashion), and where fashion is trending globally.

As one of the best-selling toys of all time, Erno Rubik’s enigmatic cube has befuddled and entranced countless minds, permanently frustrating some and deeply inspiring others. Immediately recognizable to nearly everyone on Earth, it sets forth an intuitive challenge: put the scrambled cube back into its fully ordered state, where all like colors align with one another. However, this simple premise belies the rich mathematical complexity behind this object. The cube is a tangible example of one of the most powerful mathematical structures: a group. Combinations of moves and rotations permute the pieces in different ways, with the possibility of combining and reducing moves to construct more optimal solutions. In this course, we will learn the fundamental concepts of group theory and combinatorics, using the cube as a motivator for readings, discussions, and problems. Along the way, we will explore how results of group theory and combinatorics manifest in the cube. By the end, students will be able to prove that a cube can exist in over 43 quintillion states, compare different methods of solving, use group theory to construct their own algorithms, and learn how mathematicians proved that any scrambled cube can be solved in twenty moves or fewer - and why it took them over 30 years to do so.

Children have played games since the dawn of humankind, representing ways in which they had fun, socialized, learned norms, and collaborated—establishing social expectations, experiencing independence, creativity, and pushing behavioral boundaries. This course introduces anthropology (especially socio-cultural anthropology) as a field of study, applying it to understand the nature of play and games in various cultures/societies in diverse geographical regions and eras. We ask about the nature of childhood and play, and how similar games are realized in different ways—and what this tells us about other (and our own!) cultures. Students should come to class open to learning about other cultures and reading from challenging, scholarly materials.

This Advanced Seminar will explore the nature of sound, humanity's connection to it, and our evolution from the quiet past to the din of our modern world. As we have become more and more desensitized to noise — and in the process have forgotten how to “listen” — our relationship to sound has experienced a profound change. In examining this evolution, through readings, discussions, guided listening exercises, and other projects, this seminar will cover a broad range of disciplines, including Music, History, Science, Philosophy, Wellness and Global Studies.

This course examines engineering and physics principles as applied to living organisms and how organisms work. It is relevant for students interested in biology, physiology, medicine, design for humans, and biologically-inspired design and will cross those disciplines. Examples will include topics drawn from scientific literature, including bio locomotion, structural mechanics, biological fluid flow, neural control systems, animal and plant behavior, ecomechanics, evolution, systematics, and more.