If you are a bystander and witness a crime, should intervention to prevent that crime be a legal obligation? Or is moral responsibility enough? The course examines the bystander-victim relationship from multiple perspectives, focusing on the Holocaust and then exploring cases in contemporary society. Drawing on a wide range of historical material and interviews, the course examines the bystander during three distinct events: death marches, the German occupation of Holland, and the German occupation of Hungary. While the Third Reich created policy, its implementation was dependent on bystander non-intervention. Bringing the issue into current perspective, the course explores sexual assault cases at Vanderbilt and Stanford Universities, as well as other crimes where bystanders chose whether or not to act, and the resulting consequences. The course examines whether a society cannot rely on morals and compassion alone in determining our obligation to help another in danger and whether t we must make the obligation to intervene the law, and thus non-intervention a crime.

This upper division seminar focuses on the history of Christianity (outside of the United States) after 1960. During the past half century, a seismic shift has taken place global religion. Christianity has lost importance in Europe while becoming more prominent in the Southern Hemisphere. This course examines the secularizing trajectory of Western Europe and the concurrent rise of indigenous, "new," evangelical, and pentecostal churches in Latin America, Asian, and Africa. Mass media, international transportation, liberal capitalism, and shifting populations have enabled Christianity in much of the world. Since its inception missionary activities have made Christianity a "transnational" religion and describing its current condition is the focus of this seminar.

A two-semester fiction workshop wherein student writers read and analyze published novels while composing one of their own. Each writer will commit and be expected to complete a book length draft of a novel by the end of spring semester. Student writers should not be enrolled concurrently in another writing class. Enrollment is restricted to Sophomore, Junior or Senior level Honors students. Students will be admitted by permission of the professor.

In the ancient Greek world, the followers of Aristotle were called "peripatetics" for walking with their teacher under the peripatos (covered walkway) of the Lyceum just outside of Athens. City as Text is based on the same notion, that walking around a particular place leads to a deep type of experiential learning. This model is based on the work of David A. Kolb and Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin and involves four stages: concrete experience, observation and reflection, formation of abstract concepts and generalization, and testing implication of concepts in new situations. The text for this course will be a global city (e.g. London, Paris, Seoul, or New York City). Students will study a city through a series of mapping exercises, readings, reflections and writing assignments and immerse ourselves in the place in the effort to understand its urban form and history, the social realities it exposes, and the cultural life it embodies.

As a counterbalance to the loud and fast modes so predominant in today’s society, Radical Quiet proposes, explores and develops vital alternatives: quiet and slow ways of living, learning and appreciating our lives and the world around us. We will dig down to the radical root—the fundamental quality, meaning and aesthetics—of quiet. On top of a foundation of mindfulness, we will develop critical, creative and interpretive skills through deep listening (to sounds and music), slow looking (at art) and contemplative reading (of literature). Silence will be our teacher; music will include “the space between the notes” (Claude Debussy); and artistic concepts, structures and forms will be the architecture for our learning and experience. Cross-cutting themes will include (1) the quiet power of introversion and contemplation; (2) the environmental and social effects of noise; (3) the skill and practice of listening (to ourselves and others). Radical Quiet cultivates a classroom that equally values speaking and listening, so that each student may know in deep, profound and valuable ways.

This course focuses on personal privacy and addresses the challenge of protecting privacy in an age of information abundance. The course addresses how new technology, coupled with an emerging ethos of sharing as manifested by the explosive growth of social networking, has empowered government, business and individuals to monitor our everyday lives and collect, aggregate, use and sell personal information on a scale never before imagined. What is privacy? Does privacy no longer exist in our modern digital world or is it simply being redefined? Will drones, ubiquitous video cameras, GPS-enabled mobile devices, the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence usher in a new era of around-the-clock surveillance where our movements and activities are tracked by the government, businesses and our neighbors alike? Will facial recognition, DNA databases and other biometric technologies render anonymity as a thing of the past? Has our infatuation with sharing, as embodied by Facebook, X, You Tube, Instagram, Snapchat, Tik Tok and other social networking sites, fundamentally altered our definition of privacy? Will our increased concern with terrorism, domestic and foreign, trump our personal privacy? Will the government be able to effectively safeguard and regulate our personal privacy or does the responsibility rest with us as individuals? These and other questions will be addressed in the context of today’s personal privacy controversies arising from our increasingly global and digitized world.

Are people part of nature? In this course we will explore a variety of approaches taken by scientists and other experts to this question. Through the close reading of peer-reviewed articles, students will learn to articulate the scientific processes and philosophies that inform our understanding of the human relationship with the non-human world and deconstruct concepts that imply a separation between humans and nature. We’ll explore topics in ecology, conservation biology, anthropology, ecosystem services, environmental justice, complex systems, and more. Students will gain conceptual tools that will allow them to critically examine how perspectives on the human-nature relationship inform policy- and decision-making processes within governments, NGOs and the private sector. By linking social and ecological systems, we’ll build an interdisciplinary framework for imagining the future of humanity as ecological citizens.

We live in a rapidly changing world. Climate change, population growth, ecosystem disturbance, and transmissible diseases, for example, present global challenges that bridge traditional divides between the physical and social sciences. This honors course, Global Environmental Change, provides an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to global change phenomena. The course is targeted towards non-science majors. Complementary lectures and labs will be used to evaluate how the human and physical environments interact to create global changes. Lectures will convey the science behind different global change phenomena, with an emphasis on active discussions between students and the instructor. Labs will require students to test scientific models of global change phenomena, allowing them to gain insight on the abilities and limitations of modeling. Topics that will be covered in the course include an introduction to geospatial data and modeling, Earth’s energy budget and climates, global climate change and its impacts, population growth, migration and urbanization, ecosystem disturbance, water and energy resources, and natural hazards. Students will be evaluated using exams and lab exercises based on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis. Students will also present a final project on a global environmental change phenomenon to the class.

Short of physical harm, the United States Constitution allows individuals in their private lives to discriminate based on race, sex, religion or any other reason.  Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, however, prohibits workplace discrimination based on these same characteristics or any other “protected class” and requires an employer to protect employees from sexual and other types of harassment.  The Act has been expanded to include the Americans with Disabilities Act and Pregnancy Discrimination Act, among others.  How can the Federal Government reach into the workplace and require employees to treat each other in a certain manner, and what has been the economic and cultural impact of the law?  What are the social justice implications of the Federal Government’s long-arm reach, and how has the law changed the landscape of the American workplace?  What were the controversial circumstances that led to the passage of the Act, including how gender became part of the Act?  What are the implications of the recent additions of both sexual orientation and gender identity? What is the future of Title VII in the Trump, Post-Trump and Neo-Trump Era?

Using the creative essay as a vehicle for exploration, writers will craft pieces that explore the powerful human relationship to place. Particularly, we'll indulge the magic of new, foreign or strange environments, some of which are known but not yet seen. As a component of the class, student-writers will be asked to engage the seminal writing task of the ages: go somewhere new, be in awe, and write about it.