Courses

• UHC AS 101: The Pluto Saga: How do you become a planet and stay a planet?
  The demotion of Pluto's status is used to explore the scientific, cultural, political, and religious implications of evidence in the 21st Century; the roles of visualization of Nature treated by observatory use and museum visits; writing and quantitative skills building.
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• UHC EC 101: Financial Crises: Past, Present, and Future
  The course will focus on six big problems -- the financial system, the healthcare system, the retirement system, the tax system, the environment, and inequality in a serial fashion. Each topic will feature several introductory lectures, group discussions, presentations by outside speakers, and the presentation of reform proposals by teams of students. There will be a heavy emphasis on international comparisons. The analysis of the specific topics will be proceeded with a general discussion of the status of the U.S. economy, its long-term fiscal policy, it's history of declining rates of saving and investment, its competitive position in the world, its environmental pressures, and its growing economic and social inequality.
• UHC EK 101: Engineering Light
  Engineers solve practical technical problems using an ever-evolving toolkit of modern technology. One of the most significant engineering advances of all time is optical imaging, the use of light-based technology to create representations of objects. In this course, students will learn how engineers make instruments that resolve structures as small as atoms, and as far away as the center of the galaxy. We will explore the common principles behind imaging instruments, and will probe new engineering advances that make it possible to see through "opaque" materials, to construct an invisibility cloak, and to seek earth-like extrasolar planets. Students will develop an understanding for challenges associated with microscopes that image deep within tissue for medical diagnosis and treatment, or night-vision goggles that allow seeing in the dark. The class includes lectures, interactive classroom activities, and hands-on laboratory exercises.
• UHC EN 101: Literature and Hunger
  The course will pursue the themes of hunger, the consumption of food, the formation of community, and relation to the sacred, through a sequence of readings in the Western Tradition. By reading classic works (The Odyssey the Book of Genesis, selections from the Divine Comedy, sonnets of Shakespeare, Paradise Lost) and modern works by Kafka, Mallarmé, Louise Glück, Frank Bidart, and M.F.K. Fisher, we will see how different philosophies (Greek pantheism, Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and modern atheism) have imagined the acceptance or rejection of love, life and the sacred in terms of the symbolism of food. Class work will include close analysis of literary works, even those in translation; intensive critical writing and revision; and secondary readings in literary criticism, anthropology, theology, and psychology.
• UHC FT 101: The Camera as an Agent for Social Change
  Each student in this seminar will research, write and produce a short film (five to ten minutes) about a social issue. The completed films will be launched on YouTube and Vimeo and linked to the most popular social media sites. Each film will seek to change the way people perceive that issue and will highlight ways in which positive changes can occur. No previous filmmaking skills are necessary; students will receive training as part of the course.
• UHC HC 301: Inst & Invtn 1
  
• UHC HI 101: War for the Greater Middle East
  This seminar will explore an alternative to the conventional grand narrative of twentieth century political history that, rather than focusing on Great Power competition for dominance in Eurasia, emphasizes the interaction between the West and the peoples of the Islamic world. In terms of chronology, the course will recount events since 1914. In terms of scope, it will focus on three specific zones of conflict: the Persian Gulf (emphasizing Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran; Palestine (that is, Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza); and Afghanistan and Pakistan.
• UHC HI 102: The Culture of World War I
  The Culture of World War I approaches this watershed moment in European history through works of literature, music, and art. The course's three chronological divisions: the lead-up to war, the experience of war, and its aftermath will include representative works from prominent composers, artists, novelists, and poets. Principal historical themes of the course are: the widespread conviction that war would cleanse and regenerate Europe; the brutally inglorious reality of trench conditions, chemical weapons, and the destruction of cultural patrimony; the ideals combatants held and the effects of events upon them; and the cultural landscape after the war. A textbook will ground discussions in events. Additional readings will include excerpts from memoirs, essays, interviews, and analyses.
• UHC HS 101: Cognition, Emotion and the Brain
  Cognition and emotion were classically thought to be represented separately in the brain but recent advances in brain research contradict this notion. Signals from brain pathways underlying emotion influence high-order brain association areas associated with cognition. In this seminar we will discuss evidence for the neural basis underlying the synthesis of cognition and emotion for decision and action, and dissociation of this process in several psychiatric diseases, including schizophrenia, autism and depression.
• UHC MA 101: Investigations in Number Theory
  Prerequisites are a solid background in high school algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, a healthy sense of curiosity about mathematical ideas, and a willingness to ask questions and work hard to answer them. Mathematical topics include: the fundamental theorem of arithmetic; elementary ring theory; unique factorization into irreducible elements, examples and counterexamples; probabilistic methods in the theory of prime numbers; the Riemann Hypothesis and why it matters. Strategies of mathematical investigation, including experimentation and observation, and the use of language as tool for investigation, will be a central theme of this seminar.
• UHC PH 101: The Artificial Heart and American Health Care
  American healthcare reflects four deeply-ingrained American characteristics: it is individualistic, technology-driven, death-denying, and wasteful. These characteristics make "reforming" American health care extremely contentious. No medical technology is as emblematic of American health care and culture as the artificial heart. An exploration of its 40 year history as reflected in American medicine, public health, law, bioethics, human rights, bioengineering, and economics helps explain both how the American "system" of health care works and why it is so difficult to change.
• UHC PH 102: Shifting Boundaries: Autism in the 21st Century
  In its fifth edition, forthcoming in 2014, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) may eliminate Asperger Syndrome as a separate diagnosis and subsume its features under the broader umbrella of Autism Spectrum Disorder. This likely change is proving highly controversial. Scientists disagree on whether different autism subtypes lend themselves to shared biomedical investigation; policy makers disagree on whether the educational, medical and social needs of persons with autism may be better served by a general label or by particularized diagnostic categories. This seminar adopts the current debate on the definition of autism as a privileged stand-point from which to explore the interconnection of society, science, and law in the 21st century.
• UHC PY 101: Energy
  Ours is an energy-intensive society. American energy consumption per capita is now over ten times what it was when our nation was founded, and the rest of the world is following our example. This is leading to increasingly severe worldwide problems such as competition for scarce resources, pollution, congestion and, most likely, global climate change. Many governments and industries are aware of these issues and numerous attempts at remediation (some sensible and some not) have been proposed or adopted. The goals of this seminar are to explain the underlying physical principles related to the production and consumption of energy and to use this knowledge to explore and to discuss matters such as energy conservation, the so-called hydrogen economy, electric cars, nuclear power (both fission and fusion), carbon sequestration, and the feasibility of various alternative energy sources.
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• UHC SM 101: The Secret Lives of Corporations
  Corporations are an integral part of our society and are highly influential in political, environmental and social arenas. We have all heard of oil spills, toxic dumping, and sweatshops, but the problems are deeper than these symptoms and are not widely understood. In this course you will learn the basic structure and functions of corporations as well as some of the darker secrets behind corporate practices. We then explore the ?new transparency movement? made possible by information technology, and the new market mechanism of ethical consumption it has spawned. Learn how collective consumer buying power is affecting which companies are more successful than others.
• UHC ST 111: First-Year Studio 1
  This first course in a two course sequence complements the other elements of the UHC curriculum by providing first-year students with a structured, curricular setting in which they can develop their abilities in writing, communication, and mathematics as well as their understanding of research methods and ethics. In the writing-and-communication component of the course, which meets weekly in the fall semester, students develop their abilities in written, visual, and verbal communication by sharing, discussing, and working on appropriate projects from other courses or co-curricular activities. Students receive explicit instruction in argumentation, prose style, and citation conventions, as well as an introduction to the library and the use of online catalogues and databases.
• UHC VA 101: Art for the City
  Public works of art provide enduring and powerful means of communication. In this research seminar students will examine contemporary practices of creating public art in the city. The course will investigate how public art addresses significant social, political, and moral issues of our time. Students will investigate public art in the city of both a temporary and permanent nature as the main body of research in this course
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