Courses

• KHC AS 101: The Pluto Saga: How Do You Become a Planet and Stay a Planet?
  This course will use the controversy over Pluto's status as a planet to explore the astronomical, cultural, political and religious aspects that become linked to science and societal issues. The central theme of the seminar is how to gather and evaluate evidence through writing and quantitative methods. We will examine the broad scope of how science proceeds in quantitative ways using methods of sampling and observations. Both telescopes and museum visits will help us better understand the role that visualization plays in describing how Nature works.
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• KHC CM 103: Constant Flux: Media and Communication from Telegraph to Twitter
  Students will explore the media environment and analyze the impact of technology and information on their lives. Studies will highlight the development of technology over time, assessing how governments, economies and social beliefs were changed in unexpected ways. Students will perform research that uses information from their academic majors as a foundation for examining the role media play in their lives and society. Assessing how the liberal arts, sciences, business and communication have changed with inventions such as the printing press, telegraph, television and computers will encourage students to consider the widespread impact of technology on the historical development of civilization.
• KHC EC 102: Blood and Money
  This interdisciplinary seminar will introduce students to the interaction among the promise of science, ethics, and economic reality by focusing on the very specific topic of blood. We will examine an outcome that in one respect was obviously catastrophic. We will seek to understand it from a scientific, historical, and economic perspective. We will study the basic science of two specific blood diseases, sickle cell anemia and hemophilia. We will discuss the history of the development or treatments from those diseases. With respect to the economic perspective, we will analyze the economic forces that caused key players in the historical drama to behave as they did and assess what lessons the episode teaches about the reliance on market outcomes and ways to try to seek to improve upon them.
• KHC EK 101: Engineering Light
  Students in this course will gain an appreciation for light and its use in three optical instruments: the eye, the microscope, and the telescope. They will study landmark discoveries concerning light, the development of various light sources, the scientific advances that led to our current understanding about the properties and characteristics of light waves and photons. The course includes weekly lectures and in-class laboratory exercises, several field trips, and a semester-long project. Students will engage in more than twenty hands-on experiments throughout the semester, to untwinkle the stars with adaptive telescopes, to measure the speed of light using parts hacked from a laser pointer, to make a light bulb like Thomas Edison's, to discover how engineers ruined -- and then fixed -- the world's first astronomical space telescope, and to use a high-resolution ophthalmoscope to see image photoreceptors and capillary blood flow in their own retinas.
• KHC HC 301: The Nature of Inquiry
  This course explores how we investigate nature, art, society and their interconnections. It does so by examining and juxtaposing the practices of three disciplines: history, natural science, and classics. Each section focuses on a specific problem in one of these fields while also considering the general questions of what we know, how we know it, and what knowledge means. Throughout the semester, we consider fundamental ethical, social, and aesthetic issues posed by the relationship of human beings to each other, nature, and works of art. The central concern in this class is to understand how and why people make decisions in complex circumstances; how they take or fail to take responsibility for their outcomes, and how they respond when gross mistakes are made by others or indeed by themselves.
• KHC HC 302: The Nature of Inquiry: Insight & Invention
  How do different disciplines help us understand society, art, and nature? This course attempts to bridge the gap between the arts, sciences, and professions, and between "pure" and "applied" knowledge by examining the differences and commonalities of different forms of knowledge. Consisting of six major units drawn from diverse fields, we focus on how practitioners approach specific problems in their areas of study. This exploration provides a basis for confronting the general questions: What do we know? How do we know it? What does knowledge mean? -- Thereby deepening our grasp of various forms of inquiry.
• KHC HC 401: The Process of Discovery
  This one-semester course explores the structure of the discovery process, focusing on how researchers embed imaginative questions in viable research projects and balance creative ambition with intellectual modesty. The course is designed to guide students through the challenge of designing their senior research projects through common readings of field-changing research across disciplines, individual and group project analysis, and intensive writing exercises. Together with KHC faculty and a faculty adviser of their own choosing, students will learn how to capture the explanatory power of an imaginative leap in clear language accessible to anyone outside their chosen discipline.
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• KHC HC 502: Innovation, Culture and Society 2
  This course builds on the principles and skills developed in KHC HC 501. The course will center around the completion of the Senior Keystone project.
• KHC HC 503: Keystone
  Innovation, Culture, and Society will be supplemented by a two-credit independent course that students take with their Keystone advisor. (2 credits, required both semesters)
• KHC HC 504: Keystone
  Innovation, Culture, and Society will be supplemented by a two-credit independent course that students take with their Keystone advisor. (2 credits, required both semesters
• KHC LW 102: Mar,Fam,Gen
  
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• KHC RS 103: History and the Novel
  A series of close readings of major modern works of fiction. Focus will be on such topics as the novel's effort to speak the truth of history, its status as unintended historical symptom, its occasional conflictual relation with history, its rivalry with music in the effort to distill an essence of time, and the notion of literary history itself.
• KHC ST 111: Studio I
  The studios foster writing, research, and quantitative skills by exploring fundamental ethical, aesthetic, and social issues. They focus on the themes and problems raised by provocative modernist texts drawn from literature, film, psychology, philosophy, and the arts.
• KHC ST 112: Studio II
  The studios foster writing, research, and quantitative skills by exploring fundamental ethical, aesthetic, and social issues. They focus on the themes and problems raised by provocative modernist texts drawn from literature, film, psychology, philosophy, and the arts.

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