Environmental History

What are our moral obligations to other animals? Should non-human animals have legal rights and moral standing? If so, on what basis? How does the moral treatment of animals change across the contexts of food, research, captivity, and the home? Historically, western philosophers construct the animal in opposition to the human. Why? What is an “animal” and why is the “human” contrasted with it? How does language shape and produce our relationships with animals? How is the animal represented and characterized, and how does this representation impact our thinking about animal ethics?

This discussion-based course explores the relationships between humans and non-human animals. Drawing on fiction, philosophy, and ethology, we will examine our beliefs and assumptions regarding animals, human-animal relations, and the ethical implications of the human-animal binary. This course will focus on a wide range of theoretical approaches, including the traditions of animal liberation and animal rights as articulated by thinkers such as Tom Regan and Peter Singer, the growing field of animal studies as represented by thinkers like Jacques Derrida, and current debates in practical ethics, such as animal experimentation, hunting, and invasive species.

Upon completion of the course, students will have refined their understanding of the concept of the animal and they will be familiar with the key legal and ethical debates regarding human-animal relationships. Course requirements include class discussions, weekly writing exercises, a midterm exam, and a final paper or project. Students should come to this class prepared to read challenging philosophical essays and to share their ideas with others.

This course introduces students to the molecular and cellular processes that are essential for life. We will initially cover some basic chemistry to develop a common language for discussing the complex molecular events that are the basis of the structure and function of cells. This class will explore cellular processes involved in metabolism, communication, growth, and reproduction. There is a strong emphasis on the understanding the genetic basis of these processes as well as how these processes are controlled, and we will delve into the structure and function of the DNA molecule in some detail. We will examine how our understanding of genetic processes and genome sequencing has led to applications in research, medicine, agriculture, and industry, with time also devoted to discussion of the social and ethical consequences attached to these technological innovations. Students will be evaluated on participation, performance on problem sets and quizzes throughout the term, and a final oral presentation.

This is one half of a 20-week, two-term introductory course in biology, providing an overview of the discipline and prerequisite for many intermediate and advanced biology courses. The course will emphasize biological structures at the level of whole organisms and organs and their role in the survival and reproduction of individuals and the evolution of populations . We will explore principles of evolution, classification, anatomy and physiology, epidemiology, behavior, and basic ecology. The primary focus of the course is on vertebrate animals and vascular plants, but we will make forays into other phylogenetic lineages at intervals. Weekly field and laboratory studies introduce students to the local range of habitats and a broad array of protists, plants, and animals. Attendance at two lectures and one lab each week is required; course evaluation is based on class participation, exams, preparation of a lab/field notebook, and a presentation. It should be stressed that this course emphasizes the unity of the organism within its environment. Ideally students will subsequently enroll in Biology:Cells and Molecules in order to further their exploration of issues in a more reductionist form, but neither course is a pre-requisite for the other.

This course will provide students with a toolbox of techniques in statistical analysis, with a focus on the biological sciences. Students will learn how to choose and apply a variety of widely used statistical tests, how to design experiments and studies with statistical analysis in mind, and how to use a range of specialized statistical approaches for data types frequently encountered in the biological sciences. The methods we will cover include parametric and nonparametric tests; approaches designed for categorical, ordinal, and continuous data; biodiversity statistics and ordination methods; Bayesian vs. frequentist inference; and robust experimental design. The class will highlight the assumptions involved in statistical inference and the conditions that must be met in order to use statistical tests appropriately. In the lab, students will use the statistical programming language R to explore, display, and analyze data using the methods covered in class. By the end of the term, students should be able to choose appropriate analytical methods for a wide range of data types, design statistically valid experiments, and write code for basic statistical tests in R. Students will be evaluated based on daily homework assignments, weekly lab work, several take-home exams, and a final group presentation based on an original analysis of an archived data set chosen by the students. Note: each student should have a laptop for lab (PC preferred; limited support will be provided for Mac users). Contact the instructor if you do not have your own laptop.

This is the first half of a two-term sequence designed to help students describe and understand properties of materials. The course first explores how atomic and molecular structure relates to the physical properties of materials and their reactivity. The course explores the reasons, rates, and outcomes of chemical reactions. Course material is applied to better understand living systems, the natural environment, and industrial products. The course meets for three hours of lecture/discussion and for three hours of lab each week. Students are strongly urged to take both terms of this course. Evaluations are based on class participation, lab reports, and quizzes.

This is the second half of a two-term sequence designed to help students describe and understand properties of materials. This course begins with a survey of how the internal structure of atoms leads to the formation of different sorts of bonds between them. It then considers how weaker forces can arise between molecules and the sorts of physical phenomena that such forces explain. The class concludes by considering how to describe and explain the rates at which (and the extents to which) chemicals reactions occur and applies such descriptions and explanations to common types of reactions (acid/base and redox). Throughout the course, examples are drawn from living systems, the natural environment, and industrial products. The course meets for three hours of lecture/discussion and for three hours of lab each week. Chemistry 1 is a strongly recommended a prerequisite for this course. Evaluations are based on class participation, homework, midterm and final exams and a term project or paper.

This course introduces the basics of statistical analysis that can be used in either a scientific or a social science frame of reference. While this course teaches you to perform both nonparametric and simple parametric analysis both by hand and computer, an emphasis will be placed on understanding the principles and assumptions of each test, rather than mathematical ability per se. We will also learn how to report statistical results in journal format, and there will be plenty of lab time to sharpen skills. Evaluation is based on lab participation, three quizzes, and a team project.

Families are a touchstone of many people’s identity, and stories about where we come from and who came before us are often key ways of orienting ourselves and understanding who we are. Storytelling, documentary and photographic collections, and other methods of preserving memories serve as the very concrete ways that many of us come to learn about our immediate family and our ancestors. New techniques of genetic testing provide a method that can contribute to that understanding and in some cases fill in blanks left about ancestors and provide a new source of stories in addition to those passed along from generation to generation. Recreational DNA testing can also provoke discussion about how to make sense of the genetic stories revealed and how they mesh with or challenge people’s sense of themselves. This class will explore the traditional methods of collecting family histories (oral history, genealogical research) and recreational genetic testing as a point of entry into complex issues around history, memory, ethics, race and the role of new technologies. Students will learn the basic skills of doing genealogical research as well as develop an understanding of the strengths and limitations of human genetic testing, which can reveal our shared history as well as our differences. Evaluation will be based on class participation, short assignments, and a final project. The expectations surrounding the final project explain why this course is designated as intermediate even though there are no specific pre-requisites. Students will be expected to conceptualize, plan and carry out their own projects, and they will be evaluated on their ability to self-direct, seek feedback and complete those projects. This class is appropriate for a wide range of students with diverse interests concerning identity and history.

What is the meaning of death? What is the nature of the soul or self? What happens after death? Is death bad? Would it be good to live forever? How does thinking about death change our thinking about life? The purpose of this course is to compel students to think philosophically about the many profound questions that arise in the face of death. We will read theoretical essays, short stories, memoirs, and a novella to explore topics such as the following: evolving definitions of life and death, immortality, nothingness, the afterlife, physician-assisted suicide, the ethics of killing, the death Peñalty, biotechnologies, cryonics, grief, corpses, and artistic depictions of death. Although we will engage with religious, legal, and medical perspectives, philosophy is the primary disciplinary framework for this class. There are no prerequisites for this course, but students should be prepared to engage and discuss challenging philosophical literature that requires careful and critical reading. Students will be evaluated on the basis of weekly writing assignments, midterm essays, a final paper, and class participation.

Bioethics studies ethical problems that occur in medical practice and the life sciences. Contemporary bioethics is an expansive and fundamentally interdisciplinary field, but this course will consider key dilemmas in bioethics from a philosophical perspective. More specifically, we will explore how bioethical issues complicate our concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, life and death, and the human and the natural.

We will begin with a quick overview of prominent ethical theories and we will consider the possibility of transcultural bioethics. Secondly, we will address the ethical and philosophical questions raised by the following topics: abortion, birth, population, reproduction, cloning, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, resource allocation and organ donation, human research ethics, genetic engineering, the doctor-patient relationship, and medical decision making. Throughout the duration of the term, we will consider how different ethical frameworks shape our assessment of contemporary moral dilemmas.

This course will introduce students to the principles of ethical thinking, familiarize students with pressing debates in bioethics, and compel students to discuss issues that are politically and socially contentious. Course requirements include engaged class participation, three short papers, a presentation, contributions to online discussion documents, and a final paper. There are no prerequisites for this course, but students should be prepared to engage complex, theoretical essays that require careful and critical reading.

Buildings account for nearly 40% of global carbon emissions. Sixty percent of Maine homes are heated with heating oil, the highest percentage of any state, and Mainers spend more than a billion dollars on heating oil each year. Improving the efficiency of our homes and buildings is essential for transitioning away from fossil fuels and reducing carbon emissions.

In this course, students will learn how to safely transition buildings away from fossil fuels. This includes understanding the science of energy and moisture movement through a building, how to monitor carbon monoxide and other harmful combustion gases, and methods to reduce energy loss, while maintaining comfortable levels of humidity and fresh air. Students will gain proficiency measuring air leakage with a blower door, using an infrared camera to assess insulation levels, calculating heat loss, and identifying solutions and best practices to develop a plan of action for homeowners.

They will also learn about high efficiency mechanical systems like air source heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, and how to assess lighting and appliance electrical usage. Students will learn how to carry out cost calculations for energy savings and research and share information on rebates and incentives available for homeowners. This will be a very hands-on course, with weekly labs to teach energy auditing field skills. This course will include presentations from local energy contractors, and students will participate in energy audits of residential buildings on or off campus. Through these experiences, students will meet and interact with home performance businesses and non-profit organizations in the local community. As time and weather conditions permit, students will gain experience implementing efficiency solutions such as insulation and air sealing.

Students who successfully complete this course will be able to conduct energy audits for homes, identify cost-effective improvements, and prioritize energy improvements to maximize energy savings. This course will provide students with the tools and experience to reduce building energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in a holistic, whole-building approach.

Evaluation will be based on completion of assignments, participation in class discussions, and mastery of field skills.

This class will explore general weather and climate patterns on global, regional, and local scales. We will discuss the major forcings driving global climate fluctuations – on both long (millions of years) and short (days) timescales, including natural and anthropogenic processes. We will also learn about basic meteorology and the processes producing some common spectacular optical weather phenomena (rainbows, coronas, cloud-types, etc). Students will complete a term project comprising a photo-documentary journal of the different weather phenomena they observe during the 10-week term. The field component of this course will be self-guided through the observation and documentation of weather phenomena. Who should take this course: No prior geology/science experience is needed – but expect to do a bit of basic math in this course! The course level is intermediate because it will not cover foundational principles of geology (or other sciences) but instead the course will be integrative and require students to practice both their quantitative and qualitative skills. Take this course if you are passionate or curious about climate change, but do not know much about the science of climate and weather!

Climate change is one of the biggest and most difficult challenges faced by contemporary societies. The challenge has multiple facets: environmental, social, political, economic – each with its own complexities. This course focuses primarily on the social, political and economic components of the climate problem, framed by the concept of climate justice. In the course students are introduced to basic conceptions of justice, the latest findings of climate science and possible impacts on regional scales, and the global politics of climate change, principally in the context of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Climate justice and its operationalization is the principal organizing theme for work over the term, addressing questions such as: how the costs of climate change impacts and efforts to address climate change could or should be distributed between rich and poor, global north and global south; and what are the possible means whereby those costs might be addressed through collective action at various levels: local, national, and global. Students will be evaluated based on regular quizzes, several short papers, class participation, and a final synthetic paper or project.

We typically think of cities as centers of political and economic power, social vibrancy (and tension), and cultural richness, diversity and production. This course explores ecological “readings” of cities, landscapes transformed irrevocably due to human activities and the introduction of unprecedented concentrations of “unnatural” substances and significant loss of biological and hydrological integrity. The course also examines processes by which cities have transformed surrounding regional landscapes as both “wells” of resources and “sinks” for waste and the planetary scale environmental impacts of urban growth in the contemporary global economy. Following a succinct historical survey in the first part of the class (with focus on the interrelated forces of industrialization, colonization and explosive urban growth in the nineteenth century), we will look to recent efforts to reimagine cities such that they are more “ecological.” These efforts come in a variety of forms from “city as refugia” (establishing habitat for nonhumans) to “novel ecosystems” (working with new concentrations of contaminants and colonization of non-native biological communities) to cities as settings in which closed-loop, ecologically inspired systems drive processes of development. Of concern related to all of these ecological urbanisms is that conversion of city landscapes from grey to green and blue can lead to ever greater levels of inequality. In the final section of the course, we will speculate as to ways to intervene in cities-as-ecosystems that build on commitments to both social justice and ecological replenishment, bringing into relation the flourishing of humans and nonhumans in urbanized environments. Evaluations will be based on class participation and sustained engagement with the core themes: attendance, demonstration of close readings of texts, contributions to group discussions (including listening), honing of collaborative capabilities, and commitment to an iterative process with the three course projects (the last of which will be worked on in teams) that involve succinct compositions of written narratives and diagrams and other visual representations (multiple graphics workshops will be structured into the class).

How has human history shaped and been shaped by “the environment”? Environmental history is one of the most exciting new fields in history. In this course we examine world history from Mesopotamia to the present to see the role such things as resource scarcity, mythology, philosophy, imperialism, land policy, theology, plagues, scientific revolutions, the discovery of the new world, the industrial revolution, etc. on the natural, social, and built environments.

Environmental harms and benefits fall in predictable patterns across our bodies and landscapes, tracing lines of inequality that are embedded deep within our colonial history and modern societal structures. Environmental justice as a field of study represents an attempt to uncover and understand those patterns by drawing connections between harm and broader practices, laws, and procedures by state and private actors. It is also a study of resistance to harm, often led by those in marginalized communities, but increasingly led by more reluctant activists who find themselves on the losing side of capitalism’s growing list of externalities, from pollution, pipelines, and extraction to land degradation and climate collapse.

In this foundational course, we will navigate frustration and accomplishment, despair and hope, and the boundaries around what’s broken, and what may still be fixed, in our movement toward a more desirable future for life on earth. The course will draw on philosophy (e.g., John Rawl’s Theory of Justice), history and contemporary politics (e.g., Nina Lakahni’s Who Killed Berta Cáceres), and sociological theory (e.g., Naomi Klien’s Shock Doctrine) to ground specific case studies and bring context to their development so that students may begin to see what drives environmental injustice and response.

This course will be of value to students at all levels interested in bridging social theory with contemporary problems so that they may develop deeper analysis of and more sustainable solutions to ongoing environmental and social problems. Over the course of the term, we will pair readings and in-class discussion with the development of a “braided narrative” that brings together lived experiences and deep research. Students will be evaluated through a combination of self-assessment, written assignments, and in-person engagement.

Glaciers are rapidly retreating around the planet and predicted to continue this trend in the coming centuries. The decline of the world’s ice sheets and mountain glaciers will impact sea level, infrastructure, and fresh-water resources for communities around the world. To put current changes into a long-term geologic context, students will learn the processes, landforms, and impact of glaciers on the Earth’s surface as the planet has cycled through ice ages. This course is designed to provide students with a solid understanding of the dynamic interactions between ice, climate, landscapes, and humans over varying spatial and temporal scales. In addition, we will cover the basics of glaciology and the physics that influence the structure, size, and movement of ice. Through class discussions and assigned problem sets, students will reinforce the content covered in lectures. In addition, this course will give students hands-on experience with tools and methods commonly used to study glaciers and ice sheets (such as: ground-penetrating radar, LiDAR, rock sampling for cosmogenic analysis). This course will have various field trips during class time on Mount Desert Island to explore how an ice sheet shaped the region’s landscape during the Last Glacial Maximum. Students will be evaluated on weekly problem sets and readings and a final project and presentation related to this history of glaciation in Maine.

Level: Introductory. Prerequisites: None. Class limit: 14. Lab fee: $50. Meets the following degree requirements: ES.

This course will explore the rapidly expanding field of marine environmental history and historical studies that focus on fish and fisheries. Recent methodological and conceptual work as well as growing interest in the history of these topics driven by conservation and policy issues has made this an important and innovative field. Using the work of a variety of scholars from different fields the class will explore how historical accounts can be constructed with an emphasis on the types of available sources, the use of evidence, and how each author builds their argument. We will explicitly compare the methods, use of evidence and other aspects of different disciplinary approaches to the topic to highlight the strengths and limitations of each approach. This dimension of the class is particularly interesting because of the dynamic and interdisciplinary nature of scholarship right now that brings a wide range of research into dialogue. Students will learn about the history of oceans and fishes by looking at how historians and other scholars frame their works and make their arguments. Students will be evaluated on their preparation for discussion, mastery of the material, short written assignments, and a final project made up of a presentation and essay. This course is appropriate for students with interest in history, community-based research, marine studies, and environmental policy. Students who are just curious and interested in lots of things are also most welcome.

In this course students will learn content and skills so that they can participate effectively in sustainable energy projects, make personal and community decisions that reduce carbon emissions, and work in ventures in sustainable energy. Additionally, this course will be useful for those interested in energy and climate policy, either internationally or domestically. We will begin with a quick overview of current CO2 emissions levels and look at how this is related to energy use. We will then turn our attention to basic ideas from physics, including the definition of energy and the difference between energy and power. The bulk of the course will consist of a survey of different forms of energy consumption and generation. Throughout, we will quantitatively analyze technology from both a local and global point of view. For example, we will calculate how much electricity one can generate on a rooftop, and we will also examine the role that solar PV could play toward the goal of eliminating fossil fuel use worldwide. In a unit on financial mathematics, students will learn about the time value of money and several ways of quantifying investments, including ROI (return on investment) and IRR (internal rate of return). Students will apply these financial tools in several short case studies. If time permits, we may also cover negative emissions technologies and the electrical grid, including grid stability issues and the potential of smart-grid technology. This will be a demanding, introductory, class. Evaluation will be based on weekly problem sets.

This class offers an introduction to plant biology centered around plants that are useful to human societies. We will explore plant anatomy, physiology, evolution, and ecology through case studies involving plants that are useful to humans. Through lectures, readings, and discussions, students will gain a rich understanding of how plants function and how human societies depend on them in myriad ways. We will cover universal and familiar uses of plants such as food, building materials, and textiles, as well as less widely practiced uses including arrow poisons, lacquers, and living fences. We will discuss the origins of agriculture and methods of plant breeding, as well as the biogeographical history of important cultivated plant lineages. The focus will be on plants and our uses for them, but we will also discuss ethical concerns surrounding practices like bioprospecting and ex situ conservation. Students will be evaluated on participation and the successful completion of two presentations and a research paper.

Carbon is the building block of life. It is also central to one of the most critical challenges of this century: climate change. Combustion of fossilized carbon leads to the increase in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide that threaten life across the planet. Trees and other living organisms that store carbon are celebrated as solutions to the growing crisis, yet rampant destruction of these carbon stores continues unabated. The global management of carbon and its impacts includes projects to decarbonize economies and recarbonize ecologies, as well as fantastical technofixes for carbon removal and blocking the sun. Who will decide how much fossil carbon ultimately gets burned? How much land will be claimed by global elites to soak up their continued fossil emissions, and where will it be located? What role do carbon markets and geoengineering play in addressing or perpetuating fossil economies? These are some of the questions we will explore. In the course we use several different theoretical lenses that look at intersections of institutions, nature, economy, and power (critical geography, political ecology, political economy) to understand more deeply the political, economic, and ecological relationships that emerge around forms of carbon (fossil fuels, trees and landscapes, monoculture plantations) in the context of global efforts to address climate change. Topics to be covered include the carbon cycle; carbon markets; climate models; geoengineering and carbon dioxide removal; international climate treaties and global politics of governing carbon; and carbon democracy and fossil capital. The aim of the inquiry, and what students should expect to take away from the course, is a broader and deeper understanding of global political economies and local political ecologies of climate change and carbon.

Readings will come from academic as well as non-academic literature from think tanks, non-governmental organizations, and social movements. Core course texts will include Carbon Democracy by Timothy Mitchell and Overshoot by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton. The course will be conducted in a lecture-seminar format, with emphasis on class discussion of readings and lecture material. Students will be evaluated based on engagement in class discussions, regular writing assignments and problem sets, and a final project or synthetic essay.

Students will participate virtually and/or in-person in the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In-person attendance is optional.

This is a hands-on, project-based class in which students will collaboratively plan for and participate in all aspects of renewable energy projects on College of the Atlantic’s campus. Examples of projects include installation of a solar photovoltaic array, airsealing and insulating one of the college’s buildings, or planning and installing a greenhouse heating system. Students will learn how to take a project from design through fruition while navigating the various phases of the project lifecycle including operation and maintenance. The course will begin with an overview of existing technology and an analysis of the current energy generation and consumption data for the project site(s). The class will then plan the project and present this plan to the community. As part of this planning process, students will learn about the economics of renewable energy systems, including return on investment (ROI), internal rate of return (IRR), and related quantities. Students who successfully complete this class will gain the skills necessary to conceptualize, plan for, finance, and implement renewable energy projects. Evaluation will be based on several short presentations, problem sets, and active and effective participation in all aspects of the project. Default grade is Credit/No Credit.

This is an intermediate/advanced reading seminar focused on contemporary, experimental, and speculative political ecologies. Readings will include books, dissertation manuscripts, and scholarly articles. The course is designed to allow students to explore intersections between their own individual and collective intellectual interests and endeavors and political ecologies. The course will be a collective intellectual endeavor conducted through conversation and written reflections, including through regular interaction on an online blog. Evaluation will be based on participation in real-time and blog conversations, including twice-weekly reflective blog postings; leading several class discussions; and a final synthetic essay on a topic of their choosing.

Does nature have rights? There is a growing global movement answering that question in the affirmative. But what does that mean and how does it function in legal and political systems? The Rights of Nature (RoN) movement(s) has the potential to revolutionize environmental law and our relationship to the planet. Many believe that existing environmental law is inadequate to solve the critical problems of climate change, habitat loss, and mass extinction. The RoN movement proposes strategies that include granting rights to nature through legal personhood and assigning property rights to rivers, culturally important plants, specific animals, and wildlife. The course explores both the promise and perils of this approach while also exploring the field’s multifarious origins, including Indigenous Law. By examining the concepts of rights, constitutionalism, standing, human rights law, and eco-centric law, students will gain an understanding of the context of the RoN movement. Although a powerful rhetorical concept, implementation of RoN as a legal strategy has been challenging and has met with mixed success. Fundamental questions of “who speaks for the trees” and what obligations are conferred when rights are granted are slowly being worked out in courts and national legislatures. These questions are particularly challenging where Western and Indigenous worldviews come together. Fundamentally, this seminar will explore what it takes to recognize the inherent rights of the natural world to “exist, thrive, and evolve.” Students will be evaluated through several written assignments, class presentations, and active and meaningful participation in seminar discussions. Students will be asked to engage in a term-long research project that examines a specific RoN case study.

Over 90% of today’s terrestrial flora are seed plants and provide the majority of the ecological energy across the world. Today the majority of the human population is dependent on the energy and nutrients stored in the seed of a remarkably few crops that arose through the breeding and saving of seeds. Today this critical interdependence is rich with questions and at are at the center of the food security and food sovereignty debates. Some questions of this human-plant co-evolutionary story to be addressed in this course are: How is crop breeding done in different parts of the world? What are the techniques for breeding, seed saving, and storage? What traits are selected for in traditional and modern breeding? What role do seed banks and libraries play in our common future? What are the current laws governing seed quality and ownership? How do these laws and treaties structure corporate consolidation, community initiatives, and possible mechanisms for developing crops in the face of global climate change? What is the “free the seed movement” and why might it be important? The second major debate to be explored will be the ethical and ecological implications of the “assisted migration” of wild plants as a means of conservation and adaptation to global climate change and the replacement of horticultural materials with wild plants as means for expanding native habitat corridors. We will contextualize these two major themes with an in-depth look into the biology of seeds as well as the ecological and evolutionary significance of seeds. In preparation for required attendance at the Organic Seed Alliance conference, laboratory exercises will cover seed dormancy and germination, and build skills in hand pollination and trait selection. Evaluation will be based on class participation, leadership in seminar discussions, quizzes, a group report on the Organic Seed Alliance Conference, and the development of a final project based on one or both of themes in the course.

We live in a world of problems . . . global warming, inequality, discrimination, child labor, slavery, waste, species extinction, domestic violence and a myriad of other issues occupy the headlines, courses and can feel overwhelming at times. Unfortunately, we rarely here about solutions, let alone have the opportunity to create our own solutions for the issues that concern us and inspire us to action.

Changing the world takes more than a critical eye for what is wrong, proselytizing a good idea and hope. There are many factors which contribute to creating social change and in this course we explore what it takes to be a successful change maker in our communities, and thus in the world. Reversing the lens we use to approach the problems of the world is part of what a Human Ecologist needs to do to understand our challenges:

“…social entrepreneurs are uniquely suited to make headway on problems that have resisted considerable money and intelligence. Where governments and traditional organizations look at problems from the outside, social entrepreneurs come to understand them intimately, from within.” — David Bornstein, How To Change The World

In this experiential, project-based course students will select a specific problem they would like to solve. Students will perform thorough research into a problem of their choosing, understanding it from within by identifying root causes and other exacerbating factors as well as investigating positive deviance and what people around the world are doing to solve this issue. Through these projects and other readings, students will examine a myriad of problems around the world and look at different strategies people are using to tackle them and create positive social change. The final project for the course will be a concrete proposal for solving the problem they selected. Students will be evaluated based on their performance, participation and the quality of the projects they produce over the course of the term.

This seminar serves as a design primer for human and environmentally friendly approaches to the design of the built environment captured by the term “sustainable architecture.” We will consider the different and sometimes competing understandings of what sustainable architecture means (for it is not one homogenous thing), discussing and evaluating these various “logics” from the standpoint of performance (energy efficiency and reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions for example) as well as from the perspective of aesthetics and architectural meaning. We will deconstruct and investigate building systems in the first half of the class: landscape and site systems; water; heating, cooling and ventilating (with a strong focus on passive or natural systems); and building materials, envelope, and construction. We will then discuss integrated building systems, that is to say, design strategies for achieving synergies between systems so the sum is greater than the parts (arguably the overarching goal of sustainable design). Exposure to and analysis of case study projects and guest talks by cutting edge contemporary practitioners will enrich our understanding of the current state of sustainable architecture and promising directions now under research and development.

This course does not require previous coursework in architecture and design, only interest in design and sustainability, curiosity as to their intersections, and overall commitment to the acquisition of basic architectural literacy skills that will be of value in multiple arenas and capacities (as future designer, client, advocate, critic, concerned citizen, other). Evaluations will be based on participation and sustained engagement with course material and content, maintenance of a sketchbook that combines notes and simple illustrations (diagrams), short quizzes to assess understanding of core sustainable design principles and strategies, and analysis of case study projects through a framework we will introduce in the first part of the class.

This course explores politics of the terrestrial, of the earth and its defenders, through lenses of both theory and practice. Through their writings and, where possible, in direct conversation, we interact with activists and movements involved in struggles to protect earth, land, livelihoods, and community, and those actively working to build alternatives to ways of being in the world that they are struggling against. We also read theoretical reflections on these struggles, drawing from scholars in the fields of political ecology, political ontology, and political economy, among others. Locally rooted activities take place within global economic and political contexts – markets, international treaties, and other spaces and places where local and global come into contact, where ontologies collide, and where different forms of power are produced and interact across distances. Course materials and discussion will explore these global contexts, concrete ways and means by which economic and political power is contested in these spaces, and ongoing experiments with and strivings toward a different world, one where many worlds may fit. Topics explored include resistance against mining and other extractive industries, pipeline fights, land grabbing for agro-industrial expansion, carbon and biodiversity offset markets, and geoengineering. Evaluation in the class will be based on preparation for and participation in class discussions, regular reflective essays on readings, and a final extended essay, presentation, or podcast on some aspect of terrestrial politics.

Thermodynamics is the area of physics concerned with the behavior of very large collections of particles. Examples include the water molecules in glass of water, the electrons in a wire, or the photons given off by a light bulb. Thermodynamics studies properties of collections of particles that are largely independent of the particles’ detail, for example, the tendency for heat to flow from a hot object to a cold one.

This course will begin with a treatment of the first law of thermodynamics and basic thermal physics. Topics to be covered include the conservation of energy, heat and work, the ideal gas, the equipartition of energy, heat capacities, and latent heat. We will then move to the second law of thermodynamics, beginning with a statistical definition of entropy. This will require learning some combinatorics (a mathematical technique for counting) and approximation methods for working with very large numbers. This statistical approach will enable us to understand the origin of the second law of thermodynamics, and will lead naturally to statistical definitions of temperature, pressure, and chemical potential. We will then turn our attention to two broad areas of application. The first of these is heat engines and refrigerators, including heat pumps. The second set of applications involve free energy and chemical equilibrium. Depending on student interest, we will cover batteries and fuel cells, phase transitions, adiabatic lapse rates in meteorology, and nitrogen fixation. Thermodynamics is a broadly applicable field of physics, and so this course should be of relevance to students whose interests are in almost any area of science or engineering, as well as those who wish to gain a general introduction to a field that is one of the pillars of modern physical science. Evaluation will be based on weekly problem sets and a final research paper, presentation, or lab project.

This course investigates an ecological design approach that centers on water and water systems as a means of achieving community development goals in an equitable and environmentally responsive manner. Participants will investigate contemporary water challenges facing communities (the combination of which varies from location to location): scarcity, poor water quality, downstream ecological impacts associated with processes of urbanization, climate change and sea level rise, and others. We will examine and reframe these challenges through the lens of the “hydro-social,” a term geographers use to describe how cultural perspectives shape our relationships to water (in other words, water is more than simply H2O). Through use of case study project examples, we will explore how combinations of age-old (premodern and vernacular) water systems design strategies and cutting-edge approaches can lead to projects of greater resilience, ecological responsiveness, beauty, and civic identity than more conventional, engineered, “end-of-pipe” solutions. We will lastly explore how these strategies might apply to a case study watershed that we will investigate in the last portion of the class. The course does not require previous experience in design; rather it is intended to engender greater awareness of how systems-based design thinking can allow us to address contemporary hydro-social challenges holistically. Evaluations will be based on participation and sustained engagement with course content; responses to this material in the form of short, illustrated essays that combine written narratives with simple diagrams, photographs, and sketches; analysis of case study projects through a framework we will introduce in the first part of the class; and a “final synthesis” assignment that involves speculating about the application of strategies and approaches discussed throughout the class to the case study watershed.

How have schools changed and how should schools change to ensure “the good life”? This interdisciplinary, team-taught course examines the potential and limits of a human ecological education as an instrument of enlightened progress and lasting positive social, cultural, and environmental change. It explores three essential questions about education and its relationship to human development and social progress. Looking at the role of formal educational institutions and their relationship to government and other social institutions: What is the role of schools in development and social change? Considering the role of teachers as agents of change: What is the role of the teacher in school/organizational change and community development? And finally, reflecting on our subjective motives for working in the field of education: Why do you want to become an educator? Through course activities such as service-learning in schools and group project work on a contemporary educational phenomenon (e.g., school choice, new technologies for learning, single-sex education), students will learn how educational policy at the federal, state, and local levels impacts teaching and learning, investigate the moral dimensions of the teacher-student relationship, and reflect on the construct of teacher-learners. Students will be introduced to a variety of educational research methods (i.e, ethnography, case study, quasi-experimental, correlational) that will allow for critical analysis of the knowledge base that strives to impact educational policy and practice. Evaluation will be based on participation, reflective writing, service learning, and group projects and presentations.

How does a child think? What causes them to learn? What teaching approaches work best with young children? These questions and more will be explored through readings, lectures, field observations, and planned class activities. This course will provide an introduction to early childhood education (preschool to eighth grade). Theorists such as Piaget, Vygotsky, Montessori, Gardner, Erikson, Maslow, Kohlberg, and Gilligan will be used to examine the physical, mental, emotional, moral, and social aspects of childhood growth and development. Students will explore a range of curriculum models, approaches, and strategies as they learn to apply developmental theory to best practices. These best practices will include the role of teachers in creating meaningful learning experiences and classroom environments (curriculum), documenting learning, assessment, inclusion, and family involvement. The primary modes of instruction for this class will be lectures, classroom discussions, field observations/reflections, and cooperative hands-on learning activities. Short reflective papers, an observational journal, and class projects will be used to assess learning.

This course is a broad overview of children’s literature and its place in the elementary school classroom. It examines the range and trends in literature for children that includes all genres, prominent authors, illustrators, awards, critical evaluation, and integration into instruction across the curriculum. Students participate in and design lessons which incorporate or extend children’s response to literature. They survey poetry and media appropriate for elementary students. Students read an extensive amount of children’s literature, keep a response journal, develop an author study, and create a teaching unit using children’s literature.

This course is designed for students planning to teach in schools whether in Maine or outside of the United States. Culturally sustaining/revitalizing education (CSRE) builds on the aims, values, insights, and practices of anti-racist education, culturally relevant pedagogy, culturally responsive teaching, culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy, decolonizing education, global education, intercultural education, and multicultural education. In particular, it aims to contextualize education in the history of colonization, land theft, slavery, the continued struggle for sovereignty and self-determination of native tribes and First Nations, and calls for wider community accountability. This educational approach challenges deficit mindsets and structures that undergird policies and practices that widen the opportunity gap and equitable access to basic human and civil rights and impede educational access for sustaining and revitalizing cultures that settler colonialism has attempted to eliminate, assimilate, or marginalize. Students will practice asset-based and growth mindsets to gain an understanding of the relationship between CSRE and respect for tribal sovereignty and support of contemporary struggles for tribal continuity and resistance to cultural genocide and epistemicide. The course also opens a dialogue on the applicability of CRSE for immigrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking students whose relationship to their new place of residence may be tenuous at best and whose heritage languages and cultures are also endangered as a result of first- to second-generation assimilation in their adopted communities. Students will gain an understanding of conceptual frameworks, knowledge of empirical studies documenting outcomes and impacts of these approaches, and skills in ethically and effectively teaching indigenous, immigrant, and other culturally and linguistically diverse learners. For students seeking Maine teaching endorsements, this course will prepare them to implement LD291 requiring Maine educators to teach Wabanaki history and culture. Students will learn through field trips, guest speakers, films, discussions, critical exploration and reflection, independent research, observation/fieldwork/practicum, and peer teaching. Evaluation will include artifacts to be incorporated into a teaching portfolio: a lesson plan, teaching video, self-assessment, assessment of PK-12 student work, and communication with families and community members. Although there are no prerequisites, the following are recommended; Learning and/or proficiency in a language other than English; a psychology, sociology, or anthropology course; and/or a prior education course.

Human ecologists who educate, embrace not only the interdisciplinarity of knowledge, but also the complexity of individual student development in political school environments. This course focuses on two essential nuts and bolts of teaching: curriculum design and assessment. How can a teacher learn what students know, how they think, and what they have learned? How can a teacher use this knowledge of students and subject matter to plan learning experiences that will engage diverse interests, adapt to a wide range of learning styles and preferences, accommodate exceptional needs, and meet state-mandated curriculum standards? This course is a required course for prospective secondary school teachers that provides an introduction to the backward design process and diverse assessment strategies. Students will engage in examining theory and practice designing and implementing curricula and assessments. A service-learning component will provide students with the opportunity to observe and participate in a variety of assessment methods in the subject they aim to teach. The final project will be a collaboratively designed, integrated curriculum unit, including lesson plans and assessments. Evaluation will be based on participation, reflective writing, individually designed lesson plans and assessments, and the final project.

Even before John Dewey published Experience and Education in 1938, experiential education had been practiced in various forms around the world. This course explores the philosophy of experiential education and its diverse practices in the realms of adventure education, service learning, workplace learning, environmental education, museum education, and school reform. Group activities and fieldtrips will provide opportunities to participate as both learner and teacher in a variety of teacher-led and student-designed experiences. The final project involves researching an existing experiential education program, its philosophy, and its practices. Evaluation is based on class and fieldtrip participation (including one multi-day fieldtrip), reflective logs, curriculum design, service-learning journal, an oral presentation of the service-learning, and a final essay that articulates a philosophy of experience in education.

Humans don’t have a steady growth rate. In the first two years of life for human children the rate is fast, and then it slows for the next seven to ten years and then things speed up again. Interestingly, a child’s brain is already at 90% of its full size by age five. So many factors go into the development of children from their birth to the time that they enter adulthood. What do children inherit from their parents, biologically, culturally, socially, and how do those influences help us understand individual child development? In this course, students will explore and examine the contributions of prominent theorists and empirical research to foster a deeper understanding of the complexities of child development from birth through adolescence. This foundational learning will support students as they investigate additional influences on development. Students will be asked to reflect on their own development and the factors that helped to shape their own growth. Additionally, students will read and discuss current research in psychology, neuroscience, education, and sociology as integral parts of student learning. Understanding the arc of development is essential for individuals who work in education and related fields. Knowing what to expect in typical development is imperative to providing appropriate experiences and curriculum, and facilitates positive coaching and partnering with parents and caregivers. While this class is primarily geared towards individuals who may pursue education or education-adjacent fields, it is ultimately a class intended to explore what it means to develop and grow as a human from early childhood up to adolescence. Students should expect the following experiences and assessments: rich class discussions based on readings and personal reflections, field observations, hands-on activities, assigned work, and class presentations.

This course is designed to prepare prospective teachers with methods necessary to implement a comprehensive literacy program for grades PreK-3 to include all aspects of literacy acquisition. Major areas of focus will include oral, visual, and technological communication, shared and interactive strategies, phonics, word study and spelling, independent and guided reading, writing workshop, and writing in all content areas. The course content focuses on an integrated approach to the acquisition of literacy skills, current best practice, and lesson design, questioning techniques, formative and summative assessment. Learning objectives address the standards for Maine’s teaching standards and Maine’s Learning Results. There is a fieldwork component of 50 hours for this ten-week course. There will be a weekly one-hour lab, shared with Integrated Methods I: Gr 5-8. Evaluation will be based on the quality of a course portfolio to include class participation, curriculum and assessment design, performance assessments, cooperating teacher feedback, and reflections on the fieldwork and required readings.

This course is designed to prepare prospective teachers with methods necessary to implement a comprehensive literacy program for grades 3-6 to include: motivation and the upper elementary reader; helping middle grade students develop their writing voice through knowledge of language, vocabulary acquisition and use, and working with a variety of text; teaching critical, creative, and collaborative technology use; using multiple tools to differentiate instruction; creating and using rubrics/alternatives for assessing writing. The course content focuses on an integrated approach to the acquisition of literacy skills, current effective practices, lesson design, questioning techniques, and formative and summative assessment. Learning objectives address Maine’s teaching standards and Maine’s Learning Results. There is a field studies component of 50 hours and there will be a weekly one-hour lab, shared with Integrated Methods IA: Gr PreK-3. Evaluation will be based on the quality of a course portfolio to include curriculum and assessment design, performance assessments, cooperating teacher feedback on classroom performance, and reflections on the fieldwork and required readings.

How can an integrated curriculum for elementary school students help to deepen the relationships children and young adolescents construct with the natural and social worlds in a way that promotes their capacity to know themselves and the communities in which they act?

For students interested in working with learners in grades preK-6, this course provides an enriched guided apprenticeship focused on necessary knowledge, skills, and experience to begin integrating science curricula with social studies, math and English language arts. Students will observe and practice creating and maintaining a constructive learning environment while teaching diverse learners using appropriate teaching methods and learning technologies. In addition students will explore providing effective feedback and constructing and implementing relevant assessments. Learning objectives include all eleven of Maine’s teaching standards as well as a working knowledge of the Parameters for Essential Instruction (PEI) for Science. Students will participate in an eight-week field work practicum observing and participating in elementary classrooms as well as planning and teaching in a weekly lab environment. Readings, discussions, and experiential learning in class will complement the field work component. Evaluation will be based on reflection on fieldwork, participation in discussions of readings and field work, curriculum and assessment design and implementation, and professional performance at the practicum site.

How can an integrated curriculum for elementary school students help to deepen the relationships children and young adolescents construct with the natural and social worlds in a way that promotes their capacity to know themselves and the communities in which they act?

For students interested in working with learners in grades preK-6, this course provides an enriched guided apprenticeship focused on necessary knowledge, skills, and experience to begin integrating social studies curricula with science, math and English language arts. Students will observe and practice creating and maintaining a constructive learning environment while teaching diverse learners using appropriate teaching methods and learning technologies. In addition students will explore providing effective feedback and constructing and implementing relevant assessments. Learning objectives include all eleven of Maine’s teaching standards as well as a working knowledge of the Parameters for Essential Instruction (PEI) for Social Studies. Students will participate in an eight-week field work practicum observing and participating in elementary classrooms as well as planning and teaching in a weekly lab environment. Readings, discussions, and experiential learning in class will complement the field work component. Evaluation will be based on reflection on fieldwork, participation in discussions of readings and field work, curriculum and assessment design and implementation, and professional performance at the practicum site.

This course focuses on the segment of the human life span from puberty to early adulthood. In this class we will examine the physical, cognitive, social, and moral aspects of adolescent growth and development. Issues to be considered include adolescent relationships (peers, family, romantic), adolescent issues (identity formation, at risk behavior, schooling, and stereotypes), and critical reflection on one’s own adolescent experience. The main objectives of this course are to: 1) provide students with a working knowledge of the theories of psychology which pertain to early adolescent development; 2) help students develop the ability to critically analyze information and common assumptions about the development of adolescents; 3) consider contemporary issues and concerns of the field; and 4) to afford students the opportunity to explore their own adolescent development. Course work entails lecture, discussion, extensive case analysis, and a field component.

This is intended as a survey course that will overview the contemporary theories, issues, and techniques of professional counseling. In brief, topics to be considered in this course include; a) legal and ethical responsibilities associated with professional counseling); b) assessments of differing therapeutic approaches (theories and techniques) to the counseling process; and c) reflection on the changing perspectives and practices in counseling including pluralism and diversity models. Students will begin to develop their own perspective of counseling through lectures and discussion, demonstrations, guest speakers, case studies, mock counseling sessions, reading, and writing papers. Experiential learning, through mock counseling sessions, with feedback from classmates and the instructor, will be stressed. Evaluation will be based on written assignments, class participation, and independent research.

This course is designed to prepare those who are intending to meet the learning needs of diverse populations of students in grades 7-12 or late adolescent young adults in other learning environments. It is an objective of the course to communicate that teaching is intellectual work, that it requires a dedication to and a love of subject matter, a respect and caring for students, a concern for equity, and a moral imperative for excellence in teaching. Students spend 70 hours with their target population and curriculum, as well as consulting with content faculty. (Some of these hours may be reserved for fall term.) These learning-teaching experiences are integrated into class discussion where students analyze the elements needed for successful teaching, learning, and assessing in their own content area and across disciplines. The purposes, problems, opportunities, issues, strategies, and materials involved in teaching diverse adolescent and young adult learners will be examined critically, and students will be evaluated through class discussions, individual and group work, reflections on field experiences, and peer and virtual teaching and assessing.

This is an introductory course in special education. We will explore the needs of children with disabilities and techniques for meeting these needs in the regular classroom. The course will emphasize both the social and instructional aspects of the concepts of inclusion, differentiation and serving students in the “least restrictive environment”. Participants will be introduced to concepts central to understanding the role of regular classroom teachers in meeting the academic, social, and emotional needs of students with disabilities. Objectives: By the end of the course students will be able to: identify and describe current issues and trends in education related to individuals with disabilities and their families; describe the Special education laws and procedures impacting individuals with disabilities; develop a working definition for each area of exceptionality in relation to achievement of educational goals, and develop strategies and resources for modifying, adapting and/or differentiating curriculum and instruction.

In a world marked by complexity, uncertainty, and diverse challenges, the role of teachers extends far beyond the transmission of knowledge. Students in this course will explore the question of what helps certain teachers to bring a continual sense of hope to their professional practice despite often relatively low pay, long hours, negative attention during political clashes, and increasing stressors on youth and society that inevitably appear in the classroom. Why do people choose to teach? And what keeps them in the classroom? How do teachers experience the impact of various education-focused policies on their efforts, and what are some ways teachers navigate and influence policy to maintain their visions for successful schools? Through critical readings, podcasts, guest speakers, small group interviews, and classroom observations students will reflect on how teachers bring and maintain hope in their learning communities. Students can expect to speak with area teachers as well as education experts from a variety of realms, and texts will include choices from authors such as Patrick Harris II, bell hooks, John Dewey, Regie Routman, Parker Palmer, and Nel Noddings. Final projects will allow students to creatively share their learning with one another and with teachers whose ideas have been most influential in their growing understanding of this realm of world-changing efforts. This course is suitable for future teachers or those considering teaching as well as education enthusiasts and anyone interested in the profound impact of education on society.

Why should we study the economics of education? One answer is the significant amount of money that individuals and society spend on education across all levels. In 2024, the United States alone spent nearly $1.5 trillion, or about 5.5% of GDP, on education. Likewise, governments throughout the world devoted considerable resources on the financing and operation of schools. These investments in education are motivated by the belief that the strength of the economy depends on the knowledge and skills of the workers. But does higher education expenditure cause better learning outcomes? Does better test score cause higher economic growth? How do policymakers design education policies that produce skills valued by society and rewarded in the labor market? How do the organization of schooling and incentive structure affect students, teachers, parents, and learning outcomes?

We will engage these questions both substantively and as a way to learn about how quantitative methods – e.g., cost-benefit analysis, and causal inference – are used to design, debate, and evaluate public policies. As such, this class is valuable for (i) students who are interested in education policy debates, (ii) who want to learn about the increasingly dominant role of causal inference models in public policy design, or (iii) who want to acquire quantitative reasoning skills through an applied, policy-oriented approach.

Topics may include return to schooling, education production function and inputs, financing of local K-12 schools, teacher labor market, incentive and students’ performance, and peer effect and learning environment effect. Throughout the course, you will have ample opportunities to develop quantitative reasoning skills, including causal analysis, natural experiment, and randomized control trials. Some knowledge of introductory microeconomics is beneficial but not required. Students will be evaluated through leading group discussion of assigned reading materials and developing a summative research proposal on a relevant topic.

This course is designed to provide an overview of the use of international law in solving transnational environmental problems and shaping international behavior. We examine, as background, the nature and limitations of international law as a force for change. The course will then explore customary law, the relationship between soft and hard law, enforcement of international law, implementation mechanisms, and the effectiveness of multilateral environmental agreements. Special attention is given to existing international environmental law frameworks addressing climate change, Arctic and Antarctic development, ozone depletion, biological diversity, forest loss, export of toxic chemicals, and the host of issues raised by the 1992 United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development and subsequent environmental fora. Students will also consider the interface between international environmental law and other important international forces such as the Bretton Woods institutions, human rights frameworks, and international development entities. Students will be evaluated on the quality of their classroom comments and several analytical problem sets given during the term. Students will also be asked to complete a major research project examining the effectiveness of a treaty or a proposed international environmental legal arrangement.

The fear of the “hidden” enemy that lurks behind the curtain, controlling events from the shadows, is a narrative topos that continually seems to raise its conspiratorial head in all kinds of spaces and venues: from politics to pop culture, movies, novels, music, political speeches, etc. Yet, there is also evidence to suggest that widespread acceptance of these conspiracy “theories” has the potential to cultivate and propagate inherently antidemocratic, divisive, and dangerous beliefs. Those who posit the existence of conspiracies, or at least certain ones, are often dismissed outright as irrational, without any consideration made as to the substance of their claims. Belief in conspiracies, or at least certain ones, is taken as a sign of faulty logic or reason. Yet, despite this, conspiratorial explanations of various phenomenon actually have a long and vibrant history of popular acceptance in US political culture (as well as in other parts of the world). Some have gone so far as to suggest that narratives of conspiracy, as alternative or resistant explanatory frames, are actually a necessary component of democratic political life. After all we know that conspiracies, political and otherwise, have existed in the past, and may exist again in the future. How do we make sense of this tension? If conspiracy theory as a mode of explanation is inherently “irrational,” what does this mean for its enduring presence in our political discourse? Is the only difference between a “reasonable” claim rooted in fear and what we consider the paranoid ramblings of “kooks” and “nutjobs” simply a matter of which one is “correct?” Is there a silver bullet theory or magic wand that would allow us to differentiate the supposed good from the bad? Is the very act of labeling something a conspiracy theory itself a form of political hegemony? Even if conspiracies might exist, is it better to live in a world in which we assume they don’t? What do we actually mean by conspiracy theory in the first place? This seminar will explore a variety of topics related directly to how threats of conspiracy become manifest in public discourse. Readings will focus on secondary research that examines the role of conspiracy theories in political and social life, both in the United States and abroad. We will also supplement this with primary “artifacts” such as pamphlets, social media postings, videos, speeches, etc. Along the way we will also use this as an opportunity to reflect on what inter and trans disciplinary research actually looks like. The study of conspiracy narratives is an ideal example that helps us think about how different fields attempt to make sense of a phenomenon. We will survey, compare, and attempt to synthesize research from a wide range of fields, disciplines and methodologies including those from historians, anthropologists, political scientists, legal scholars, literary critics, psychologists, and others. This is an advanced seminar and students should expect to encounter readings that are rooted in disciplinary perspectives they are not familiar with. Students will need to adapt to shifting perspectives in order to both the various texts in conversation with each other. Evaluation will be based on in-class discussion as well as individual student writing assignments. Students will produce several short length essay assignments during the term as well as a longer research paper at the end of the term. Weekly lab sessions will be used for screenings of primary material and students may also be responsible for at least one primary source presentation during these sessions. This class is open to students of all interests regardless of their experience with politics, government, or social theory.

This introductory class in constitutional law will have one fundamental objective: understanding the current and historical role of the US Supreme Court in the recognition of civil and associated rights. The rights we will examine will include reproductive rights, freedom of speech in both the general and academic contexts, marriage equality, the rights of individuals in the transgender community, and racial equality. In order to understand these specific issues of Supreme Court doctrine, the class will begin with a review of how our courts function, how the doctrine of judicial review developed, and how to read and understand decisions of the Supreme Court. The question looming over the course will be whether the Supreme Court is a distinctive legal institution, an anti-democratic policy making body, or both – and whether this question can be resolved independent of our views on the underlying issues. The course will conclude with a “moot court” exercise in which students will play the role of either Supreme Court justices or lawyers appearing before the Supreme Court. The topic of the exercise will be drawn from a case or cases currently pending before the Supreme Court.

Assessment will be based on evidence that the student has completed assignments and readings, meaningful participation in seminar discussions, the preparation and presentation to the class of a summary of a judicial opinion under discussion, two short quizzes, and performance in the moot court exercise.

This class will be an intensive immersive exploration of presidential elections in the United States. It runs only in the Fall terms of US presidential election years, using the current campaign as a lens through which to explore a wide array of issues related to presidential elections specifically, as well as elections in the US generally. It is structured as a working lab that is supplemented with a series of discussion and lecture sessions. In lab sessions students will combine into teams to conduct term long tracking projects focused on the upcoming US presidential election. This may include battleground state profiling, campaign finance monitoring, litigation tracking, advertising and media placement, debate watches, candidate travel schedules, etc. In addition to the lab sessions, regular discussion and lecture sessions will provide students with a crash course in interdisciplinary approaches to a range of issues related to the conduct of US presidential elections. This may include examinations of the history of campaigns, campaign advertising and messaging, the structure of presidential elections and the role of the electoral college, the conduct of voting and voter access, campaign finance reform, empirical research on campaign effects and outcomes, polling and poll methodology, campaign organization and administrative structure, best practices for GOTV and targeted mobilization, etc. A great deal of what will be covered in both the lab and discussion sessions will depend on the nature of the current campaign in that particular year and which issues are most salient. Students will also take part in ongoing community education projects at different times throughout the term, whether that involves providing assistance through voter registration and access, debate watch debriefings, issue education, candidate profiles, community forums, etc.. On the night of the election the class will organize and host a returns watching festival on campus. The class will develop the various activities and events for the festival, and coordinate the planning alongside the instructor. The remaining class sessions after the election will focus on debriefing the results as well as addressing any outstanding issues that linger beyond election day (e.g. disputes over election counts and the certification of results). Students will be evaluated on the basis of their engagement with class sessions and other class related activities, their work for their tracking projects, short form response papers related to discussion topics, their debrief reports, and check in meetings with the instructor. Presidential election season can be a stressful, and at times uplifting time for many community members. This class is a great way to engage the campaigns in a direct and hands on manner, while also learning more about elections generally and presidential elections specifically. It is open to a wide range of students with varied interests. Given the working lab nature of the class, it is flexible enough to accommodate both students who have had extensive experience with politics and campaigning in the US context, as well as students for whom this will be their first exposure to anything campaign related, and everyone else in between.

This course provides an overview of environmental law and the role of law in shaping environmental policy. We examine, as background, the nature and scope of environmental, energy, and resource problems and evaluate the various legal mechanisms available to address those problems. The course attempts to have students critically analyze the role of law in setting and implementing environmental policy. We explore traditional common law remedies, procedural statutes such as the National Environmental Policy Act, intricate regulatory schemes, and market-based strategies that have been adopted to control pollution and protect natural resources. Students are exposed to a wide range of environmental law problems in order to appreciate both the advantages and limitations of law in this context. Special attention is given to policy debates currently underway and the use of the legal process to foster the development of a sustainable society in the United States. Students are required to complete four problem sets in which they apply legal principles to a given fact scenario.

This course provides students with an overview of the American conservation movement from the 1600s through the present. Through an examination of historical accounts and contemporary analysis, students develop an understanding of the issues, places, value conflicts, and people who have shaped conservation and environmental policy in the United States. They also gain an appreciation for the relationship between the conservation movement and other social and political movements. Students should come away with a sense of the historical and cultural context of American attitudes toward nature. We also seek to apply these lessons to policy debates currently underway in Maine. Working from original writings, students do in-depth research on a selected historical figure. Evaluation is based on problem sets, group activities, participation, and a final paper.

“Save the whales”; “save the tiger”; “save the rainforest” – – increasingly wildlife and their habitats are the subject of international debate with many seeing wildlife as part of the common heritage of humankind. Wildlife does not recognize the political boundaries of national states and as a result purely national efforts to protect wildlife often fail when wildlife migrates beyond the jurisdiction of protection. This course focuses on two principle aspects of international wildlife conservation: 1) the framework of treaties and other international mechanisms set up to protect species; and 2) the system of protected areas established around the world to protect habitat. We begin with an examination of several seminal wildlife treaties such as the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, CITES, migratory bird treaties, and protocols to the Antarctica Treaty. Using case studies on some of the more notable wildlife campaigns, such as those involving whales and elephants, we seek to understand the tensions between national sovereignty and international conservation efforts. The Convention on Biological Diversity and its broad prescriptions for wildlife protection provide a central focus for our examination of future efforts. Following on one of the key provisions in the Convention on Biological Diversity, the second half of the course focuses on international and national efforts to create parks and other protected areas. In particular we evaluate efforts to create protected areas that serve the interests of wildlife and resident peoples. Students gain familiarity with UNESCO’s Biosphere Reserve model and the IUCN’s protected area classifications. We also examine in some depth the role that NGO’s play in international conservation efforts. The relationship between conservation and sustainable development is a fundamental question throughout the course.

This course provides an introductory lens to understand the economy as a whole – the macroeconomy – and how its various parts interact. We will study topics such as (i) the short-term fluctuation of the general price level, employment level, and total output level, (ii) the linkages between structural unemployment, economic inequality, and government policies, and (iii) the long-term trajectory of economic growth and the unevenness of capitalist development. Some of the key questions we will explore include: How do we measure the macroeconomy, and what do our conventional measurements often leave out? Why do cyclical economic booms and busts exist and what drives them? What can governments do to limit the costs of job loss on workers? Looking globally, why are some countries rich and other countries poor? How have global living standards improved over the long run, and at what cost to humans, non-human beings, and the environment?

This course aims to increase your ability to use abstract, quantitative models to describe and articulate the various ways in which macroeconomic factors frame the condition of possibilities for people, their families, and their communities. Upon completion of this course, you will have developed practices of thinking critically and politically about public policies and debates. You will also expand your capacity for numerical literacy and quantitative skills such as drawing valid conclusions based on data and communicating your reasoning and results effectively and clearly. The course is especially valuable for students with interests in civic engagement, social justices, political transformation, and sustainable development. Previous knowledge in economics, calculus, statistics, and linear algebra is not necessary. Familiarity with elementary algebra will be helpful but not required. Students’ learning will be assessed through problem sets, and take-home exams.

Economics has a popular reputation as a field of study centered around making money and getting rich. However, for most of its history, economics has been about understanding and changing the way the world works. How do we get our dinner every night? What does it take to transform coffee beans harvested in plantations in Costa Rica to the morning cup of Starbucks across their 38,000 global locations? Why do some individuals amass unfathomable personal wealth while others face daily struggle for material survival? These questions are what economists primarily study. Whether seemingly straightforward or seemingly unfathomable, at their core these issues are about the process of social provisioning. It can be further broken down into the following questions: (i) As a society, how do we determine what to produce and how much? (ii) As a society, how do we distribute what we produce? And (iii) Who benefits from and who are harmed by our production, distribution and consumption? In this course, we will examine these questions from the perspective of individuals and firms, and we will consider the ways an individual’s preference and decisions are shaped by social institutions and how they, in turn, affect other beings, both human and non-human. You will be introduced to topics such as: individual’s decision making under constraints, social coordination dilemmas, firm’s wage-setting and labor discipline, supply-demand and price setting, market’s successes and failures, and the limits of economic growth. This course aims to increase your ability to use abstract, quantitative models to approach complex, real-world problems such as worsening economic inequalities and global climate change. Upon completion of this course, you will have developed practices of thinking critically and politically about public policies and debates. You will also expand your capacity for numerical literacy and quantitative skills such as drawing valid conclusions based on data and communicating your reasoning and results effectively and clearly. The course is especially valuable for students with interests in civic engagement, social justices, political transformation, and sustainable development. Knowledge in calculus, statistics, and linear algebra is not necessary, and familiarity with elementary algebra will be helpful but not required. Students’ learning will be assessed through problem sets and (take-home) exams.

The “law” affects every aspect of human activity. As human ecologists we must garner some basic understanding of how law is used (or misused) to shape society and human behavior. This course examines two aspects of the American legal system: 1) the judicial process or how we resolve disputes; and 2) the legislative process or how we enact policy. Course readings cover everything from classic jurisprudence essays to the daily newspaper. We use current environmental and social issues to illustrate specific applications of the legal process. Legal brief preparation, mock courtroom presentations, lobbying visits to the Maine legislature, and guest lectures are used to give a practical dimension to course subjects. Students analyze Federal Election Commission documents to understand the impact of campaign financing on public policy and look closely at other current issues facing the legislative and judicial systems. Evaluation is based upon two papers and several other exercises.

From first contact through the confrontation surrounding the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Dakota Access Pipeline, Native American law has tried to reconcile two incommensurate legal systems and widely varying government policies. This course examines the evolution of federal Native American or “Indian” Law from colonization onward as impacted by treaties, executive orders, congressional enactments, and major U.S. Supreme Court cases interpreting the U.S. Constitution and statutes as they involve Native American legal issues. This is not a class about tribal law or the indigenous legal systems that exist among the various tribes in the US. Rather, it examines the legal system imposed on tribes from the outside; a system that has evolved over time and creates the legal framework which tribes operate under today. Students will gain an understanding of law as a policy tool and framework, and acquire the necessary skills to work on policy issues affecting native peoples. We will focus on primary legal material as well as secondary interpretations of that material. There will be some comparative law analysis from other countries and an examination of how the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples relates to US practices. Students will complete several analytical problem sets that require an application of course concepts to fact scenarios as well as a major paper on a legal topic of their choosing. A class visit to a Maine reservation will allow conversation with tribal leaders involved with current environmental and Native American issues in Maine.

By definition “public lands” belong to all of us, yet public lands in this country have a history of use (and abuse) by special interests and a shocking absence of any coherent management strategy for long-term sustainability. This course is taught in seminar format in which students read and discuss several environmental policy and history texts that concern the history and future of our federal lands. We also use primary historic documents and texts to understand the origins of public ownership and management. We examine the legal, philosophical, ecological, and political problems that have faced our National Parks, wildlife refuges, national forests, and other public lands. An effort is made to sort out the tangle of laws and conflicting policies that govern these public resources. Special attention is given to the historic roots of current policy debates. Evaluation is based upon response papers, a class presentation, participation in class discussions, and a group project looking closely at the historical context and policy implications of a management issue facing a nearby public land unit.

This class will provide a broad introductory overview of the history, practice, and core concepts that encompass political messaging and persuasion through an empirical examination of grounded applications of such strategies. In order to capitalize on the saliency of the Fall election cycle, the course materials will be based on a series of historical case studies directly tied to American presidential campaigns. Instead of studying various theories of political persuasion in the abstract, we will extract principles that commonly appear in political messaging from these case examples. In addition, students will participate in two collaborative projects. The first will involve tracking political persuasion techniques in campaigns that are occurring in real time during the term. The second will involve students working in teams to produce their own political messaging materials for a hypothetical campaign. The overall goals of the course are three-fold. First, to provide a broad survey of the history of political campaign communication and advertising as it has developed in the United States. Second, to confront some of the pragmatic issues that go into producing messaging strategies for electoral candidates. Third, to help students cultivate a more critical approach to analyzing the political messages that they confront in their daily lives. The class will be highly interactive with discussion being the primary mode of instruction. However, there will also lecture components that provide the historical basis for the case studies we are examining. Final evaluation will based on a combination of class participation, several take home essay assignments, the contemporary tracking assignment, and a final creative project in which student produce their own campaign materials. The class is open to all students, regardless of their experience in politics or their knowledge of American history. It is well suited for introductory students who are interested in politics, human persuasion, and mass communication. However, it is also equally valuable for advanced students seeking to deepen their understanding of political persuasion.

People organize to bring social change for many reasons – e. g. to end oppression, bring peace, prevent ecological collapse, promote cultural survival or advance sectarian interests. The character and success of strategies depend on social and historical contexts. People typically alternate between – or combine – varied approaches including: social movements, electoral politics, lobbying, nonviolent (or sometimes violent) struggle, technological innovation, social entrepreneurship and community organizing. This course uses theories of social movements as a starting point to look at strategies for social change and criteria for evaluating them. The course assumes it is important to understand views and strategies we disagree with respectfully and with careful analysis. The class combines readings in history and theories of social change, and diverse case studies from both the left and the right. It looks both at classic cases (e. g. Gandhi, King) and a variety of efforts from recent years and the present (e.g. Indivisible, the Tea Party, #MeToo, Zapatistas, 350.org, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, and alternative food system entrepreneurship). This is a course for students who want to develop skills for doing critical analysis of society, for developing effective plans to create social change, and for applying strategies to implement those plans. Evaluation will be based on progress in developing those skills as demonstrated in homework and class participation, short papers, and a term project developing a sample strategy document for a viewpoint of the student’s choice.

Loren Eisely once remarked, “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” Eisely’s observation is an underlying premise of this course – that there is something very special about moving water. This course is taught in a seminar format in which students will read and discuss ecological, historical, sociological, political and legal aspects of river conservation and watershed protection. Special emphasis is placed on understanding the policy issues surrounding dams, river protection, and watershed planning. In conjunction with readings and class discussions, students will use a term-long study of a local stream to learn about the threats facing rivers in the United States and the legal and policy mechanisms for addressing these threats. In addition, the class will take an extended field trip to western Massachusetts to gain first-hand knowledge of the tremendous impact river manipulation can have on a social and ecological landscape. We will spend time looking at historically industrialized and now nationally protected rivers in the region. Through weekly excursions on Maine rivers, students will also develop skills to enable them to paddle a tandem canoe in intermediate whitewater. Evaluation will be based on problem sets, role-playing exercises, contribution to the class, short essays, and paddling skills. Weekly excursions to area rivers entail special scheduling constraints as we will be in the field all day on Fridays.

The global demand for food and fiber will continue to increase well into the next century. How will this food and fiber be produced? Will production be at the cost of soil loss, water contamination, pesticide poisoning, and increasing rural poverty? In this course, we examine the fundamental principles and practices of conventional and sustainable agriculture with a primary focus on crops. By examining farm case studies and current research on conventional and alternative agriculture we develop a set of economic, social, and ecological criteria for a critique of current agricultural practices in the United States and that will serve as the foundation for the development and analysis of new farming systems. Evaluations are based on two exams, class presentations, participation in a conference on potato production, and a final paper.

This course will take an in depth look at the art and science of fermented and cultured foods. The first half of the class will focus on the microbiology of fermentation with a specific focus on products derived from milk and soybeans. Each week there will be a laboratory portion in which students will explore how the basic fermentation processes and products change with different milk and soy qualities. These small-scale experiences and experiments will be complemented with field trips to commercial enterprises in Maine and Massachusetts. In the second half of the term students will explore the differences in flat, yeast, and sourdough breads. Final projects will focus on a foodway of choice and will culminate in presentations that explore the historical and cultural context in which these different cultured foods were developed and how these microbial-mediated processes enhance preservation, nutritional and economic value, and taste. Evaluations will be based on class participation, short quizzes, a lab report, journal, and a final project.

Just three aquatic species account for most seafood consumed in the US: shrimp, tuna, and salmon. But worldwide consumption is more diverse, including an array of finfish, invertebrates, aquatic plants, algae, and other animals. These ‘blue foods’ are fished, collected, gathered, or grown in the sea or freshwater and play essential roles in supporting human health, nutrition, livelihoods, and culture. Recent studies have shown that the top 7 categories of nutrient-rich animal-source foods are all aquatic in origin. So why do food policy and science still heavily focus on terrestrially produced foods, overlooking blue foods? This course will unpack this conundrum and examine blue food systems from ‘bait to plate’ by analyzing food production, provisioning, and consumption as interlinked activities. Blue food production includes small-scale and industrial harvesting and wild capture and aquaculture systems. Provisioning activities link production and consumption: the offloading of catch, storage and transportation of highly perishable foods, transformations from raw fish to the final product, and the marketing and distribution affected to reach consumers. Finally, consumption includes how we acquire our food, cook and eat it, and dispose of waste, as well as our nutritional and health outcomes. While conventional food policy and science have focused on food production in isolation, a food systems framework sheds light on dynamics that impact the flows and distribution of foods with equity implications: which foods are made by whom, where does food go, and who benefits? This course will introduce students to key changes in the goals and means of food policy, focusing on how the emergent dialogue on food systems in fisheries is reframing how we know and govern aquatic resources. A significant portion of the course will be dedicated to examining blue food case studies, which may include: seaweed farming in Tanzania, fishing cooperatives in Mexico, tuna longliners in the Mid-Atlantic, and Lobster fishing in Maine. Students will work in teams to analyze one of these case studies in-depth, applying a food systems lens to examine each case’s sustainability and equity challenges. Students will be evaluated through their participation in class discussions and in-class activities, weekly writing reflections, and co-leading a class with your case study team. The final project will be a group policy proposal outlining how stakeholders could better govern from a ‘food systems’ perspective in your blue food case study.

Introductory chemistry and biology are explored in the context of food and drink: the biology of crops, culinary chemistry, and the biochemistry of brewing. Major chemistry topics include atomic structure, periodicity, bonding, acid base chemistry, kinetics, equilibrium, colloids, and solubility of gases in liquids. Major biology topics include photosynthesis, respiration, plant and yeast life histories, cellular reproduction, and metabolism. We will also explore agricultural chemistry from a systems perspective: examining strategies to for keeping pace with the demand for nitrogen and phosphorous in soils. This course is meant to offer important, fundamental chemistry and biology through the framework of food, a universal human experience. These fundamental topics in Chemistry and Biology will be explored from the ground up, so no prior experience is required. Meanwhile, the culinary and agricultural framework should offer enough new content for students with a background in natural sciences. Students will be evaluated based on participation in classroom and laboratory sessions, projects, and quizzes.

This course uses food as a lens to explore human origins, cultural diversity, social structure, and human/environment interactions. Through academic articles and films, the course exposes students to the different ways anthropologists think about food and the frameworks they use to answer questions concerning the human experience. The course also engages other disciplinary perspectives—including history, economics, and political ecology—to make larger connections between food and society.

Designed as a survey course, this course introduces students not only to writing as process—prewriting, writing, and rewriting—but also to the broad and dynamic subfield of food anthropology. The course is organized around four themes. The first—human origins, diets, and biocultural evolution—explores the uniqueness of cooking to the human species, and how the co-evolution of human diets and culture has shaped different groups’ dietary needs, practices, and restrictions. The second—globalization and international trade—looks at the flow of foods and food practices around the world, from sugar to sushi. The third—hegemony and difference—considers how race, gender, and class are constructed and expressed through food. The final theme—consumption and embodiment—considers the relationship between eating and the body; readings in this section focus on body image, eating practices, and critical studies of the rhetoric around hunger and obesity. Students are evaluated based on class participation, a series of reflection papers, a dietary analysis, and a recipe project involving a prepared meal, an audio-visual presentation, and a critical analysis paper. This course meets the first-year writing requirement.

This course explores the rich history of capitalism through the lens of two of the most ubiquitous and valuable crops in the world: corn and coffee. The crops provide insight into the global and local dimensions of both historical and contemporary reality in the countries where they are grown with a focus on Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States. Corn and coffee provide a convenient vantage point from which to examine the social, economic, and cultural dynamics of community-based production of both crops on the one hand and their globally-connected production as commodities. The course moves from a broad macro perspective on each crop to an intensive exploration of how both are produced in Guatemala. In this way, class participants will be able to look at how global historical trends in consumption have played themselves out in local communities. The class will simultaneously be able to look at the processes at work in pueblos throughout Guatemala that root the corn economy into rich cultural and social dynamics that are at the core of communal life. Using these two crops as a starting point, the class will allow students to develop a holistic and synthetic understanding of how global food systems land in places. The course emphasizes attention to the broad global dimensions of corn and coffee’s production as well as the fine-grained study of Guatemala’s socio-cultural life in historical and anthropological perspective. Through discussions of the books, this seminar-style course seeks to provide students with deep insights into the history of a specific place while maintaining a sense of the global and regional context. Intensive readings will provide students with a snapshot of trends in both history and ethnography while broader synthetic analyses of both corn and coffee will embody more popular approaches to the topic. Students will lead discussions of the readings, write short synthetic essays, and undertake a research project for the class. Evaluation will be based on short writing, course participation and the final project.

Farming has always operated with a degree of tension in relation to wild things and wild places. Agricultural tradition has often embraced the idea of “taming” nature or driving back the wilderness in order to meet human needs. In the 20th Century, an increasingly competitive economy, coupled with rising human populations emphasized massive monocultures that had serious impacts on wildlife and native vegetation. There is no question that conflict can exist between the wild and the curated, however there are also real possibilities for a more harmonic interface between humanized and non-humanized landscapes that can benefit both. In this team- taught course an experienced livestock farmer and a seasoned field ecologist will lead students in exploring the complex and nuanced relationships between managing land for production agriculture and land conservation. By utilizing Peggy Rockefeller Farm (PRF) as its primary case study students will be able to explore the complex histories of land conservation and the current practices of farming on the edge of nature. Students will also explore how farms can enhance native wildlife by providing key habitats and food sources. Students will be expected to learn through course lectures, extensive readings on farming, and wilderness, and practical, hands-on experience on the farm in making domesticated plants and livestock “wild safe”. Evaluation will be based on class participation, two short “problem sets” and a comprehensive final exam. Intermediary. Interdisciplinary. Students will be evaluated based on class participation, weekly quizzes, assignments, and a final project and presentation.

Downeast Maine, from the Penobscot River east to the Canadian border, includes Hancock and Washington Counties, a region of extremes between high levels of tourism, like Mount Desert Island, and many coastal towns that are heavily reliant on fisheries for their economic existence. This long history of cultural and economic dependence on fisheries makes the region particularly vulnerable to fisheries decline, such as the collapse of the sardine and cod fisheries. Recent trends in the lobster, clam, scallop, and elver fisheries, as well as aquaculture, show various levels of instability and risk. At the same time, numerous initiatives in the region focus on revitalizing and stabilizing fisheries, while enhancing community resilience. This class uses a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to examine the relationships among marine resources, fisheries policy, harvesters, and communities. In this course, we will examine the relationships within this linked social-ecological system, and use historical data, current documents, interviews and oral histories to examine the human-ecological relationships among residents, policy, and resources. We also will examine relationships between other industries, uses, and values placed on the coast and their relationships to fisheries and aquaculture. The course will include guest speakers and field trips (including an overnight to the Cobscook Bay area) to Downeast communities. Evaluation will be based on several assignments during the term, including journals, analysis of oral histories, and research on a Downeast fishery. Students will also work on a final project examining a research question using multiple information sources and ways of knowing with a presentation due at the end of the term. Active engagement during class, with guest speakers, and on field trips will be expected.

It feels like pizza has always been considered American, but we know that it was originally brought to the US by Italian immigrants. Both the US and Italy claim pizza as a national dish, and this type of debate about where food comes from—and who it belongs to—is highly connected to our national and local identities. As humans continue to migrate across borders and blur the boundaries in digital spaces, our identities continue to develop as we interact with each other and different types of food. We will consider how this movement shapes our ideas of ‘foreign’ and ‘local’ and how one becomes the other, as well as the line between honoring a culture and appropriating it.

We will examine the intersections of the genre conventions, rhetorical situation, and the writers’ identities to understand how these elements work together when producing texts. We will learn key composition concepts (genre, rhetorical situation, and multimodality) and support the development of your genre research skills. We will use these concepts and conduct genre research to examine various food writing genres, such as narratives, recipes, and social media posts to understand how writing is an activity that goes beyond putting words together on a piece of paper. These activities will support your overall genre research skills and deepen your understanding of writing, which can be transferred to other writing activities beyond this course. Classes will be based on genre analysis activities and group discussions. We will read works that address food writing genres and identity, and we will watch documentaries that explore the intersections of food, identity, and migration. Course assignments include your reproduction of a food writing genre, weekly reading responses, reflections and narratives to document your learning trajectory, which will also be used for assessment purposes.

This class offers a good foundation of knowledge for a gardener to begin the process of organic gardening, as well as an understanding of what defines organic gardening. The information presented focuses on soil fertility and stewardship, the ecology of garden plants, soil and insects, and practical management of the above. The garden is presented as a system of dynamic interactions. Emphasis is given to vegetable crops and soil fertility. Laboratories include soil analysis, tree pruning, seedling establishment, weed and insect identification, garden design, covercropping, composting, and reclamation of comfrey infested area. Evaluations are based on participation in class and lab, written class work, exam, and final individual garden design.

This course will explore the history of agriculture from the vantage point of Downeast Maine with a focus on apples. The premise of the course is that by exploring this fascinating crop in detail from the local vantage point of Downeast Maine students will be able to grasp the many historical processes at work from the introduction of the fruit in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to the age of agricultural improvement in the eighteenth on to the rise and fall of commercial orcharding as a major component of Maine’s farm economy in the early twentieth century. Using sources ranging from secondary sources, historical atlases, aerial surveys, and diaries, we will explore how the culture of apple agriculture in Maine develops over time as part of an interconnected Atlantic World where crops flow back and forth between Britain and the colonies/U.S. over hundreds of years. Course activities will include fruit exploration and fieldtrips to track down and identify antique varieties, as well as visits to the local farms where a new generation of apple culture is taking shape. The course will also engage students with the process of cider-making, both sweet and hard, as well as exercises in the preparation, storage, and processing of apples. Students will be evaluated on their participation in discussion, how they collaborate with others in class projects, and a final individual or collaborative project. This course is designed for students interested in history, farming and food systems, community-based research, and policy/planning issues. It is also very appropriate for students who like apples and just want to know (a lot) more.

This course examines homesteading as a food systems, cultural, and economic practice. Maine is a center of homesteading activity in the United States and an ideal place to study the theory and practice of homesteading. From a food systems perspective, homesteading represents a means of divesting from the global food system through the practice of subsistence agriculture and food preservation. Viewed from an anthropological perspective, homesteading raises interesting questions about why some individuals eschew conventional lifestyles and seek significant degrees of self-sufficiency, various forms of intentional living, and commitments to non-commodified production. A critical examination of homesteading raises questions about privilege and the benefits and limits of social movements founded on personal choice and private property. And viewed through political economy, homesteading can be seen as a choice to resist the intrusion of market-based relationships into social life and an attempt to restore social relationships and normative values other than efficiency to production and consumption.

Applying these lenses, this course will examine the conditions that influence contemporary homesteading practices. Three key questions frame the course: (1) What motivates self-identified homesteaders to resist normative lifestyles and seek self-sufficient, non-commodified ways of living? (2) How do variables such as class, education, race, geographic location, and property-ownership shape homesteading practices? (3) What are the benefits and limits of homesteading as a form of resistance to commodified production and consumption? Through classroom discussions, readings, and fieldwork students will attempt to answer these questions. Readings will include personal and ethnographic accounts of homesteading as well as critical studies of non-commodified living. We will be joined for several class meetings by guest discussion leaders with additional expertise in food systems, anthropology, and related areas. Field work will include visits to several homesteads. Students will be evaluated based on participation, interviewing exercises, a field journal, and a series of reflection papers.

This course provides an introduction to small-scale farm production and planning with an emphasis on organic vegetable production practices. This course includes lectures from professionals in the field, tours of local farms, and hands-on learning at COA’s Beech Hill Farm and Community Garden. Students will explore all aspects required to successfully plan and grow produce for an organic, small-scale market farm. Topics covered in the course will include soil health, crop botany, crop planning and rotation, pest control, disease and weed management, tractor safety and operation, farm budgeting, and farmland access strategies. Student evaluation will be based on attendance, participation in class discussion and activities, problem sets, and a final project focused on the development of a profit-oriented farm plan.

Food is central to the human experience. It can bring us profound joy and a sense of belonging to a place, to a people, and to ourselves. And yet, food is frequently used as an additional form of punishment for the nearly 2 million people incarcerated in jails and prisons across the United States. In this course, students will learn about different kinds of prison food systems, from those using food to dehumanize incarcerated people, to those using food as a tool to help promote rehabilitation and support successful reentry. We will explore this topic through readings, lectures, field trips, and interviews with folks working to transform prison food systems. Simultaneously, students will learn how to produce a podcast from start-to-finish in order to share the stories they gather.

To understand the U.S. carceral system, we will read works by Michelle Alexander and other scholars, using as our primary text Eating Behind Bars: Ending the Hidden Punishment of Food in Prisons, published by the organization Impact Justice in 2020. The audio production skills students will learn include recording, importing, mixing, editing, mastering, and exporting sound. Students will be evaluated based on their participation in class discussions, performance on a series of audio-production exercises, preparation for and completion of interviews, and production of a short podcast episode.

How will students in this course be evaluated?: Students will be evaluated based on their participation in class discussions, performance on a series of audio-production exercises, preparation for and completion of interviews, and production of a short podcast episode.

Sheep play profoundly important roles in human societies. This course is a human ecological exploration of sheep and wool, combined with a hands-on component in which we will work with sheep and learn fiber arts. This class will meet for one studio session and two lecture/discussion sections per week, plus at least one Saturday field trip. In the studio sessions, we will study sheep husbandry through visits to Peggy Rockefeller Farm, and learn a variety of techniques for working with wool, from the preparation (shearing, washing, and carding) to spinning and working with yarn (including knitting, crochet, and weaving). The lecture/discussion sessions will cover topics such as the ecological impacts of sheep in different parts of the world, the physics of spinning and the chemistry of dyes, and the symbolism of sheep in the mythology of different cultures. The course will draw on a wide range of material and intellectual approaches, with sheep and wool as the unifying theme. Students will be evaluated based on participation, short written assignments, and a final oral presentation.

No prior knowledge of fiber craft is necessary, but students who come in knowing one of the basic techniques may be able to explore advanced techniques like lacework or design in three dimensions. Students should meet with the instructor before spring break to discuss goals and equipment needs for the studio sessions. Some basic supplies will be provided, but students should plan to purchase additional equipment such as knitting needles depending on the projects that they choose.

The aim of this practicum is to pursue a collaborative project with seed workers at the local, national, or international level. A basic background and interest in seeds will be critical to a student’s success in this course. The course will examine key readings in the field of seed systems and investigate the practice of different seed workers. This course will involve fieldwork outside of class time. In the first few weeks of class, we will review the foundation of angiosperm seed biology and develop skills in plant trials, evaluation, harvesting and processing. The term-long project may include an expansion on the Maine Heirloom Seed Project, a seed library serving Hancock County, archival research of the rich history of the beans and their uses across Maine, or a project proposed by one of the participants in the course. Evaluations will be based on research, participation, and sustained engagement with peers and stakeholders in the larger community, and a final presentation to the stakeholders of the project.

This course explores possibilities for transformative change across local and global food systems. The course centers on the questions: What would it take to ensure access to healthy, safe, affordable, culturally appropriate foods for all people? The first part of the course critically examines capitalist food systems with particular attention to the ways culture, politics, and economics shape our interactions with food. Through readings and exercises, we explore issues such as nutrition, worker safety, contested agricultural and land use policies, hunger, and environmental and community health. The second part of the course examines case studies of transformative food movements around the world, from the Zero Hunger programs in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to La Via Campesina global campaign for agrarian reform. We focus particularly on food sovereignty and agroecology movements. The final third of the course focuses on transformative work in Maine and at COA. Students take multiple field trips to participate in local movements and to learn about their philosophies, objectives, and activities. By the end of the course, students will be able to analyze how power shapes food systems and articulate a theory of change for addressing a food systems problem of their choice. Students are evaluated based on participation in class discussions and field trips, a series of reflection papers, and a final project including a paper and an audio-visual presentation.

This course offers a broad introduction to food and farm policy in the United States. Food and farm policy encompasses laws, regulations, norms, decisions, and actions by governments and other institutions that influence food production, distribution, access, consumption, and recovery. This course focuses on the policy process and two major policy tools: the U.S. Farm Bill and U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

The course begins with an overview of the evolution of food and farming technology in the United States. Students are then introduced to the concepts, institutions, and stakeholders that influence farm and food policy, and examine examples of some of the most salient contemporary issues. Topics covered include: food production and the environment; farm-based biodiversity conservation; international food and agricultural trade; food processing, manufacturing, and retail industries; food safety; dietary and nutrition guidelines; food labeling and advertising; food and biotechnology; food waste and recovery; food advocacy and activism; and food insecurity and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Through case studies and exercises students examine the policymaking process at the local, state, and federal level and learn to evaluate various policy options. Finally, the course compares and contrasts international perspectives on farm and food policies and programs. Students are evaluated based on participation in class discussions, a series of op-ed essays, in-class briefs and debates, and a policy recommendation report on the upcoming U.S. Farm Bill.

For much of the past 5000 years the sea has played a major role in a broad variety of human cultures, histories, arts, and economies. Sea-faring peoples have developed a rich lore and technology that allows them to both survive and even thrive in an often hostile element. This course will mix practical, hands-on learning of aspects of seamanship with a survey of fiction and non-fiction that address maritime themes. During the early part of the term we will concentrate on aspects of small-boat handling, using the College’s inflatables, rowing boats, and the larger research vessels, Osprey and Laughing Gull. Students will learn how to launch and land small-craft from docks and beaches, basic rowing skills and use of an outboard motor. They will learn essential knots useful aboard ship and on the dock, how to lay out a course using a chart and compass, use of GPS and depth sounders, basic Rules of the Road, and elements of celestial navigation. During some lab periods we will go on short voyages in the general area of Frenchman Bay. As the term proceeds and weather worsens, we will turn to an increasingly greater literary component, reading accounts of famous voyages and local fishermen, discoveries, battles, legends and poetry. Possible texts include, but are not limited to: Working the Sea by Wendell Seavey, Master and Commander by Patrick O’ Brian, Maiden Voyage by Tania Aebi, The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger, In the Heart of The Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick, Longitude by Dava Sobel, Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker, Kon Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl, We Didn’t Mean to Go To Sea by Arthur Ransome as well as excerpts from The Greenlanders’ Saga, Moby Dick, The Old Man and the Sea, The Voyage of the Beagle, and Two Years Before the Mast. Students will be evaluated on the basis of class participation, a number of short “quizzes” – which will include practical elements – and a term paper focusing on one aspect of working the sea.

Using Acadia National Park as a case study, this course will explore the various facets of “the national park idea” and what it means for Americans in terms of history and identity. Through direct experiences in one of the “crown jewels” of the park system, the class will examine the historical, ecological, cultural, social, legal, economic, and spiritual context in which national parks are formed and continue to exist in the 21st century. We will work with National Park Service professionals to look at various aspects of park management and day-to-day challenges of implementing the “national park idea.” Through weekly field trips, journaling, service learning opportunities, and projects, we will be immersed in the management and experience of Acadia. We will explore, through reading and writing, the broader themes of wilderness preservation, attitudes toward nature, the history of conservation, and the commodification of nature. This experiential class is specifically geared toward first-year students and they will be given preference for enrollment. Assignments will include journal writing, short exercises, a group project/service learning opportunity, short presentations, and papers.

Natural history collections are important artifacts that provide pivotal information on the past, present, and future of our natural world. They document species ecology and distribution, changes in aspects of phenotypes, and aid in conservation initiatives. Collections have tremendous value in understanding and documenting our natural and cultural world. Yet their history, and the practice of scientific collecting, is muddled with bias, controversy, and colonial practices. Through discussion and practice, we will explore the science and art of scientific collecting, preparing, and caring for specimens (plant and animal). We will discuss the history of scientific collections, and collection practices, and consider their role and value. We will visit natural history museums, their collections, and the curators that care for them. Thus, there are two required field trips, including one overnight. We will also practice the art of specimen preparation and care, learning different preparation and cataloging techniques. This class is open to anyone with any interest or curiosity about natural history museums, collections or scientific collecting. It is recommended for students interested in museology techniques or those interested in pursuing careers in museum studies. Assessments include written responses to weekly prompts, discussion participation, written essays, and a term project.

This course is designed for science students developing their professional communication skills. It will improve the students’ writing ability by introducing them to writing for the scientific community and for the lay public. The course involves understanding the protocols for writing a scientific paper based on lab or field data, including learning to write an abstract and literature review. Students will also learn and apply visual and oral communication skills to construct and present a scientific poster. In addition to working with the instructor and in-class peer reviews, students will work on the content of their writing and grammar with writing tutors.

This course focuses on the ecological and evolutionary consequences of associations formed between organisms that are markedly different in form and function. A diverse array of interactions ranging from pollination and termite digestion to hitch-hiking mites are examined in order to explore the role of symbioses in biological systems. In this context we explore the changing conceptions of the major divisions of life; current models for explaining the origin of eukaryotes, angiosperms, and two-sex systems; coevolution; keystone species, and models for assessing mutualism and parasitism within an ecological context. Evaluations are based on ability to read and critique primary scientific literature, class participation, and the completion of a term project.

Most of the ocean is deep, dark, and cold – conditions that at first glance appear terribly inhospitable. And yet the past century and a half of deep-ocean exploration has revealed an astonishing abundance and diversity of life, with forms and functions that, though seemingly alien, reflect exquisite adaptation to the unique challenges of surviving in such an environment. Our expanding knowledge about the deep ocean is only possible with the boundary-pushing technologies and instruments developed to delve deeper, see further, and collect more from the most remote depths. As we have learned more about the ecosystems in the deep ocean, it has also become clear that human activities are not so removed from them as we once believed. Discussions about deep ocean biology now include debates about our obligation to protect and conserve it.

In this course, we will take a tour of the variety of life that exists in the deep ocean, learn about how we observe and study it, and discuss the ways that humans interact with and affect it. Our guiding questions for the course are:

What kinds of life exist in different deep ocean ecosystems? How are deep sea organisms adapted to life in an environment of extremes? What technologies are used to study life in the deep ocean and what are their capabilities and constraints? What do we owe to life in the deep ocean in terms of conservation? What do we owe to human society in terms of deep-ocean exploration, discovery, and resource use?

We meet twice a week in class and have one afternoon lab period. Classes are a combination of lecture, discussion and activities, and labs focus on one or two elements of deep-sea biology for deeper investigation as a group. This course is open to anyone but is particularly suited for students interested in marine studies, ecology, evolutionary biology, and/or environmental ethics. Students will be assessed based on short research assignments throughout the course and a term project.

This course examines ecology in the classic sense: the study of the causes and consequences of the distribution and abundance of organisms. We examine the assumptions and predictions of general models of predator-prey interactions, inter- and intra-species competition, island biogeography, and resource use, and compare these models to the results of experimental tests in lab and field. In addition we discuss appropriate techniques used by ecologists in collecting data in the field, note-taking and the appropriate collation and storage of field data. Although this course is NOT a course in Conservation Biology, we examine how ecological principles are applied to conservation questions. Readings include selections from the primary literature. Students are evaluated on the basis of class participation and two in depth problem sets,drawing extensively on the primary literature.

This course emphasizes field studies of the ecology of Mount Desert Island, incorporating labs and field trips. Each exercise focuses on a central ecological concept. Topics include intertidal biology and diversity, forest trees and site types, bedrock geology, soil biology, insect diversity, pollination ecology, freshwater biology, predation, herbivory, and the migration of birds. Discussions include the development of natural history as a science and the role of natural selection in the evolution of diversity. Students are expected to keep a field notebook or journal, to undertake a project, and to write a term paper. Class meets for two lecture sessions and one lab session or two field/lab sessions per week. The course is particularly appropriate for students concentrating in Environmental Education.

This course is a partner course to Intertidal Ecology, meaning we explore the same topics just in different environments. Therefore, students may enroll in either Ecology: Natural History or Intertidal Ecology but not both.

Ecosystem ecology is the branch of ecological science that considers the large-scale transfer of matter and energy among different living and non-living compartments in ecosystems. Thinking about the natural world with this level of abstraction has provided critical insights into the processes that support life on Earth, the feedbacks that connect the geosphere and atmosphere to the biosphere, and the ways life is likely to respond to large-scale perturbations such as climate change. In this course, we will explore the deep history of life on earth and how living things have transformed the chemistry of the planet. We will study how energy flows and nutrients cycle in present-day ecosystems, and how these processes are coupled and regulated by the actions of living organisms. Using examples from terrestrial, freshwater, and marine systems, we will study how to quantify fluxes of energy and matter. We will analyze the factors that affect rates of ecosystem processes such as plant growth and decomposition in different ecoregions. We will explore the feedbacks that link living and non-living matter into a single complex network. The drivers and ramifications of climate change will be a recurring theme throughout the term. This course will be useful for students interested in global change research, particularly those who plan to pursue graduate degrees in related fields. Students will be assessed based on class participation, a research paper and presentation, and a project on communicating scientific information.

The simplest definition of an estuary is a place along a coast where freshwater and saltwater meet; however, estuaries are far from simple. They are complex systems driven by a fascinating network of interactions and feedbacks. This course offers a comprehensive exploration of estuaries as complex systems, integrating their physical, chemical, biological, and ecological processes. We will cover advanced topics such as estuarine hydrodynamics, sediment transport, productivity, ecosystem function, and biogeochemical cycling. Every estuary is different and throughout the course we will examine case studies of different estuaries, developing a global perspective on their variety. After building a foundation of knowledge on estuarine processes, we will explore how these systems respond to perturbation, how they exercise resilience, and how pivotal features of estuarine networks can be drastically altered by human activities. Estuaries are at the intersection of myriad anthropogenic influences and are critical environments supporting human survival, health and happiness. Together we will explore the various ways that humans interact with and affect these systems.

We meet twice a week for in-class work, and once every other week for an extended afternoon lab session when we go on field trips to explore local estuaries. The course also involves one required weekend field trip to a far off-site estuarine system. Assessment in the course will be based on case study problem sets, reading responses, and a term project.

This course is intended as an advanced offering for students interested in environmental research, management, and/or restoration. A solid background in marine biology, environmental science, or related disciplines is essential to succeed in the course. Experience and comfort with mathematics (particularly the basics of calculus) will also be very beneficial. If you are unsure of whether you have the math skill set for this course, I encourage you to reach out to me.

This course provides students with the opportunity to put their knowledge of ecology and diversity into an evolutionary framework. The emphasis is on how populations of organisms are currently evolving, with a focus on the ecological context of natural selection. Topics in the course include the genetic basis of evolutionary change, selection and adaptation, reproductive effort, co-evolution, the ecology and evolution of sex, behavioral ecology, speciation, and applied evolutionary ecology. In addition to a textbook, students read several original research articles. The course has two lectures and one discussion section per week. Evaluations are based on exams and short essay sets.

Despite uniform rules of development, seed plants exhibit an incredible range of forms including succulent cacti, bug-eating sundews, dainty annuals, and leafless parasites. These differences in form often are correlated with habitat and life history parameters such as nutrient and water availability, herbivores, light quality, and modes of perennation. In this course we begin by examining the morphological development and organization of seed plants from inception in the seed to reproductive maturity. With this general developmental framework, we then examine whole plant and organ level patterns of variation, modification, and ecological specialization that underlie the variation in form observed today. Evaluations are based on laboratory quizzes, paper, midterm, and final exam.

Ever-rising numbers of people and their impact on the Earth’s finite resources could lead to disaster, not only for wildlife and ecosystems but also for human populations. As researchers gather and publish more data, GIS becomes vital to graphically revealing the inter-relationships between human actions and environmental degradation. Much of what threatens the earth and its inhabitants is placed-based. Solutions require tools to help visualize these places and prescribe solutions. This is what GIS is about. Built on digital mapping, geography, databases, spatial analysis, and cartography, GIS works as a system to enable people to better work together using the best information possible. For these reasons, some level of competency is often expected for entry into many graduate programs and jobs, particularly in natural resources, planning and policy, and human studies. The flow of this course has two tracts, technical and applied. The course begins with training in the basics of the technology. Then, skills are applied to projects that address real-world issues. Project work composes the majority of course work and each student has the opportunity to develop their own project. Because GIS provides tools to help address many kinds of issues, GIS lends itself well to the theory of thinking globally and acting locally. Projects often utilize the extensive data library for the Acadia region developed by students since the lab was founded in 1988. The GIS Lab acts as a service provider to outside organizations and students can tap into the resources of a broad network of groups and individuals working towards a more sustainable future. Course evaluations are partially based on the on-time completion of exercises and problem sets. Most of the evaluation is based on critique of student independent final project work and related documentation.

Wilderness has been the clarion call for generations of environmentalists. Henry David Thoreau once said, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” That single sentence and the controversy surrounding that idea provides the central focus of our explorations over the term. This course examines the question of wilderness from multiple perspectives in the hopes of providing an understanding of the concept and real spaces that constitute wilderness. Starting with a week-long canoe trip down Maine’s Allagash Wilderness Waterway, we look at historical and contemporary accounts of the value of wilderness, biological, and cultural arguments for wilderness, and the legal and policy difficulties of “protecting” wilderness. Considerable time is spent evaluating current criticisms of the wilderness idea and practice. Students are involved in a term-long project involving potential wilderness protection in Maine. This involves some weekend travel and work in the Maine Woods. Classwork emphasizes hands-on projects as well as theoretical discussions.

The intertidal occupies the space on the ocean shore between the highest and lowest extents of the tides, and the organisms inhabiting the intertidal must adapt to an ever-fluctuating environment. It is unique among ecosystems in that it condenses and concentrates many ecological processes along a strong physiological gradient, and so serves as an ideal environment to observe and investigate fundamental ecological principles.

In this course, you will be introduced to the many diverse intertidal ecosystems of coastal Maine, from rocky shorelines to tidal mudflats to salt marshes. Through discussions in class and observations in the field, we will endeavor to answer the questions:

What organisms are found in the intertidal, and how are they adapted to life there? How is the distribution of intertidal organisms dictated by living in a transitional environment? How do intertidal organisms interact with each other, and how does this shape the community?

We meet twice per week for class time with one afternoon lab period. During lab time we will be going on field trips as much as possible to explore the local intertidal habitats. This course is intended as an accessible introduction to marine community ecology and field work. Assessment is based on weekly question sets, lab assignments, and a short research proposal.

This course is a partner course to Ecology: Natural History, meaning we explore the same topics just in different environments. Therefore, students may enroll in either Intertidal Ecology or Ecology: Natural History but not both.

Planet Earth is misnamed. Seawater covers approximately 70% of the planet’s surface, in one giant all-connected ocean. This ocean has a profound effect on the planet’s climate, chemistry, ecosystem, and energy resources. Billions of years ago life began there, in what now we regard as the last unexplored frontier of this planet. In this course we examine the various disciplines within oceanography, including aspects of geology and sedimentology, chemical, dynamic and biological oceanography. The course concludes with an introduction to marine ecosystems examined at various trophic levels, including phyto/zooplankton, fish and other macrofauna. Fieldwork (weather dependent) includes trips on RV Indigo, trips to intertidal and estuarine ecosystems, and possible visits to the college’s islands, Mount Desert Rock and Great Duck Island. Evaluation will be by lab, quizzes and a final paper.

This intensive, field-based course examines fundamental concepts and processes of tropical ecology through exploration and investigation of a diverse array of bioclimatic zones found within the Central American country of Costa Rica. Students will spend extensive time in the field learning the biotic diversity of each region through observation and application of field techniques. Students will then integrate these field experiences with readings from the primary literature and classic works to contemplate and discuss current topics in tropical ecology. Primary emphasis in this course will be placed on the vertebrate fauna of Costa Rica, with arthropod diversity and ecology addressed in the Tropical Entomology course. The course will visit Caribbean slope rainforest, pre-montane forest, montane cloud forest, Pacific slope dry forest, Pacific wet forest, and Pacific beach/marine communities. Non-travel days will typically consist of early morning to early/mid-afternoon field time, afternoon lectures, or discussions followed by early evening to late night field time. Evaluation will be based on quality of work associated with a series of field-based independent research projects, level of engagement in class discussions, and overall commitment to all aspects of this immersion experience. Permission of Instructor required. Previous coursework in the areas of ecology, organismal biology, or natural history will be taken into account during the selection process.

This course is part of a three-credit expeditionary program in neotropical field ecology. Students must enroll in all three courses.

Nearly 80% of all described species belong to the class Insecta. Due to their abundance, diversity and adaptability, insects are crucial components of terrestrial, freshwater and human-made ecosystems. Students with a background in entomology can apply their knowledge of insects to many other fields, including botany, ecology, anthropology, epidemiology and medicine, agriculture, climate change, visual arts, history, and even the culinary arts. This course will give students a sampling of entomological applications within these diverse fields. Students will be given a solid introduction to insect biology, ecology, taxonomy and identification through lectures, lab sessions and field trips. They will assemble their own insect collections and will learn to identify all Maine insect orders and many common insect families. Lectures, field trips and readings will emphasize the important role of insects in human lives and our impact on the environment. Students will be evaluated on their insect collections, performance on lab quizzes, participation and one paper with presentation.

This course is a phylogenetic survey of the major groups of animals without backbones. These animals range in size from single cells to giant squids, and they include the vast majority of animals on earth. Using text readings, assigned articles, and one afternoon per week of field/lab work, students gain an understanding of the classification, physiology, ecology, evolutionary relationships, and economic significance of this remarkably diverse collection of organisms. Students are evaluated on lab notebooks, weekly homework assignments, and two short research projects.

Islands have played a major role in the development of ecological and evolutionary theory. Most recently, islands have served as an important metaphor in the development of conservation biology. Maine is blessed with a plethora of islands -between 4500 and 6000 at the last count- and the history and pre-history of these islands is intimately entwined with that of the continent itself. This course examines historical and current interpretations of island biogeography and the interplay between natural and human history and human ecology. The class will be taught as a combination of term-time seminar and in the field, based on the College’s field station on Great Duck Island and the College’s research vessel. During the Spring term we will be meeting regularly to examine the theoretical basis of Island Biogeography and islands as the subject of scientific and literary discussion since Aristotle. Readings will include Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace, and contemporary authors. In late August we will re-convene for the field component of the class. During the first half of this component, we will be focusing primarily on Great Duck Island and its immediate surroundings, learning and applying theoretical approaches to islands’ landscapes, with extensive reading from the primary literature. During the second half of the class, we will move further afield, exploring a variety of islands in eastern Maine, and relating our observations to theoretical predictions. Ultimately we hope to travel to Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy to observe a large island community, see the traditional weir fishery, and observe firsthand migrating right and humpback whales, and northern seabirds. Evaluation based on participation, quizzes and a term project.

A survey of Anglo-American literature from the Scientific Revolution to the present. Focuses on the ongoing debate about the role of science in Western culture, the potential benefits and dangers of scientific experimentation, the spiritual, religious, social and political issues that come about with the Ages of Discovery and Reason, and their treatment in literature. Specific debates include concerns over what is “natural,” whether knowledge is dangerous, the perils of objectivity, and the mind/body dichotomy; works include Shelley’s Frankenstein, Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Brecht’s Galileo, Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams and Naylor’s Mama Day as well as short stories and poems. Writing-focused option.

This course provides an introduction to the biology and natural history of marine mammals, specializing in species resident within the North Atlantic. Topics covered include: phylogeny and taxonomy; anatomy and physiology; behavior; sensory ecology; and management/conservation issues. The course includes field trips to observe animals in their natural habitat, dissection of specimens, and exposure to the professional peer review field. Students are expected to complete two individual literature-based reviews, one species- and one system-based, to be presented in class. Assessment is based on class participation, presentations as well as written submissions. Lab fee covers costs of field trips, including potential boat and field station time, and optional travel to a regional conference during the term. Offered every other year.

Where is the largest population of humpback whales in the world, the largest caribou herd in North America, the only confirmed Viking settlement in North America, and Paleozoic water bottled for consumption? The remote Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador presents a stunning landscape, an astoundingly rich ecological setting, and a tragic history of poverty amidst an incredible natural resource, the northern cod fishery, that was ultimately destroyed. The province has been alternately invaded or occupied by different groups of Native Americans along with Norseman, Basques, French, British, and the U.S. military, because of its strategic location and rich fishing and hunting grounds. One of the first and one of the last British colonies, this richest of fisheries produced a very class based society, composed of a wealthy few urban merchants and an highly exploited population of fishing families often living on the edge of survival. But within the past 50 years, Newfoundland society has been forced to evolve. The provincial government looks towards oil and mineral exploitation to turn around the economy, while ex-fishermen consider eco- and cultural tourism with growing ambivalence. This then is our setting, and background, for an intense examination of the human ecology of this province; the relationship between humans and their environment, sometimes successful, sometimes otherwise, the struggle between the tenuous grasp of civilization and this marvelous, terrible place. To do this we will discuss various readings, examine case studies and review the natural and human history of this unique province. Our learning will culminate with a two-week trip to Newfoundland to examine its issues firsthand. Evaluation will be based on class and field trip participation, responses to reading questions, a field journal, and a final project.

Systematics is the scientific study of classification, specifically the placement of organisms into groups based on their common descent. This course focuses on the classification of land plants, with a particular focus on herbaceous taxa found in coastal Maine. Through lectures and field, lab, and herbarium work, we will gain familiarity with the practice of systematics and the characteristics of plants that are used to infer their phylogenetic relationships. Lectures will cover the theory and practice of systematics, including botanical nomenclature, plant identification terminology, relationships among the major plant groups and characters with taxonomic significance, herbarium specimen preparation, and bioinformatics. Labs will cover collection methods, specimen preparation, and field characters for about 30 plant families in the region. Evaluation will be based on participation, field and lab quizzes, a 5-minute oral presentation on a plant species chosen by the instructor and a 15-minute oral presentation on a topic in plant systematics chosen by the student, and a collection of at least 30 plant specimens from at least 20 different families prepared and identified by the student. Students should plan to begin collecting specimens over the summer in preparation for the course, following guidance that will be provided to registered students during the spring term. Please note: all collecting must be done in accordance with state and federal laws; there must be NO collecting in Acadia National Park and no importation of specimens from outside the US.

The Arctic and Antarctic represent some of the most extreme environments on the planet. As physical places, both poles play an important role in governing the planet’s climate and heat flow. Both are suspected to be rich in minerals and are thought to perhaps hold short-term relief from current world shortages in natural resources. As ecosystems, both are hugely productive in spite of, and in part because of the extreme temperatures they experience; certain species are found nowhere else and in fact thrive in these remote locales. Superimposed upon these natural environments is the presence of humans. Exploration of both areas has been particularly focused in the past century, with countless stories of the perseverance and persistence of our pioneering spirit. Initially surveyed to forward nationalistic agendas, both poles are now sites of scientific inquiry. In particular, the political model that currently governs Antarctica as one massive Protected Area has no precedent and perhaps suggests a way forward for environmental agendas working on global scales. More recently, the poles have been exploited by ecotourism businesses.

This class examines the provinces of the Arctic and Antarctic, wildernesses whose boundaries can be defined physically, biologically, geologically and politically. We will examine the rich and highly adapted diversity of life as it is affected by local and global oceanography and atmospheric science, and assess the impacts of climate change on these fragile environments. We will also review our relationship with these places and examine what future we might play in preserving, and/or exploiting the polar regime, using Human Ecology as a model for our understanding. Evaluation will be by two term papers and participation in class activities.

The Society for Ecological Restoration defines ecological restoration as “the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed.” In this era of widespread environmental degradation, restoration ecology provides an important set of methods for mitigating anthropogenic damage. However, the science of restoration is still in its early phases, and important theoretical and practical questions remain to be resolved. This class will critically examine the assumptions that underlie restoration planning, both in the ethical dimension and in the realm of scientific theory. We will consider the validity of conceptual models of ecological communities and ecosystems and the way that these models shape decision-making. We will survey the factors that must be taken into account during restoration and study best-practices approaches, with a focus on adaptive management. In the final project, groups of students will develop and present restoration plans for a local site. Students will be evaluated based on two essays, class participation, and the final project.

When you keep a natural history field journal, you join a long and proud tradition, shared through time with naturalists, explorers, and artists. Careful observation of nature, followed by careful writing and illustration, is a time-tested technique for “capturing” some of the wonders of the planet’s life. While many of us have become dependent on technology to record notes and photographs, the practice of keeping a physical journal confers many advantages. Making a sketch requires you to look closely at your subject in a way that taking a photograph does not. A carefully created field notebook is a permanent record that will outlive technical obsolescence and even the life of its creator. Today, the field notebooks of figures such as Henry Walter Bates, Alexander von Humboldt, and Maria Sibylla Merian continue to provide useful data and artistic inspiration centuries after the death of their creators. Students will develop a regular natural history field journal practice by creating a journal as a record of their journey through Costa Rica. Along the way, they will document their observations through structured and unstructured entries using a variety of writing and drawing techniques. Assignments will be based on content from Introduction to Tropical Field Ecology and Tropical Entomology. The journals will be exhibited in an end of term show at the Dorr Museum. Evaluation will be based on completion of assigned entries, individual growth, and overall commitment to all aspects of this immersion experience.

This course is part of a three-credit expeditionary program in neotropical field ecology. Students must enroll in all three courses.

Natural History can be regarded as the oldest “science” -indeed, at one point within the Western canon Natural History WAS science. Beginning with discussion of early hunter-gatherers, working past Ashurbanipal, King of Kings, Hellenistic Greece, the Roman Empire, and into the herbals and magicians of the Middle Ages, this course will survey the development and eventual fragmentation of Natural History into more specialized branches. Once a foundation has been established, we will engage with the naturalists of the great age of exploration and conquest during the 17th through the 19th centuries, ending with an examination of Natural History’s legacy in the rise of modern Ecology. Course readings will draw heavily on original sources, using translations where appropriate. Towards the end of the term we will discuss the strengths and limitations of inductive and deductive reasoning in science and the implications of the 20th and 21st centuries’ increased emphasis on theoretical reasoning. Students will gain a better sense of Euro-American history overall and of the history of science in particular; the ability to use original sources; understanding of the importance of comparing multiple sources in arriving at historical conclusions and of the importance of recognizing cultural and historical biases in interpretation of information. Evaluation will be based on class participation and the spoken and written presentation of individually chosen research on a person or topic important to the development of natural history as a science.

This course introduces you to the native and ornamental shrubs and trees of Mount Desert Island. Lectures will cover basics of plant taxonomy and forest ecology focusing on the dominant woody plant species of the region. Laboratory and field sessions will involve the identification of woody plants and an introduction to the major woody plant habitats of the island. The course is designed to teach botany and plant taxonomy for students interested in natural history/ecology, forestry, and landscape design. Evaluations are based on class participation, weekly field/lab quizzes, a plant collection, and term project.

Insects are the dominant animals in nearly all terrestrial ecosystems. However, in places like Maine, their abundance, diversity, and impact are not always apparent to the casual observer. This is not so in the tropics! Nowhere else are insects as large, showy, and numerous. Costa Rica is home to at least 300,000 species of insects, approximately one third of all described insect species. We will travel to and observe insects in a Caribbean slope rainforest, pre-montane forest, montane cloud forest, Pacific slope dry forest, Pacific wet forest, and Pacific beach/marine communities. Non-travel days will typically consist of early to late-morning field time, afternoon lectures or discussions followed by early evening to late night field time.

Students will spend extensive time in the field learning and practicing insect identification to the order and family level, observing insect behavior, and studying interspecies interactions. Reading and discussion topics will include insect conservation and declines, relationships between insects and plants, humans, and other animals, and control of agricultural and medical insect pest species. Particular attention will be paid to leafcutter ants, army ants, and other ecologically and culturally significant species. The course schedule will complement the content taught in Introduction to Tropical Field Ecology and will be reinforced through assignments in the Field Journal course. Introductory Entomology is helpful but not a prerequisite.

This course is part of a three-credit expeditionary program in neotropical field ecology. Students must enroll in all three courses.

In this course, we will explore the phylogenetic, morphological, and ecological diversity of vertebrates within an evolutionary framework. Using a comparative approach, we will explore the diversity of major vertebrate groups, with a focus on local representatives; interpret major evolutionary transitions; and identify the relationships between structure and function. We will practice developing hypotheses about vertebrate ecology and evolution, considering morphological, behavioral, ecological, and life history traits. The laboratory component will be a mixture of work with museum specimens, dissections, and fieldwork. We will focus on nomenclature of anatomy, standard necropsy and identification techniques, including use of taxonomic keys. Fieldwork will introduce methods to survey and monitor vertebrates, including standard capture, handling, and marking techniques. The laboratory is scheduled with early field mornings in mind. Days we are not conducting field work, we will meet later for lab. There is a required weekend field trip. This class involves a fair amount of reading and memorization to help develop a strong foundation in the taxonomy of vertebrates, as this course is a prerequisite for other advanced vertebrate courses. Assessments include quizzes, a lab/field journal, a practical, and a final written “dream project” on a vertebrate ecology and evolution question of your choice.

This course serves as a prerequisite for ornithology, herpetology and mammalogy courses.

This course is designed to introduce students to how, and why, we study and manage wildlife populations. We will discuss the socio-political background and establishment of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, considering its biases and limitations. Using a variety of readings, case studies, and hands-on activities, we will explore the ecological processes and common conservation management tools that underlie wildlife management. We will apply our knowledge throughout the term through the investigation of different wildlife populations found on MDI, in collaboration with the National Park Service and other agencies. Therefore, there is a strong field component to this course. The class is scheduled to allow for the integration of discussions, in-class and field activities, and early field mornings.

This course is open to anyone interested in wildlife ecology, particularly the field and applied aspects. It is particularly suitable for students interested in pursuing careers in field ecology, or those interested in working with state or federal agencies, or NGOs. Assessment will be based on participation, activities, reflections, and an end-of-term technical report and presentation.

The ability to make careful observations and record them through sketches is an invaluable tool for artists, scientists, and other curious and creative people. Maintaining a sketchbook can be both a professionally useful and personally rewarding practice. This multidisciplinary course will encourage students to develop a regular sketchbook practice using animals as the focus of study. It is intended for any student who wishes to improve their sketching and observational skills, gain an understanding of animal anatomy, and learn about local animal life. Students will draw from museum specimens, taxidermy mounts, and live animals using a variety of media and techniques suitable for field sketching. Class will take place in the Dorr Museum and at field sites within Acadia National Park and Hancock County.

This course will meet for two three hour sessions per week. The first session will include a lesson about a particular animal taxon, followed by sketching exercises using museum specimens and mounts as references. In the second session, students will draw from live animals in the field. Students will also spend approximately nine hours per week outside of class on additional field sketching assignments, readings, and research.

Evaluations will emphasize participation and student growth rather than artistic ability. Our focus will be on practice and learning to effectively record observations, not on creating polished illustrations. Prior experience with drawing is not required.

Picture this: you and your friends are grabbing burgers and you overhear someone order a pop. You instantly get the urge to correct them because soda is the proper word you were taught. Later, the server brings the coke they ordered, which further increases your urge to intervene because they actually ordered Sprite. After all, soda is the correct word. Or is it? Which word is correct? Actually, they all are.

Linguistic variation is inherent to all languages and from a linguistic standpoint, all languages are equal. Yet, humans are continuously judged, evaluated, and discriminated against based on how they speak and write in professional, academic, and everyday settings. These seemingly innocuous comments about correctness have harmful effects on people who don’t conform to perceived language standards. As a result, various forms of discrimination and policies that exist continue to marginalize people due to misinformation and in some cases, disinformation. In this class, we will examine the intersections of language, ideology, and discrimination in everyday, educational, and professional settings while developing our research practices.

Classes will be facilitated through weekly reading discussions and discourse analysis of data (i.e., data sessions) in small and whole group activities. Readings will address the intersections of language and discrimination, such as accentism, racialization, language subordination, and social identities. The class will provide foundational concepts from applied linguistics and related fields, such as sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. The course is also focused on developing your research literacies and project management skills. You will learn how to develop and carry out a project, evaluate the credibility of information, and various types of data. Labs will be used to create space for data sessions and peer-reviews.

Through discourse analysis, you will apply concepts you learned in class to develop your understanding of linguistic diversity and language related issues. Projects can utilize print and digital media to address, for instance, monolingual policies and their impact in educational or workplace settings, intersections of language and gender or race, and various forms of linguistic discrimination in the US or other contexts.

There are no prerequisites and this course is suitable for students who are curious about language, discourse, social issues, as well as research. Students will be evaluated based on completed assignments, such as readings and other homework, research projects, peer-review, and overall class contributions, including lab sessions. You must be prepared to reflect on implicit biases and perceptions of language and rethink how you approach and conceptualize research. This course meets both the writing requirement and HS requirement as it develops genre knowledge, rhetorical awareness, understanding of writing as dynamic and iterative processes, and research literacies grounded in social sciences.

Algerian Jewish philosopher, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), one of the most widely translated French philosophers of the 20th century, developed a body of work often referred to as “deconstruction.” Derrida’s oeuvre has influenced multiple fields and disciplines, including Literature, Anthropology, Philosophy, Postcolonial Studies, Psychoanalysis and Feminist Theory. This course will track some of the ways in which Derrida engaged with ideas of difference, through a focus on questions his work poses for understandings of the human. The class will engage with Derrida’s archive through reading some of his early work, including essays and interviews about the status of writing and speech, language, and philosophy, and then move through his later work, including his increasing focus on explicitly political topics such as the death Peñalty, the animal, sovereignty, and war. Although the texts we read will be primarily Derrida’s own writing, we will also read authors who respond to and build on Derrida’s thought. These may include Gayatri Spivak, Ranjana Khanna, Samir Haddad, Peggy Kamuf, and Michael Naas, as well as texts by those with whom Derrida was in dialogue, such as Sigmund Freud, Hélène Cixous, Michel Foucault, Sarah Kofman, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. As we move through Derrida’s texts and those informed by them, we will pay particular attention to questions about sexual difference, colonialism, the human, death in relation to life, and representation. Students will be evaluated on participation in seminar discussions, weekly reading responses, a mid-term paper and final paper. There are no prerequisites for this course, but students will be expected to conduct close readings of challenging texts. Students are encouraged to contact the professor with any questions about the course and whether it is a good fit for them.

This course will explore heroines from two Hindu epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana, alongside the Greek mythological figures Ariadne, Medusa, Circe, and Galatea. Both sets of heroines have generated deeply rooted cultural archetypes. Central to the upbringing of more than half of the Indian population through comic books, TV shows, movies, and the like, the Hindu epics have set the standard for what an ideal Hindu woman should be, bolstering the patriarchal system in the name of religion and culture. Much like Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships” in Greek mythology, some of these women have been the cause of wars of “epic proportions.” Others have become infamous archetypes for women’s witchiness and trouble-making, especially in Greek epics Western authors have retold. Myths of their beauty or its opposite have long been part of these narratives, but do we hear them speak? What do we know about the power they yield? Epics and mythologies have been unable to provide us with concrete answers.

Therefore, we will turn to female authors like Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Kavita Kané, Volga, and Vaishnavi Patel for the Hindu epics and Madeline Miller, Jennifer Saint, and Rosie Hewlett for the Greek tales. These authors have created spaces where women’s voices can be heard and analyzed, where archetypal and epic types can be studied as multifaceted humans. We’ll not only read their novels closely but also supplement their work with feminist theory and short videos. Eventually, we’ll trace how these epics stay relevant with regard to the construction of gender and sexuality in the modern Indian and Western world.

Students will be evaluated based on class participation, an oral presentation, response posts, final paper, and a multimodal project. This class will be good for students who are interested in reading feminist literature and theory and understanding the enduring power of epics and myths as well as the contemporary feminist purpose in giving their heroines voice. Reading the Indian epics alongside the Greek tales will provide an opportunity for ample comparison of patriarchal systems and how they developed in representative cultures from the East and West.

This seminar will provide an in-depth exploration of public speech texts by a wide array of 19th century woman suffrage activists in the United States. This includes works by those individuals most often associated with the first wave of the movement including: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ernestine Rose, Anna Dickinson, Lucretia Mott, Victoria Woodhull, as well as other activists who are generally less well known today. While this is a course rooted in the history of what we might consider early American feminism, it should come as no surprise that, along the way, we will confront issues that continue to have salience today. Many of the topics surrounding gender, sex, identity, equality, empowerment, and political allyship that these activists wrestled with are still just as relevant for us to consider in our contemporary context. This is especially true when it comes to the topic of race and the intersectional nature of the discourse around gender equality, both then and now. We will spend time examining how the idea of race was rhetorically constituted, in both exclusionary and inclusionary ways, within these texts. We will also look specifically at the works of early Black feminists in the United States, and the myriad of ways they navigated the challenges of the moment, especially as they confronted a deeply embedded legacy of white supremacy within the early woman suffrage movement. Rather than rely primarily on secondary historical accounts, there will be a heavy emphasis on the close reading of primary source materials, mostly speeches, as we encounter these speakers “in their own words.” In addition, students will also take part in “hands on” recovery projects designed to locate, transcribe, document, and make broadly accessible works from the period that have been previously undocumented or left unaccounted for. In doing so, students will learn basic techniques for exploring and making effective use of various types of digitized historical collections that have emerged in recent years. Class sessions will be organized as a discussed based seminar. Assignments will emphasize critical, reflective, and analytical writing. Evaluation will be based on participation in class discussion, short written response papers, two longer form take-home essays, individual presentations, and a final “recovery” project. Students interested in topics related to gender, politics, historical research, and activism are especially encouraged to enroll. This is an introductory class and open to all students regardless of whether they have a previous background in feminism, social theory, US history, or politics.

Why do fairy tales capture the attention of adults and children all over the world and endure in popular literary and cinematic forms? What do they reveal to psychologists, biologists, historians, linguists, artists, anthropologists, and educators? Do they politicize or de-politicize? socialize or subvert? What is the postfeminist, postmodern response to the Brothers Grimm? What do fairy tales convey about animal behavior, entomology, and cosmology? How might the tales shape human limitations, moral values, and aspirations? This course will explore the storytelling and re-telling of literary, cultural, and scientific stories from a comparative perspective, imagining their interpretations and how they may be re-told with an eye toward new understandings of human interrelationships, of a given sociohistorical moment, the culture of COA, and the larger culture. Students will read folklore and fairy tales, view several films, and discuss essays by writers such as Cristina Bacchilega, Bruno Bettelheim, Ruth Bottigheimer, Michel Butor, Italo Calvino, Robert Darnton, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maria Tatar, and Jack Zipes. Contemporary works by writers, visual artists, and musicians inspired by traditional tales will also be explored. Writers may include Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Michael Cunningham, Neil Gaiman, Tanith Lee, Naguib Mahfouz, Haruki Murakami, Helen Oyeyemi, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Francine Prose, and Anne Sexton. Reflections may center on recurrent motifs and patterns; and social, sexual, moral, scientific and political content, with emphasis on race, gender, and class structure. Students will be evaluated on two short papers; one creative project that may be expressed in writing, visual art, music, or dance; and a final written assignment in any genre—poems, plays, fiction or nonfiction.

Race as a concept was constructed in the western world in the early modern era as commentary on and explanation of human differences. This class will examine the origins of the idea of race and the ways it is central to the creation of the modern world. Drawing on histories of Europe and the Americas this class will look at the different ways racialized thinking was deployed in colonial contexts. Central themes of the course will be the history of race as an idea, the nature and impact of the Atlantic slave trade, how indigenous peoples reshaped European ideas of what it meant to be human, the construction of whiteness, and the history of slavery in the new world. The period covered by the class spans from the origins of race as an idea to the late nineteenth century. The course will be a hybrid of a lecture course and a readings seminar. Students will read major works in the field and develop an understanding of the historical background of contemporary forms of structural inequality justified and reinforced by racialized thinking. Students will do a series of short assignments, lead discussion of books, and undertake a major research paper. The research projects will allow students to explore topics beyond the chronological and spatial scope of the course.

This class will be an empirically-based research seminar on the history, politics, archaeology, and culture of Maine’s Wabanaki tribes that tackles a wide range of issues. The class will consist of several group projects on topics such as cataloging indigenous place names to the loss of cultural heritage sites due to coastal erosion. After completing several of these projects, students will develop their own research project on Wabanaki history and culture that they will conceptualize, plan and carry out. The class will also cover the themes of colonialism, cultural revitalization, tribal sovereignty, preservation of cultural resources, and much more. The course will be based on projects developed in consultation with tribal cultural preservation specialists and tribal historians from Maine’s Wabanaki communities. Final projects, so long as they have a historical component, can explore a topic of the student’s choosing in consultation with the faculty. This class is appropriate for students from a range of backgrounds. Previous coursework such as Indigenous America, Native American Law, Race and Racism in America, the Yucatan Program, or other relevant courses will be extremely helpful, and preference will be given to students who have some previous academic background in historical research, indigenous studies, and ethnography. Students who have taken classes with a strong component of textual analysis of historical sources are also encouraged to take the class. Students will learn to work with both primary and secondary sources (both written and visual). Students will be evaluated on their contribution to the group projects, participation in discussion, several small assignments, and their final project.

On the one hand, modern economies are shaped by uneven capitalist development and premised on exploiting colonized, raced, gendered, sexualized Others. On the other hand, the racial and sexual violences at the heart of economic relations are often rationalized, naturalized, and turned invisible. In this course, we will explore the visible tip of the iceberg of these systemic inequities in the context of the contemporary US labor markets. We will focus on quantitative, empirical evidence of how race, gender, and sexuality influence individuals’ earnings, career prospects, life opportunities, and health and well-being; and how intersectional positionalities amplify or mitigate these disparities. We will pay particular attention to the Black–White gaps and cisgender–transgender gaps in economic opportunities and outcomes. We will also study theoretical approaches in labor economics, ranging from neoclassical economic models of discrimination to feminist economics models of marriage and intra-household bargaining, and stratification models of racial wealth inequality.

This course is intended for students who want to develop a quantitative understanding of the economic disparities that racial, gender, and sexual minorities face in the US. You will evaluate how economic policies can be used to generate and reproduce inequalities between social groups, and how they can also be used to promote a more just and equitable economy. You will leverage the tools developed in this class to prepare yourself for independent intellectual engagement in an area of personal interest, including senior projects, independent studies, internship, or postgraduate work. This is an intermediate-level seminar. Students will be evaluated through leading group discussion of assigned reading materials and developing a summative research proposal on a relevant topic of their choice.

This course will provide an introduction to the history of indigenous peoples in the Americas. Using a seminar style the class will combine some overview lectures, student-led discussion of books, and project-based learning to provide an initial introduction to the diverse histories of native peoples from Canada to the Andes. The course will focus on both pre-contact societies as well as the processes of interaction between Europeans and indigenous peoples in the Americas. Using a selection of case studies the course will highlight building an understanding of indigenous worldviews as well as socio-political organization and the ways both were transformed by colonialism. A range of books will introduce students to the ethnohistorical literature on native communities from Mesoamerica, North America, and the Andes. A simultaneous component of the course will be student’s research projects on a topic of their choosing that explores a dimension of native people’s histories. Students will be evaluated on attendance, course participation, short analytical essays, and their final project.

From a historical perspective domestic violence has been noted as primarily a “women’s issue”. We now recognize the misuse of power and control in relationships as a complex and prevalent social issue that profoundly impacts our society as a whole. To address the complexity of domestic violence we must strive toward changing the belief systems that allow this problem to exist. Together we will explore these belief systems by examining the aspects of culture that shape and support domestic violence on individual, community, institutional, and global levels. We will review the history of the domestic violence movement, including its roots in the women’s movement and how that movement grew into a network of victim-centered services and community-based advocacy responses. As a student you will learn how best to respond to victims of intimate partner violence, and how to apply the core principles of individual, community, institutional, and social change advocacy. You will be challenged to consider and reflect upon your own beliefs and cultural lenses throughout the course. The class format includes lectures, role-plays, media presentations, interviews with guest speakers, group work, and discussions. Opportunities will be provided for students to reflect upon experiences, to practice skills, and apply new learning through community and cultural change projects. Students will be evaluated on their critical thinking, analysis, and synthesis of the course goals and objectives as demonstrated by participation in class activities (responsiveness to required and suggested readings and materials, guest and peer generated discussion), personal culture analysis (personal reflection, self-evaluation).

We live in a time when the struggle for economic survival is life-shortening. We live in a place where the struggles for reproductive justice, the rights of women, the rights of trans and non-binary people, and gay and lesbian freedoms are intensified and weaponized for electoral gains and political power. What are the linkages, visible or hidden, between these two phenomena? How do we bring together Marxist political economy and queer/trans-inclusive feminist analysis to diagnose them? What can the anxieties, fears, and hatreds collected at the site of (trans)genders teach us about the inner working of capitalist (re)production? In turn, how can wrestling with the racial, sexual, and environmental violence that makes contemporary capitalism possible inform our collective struggle for gender and sexual equality and justice?

In this seminar, you and I will think through these questions together through the lens of contemporary Marxist–feminist political economy. We will engage contemporary feminist, black, and queer Marxist scholars whose works illuminate the contradictory, exploitative treatment of colonialized, raced, gendered, sexualized human and non-human Others under capitalism. Topically, our focus includes the birth rate crisis and the struggle for reproductive autonomy, contemporary attacks on gender minorities, and queer and trans-centered class struggles. This is an intensive, exploratory seminar. We will read 4-5 texts closely, focusing on each book for two weeks. In the first week, we will identify the book’s main arguments and approaches. In the second week we will re-read the book along with key texts that inform, supplement, or challenge its author(s). Our selection of key texts may include Jenny Brown’s Birth Strike, and Jules Gleeson and Elle O’Rouke (eds.) Transgender Marxism, but there are rooms to replace them with texts that better reflect your interests. You don’t have to be an expert on the debates and issues we engage in, but you must be unafraid and willing to actively grapple with them both intellectually and ethically.

The course is intended for students who are interested in approaching contemporary debates about LGBT+ issues, women’s rights, and reproductive justice from a radical, intersectional, and anti-capitalist perspective. It is also valuable for students who want to understand what makes capitalism possible and what may un-make it. You will get the most out of this seminar if you have a working knowledge of the political economy of capitalism, feminist theory, and/or critical social theory. Students will be evaluated through bi-weekly reading reviews and a final project or essay.

This readings seminar will explore the history of race thinking and structural forms of power in America from the earliest settlement of the hemisphere by Europeans to the twentieth century. We will emphasize the specific mechanisms of power used to produce and reproduce the ideas and institutions that oppressed African Americans, Native Americans, and “ethnics” over the course of the country’s history. As a nation built on slavery, racial discrimination, and white supremacy, the United States provides a unique vantage point from which to examine the workings out of the strange ideologies of difference that took root in the New World. The class will explore a wide range of histories from the origins of slavery in the seventeenth century as a solution to the “the problem of the poor” to the inclusion of Irish, Jewish and others in the category of “White” in the twentieth. A key aspect of the course will be examining the construction and workings of Whiteness. The seminar will be based on discussion of key texts in the scholarship of race and racism in the United States, and students will lead those discussions. Other core work of the class will be mastering the complex arguments and evidence used to reveal the inner workings of white supremacy through readings, analytic writing, and an independent project. The course is intended for a wide range of students willing to dig in to the work of reading extensively about a contentious topic to form their own historical analysis of the past. Evaluation will be based on discussion, mastery of the readings, short analytic writing, and a final project.

How do “philosophies born of struggle” (Leonard Harris) change, disrupt, and advance the discipline of philosophy? Academic philosophers have historically studied a select group of thinkers, most of whom are white men from Europe. European philosophers offer wonderfully rich arguments, but like all perspectives, theirs are partial and limited. To explore foundational philosophical questions, this course will read canonical European philosophers alongside scholars who engage with this canon from a diverse set of cultural, political, and historical contexts, such as indigenous studies, Africana philosophy, Latinx philosophy, postcolonial studies, and feminist theory. Along the way, we will discuss the concept of “the canon,” and we will consider how different theoretical interventions advance the discipline of philosophy.

To rethink the canon, this course will center on three philosophical questions: 1) What is the self or subjectivity? 2) How do philosophers theorize the “other”? 3) What is an ethical relationship between self and other? To explore these questions, we will pair texts from different historical and cultural contexts. Possible philosophers include Gloria Anzaldúa, Linda Martín Alcoff, Susan Bordo, Brian Yazzie Burkhart, Ranjana Khanna, René Descartes, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Immanuel Kant, Maria Lugones, Friedrich Nietzsche, Kwame Gyekye, Mariana Ortega, John Pittman, Plato, Sarah Ahmed, and Jacqueline Scott. Course requirements include weekly writing assignments, class participation, a midterm exam, and a final paper. This will be a discussion-driven course and students should be prepared to engage and discuss challenging theoretical literature. Prior work in philosophy will be helpful, but not required.

This course offers an overview of feminist, trans, and queer theories. The purpose of this course is two-fold. First, it will provide a snapshot of the ideas, traditions, and debates that shape these traditions. Second, this course will teach students to critically interrogate the meaning of sex, gender, sexuality, power, and oppression. Along the way, we will consider a host of arguments regarding the sources of sexism, racism, transphobia, and heteronormativity, debates regarding language and reality, the relationship between subjectivity and oppression, and the benefits and downfalls of identity politics. Although this course will stress the many ways feminist theory, trans theory, and queer theory overlap, we will also consider the emergence and development of queer and trans philosophies as distinct and unique disciplines.

Some of the principal questions for this course include: Which categories are used to study the human being and when are these categories oppressive or problematic? How do the categories of identity and difference inform our understanding of human experiences? When is language a mechanism for social and political oppression and when does language facilitate liberation? How do multicultural, intersectional, transgender, and queer approaches inform and transform feminist politics? How do queer philosophers challenge the theoretical orthodoxies of identity, gender, and sexuality? Course requirements include weekly writing assignments, class participation, a midterm exam, and a final paper. This will be a discussion-driven course and students should be prepared to engage and discuss challenging theoretical literature.

This course selects from among the most interesting, diverse, and well-written of contemporary women’s novels — many from the global South and all from other countries than the US — to focus on questions of women’s writing (and how/whether it can be treated as a literary and formal category), gender identity and women’s issues, and the tensions between sameness and difference among women’s experiences, and narrations of women’s experiences, around the world. The course begins by acknowledging the historical realities that limited women’s narrative options in the publishing industry until quite recently. We will examine a relatively unknown yet rather extraordinary short novel from 1967: Sawako Ariyoshi’s The Doctor’s Wife. After Ariyoshi, we will read from quite varied authors published within the last fifty years, writers such as: Buchi Emecheta, Clarice Lispector, Nawal El Saadawi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Hanan al-Shaykh, Jeannette Winterson, Rose Tremain, Nora Okja Keller, Fadia Faqir, and Yvonne Vera. We will also read some classic and contemporary feminist literary theory to gain a sense of how feminist scholars approach women’s novels and our questions. The course is especially designed for students interested in women’s and gender issues who have had some previous experience with literary analysis, close reading of texts, and/or feminist theory. As one way to do the work of an intermediate/advanced class, each student will choose an additional author to investigate, either a novelist or theorist who has published since 2000, and read a novel or theoretical essay by this author outside of class. Students will be evaluated based on class engagement, response papers, passage analyses, a presentation to the class of the outside novel or theory and the questions it raises, and a final evaluation essay.

The European Union is a fascinating, ongoing experiment in international cooperation. Currently twenty-eight countries have joined together in a supra-national political and economic union, creating a political entity unique to a world of sovereign individual nation-states. This course focuses on understanding this complex and evolving union through study of its main political institutions: the European Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, and the European Commission. We will look at the workings of and functional relationships between these institutions through readings, meetings with politicians, bureaucrats, and NGOs involved in European-level politics, and visits to each of the institutions during two weeks in Brussels. We will also spend some time in the course looking at the broader political and cultural context in which the institutions operate, through examination of several important current topics in European politics. Topics could include: refugees and migrants in Europe, the reauthorization of the Common Agricultural Policy, Brexit, the rise of right-wing movements across countries in the EU. Students will be evaluated based on participation in class discussions, a reflective journal kept during their time in Brussels, and a presentation and final essay on a current EU-relevant political issue of their choosing.

This course provides students with an immersion experience in the language and culture of the Yucatán Peninsula. The course aims to increase student’s abilities to navigate the linguistic and cultural terrain of another society in sensitive, ethical, and effective ways. Class sessions, visiting lecturers, field trips, and readings will provide background on the history and anthropology of Yucatecan culture. Immersion experiences and living with a family will provide one important source of experiential learning. A second source takes the form of an independent project developed by each student based on the student’s interests. This practicum experience involves weekly activities during the term and an intensive independent project during the last three weeks. During these final three weeks, students live in a community of the students choosing, provided the location is relevant to their study and project. While each student is completely free to create their own unique project, past projects have included: creating a children’s book, filming a documentary about the families work as ‘Mayan Dancers’, organizing classes for the children in the community, and participating in a crocodile research project. Evaluation is based on participation in the project as well as the final project presentation.

Since 1848, the border between the United States of America and Mexico has posed a cultural enigma. The literature of the people inhabiting this area reflects the diverse and complex society that has evolved over a period spanning almost 200 years. We will begin by reading selections from Neil Foley’s Mexicans in the Making of America and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera in order to locate ourselves geographically. We will then read a variety of contemporary Mexican and Latinx writers, whose work confronts the border from different perspectives and literary genres which may include: Octavio Paz, Ada Limón, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Yuri Herrera, Carlos Fuentes, Tomás Rivera, Gloria Anzaldúa, Valera Luiselli, and Jeanine Cummins. We will also consider film (Chulas Fronteras, Espaldas mojadas, Backyard/El traspatio, Sin Nombre, A Touch of Evil) and music from the borderlands to aid in our study of this complex area of the world. Evaluation will be based on engagement with the materials and discussion, weekly written responses, a midterm essay and a final project.

This course is immersive and interdisciplinary. Students work exclusively in Spanish, and the language is always taught through the cultural context of Latin America and more specifically Yucatán. Students learn not only in the classroom but also through constant interactions with other Spanish-speaking environments, fostering cultural enrichment and connection. This course is designed for students who competently use fundamental grammatical structures, such as simple and compound tenses in the indicative mood, and some forms of the imperative mood, as well as common vocabulary. Daily classes and assignments further students’ abilities to express themselves clearly orally and through writing. Students write, read texts, present on various topics, and converse in pairs and groups, all while learning intermediate grammar and developing their vocabulary. Outside of the daily classes, students organize and perform in the annual Spanish Festival. This course focuses on the study of intermediate grammatical structures, which may include but are not limited to: compound tenses of the indicative mood, present, past, and future perfect tenses. Students are also introduced to the subjunctive mood and the conditional perfect tense. They get acquainted with the use of quantifiers, prepositions, time markers, and transitional phrases in order to use the new grammatical structures more effectively. Upon completing this course, students will be able to express themselves and communicate confidently in Spanish. They will be able to talk about the past; express cause, effect and probability of events in the past and present; define the personalities of themselves and others; talk about personal relationships; and express moods, wishes and plans for the future.

Evaluation is based on presentations, written compositions, listening and spoken tests, written tests covering grammar, oral tests, daily homework, and most importantly class participation.

This course is immersive and interdisciplinary. Students work exclusively in Spanish, and the language is always taught through the cultural context of Latin America and more specifically Yucatán. Students learn not only in the classroom but also through constant interactions with other Spanish-speaking environments, fostering cultural enrichment and connection. This course is designed for students with substantial vocabulary and intermediate grammatical structures, including the imperative mood as well as simple and compound tenses in the indicative mood. Students in this course should also have some understanding of the subjunctive mood. Daily classes and assignments foster student’s abilities to express themselves clearly in speech and writing. Students write, read texts, present on various topics, and converse in pairs and groups, all while learning intermediate grammar and developing their vocabulary. Outside of the daily classes, students organize and perform in the annual Spanish Festival. This course focuses on the study of intermediate to advanced grammatical structures, which may include but are not limited to: a review of all tenses in the indicative and imperative moods, as well as an in-depth study of the subjunctive in present and past tense. Students deepen their knowledge of time markers and transitional phrases to construct more complex sentences. Upon completing this course, students will be able to communicate confidently in Spanish. They will be practiced in asking for and giving advice, paraphrasing other people’s statements and opinions, and using complex structures for analysis and reflection. Evaluation is based on presentations, written compositions, listening-comprehension, written tests covering grammar, tests, daily homework, and most importantly class participation.

The Camino monster course travels the roughly 500-mile pilgrimage route of the Camino Frances. Students will walk the path from St. Jean Pied-du-Port to Santiago de Compostela that millions have traveled since the end of the 9th century. Designated as the first Cultural Route of the Council of Europe and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the route starts in France, crossing the Pyrenees and traveling through the vineyards, plains of wheat and sunflower, verdant hills, medieval villages, and storied cities of northern Spain. While founded as a Catholic pilgrimage, people walking the route today may be embarking on a personal challenge, wrestling with existential questions and life transitions, searching for an intentional community with more caring societal norms or journeying for a myriad of other reasons. Intertwined with the Camino’s religious, cultural, and personal significance is its role as an economic engine across the millennia. The Roman roads and forts are testament to its long standing economic significance. From the age of the Knights Templar through today, the Camino continues to be the economic lifeblood of the region and the small businesses, inns and villages along the route. The course has three primary components. First, students will investigate the human ecology of the Camino through modern and ancient readings, film screenings, visits to sites of historical and cultural significance, and interactions with pilgrims. These materials and interactions will inform group discussions, as well as papers, presentations and other deliverables. Second, to move students beyond their quotidian routine, participants will follow a guided plan of self-discovery, introspection, and reflection that will take place on and around their daily walks. These activities include a series of exercises, one-on-one meetings, and journaling. Finally, to dive deeper into their own Camino, students will conduct a capstone research project of their own design. Proposals, finalized early in the course, shall include the most appropriate means of communicating their findings, such as a research paper, in-depth presentation, or other modality. Whether students are interested in history, geography, commerce, sustainable tourism, art, human relations, spirituality, local foodways, or what it means to be human, this journey will provide ample fodder for a curious mind. Evaluation will be based on engagement with the course, participation in group discussions and meetings, quality of the various written and verbal assignments, and the capstone research project. There are no prerequisites or language requirements. However, some knowledge of Spanish is encouraged and can provide for a more enriching experience. Students must be capable of walking with a 20+ pound backpack over a variety of terrain for an average of 12.4 miles (20 km) per day. As this is a monster expeditionary course, space is limited and enrollment requires permission of the instructor.

Assessment will be based on evidence that the student has completed assignments and readings; conducted a substantive and thorough independent research project; as well as, active and meaningful participation in seminar discussions and other course activities.

This course covers key aspects of the history and culture of the Yucatecan Maya, including pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern times. Lectures, discussions, and readings by and about the Maya will explore topics such as social structure, religion, politics, agricultural practices, language, family life, and other cultural aspects. Classwork will include participation in discussions, small research projects, oral presentations, and brief field journal entries on cultural observations. This course involves several field trips to various socio-cultural locations in the city of Mérida and Mayan communities, as well as visits to sites of biological and cultural significance, such as archaeological zones and natural reserves. Workshops and talks will aid students in comprehending the cultural context and topics covered in class. The class includes an ethnographic project that involves bibliographical and field research in both urban and rural contexts. The final assignment consists of a written essay and an oral presentation. Upon completing this course, students will be able to socialize and interact in diverse social and cultural contexts with cultural competency and sensitivity. Additionally, they will be acquainted with ethnographic techniques that allow them to develop new perspectives on others and the relationships they have with their diverse environments. This course will be taught entirely in Spanish, and evaluation will be based on class participation, homework assignments, and the ethnographic project.

The course provides students a compact immersive experience in Yucatecan culture and Spanish language through a self-directed and individualized program. This course is primarily directed towards students who have previously completed the Yucatán program or are in their final year of studies and have at least an intermediate level of Spanish. Depending on the student, the activities in the class may be entirely project based or more focused on directed coursework with instructors in the Yucatán Program. Either way the students’ work will take place on the Yucatán Peninsula and last four weeks.This course requires active student engagement in the preparation of the project as well as during the project. If you are interested in this course, please contact the instructor well in advance.

This course is offered through collaboration with CAVILAM as part of the COA program in Vichy, France. Students take 20 hours a week of language classes and workshops taught by immersion methods and advanced audio-visual techniques. Students live with host families in homestays and take part in a variety of cultural activities. They are carefully tested and placed at levels appropriate to their ability and are expected to advance in all four language skills – reading, writing, speaking and listening – as gauged by the European Erasmus scale of competency.

The goal of this course to help each student design and implement an effective learning program for the study of a language of her choice at whatever level of learning she is currently at. A very wide variety of general strategies, resources and practical advice for independent language learning are reviewed in weekly class sessions along with progress and reflection reports from each student that can help guide and motivate independent work. The core common text for this work will be Betty Lou Leaver, Madeline Ehrman and Boris Shekhtman’s “Achieving Success in Second Language Acquisition”. The primary focus of the class is on the development and implementation of each student’s individually designed plan for learning a language of their choice. Materials for this will be identified by each student as part of their work on their chosen language. Progress in these plans are discussed in one on one weekly meetings with the teacher. Plans may include the use of software, peer tutors, Skype, videos, standard texts, flash cards, specialized technical material, music, visual art, field trips, and a wide variety of other materials as appropriate. Evaluation will be based on the clarity, coherence and effectiveness of the student’s developed plan and the discipline with which they actually pursue it and revise it appropriately as the term progresses. Students will be asked to meet with the instructor prior to the start of the term to discuss their motivation, aims, possible resources and possible plans for language learning after the course is over.

What is language? What is the relationship between language and thought? Between language and experience? What is meaning? These are some of the central questions of the philosophy of language. They are fundamental not only to large portions to modern philosophy, but also linguistics, computer science and other fields. This course will explore some of the key theories and criticisms that philosophers have developed in answer to these questions about our life with words.

In this course, we will take a historical approach and work our way to the present, exploring classic theories of meaning and language from the early modern period and early analytic philosophers, such as Mill, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and others. Then we will examine criticisms that philosophers have raised over the years, both from texts in the analytic tradition as well as other positions from, for example, ordinary language philosophy, continental approaches. Students will acquire an understanding of those central problems in the philosophy of language; they will also develop philosophical skills in analysing texts, articulating arguments, and presenting complex philosophical material through writing and oral presentations. Introductory/Intermediate.

This course is immersive and interdisciplinary. Students work exclusively in Spanish, and the language is always taught through the cultural context of Latin America and more specifically Yucatán. Students learn not only in the classroom but also through constant interactions with other Spanish-speaking environments, fostering cultural enrichment and connection. This course is designed for students who are familiar with the indicative, subjunctive and imperative moods in all tenses across a specific and diverse vocabulary. Daily classes and assignments develop the ability of students to express themselves clearly orally and through writing. Daily classes and assignments foster student’s abilities to express themselves clearly in speech and writing. Students write, read texts, present on various topics, and converse in pairs and groups, all while perfecting advanced grammar and developing their vocabulary. Outside of the daily classes, students organize and perform in the annual Spanish Festival. The primary goal of this course is mastery and muscle memory across a wide range of grammar, including the indicative and subjunctive moods in all tenses. Students will be trained in understanding and applying the nuances of Spanish idioms. The students develop strategies to broaden their general vocabulary and deepen it in targeted areas. Upon completing this course the student will be able to communicate more effectively and with greater grammatical correctness across a diverse range of topics. This course will also help the student to enrich their understanding of the multiple dimensions of Spanish-speaking cultures. Students are evaluated based on homework, class participation, and their ability to work effectively with multiple kinds of texts, interviews, conversations, formal interviews, presentations, writing exercises in different styles, and non-verbal communication. This class is typically offered in fall depending on student interest.

This course is immersive and interdisciplinary. Students work exclusively in Spanish, and the language is always taught through the cultural context of Latin America and more specifically Yucatán. Students learn not only in the classroom but also through constant interactions with other Spanish-speaking environments, fostering cultural enrichment and connection. This course is intended for students with a basic knowledge of grammar and some fundamental vocabulary. Daily classes and assignments strengthen the ability of students to express themselves clearly orally and through writing. Students write, read texts, present on various topics, converse in pairs and groups, sing and dance, learn basic grammar, and develop their vocabulary. Outside of the daily classes, students organize and perform in the annual Spanish Festival. The course reviews grammar structures familiar to the students before continuing with the study of additional basic grammatical structures, which may include but are not limited to: complex sentence structures in present perfect and past continuous; imperatives; conditionals; two future tenses; personal pronouns and pronouns of direct and indirect objects; as well as more simple and compound sentence structures. Upon completing this course, students will be able to express themselves and communicate confidently in Spanish. They will be able to express general information and stories in past tenses. They will be able to express differing degrees of certainty, feelings, desires and preferences. They will also be able to express obligations, ask for permission, and explore possibilities. Evaluation is based on presentations, written compositions, listening and spoken tests, written tests covering grammar, daily homework, and most importantly class participation.

This course is immersive and interdisciplinary. Students work exclusively in Spanish, and the language is always taught through the cultural context of Latin America and more specifically Yucatán. Students learn not only in the classroom but also through constant interactions with other Spanish-speaking environments, fostering cultural enrichment and connection. This course is for students who have minimal experience with Spanish and are anticipating an immersion experience in a Spanish speaking context such as the Yucatán Program. Daily classes and assignments emphasize the development of basic comprehension and communication, both written and spoken. Students write, read texts, present on various topics, converse in pairs and groups, sing and dance, learn basic grammar, and develop their vocabulary. Outside of the daily classes, students organize and perform in the annual Spanish Festival. The grammatical structures developed in this course include but are not limited to: all parts of speech, such as articles, adjectives and adverbs in present tense; the use of reflexive verbs; past tense and all variety of sentence structures. This course also provides an orientation to living and studying in Yucatán, Mexico. The lab time is a specific formal orientation to immersion, building on the cultural context incorporated in daily classes. Upon completing this course, students will be able to express themselves and communicate confidently in Spanish. They will be able to share opinions, knowledge, questions, emotions, wishes, and preferences as well as petitions, greetings, congratulations and thanks using simple sentence structures. Additionally, they will have developed a basic cultural understanding, allowing them to incorporate themselves into new contexts with more ease. Evaluation is based on presentations, compositions, listening and spoken tests, written tests covering grammar, daily homework, and most importantly class participation.

How does the environment affect our sense of place as well as national, regional, and personal identity? Taking a multifaceted view of human relationships with nature, students will generate research projects driven by questions about tourism and eco-tourism, species population change, climate degradation, the role of technology, and development of wildlands and waterways. Research discussed in class will also center on environmental values and challenges expressed by ecocritics, naturalists, biologists, philosophers, archaeologists, psychologists, poets, filmmakers, and others from the nineteenth century to the present. Several local excursions will provide opportunities for taking field notes. Students will be encouraged to experiment with different forms of writing, expanding their genre analysis, rhetorical awareness, and research practices, while deepening their own relationship with nature. Sharing work during peer reviews will become integral, uncovering and inspiring various writing processes.

This transdisciplinary, experiential approach will help establish a strong foundation for students’ writings outside this course and for evaluating possible impacts on the environment by potential encroachments. Spanning memoir, travel, science and nature, cultural issues, and current events, short readings will include writers such as Wendell Berry, Charles Darwin, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Luther Standing Bear, Jacquetta Hawkes, Richard Wright, Edward Abbey, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Loren Eiseley, Terry Tempest Williams, Jamaica Kincaid, Ray Gonzalez, Evelyn C. White, and Jessica Hernandez. Evaluations will be based on fieldnotes, two research projects, and class discussions.

This course will look closely at a small selection of plays adapted from other works. At its core this is a dramaturgical practice and methods course. Students will investigate impulses and processes for re-envisioning, re-working, re-purposing another’s text. We will read and discuss some theories of adaptation (mostly, but not exclusively, as they pertain to collaborative art making practices) as well as a sampling of contemporary criticism. A central goal of the course will be to better understand how the term adaptation is understood across disciplines and to fuel a complex discussion about what might make a theatrical adaptation feel relevant or effective in a given context. We will also look closely at moments in history that have instigated a serious ‘looking back’, spurring a collective creative impulse to re-visit and re-invent previously established works. One could argue that we are currently living in such a cultural moment. Please note: this course requires a significant reading load. Students will be required to close read/view all adapted texts, all original source materials and a variety of supporting texts (as described above). We will also draw from film, visual art and music for this study. Evaluation will be based on a sequence of short practical assignments and demonstrated engagement with the course materials through live discussion and a shared class blog.

The Monster is real, and it’s calling. -Michelle Mcnamara

Grew up reading Nancy Drew and Miss Marple? Can’t let a day go by without listening to a murder mystery podcast like Serial or My Favorite Murder? Love binge-watching shows like Killing Eve and Big Little Lies? Consider watching true crime documentaries your hobby? Then this is the class for you.

This college seminar will allow you to delve into the world of murder, mysteries, and the mayhem caused by these through a woman’s eyes. Be it a woman sleuth, a femme fatale, or a damsel in distress, women have been inextricably related to the world of crime. It is no wonder that they make up almost 75% of the listeners of true-crime podcasts and 80% of CrimeCon attendees (Times.com). We will study this phenomenon by paying close attention to not only literary genres like novels, short stories, and non-fiction writing but also non-literary (and multimodal) genres that include pop-culture favorites like TV shows, documentaries, and podcasts, some of which are mentioned above. Other works that we might consider are Sharp Objects (fiction), Dial A for Aunties (fiction), I’ll be Gone in the Dark (non-fiction), Mommy Dead and Dearest (documentary), and The Keepers (documentary).

Since this class also meets the writing requirement, part of your focus will be understanding writing as a dynamic literate activity by composing varied works. For example, you’ll write short reflection posts responding to questions like “Why women kill”?, opinion or review pieces that could appear in The New York Times, conduct interviews, and work on a term-long genre evolution project. All these are different genres and might target a specific audience: me, online readers, fans, or your peers. You will be evaluated on class participation, written work, and a final project.

Students will be evaluated on class participation, written work, and a final project. Lots of attention will be paid to peer review and revision as well.

As a Pakistani-American teenager from New Jersey, Kamala Khan must contend with being a non-white female offspring of an immigrant family, a reality further complicated by her newfound superhero abilities. In this college seminar course, we will dive into the world of Kamala Khan as she follows in the footsteps of her role model and the first Ms. Marvel, Carol Danvers, one of the few female superheroes in the universe. She’ll change your idea of a superhero and what it means to be one as she balances her personal and superhero identity and navigates questions of race, religion, culture, power, and teenage angst.

We will explore all the abovementioned ideas and more as we read three to four volumes of Ms. Marvel comics (2014 onwards), paying attention to storytelling through the genre of sequential art. We will also watch the recent TV adaptation (2022) and finally pair the two with theories of race, Islamophobia, gender, and current world politics. Since this class also meets the writing requirement, part of your focus will be on understanding the writing process by composing varied works. For example, you’ll write short blog posts responding to questions like, “Are comics literature?”, opinion pieces that could appear in The New York Times, and fan fiction. All these are different genres and targeted at a specific audience, me, online readers, fans, and your peers. You will be evaluated on class participation, written work, oral presentation, and a final project.

Ways we engage with writing and literacy have shifted dramatically due to technological innovations, raising urgent questions about ethics, authorship, voice, and academic integrity and (dis)honesty. How can we develop our writing knowledge and literacy skills alongside rapidly changing tools? What challenges, issues, and opportunities do technological developments offer for the ways in which writing and learning will happen throughout life? This course examines what ethical, legal and safety issues arise in the use of digital technologies and resources and how they might shape authorship and a writer’s voice and agency. The goals are to: 1) deepen understandings of key developments in writing technologies and related social transformations; 2) strengthen abilities in fair, inclusive, effective, ethical methods of dialogue and collaboration; 3) strengthen abilities for metacognitive learning; 4) and deepen genre knowledge and rhetorical awareness through explorations in the contexts of various discourse communities.

Weekly writing assignments and collaborative learning activities are facilitated through readings, case studies, and projects. Readings include short works that explain and critically analyze ongoing developments in writing related technologies. Class sessions alternate between mini-lectures and seminar discussions exploring changing historical contexts and socio-technologies of writing. Writing activities include peer review, structured collaborations, and individual as well as group exercises with various multimodal genres. There are two class sessions per week.

Students must come prepared to challenge themselves and others in supportive ways. This course fulfills the first-year writing requirement but is also appropriate for more advanced students interested in exploring issues of ethics, authorship, academic integrity and (dis)honesty from a human ecological perspective.

Students are evaluated on class participation and contributions in individual and group activities/assignments that demonstrate progress in meeting the four course goals.

This course will serve as a workshop both for creating our own short fictions as well as a forum for reading and responding to work by established authors. As a class we will get down to business; we will read and discuss amazing short stories and amazing authors; we will learn how to offer constructive criticism of each other’s work; and we will write, we will write, we will write. Class meetings will combine analysis of published work with a discussion of how individual writers approach their craft. We will study the conflict, character, plot and music of prose. The focus of this class will be literary fiction. I define literary fiction as work that is concerned not just with what happened, but why it happened. It is character driven and explores the motivations, desires, drives and consequences of the complex human experience. It is the stuff of life. Representative authors: Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Amelia Gray, Makoto Kawabata, Gish Jen, Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Milan Kundera, Mary Gaitskill, James Baldwin, Junot Diaz. Students are expected to create four shorter and one longer piece of fiction, respond to published writers, lead weekly discussions, participate in class response to fellow writers, and to revise their own work in substantive ways.

This class is a study of, and a writing workshop in, poetic forms. We will look at constraints, techniques, and directions of contemporary poetry through intensive reading, writing, and criticism of our own poetic work. This background is useful and significant for the study of poetry at any level, and is especially helpful in light of the fact that, for better or worse, free verse techniques have dominated poetry in the twentieth century. This course is valuable for practiced poets, emerging poets, and prose writers alike. Forms of Poetry asks students to pay attention, create poetry of attention, and revel in poetry that is attentive to language; this process will help students develop voice and lyrical content in their own writing. We will look older, “received forms” (Sonnet, Ghazal, Villanelle) and create our own forms by using experimental techniques (homophonic translation, concrete poetry, erasure, nonsense words (i.e. Jabberwocky)) and look to end the term with the amazing Japanese form, Zuihitsu. You might be thinking: Why write with these crazy constraints or in these old timey poetic forms? And what the heck is a Zuihitsu? Those are good questions, questions we will address on a weekly basis. Over the last seventy years, the debates over poetic expression have been shaped in visceral ways, from “raw” versus “cooked,” “academic” versus “beat,” “formal” versus “antiformal.” This class is designed to deepen your knowledge of these debates and to inspire you to draw upon a variety of modes in your own writing. Evaluations: Students will be expected to contribute to a class blog, write several poems a week, revise poetic output, participate in class workshop, and hand sew a chapbook of their own revised, creative work.

As someone who writes every day, you have probably noticed that it’s more common to text LOL to a friend, as opposed to writing “LOL things were busy” when emailing to ask a professor for an extension on a paper. Similarly, you probably expect this course description to include certain information about the course rather than tips for becoming a viral sensation on TikTok. Why do these differences exist? What is the point of knowing the differences? And how is this relevant to writing?

In this course, you will explore different kinds of writing (genres) to understand how the context shapes the way we write. The explorations of various everyday, academic, and professional genres will help refine the rhetorical skills that you already have and develop your awareness of how writing is used in different contexts. The goal is to build your knowledge of writing and make your repertoire of languages and literacies visible so you can transfer these skills and write in other courses and non-academic settings.

The class activities will provide you with many hands-on opportunities to explore and analyze writing in a collaborative setting with your peers in small and large group activities. You will complete inquiry-based projects to examine different genres and reflect on your evolving understanding of writing. Your learning will be evaluated based on these assignments and activities. By the end of the course, you will have developed the language to talk about writing and built the skills, agency, and confidence to engage in different kinds of writing activities in academia and beyond.

This is an intermediate / advanced course in which students will explore the connections between and among modern US women’s novels focusing on intersectional identities. We will strive to better understand the nature and significance of differences between as well as common patterns or themes that shape women’s and intersectional/mixed-race/mixed-identity fictional narration. Historical perspective, cultural, class, ethnic, religious, other differences, and prescribed gender roles will all be relevant. We will read women’s fiction by authors such as Gloria Naylor, Janet Campbell Hale, Toni Morrison, Linda Hogan, Julie Shikeguni, Sandra Cisneros, Graciela Limón, Nora Okja Keller, Cristina Garcia, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sigrid Nunez, and Amanda Peters. Participants will read carefully, prepare and ask questions of each other, write response papers, and carry out an independent multimodal project to be presented to the class. The project will focus on one or more additional texts: fictional, theoretical, cultural, or historic. Presentations will be made in groups that put the outside texts into broad cultural and historical perspective and/or discuss them in terms of trends in women’s literature, immigrant literature, women’s literature of the United States, multicultural/intersectional narratives, or some other course theme. The selection of the outside text for the project will give participants the opportunity to fill in perceived gaps in their reading or to explore a particular narrative or cultural form — or identity position — in greater depth. The reading load for this course is relatively heavy. Evaluation will focus on preparation, participation, insight, critical thinking, response papers, and the outside project — both its oral presentation and development in an appropriate form (visual, narrative, analytic, curricular, etc.). The course has been designed for students with previous college-level literary experience and/or an interest in gender and identity studies.

The main goal of this course is to guide students to produce interesting, accurate, well-written, compelling articles about people, processes, and events. The course aims to give students an understanding of the principles of American journalism, the structure of journalistic writing, the techniques for identifying, sourcing, and gathering information, and insight into how news is disseminated and read, watched, or listened to in the digital age.

Students will produce several short articles for the course, learning the basics of story development, interviewing, research, and covering meetings and events. Students will be tasked with thinking critically, understanding and using news judgment, and developing skills for efficiency and self-critique. They will be introduced to the history of American journalism, the ethics and laws specific to the field, and the modern media landscape. Students will also learn about and practice photojournalism. A final project in the course will include significant research and utilize students’ skills in interviewing, observation, and documentation learned over the term.

Students will be evaluated on the following criteria: the quality of their reporting, the effectiveness of their revisions, and participation in class discussions and peer review sessions. Students taking this course should have sufficient sentence structure, grammatical, and word usage skills to communicate effectively in writing. Students that are not confident in those areas may enroll, but should strongly consider taking the course for credit/no credit.

How can witnessing and reporting other worlds—whether a country, a village, a river, a mountain, or a back alley–make us more sensitive travelers, sharpen awareness of cultural biases, and empower place-based writing? This course highlights the allure, the dangers, uncertainties, risks, and joys of travel expressed in student writing. What words, images, foods, music, rituals, or other sources of inspiration spark curiosity and passions that make us want to go places?

Genre analysis, writing, and transdisciplinary research projects will deepen a sense of place as the course explores the rhetoric of travel and its transformative impacts. Students will experiment with, for instance, flash-essays, chronicles, interviews, journals, and field notes. Research projects will spotlight judicious selection of relevant sources, integration of data, and inclusion of multimodal elements. We will consider, too, the relation between travel writing and ethnography, between travel and gender, racial, religious, and ethnic components. Conveying impressions after short or extended excursions, students will recognize and develop which rhetorical strategies are appropriate for particular purposes, situations, audiences, discourse communities, and genres. Maps, films, infographics, letters, newspaper articles, guidebooks, blogs, Instagram posts, diaries, and logs constitute genres that may be examined and created. Students will further hone their craft in writing workshops, conversations, conferences, and presentations.

Short excerpts that reflect the intimate connection between travel and writing will be discussed, and the various rhetorical strategies employed by writers such as Matsuo Basho, Tu Fu, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Kingsley, James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Taras Grescoe, Bill Bryson, Annie Dillard, William Least Heat-Moon, Anthony Bourdain, Eileen Myles, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Hans M. Carlson. Whether an Inuit film for global audiences, or the map of a route across the North American continent by water, or notes in a diary from the Hindu Kush, for example, the course materials do more than simply record or narrate experiences and territories: they also report and shape the world and what it means to us. Evaluations will be based on class discussions, writing projects, and presentations.

Computational text analysis (CTA) is an emerging field that uses computation to analyze texts. CTA draws on the fields of computer science, machine learning, computational linguistics, and literary theory. Using machine learning and statistics, computers can be used to explore how language is used in particular contexts, including how frequently different words are used, the sentiment of a word/text, as well as nuances in the ways words are associated with one another.

We will use CTA to engage in “Distant Reading”, a term coined by literary theorist Franco Moretti. Distant Reading stands in contrast to the more familiar “Close Reading”: a deep engagement with a particular text or a passage from a text. Distant Reading engages not with a particular text, but with a large corpus of texts: e.g., all novels published in English in the 20th century, all articles written in The New York Times and The Washington Post in the last decade, or the lyrics of all top-100 pop songs from the 1980s. Computational techniques applied to large collections of texts allow one to ask broad questions about structural and linguistic change over time and to look for patterns of language use that would not be evident from analysis of one or even several individual texts. Distant Reading, and computational text analysis more generally, is not intended to replace close reading, but to complement it.

We will use CTA to explore how power structures and systems—such as race, gender, and colonialism—manifest themselves in bodies of text. For example, CTA has been used to investigate Islamophobia, analyze race in US novels, explore settler colonialism in the Americas, and to investigate shifts in anti-Asian sentiments in the US brought on by the COVID crisis.

Students will who successfully complete this course will: 1) gain a conceptual understanding of various CTA techniques, including word frequency analysis, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis; 2) learn how to apply these techniques using pre-existing software and doing their own coding; 3) gain experience asking questions about power structures/systems—race, gender, colonialism—and how those structures manifest themselves in corpora of text; 4) learn how these questions of power can be explored using algorithmic methods; and 5) gain experience critiquing algorithmic methods through the lenses of race, gender, and colonialism.

Classes will be a mixture of lecture, group exercises, discussion, and live coding. Readings will include case studies and selections from literary theorists. Evaluation will be based on participation in discussion and in-class activities, several short coding/analysis exercises, several short reflection assignments, and a group project on a topic of the students’ choosing.

One of the deepest human instincts is to tell our life stories, to figure out who we are. This course will use a workshop approach with a particular focus on memoir writing rooted in an exploration of family and place. We will study the writing process and matters of craft by reading and responding to memoirs by contemporary writers (e.g., Terry Tempest Williams’ When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice), a practical guide to memoir writing (Judith Barrington’s Writing the Memoir), and essays on memoir and memory (e.g., Patricia Hampl’s I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory). Class time will include discussion of readings, writing exercises designed to help students with matters of language and technique in their own writing, and group critiques of work-in-progress. Student work will be shared through a class reading and the production of a chapbook of one of their stories. Students will be evaluated on the effort and quality of their writing, their commitment to the writing process, their participation in peer review and workshops, a final portfolio of all their writing, and their class reading of finished work.

Displacement, disappearance, deportation, exile, and return in New Writing: how do storytellers relate, relive, and re-create displacement from war, emigration, anti-immigration discourses, voluntary or coerced exile, or racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts? What emotional truths do new novels, poems, short stories, and essays reflect—from anger to “otherness” to nostalgia to numbness—when the self and its homeland are separated? Are one or more homelands foundational to identity formation? How do fiction and nonfiction convey refugee experiences and their aftermath? Finally, how are migratory journeys of geography and selfhood accompanied by related trauma, impactful on different generations and changes in the social and political spectrum – and do they evolve as “a disassembly of the heart and excavation of a new identity” in recent writing?

Readings include material by twenty-first-century writers from every continent, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Claire G. Coleman, Daša Drndic, Isabella Hammad, Cristina Henríquez, Amitav Kumar, Kyun-sook Shin, Valeria Luiselli, Geovani Martins, Imbolo Mbue, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Julie Otsuka, Salman Rushdie, Pajtim Statovci, and Shahla Ujayli.

Students will be assessed on engaged participation, two short papers, one presentation in any medium, and a final essay, story, poem, or play.

This course is an introduction to literary magazines and the work of editing. We will examine the history of “little” magazines from the mid nineteenth century to the present day. We will investigate the impact of literary magazines on literary culture in America and the world. This class will also be dedicated to surveying the current literary landscape, both print and digital, with special emphasis on BATEAU, the new literary magazine being published at College of the Atlantic. Through the production of BATEAU, the course will offer practical experience in literary publishing: students will gain experience in editing, layout and production, as well as publicizing and promoting the finished product. Students will be expected to respond to course readings on literary magazines and culture as well as keep detailed response notes to submissions to the magazine. Student editors will recommend pieces for publication, rejection and/or further consideration. In addition to editorial duties, students will be expected to complete a midterm and a final project.

This intermediate/advanced writing workshop will focus on the capaciousness and possibilities of the memoir genre and is designed for students who have a keen interest in writing short-form memoir (memoir fragments); have a working familiarity with the elements of narrative; are eager to read and write for discovery and growth; are interested in experimenting with a variety of forms; and who are seeking to join a community of writers in a workshop setting. Close attention to matters of craft, form, and the writing process will be the province of this workshop course. Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir and other essays on craft will serve as guides to the writing and revising of a memoir piece (2-3 linked pieces or 1 longer piece, totaling 15-20 pages). Workshops and craft exercises will be the central focus of our class sessions. Active and engaged reading, writing, and peer review will be the focus of work outside of class. We will read three memoirs as models of various forms and possibilities within the memoir genre, such as: Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (interweaving narratives); Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words (translingual); and Patti Smith’s Woolgathering (prose poems and photographs), or others. Students will select to independently read a fourth memoir that bends or blends genres. Class sessions will be centered on student-led workshops, craft exercises, and reflections on writing and revision. Creative work outside of class will include daily writing, weekly peer review, and the crafting of memoir work through multiple drafts. Peer review and individual writing conferences with the instructor will provide an opportunity for students to engage in focused conversations about their work outside of class. Students will be evaluated on their commitment, engagement, and growth; their participation in workshop and peer review; the production of a chapbook or art project of their work; and a final portfolio of their writing.

The roles and responsibilities of a writing tutor are evershifting. As writing studies scholar Toni-Lee Capossela tells us, a tutor will at various times be “a reader, a respondent, a questioner, a critic, a listener, a friend, a colleague, a collaborator, or a guide.” By presenting a range of writing center theories and research, this course will give students theoretical knowledge and practical tutoring strategies that will enable them to make informed choices when working with developing writers across different disciplines and conventions. Topics include negotiating the priorities of a tutoring session, differentiating between and responding to the needs of global and small-scale revision, motivational scaffolding, and understanding the often recursive nature of the writing process. Additionally, students will be exposed to active learning strategies and concepts such as cognitive load theory, the zone of proximal development, embodied cognition, and the affective domain. In the first part of the term, students will put their practical and theoretical knowledge into use by conducting one-on-one tutoring sessions with their classmates. During the second half of the term, students will collaborate with experienced tutors, and by week 8 they will begin to tutor on their own. Students will write two major essays–the first a literacy narrative, the second an expository essay on a writing center topic of their choosing.

“Only by unleashing the fictionality of fiction, the imaginativeness of the imagination, the dream songs of our dreams, can we hope to approach the new, and to create fiction that may, once again, be more interesting than the facts.” -Salman Rushdie, “Ask Yourself”. Nobody exemplifies these notions better than Rushdie himself. Therefore, this course will be an exploration of the fantastical world of Salman Rushdie through his seminal novel Midnight’s Children. Deemed as one of the Great Books of the 20th century, which won the Booker prize the year of its publication, 1981, and the Booker of Bookers twice over (in 1993 and 2008), the novel is a prime example of postcolonialism with a magical realist twist.

In this class, we will take a deep dive into Rushdie’s novel by paying close attention to the prose and his style and the history and contexts that he sets up in this novel. Therefore, the reading of the novel will be supplemented with historical background and literary criticism that bring up questions of utopia, nation, politics, identity, and subalternity, to name a few. You will be evaluated on class participation and written assignments like discussion posts, an oral presentation, a paper, and a final project.

This course is a challenging introduction to several centuries of Native American literature, the relevance of historical and cultural facts to its literary forms, and the challenges of bridging oral and written traditions. Authors include such writers as Silko, Erdrich, Harjo, Vizenor, and McNickle as well as earlier speeches and short stories. We also consider non-native readings and appropriation of Native American styles, material and world views.

In her introduction to Post-colonial Shakespeares, Ania Loomba says, “Shakespeare lived and wrote at a time when English mercantile and colonial enterprises were just germinating.” The star of Shakespeare and colonialism rose at the same time, making Shakespeare’s work a symbol of colonial supremacy. As such, you cannot be a literature student without encountering Shakespeare; the canon has made sure of that. While those who loved the Empire see Shakespeare as an exemplar of English ideals, anti and post-colonial theorists and artists beg to differ.

Therefore, this course will be an introduction to some such theorists and artists. We will read Shakespeare’s plays like Othello, The Tempest, and others from among the following—Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing—with an eye toward postcolonial interpretations, thinking about the issues of race, power, hierarchy, and others. We will also spend some time exploring adaptations of his work that come from Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world, providing new avenues of postcoloniality.

You will be evaluated on class participation, short papers, an oral presentation, and a final project. In addition, you will be required to attend at least four of the weekly screenings, and you’ll receive extra credit for attending more.

What comes to mind when you hear the word “essay”? Maybe you think of a formula for essay-writing that you learned long ago: five standardized paragraphs supporting a single thesis with little room for anything else. Maybe this formula has even given you the idea that essays are a mechanical, rulebound, and unexciting kind of writing. And yet, over its centuries-long history, essay-writing has been anything but formulaic—so much so that scholars find it impossible to agree on a set of stable essay conventions. As the editors of the Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022) argue, “the essay” isn’t a unitary genre at all. Instead, it’s a “contested space,” marked by many diverse and even competing approaches. This class is a gateway to that contested space. Assigned readings will introduce you to the outer limits of the essay universe. You will meet writers like James Baldwin, Leslie Jamison, Jacqueline Rhodes, and Cathy Park Hong, among many others, who have all made their own unique mark on the tradition. You will discover writers who make linear arguments—and others who embrace digression, fragmentation, and mosaic structures; those who incorporate research and those who write from memory; those who write in one language and those who draw on multiple languages at once; those who write alphabetically and others who produce multimodal and video essays. Studying this vast range of possibilities will help you expand your own toolkit for when you find yourself writing essays for various audiences and rhetorical situations (including, eventually, senior project proposals, independent study proposals, the Human Ecology Essay, fellowship applications and more). We will mine our readings for the diverse strategies that other writers have used for pulling in their readers, communicating their claims, acknowledging others’ thinking, and creating meaningful structures. You will be asked to reflect metacognitively about how you might transfer these strategies to your own writing in academic, professional, and public contexts. You will come away with an expanded sense of what counts as an “essay,” as well as a sharper capacity to analyze specific essay genres—such as research articles, op-eds, and application essays—each of which comes with its own range of conventions and expectations. Moreover, you will write essays for the exciting and imaginative reasons that have motivated other writers before you: to delve into questions that don’t have easy answers, to explore mysteries, to investigate the world—and yourself. Since essays incorporate so many diverse ways of making knowledge, you will also find a mix of modalities in this class: big-group discussions, collaborative analysis of readings, small-group annotation activities, individual focused free-writing, and more. You will be evaluated on 1) an essay that investigates the work of one essay writer who we will read during the term; 2) a final project (that can be a multimodal piece) in which you enact what you have learned about essayistic writing by composing an essay on an intellectual, aesthetic, or ethical question of your own choosing; 3) participation in a recursive writing process that includes reading, drafting, revision, and responding to classmates’ drafts. This course meets the writing and HS requirements and has no prerequisites.

“For him it meant that everything which existed was interconnected: the trees, the sky, the weather, people, poetry, science, nature. He hunted down facts in the way a magpie collects shiny things. Yet when he strung them all together, somehow they did become stories — of a kind.” -Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide

Amitav Ghosh uses the words above to describe one of his characters, but the same words could be used for him. A prominent postcolonial writer in English with a background in social anthropology, Amitav Ghosh has long written about the world’s interconnectedness in both his fiction and nonfiction. His works are not just stories but reflections on how the past shapes the present and the future and how memories of the past, long forgotten, can teach us how to deal with the issues that plague us now, like climate change.

This course, then, will be a deep dive into his magnum opus, the Ibis trilogy: The Sea of Poppies (2008), The River of Smoke (2011), and The Flood of Fire (2015). As we set sail on the Indian Ocean, journeying alongside the crew of Ibis, we will explore the intricate web of connections brought forward by the themes of subalternity, colonialization, trade, wars, and the environment. While our focus will be on the novels, we will also look at some of the author’s nonfictional work, like Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories (2023), which will provide an understanding of the context but also the depth of his research that culminated into three key pieces of literature.

This will be a reading-intensive class appropriate for students interested in fiction, history, and languages (some languages that appear are Bengali, Hindi, Bhojpuri, Persian, Cantonese, Chinese Pidgin, and Mauritian Creole). A background in literary/critical theory and familiarity with Ghosh’s other works will be helpful, though not required. You will be evaluated through class discussions and written assignments such as short responses, an oral presentation, a 10-12 page critical analysis paper, and a multimodal project.

“You must unlearn what you have learned.” -Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back

Before there was Star Wars, there were Empires. What began with the “Age of Discovery” in the 15th and 16th centuries, helmed by Portugal and Spain, took shape with the British and French Empires in the 17th century. The British Empire, in particular, expanded to encompass almost a quarter of the globe at one point. Literature was one of the many tools in the British arsenal to assert control and claim cultural supremacy. Therefore, as the colonized Resistance grew, they used the master’s tools to dismantle the Empire. In response to Joseph Conrad, there was Chinua Achebe; for Charlotte Brontë, a Jean Rhys; and for Rudyard Kipling, a Salman Rushdie. Our job in this course will be to engage with the writings of the colonized Resistance as they developed by looking inward, unlearning, adapting, and remaking the tool of English Literature. We will read the works of some authors mentioned above and more, along with critical theory, films/documentaries, podcasts, and even some Instagram feeds. You will be evaluated based on class participation, oral presentation, response posts, final paper, and a multimodal project. This class will be good for students hoping to expand their understanding and knowledge of literature and canon formation, develop critical thinking skills, and who wish to talk about how academia influences pop culture, like Star Wars. For those still wondering why to take this class, follow Yoda’s wisdom, Padawan: “Much to learn, you still have.”

Students will be evaluated based on class participation, oral presentation, response posts, final paper, and a multimodal project.

This is an advanced writing focused course in which students practice the human ecology of literary analysis. We explore the ‘mind’ or consciousness of fictional writing (specifically, novels) by looking at how narratives make meaning, and at how we make meaning from narratives. The course surveys some of the best modern fiction, with a particular focus on works that highlight narrative technique, stretch the boundaries of the imagination, have a rich and deep texture, and push against the inherent limitations of textuality. Students also hone their reading and analytic skills as they work closely with twentieth century texts that broke new literary ground. Some of the authors we may read include: Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Monique Wittig, John Dos Passos, Toni Morrison, N. Scott Momaday, Bessie Head, Manuel Puig, and Margaret Atwood. We also study some narrative (and possibly film) theory. Evaluation is based on class participation, frequent short response and passage analysis papers, and an independent project.

We write to discover what awes us, what questions we most need to ask, what conversations we hope to join, what causes we are drawn to support, what convictions we want to voice, and what ways we can write the world anew. Writing is both an art and a social action that can change us and our audiences. That is the province of this course.

We will read and analyze various forms of writing (genres) on a broad range of social and policy issues, such as the value of wonder, the importance of antiracist work, the need for accessibility policies on college campuses, and other issues. We will consider the craft, context, audience, purpose, and possibilities of these texts as guides for our own writing. We will focus on the possibilities of the written and spoken word; the power of our distinct and unique voices; the importance of taking risks in our thinking and writing; the messiness, urgency, and necessity of the writing process; and the value of intellectual inquiry and the seamless integration and documentation of researched material.

Students will address current issues of pressing concern and personal relevance in their own writing in three different selected genres (e.g., reflective essay, commentary, letter to editor, Commencement speech, testimony, proposal, open letter, personal statement, etc.). Students will examine and develop strategies for writing with curiosity, clarity, complexity, creativity, courage, and compassion as they invite their audience to consider their ideas and invitations/calls to action. Students will write about issues that matter to them, ones of interest to a local (Mount Desert Island or home town), state (Maine or home state), and/or national audience.

Classwork will include various analytical, generative, and collaborative exercises designed to help with matters of language, craft, technique, and rhetorical awareness. Students will write for a public audience and participate in active engagement with each other’s work.

Authors (representing a range of genres and topics) will likely include Annie Dillard, Rachel Carson, Barry Lopez, David Whyte, Margaret Renkl, Toni Morrison, Martin Luther King Jr., Terry Tempest Williams, and others. Students will also select a longer text to read from a list of authors that may include Jonathan Safran Foer, Susan Cain, Felicia Rose Chavez, Claudia Rankine, and others.

Students will be evaluated on class participation, written assignments, writing process, and presentations.

In this course we’ll explore many of the ways that writing makes the work of nonprofit organizations possible. We’ll learn to identify, analyze, and recreate several genres that are essential for nonprofits (as well as similar, mission-driven companies). Together as a class we’ll collaborate with local nonprofits and you’ll create, for instance, a grant proposal, program report or other kinds of writing to support the organization you will work with. Throughout the term, you’ll become familiar with varied communication needs, audiences, and rhetorical contexts unique to nonprofits. This experience will help you develop rhetorical awareness and flexibility as a writer in any new setting.

We will practice conceptualizing and composing clear, concise, and compelling materials that meet the multimodal communication needs typical of mission-driven organizations. Through analyzing the written materials produced by nonprofits of different sizes (smaller, grassroots organizations and larger national and international organizations) and areas of focus (environment, education and literacy, biomedical research) we’ll work as a class to understand the purposes and conventions of several key genres: mission statements, grant proposals and reports, and digital marketing and communications.

Evaluation is based on class participation and successfully completing shorter writing assignments and a longer document.

The goal of this sequence of courses is to develop the essential ideas of single-variable calculus: the limit, the derivative, and the integral. Understanding concepts is emphasized over intricate mathematical maneuverings. The mathematics learned are applied to topics from the physical, natural, and social sciences. There is a weekly lab/discussion section. Evaluations are based on homework, participation in class and lab, and tests.

This course is the continuation of Calculus I. It begins by considering further applications of the integral. We then move to approximations and series; we conclude the course with a brief treatment of differential equations. The mathematics learned are applied to topics from the physical, natural, and social sciences. There is a weekly lab/discussion section. Evaluations are based on homework, participation in class and lab, and tests.

This course is designed to introduce students to geological concepts, tools of the trade, and to the geological history of Mount Desert Island. Throughout the course, students will learn skillsets (topographic and geologic map reading, orienteering, field observation, note taking, field measurements) and geologic principles (rock types, stratigraphy, plate tectonics, earth systems, geologic time, surface processes) both in the classroom and in the field. We will conduct multiple short field excursions on MDI and one extended weekend field trip to explore the regional geology. Students will submit a term project complete with their own field data, maps, photos, and analysis of the local and regional geology. Students will be evaluated on the term project, short quizzes, additional written assignments and lab reports. Offered every fall.

In this course we will explore the origins and evolution of navigation, tracing its development from early Pacific, Mediterranean, and Eastern Atlantic regions to modern global methods. Our focus will center on techniques from the 15th through 19th centuries—a period where innovators and mariners overcame barriers and greatly refined our understanding of the world spatially.

Students will engage in the hands-on construction and use of traditional navigation tools, grounding these practices in the broader context of human migration, exploration, and our understanding of Earth’s place in space. We will compare Polynesian, and Eurasian navigation techniques, examining how these cultures applied geometry and the temporal movements of the solar system to traverse the seas.

Topics will include the development of maps and charts, the origins of the universal coordinate system, the evolution of the compass, and the role of geographical knowledge in driving exploration. We will also investigate the challenge of determining longitude at sea and how modern navigation systems, while simplifying travel, pose new risks for mariners who rely solely on them.

This course is open to all students interested in navigation and is particularly suited for those considering maritime careers.

Students who successfully complete this course will be able to: understand the fundamental principles of navigation; plot courses of travel, fix a position, and perform dead reckoning calculations; appreciate the role of celestial movements and magnetic variations that influence navigation; and use hand tools to craft instruments used in early navigation

Evaluation will be based on problem sets, engagement with course materials, and participation in discussion and collaborative activities in class and lab.

In this introductory geoscience course students will learn foundational principles and concepts such as plate tectonics, geologic time, climate and weather, rocks and minerals, and surface processes through an exploration of some of the National Parks of the United States. Through virtual field trips of various parks, students will visualize how regional climate and surface processes such as rivers, glaciers, and wind interact with the bedrock and surficial materials to produce some of the most iconic landscapes. While Acadia National Park offers a view of an ancient and eroded supervolcano, Yellowstone offers a glimpse of a dynamic landscape built on a modern supervolcano. While a few glaciers still cling to the high peaks of Glacier National Park, Yosemite hosts steep glacially carved valleys and polished domes reminiscent of a glaciated past. Class time will be used for lectures, discussions of readings, and laboratory exercises. During labs, students will get to know approximately 6 different parks in detail through interaction with geologic maps, rock samples, aerial imagery, and scientific reports. The students will be evaluated based on laboratory exercises and a final project through which students will explore one park of their choosing.

Glaciers are rapidly retreating around the planet and predicted to continue this trend in the coming centuries. The decline of the world’s ice sheets and mountain glaciers will impact sea level, infrastructure, and fresh-water resources for communities around the world. To put current changes into a long-term geologic context, students will learn the processes, landforms, and impact of glaciers on the Earth’s surface as the planet has cycled through ice ages. This course is designed to provide students with a solid understanding of the dynamic interactions between ice, climate, landscapes, and humans over varying spatial and temporal scales. In addition, we will cover the basics of glaciology and the physics that influence the structure, size, and movement of ice. Through class discussions and assigned problem sets, students will reinforce the content covered in lectures. In addition, this course will give students hands-on experience with tools and methods commonly used to study glaciers and ice sheets (such as: ground-penetrating radar, LiDAR, rock sampling for cosmogenic analysis). This course will have various field trips during class time on Mount Desert Island to explore how an ice sheet shaped the region’s landscape during the Last Glacial Maximum. Students will be evaluated on weekly problem sets and readings and a final project and presentation related to this history of glaciation in Maine.

This course presents an elementary introduction to chaos and fractals. The main focus will be on using discrete dynamical systems to illustrate many of the key phenomena of chaotic dynamics: stable and unstable fixed and periodic points, deterministic chaos, bifurcations, and universality. A central result of this study will be the realization that very simple non-linear equations can exhibit extremely complex behavior. In particular, a simple deterministic system (i.e., physical system governed by simple, exact mathematical rules) can behave in a way that is unpredictable and random, (i.e., chaotic). This result suggests that there are potentially far-reaching limits on the ability of science to predict certain phenomena. Students in this class will also learn about fractals—self-similar geometric objects—including the Mandelbrot set and Julia sets. We will also read about and discuss the development of the field of chaos. In so doing, we will examine the nature of scientific communities, with a particular eye toward how changes in scientific outlooks occur. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to explore the relations between chaos, fractals, and other areas of study such as literature, art, and cultural studies. Students who successfully complete this class should gain a quantitative and qualitative understanding of the basic ideas of chaos and fractals, a greater understanding of the cultural practice of science, and improved mathematical skills. Evaluation will be based on class and lab participation, weekly problem sets several short writing assignments and a final project.

As our access to data and compute power have increased, more and more disciplines rely on computer science techniques to analyze, visualize, and process information. As such, coding skills and computational thinking are increasingly important for work in a wide variety of fields and disciplines. This course is an introduction to computer science, designed to teach students general computational skills and habits of mind that will be immediately useful and practical, and which will also prepare them for further study in computer science and related areas. Students who successfully complete this course will be able to: read a simple program and correctly describe the outcome, take a problem statement and convert it into code, and gain an understanding of how basic computer memory works and why this matters. Topics covered will include conditionals and loops, data types, functions, as well as higher-level concepts such as abstraction, version control, and debugging. The context for this class is data; students will learn how to import and generate data, manipulate and transform it, and visualize it.

This course is intended for students who have little to no computer experience and who are interested in learning the foundations of computer science through projects that require working with data. We will use examples in class and you will implement projects throughout the course where we both generate and use data coming from across the physical, natural, and social sciences. It will be helpful if you are interested in data, but no prior experience with any particular type of data is necessary.

The course is taught in Python. Students will be evaluated on weekly quizzes and weekly projects. This course, or the equivalent, is required for many further courses in computer science, machine learning, data science, robotics, and related areas.

This course is the first of a two course sequence covering a range of standard introductory physics topics. The goals of the course are: to introduce students to important physical ideas both conceptually and mathematically; and to help students improve their quantitative skills. The first part of the course consists of a broad look at the three conservation laws: the conservation of momentum, energy, and angular momentum. Along the way, we’ll learn about vectors, work, potential energy, thermal energy, and the energy stored in chemical bonds. We’ll conclude with a treatment of Newton’s laws of motion. If time permits, we may briefly cover some topics from chaotic dynamics. Evaluations will be based on participation in class and lab, weekly homework, and two untimed, open-notes exams. This course makes extensive use of algebra and trigonometry. Potentially difficult math topics will be reviewed as necessary. Prerequisites: Understanding Functions, a strong high school algebra background, or consent of the instructor.

What are relativity and quantum mechanics, and why were they viewed as revolutionary when they were formulated in the early 1900s? How and why does relativity and quantum mechanics compel us to discard commonsense ideas about the nature of the physical world that are part of classical mechanics? Why is there not agreement on how to interpret quantum mechanics, and why does quantum mechanics even need interpretation? This version of Physics II covers Einstein’s theory of special relativity and selected topics in quantum mechanics, and is designed to introduce students to some of the formalism and central results of relativity and quantum mechanics, so that they can formulate scientifically grounded answers to the above questions. Throughout the course we will start with first principles and carefully build toward key results, allowing students to see how relativity and quantum mechanics—two of the pillars of modern physics—were constructed and how they cohere as mathematically consistent and experimentally verified theories. The first half of the course will cover relativity topics including the principle of relativity, spacetime intervals and proper time, coordinate transformations, time dilation and Lorentz contraction, and relativistic energy and momentum. The second half of the course will turn toward the foundations of quantum mechanics, including: spin-1/2 particles, wave-particle duality, and Bell’s inequalities and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. If time permits, we may cover additional topics such as blackbody radiation, the photoelectric effect, Bohr’s model of the hydrogen atom, and quantum cryptography. To gain a sense of the scientific, social, and material context in which the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics were developed, we will read a number of papers and book chapters by historians and philosophers of science. This course is designed to appeal to a wide range of students—both those whose interests lie outside of science as well as those who are drawn toward the sciences or mathematics. Students who take this course should be comfortable working with mathematical abstraction. Evaluation is based on weekly problem sets, participation in weekly discussion sections, and several short reflection assignments.

Group theory is an area of mathematics that is concerned with symmetry. In this context, an object or system is said to be symmetric if it is unchanged after an action is performed on it. Examples of such actions include rotations, reflections, and permutations. Objects’ symmetries can be classified by the types of actions that leave them unchanged. A set of actions, together with rules for how those actions behave when combined, are (loosely speaking) what mathematicians refer to as a group. Group theory has applications in physics, chemistry, and pure and applied mathematics.

A group is an example of an algebraic structure, which (again loosely speaking) is a set together with a collection of rules for combining pairs of elements of that set. Algebraic structures are classified by the properties of the rules for combining pairs of elements. In addition to groups, other common algebraic structures include rings and fields. The broad study of the properties of different algebraic structures is known as “abstract algebra”.

This course is an introduction to group theory and will also serve as a springboard to the further study of abstract algebra. Topics to be covered will include: learning to identify groups using group axioms; Cayley diagrams; examples of different classes of groups, including abelian, cyclic, dihedral, and permutation groups; subgroups and Lagrange’s theorem; products and quotients; group homomorphisms; the fundamental theorem for abelian groups; and Sylow theory. Other topics and examples will depend on student interest.

This course will be taught in a seminar style; students will frequently be asked to prepare examples and proofs for discussion in class and to work collaboratively on problems, both in and out of class meetings. Evaluation will be based on problem sets and active and collaborative class participation.

Network science is an active and growing cross-disciplinary area that focuses on the description, representation, analysis, and modeling of complex social, biological, and technological systems as networks or graphs. At its simplest, a network is a collection of nodes, some of which are connected by edges.

For example, nodes might be scientists, and there would be an edge connecting two scientists if they co-authored a scientific paper. Or nodes might be facebook users, and there would be an edge between two users if they were facebook friends. Structures and systems modeled as networks are ubiquitous in the world around us: communication networks, networks of friends and acquaintances (online and in-person), gene regulatory networks, supply chains, and food webs, to name just a few.

In general, networks are used as models in situations in which the architecture of connectivity matters, but where that connectivity is neither random (as in an ideal gas or non-interacting agents) nor regular (as in a crystal lattice or a situation where agents interact spatially). Capturing, modeling, and understanding networks requires understanding both the mathematics of networks and the computational tools for identifying and explaining the patterns they contain.

This course will consist of a survey of techniques for modeling and analyzing the structure and dynamics of networks. We will begin with basic definitions and simple descriptive statistics. We will then look at random graphs, which are useful for generating intuition and serving as simple null models. We will then consider network prediction models that can be used to predict node attributes and missing edges, and approaches for detecting community structure. As time permits, we will examine dynamical models on networks, such as disease and rumor spreading. Throughout, we will take a computational approach, learning how to work with network data and how to implement algorithms for network models and data analysis.

Evaluation will be based on participation in class sessions, coding exercises, and a final project.

This class is an invitation to explore writing for theater, film, and television by creating ten scripts over the 10-week term. Edward Albee told Andrea that a play is as long as it is. To that end, like a short story, the short form allows for the creation of numerous stories, testing of form and structure, experimentation, failure, and success. Scripts can range from 1 page to 10 pages or longer if need be. This writing workshop will be fast-paced and inquiry-driven. We will use class time to do writing exercises, ask and answer questions, discuss the craft of scriptwriting, and share and critique our own and one another’s work. Students will be expected to create ten scripts, re-draft 5 of those scripts, and select their favorite script to further refine and finalize as their final project.

Evaluation is based on the quality of written work and participation in class discussions. Work will be evaluated for quality, engagement, effectiveness, on-time delivery, and commitment to the workshop collective. Students are expected to bring in new plays each week and to contribute their best work to an end-of-class public reading.

This course is geared toward students with or without performance experience. Together we will establish a common language to define the most important tools for an actor. Through a series of games and exercises, students develop new skills and practice making bolder, clearer choices within improvised, devised or established scenes. The goals are to create confidence in any sort of performance situation and to find ways of applying acting skills to other academic and outside experiences. Evaluation is based on participation in class activities and discussion, successful completion of all performance projects, including productive rehearsal time and an organized portfolio of written responses. There will be at least one field trip. Default grading option for this course is CR/NC.