How have anthropologists encountered, written about, and produced the “Arab world” over the past century? Beginning with early Western travelers’ imaginaries of Arabia and ending with an ethnography of Egyptian dreamscapes, this course provides an introduction to the anthropological project and to the everyday realities of people living in the region. Through ethnography, literature, film, and field trips, we explore such topics as colonialism, nation building and development, family, gender and piety, media, art and globalization, labor migration, diaspora, and pilgrimage.

Students in the NYUNY MEIS Dept: This course counts for MEIS elective credit

Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz once described the modern period in Arabic literature as Zaman al-riwayya (the Age of the Novel), signaling that the popularity of the novel has surpassed that of poetry and other genres of classical Arabic literature. This course offers an introduction to the study of the Arabic novel by focusing on some of the varied and complex connections between history and fiction—from the history of the novel in the Arab world to historical fiction and fictions about history. We will discuss representative novels and novellas by Egyptian, Lebanese, Libyan, Palestinian, Qatari, and Sudanese writers who depict various periods of Arab history, from medieval times to the present. The course uses a seminar format in which students are expected to make significant contributions to discussion.

* Note: The fall 2013 version only of this course will substitute for ACS-AD 161X in meeting Arab Crossroads major or concentration requiremenets.

At the crossroads between Asia, Africa and Europe, the region that Europeans and North Americans labeled "The Middle East" presents a dynamic and heterogeneous landscape of peninsulas and isthmuses, republics and monarchies, oil producing countries and labor exporting nations. This course examines the recent history of the region from the mid-18th century until the Arab uprisings of 2010-2012. We will explore the last Islamic empires, the intrusion of European colonial powers, the modernist, nationalist and Islamic reactions to aggression, the creation of authoritarian systems of power and the multiform protests that have shaken them. The Egyptian, Iranian, Palestinian and Saudi experiences will be examined more closely.

This course provides a broad cultural and aesthetic overview to Arabic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries and considers the rise of the Arabic novel, developments in contemporary Arabic poetry, as well as examples of modern Arabic theatre. We will consider the growing importance of literature of all types in the Arab world in the context of the rapidly changing political and social circumstances of, especially, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia.

Islam changed and shaped the Middle East, the Mediterranean world, and South Asia following its emergence in the seventh century. Muslims subsequently developed and expressed their faith in the disciplines of law, theology, and mysticism, even as their religious communities fractured into a variety of Sunni and Shi’a groups. This course will focus on primary sources to examine the richness of Islamicate civilization in the pre-modern world, including inter-religious relations as well as political and economic trends.

Students in the NYUNY History Dept: This course counts for History non-western lecture credit; For the NYUNY MEIS Dept: This course counts towards MEIS history requirement

From the beginning of the 8th to the beginning of the 17th century, Islam played a crucial role in the history of the Iberian peninsula. Today this period is often portrayed as one of inter-religious harmony, while al-Andalus is simultaneously mourned in contemporary Islamist discourse as a lost paradise. In this course we investigate the rich and complex history of al-Andalus, focusing on the changing relationships between Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities.

Students in the NYUNY MEIS Dept: This course counts towards MEIS history requirement

In popular Western discourse, the Middle East is routinely depicted as "traditional," "timeless," and thus, in some ways, ahistorical or it is depicted as an area whose inhabitants are unusually obsessed with their past. At the same time, the Middle East is considered the cradle of "Western Civilization," the location of an integral part of the world’s patrimony (inheritance), possessing vital aspects of "our" religious and cultural heritage. But how do those who live in "the Middle East" relate to their past(s), and what discourses do they draw on to represent and authorize it today? How is the "the past" recovered, commemorated, embodied, erased, marketed and consumed in the modern Middle East? This course will provide a brief introduction to the modern history of this region, but will focus more explicitly on various thematics of history, heritage, and memory practices: national commemorations, contested sites (and times), the politics of archaeology, invented traditions, structural nostalgia, embodied and gendered memories, museums, and the construction (and destruction) of tangible, intangible, and "world" heritage.

At the western end of the Mediterranean, the religious, political, and economic histories of North Africa and Iberia have always been intertwined.  This was especially the case during the eight centuries from 711-1492 when various parts of the Iberian peninsula were ruled over by Muslims.  In this course we will look both at how what are today Morocco and Spain were connected in this period in both history and imagination, and at how the Spanish colonial presence in Morocco in the 20^th century played a important role in the Spanish civil war.  The course will include an extended trip through Morocco and Spain.

Energy is, by many counts, the biggest business on earth. Its geopolitical significance is similarly enormous. Oil and sovereignty are virtually indistinguishable in many Middle East countries. Energy’s outsized role is mirrored in US public discourse, where increasing reliance on imports has made supply fears an obsession of domestic politics. The epicenter of that anxiety is the Middle East. This course provides an overview of the issues surrounding global energy supplies, oil’s unique economic properties, and its role in shaping the political economy of the Middle East and U.S. strategic interests in the region. We begin by discussing the basic science and availability of energy sources, the state of technology, the functioning of energy markets, the challenges of coping with global climate change and the key role of the oil reserves in the Middle East. The second part of the course focuses on the history of oil in the Middle East and its impact on societies in the region.

This course is an introduction to the study of Saudi Arabia and can be taken as a gateway course to the Arab Crossroads concentration. Its aim is to present various aspects of Saudi society and politics, from tribes and tribalism to oil, state building, Islamic activism and women. Saudi history has shifted since the 18th century, when a remote polity was confronting the Ottoman Empire and powerful Bedouin tribes. Since the creation of the modern state in 1932 and the discovery of oil in 1938, the country has become an essential albeit poorly understood player on the international scene.

We use fiction as a tool to visit (figuratively) five cities: Cairo, Alexandria, Beirut, Haifa, and Baghdad. The novels are our guides in order to understand the multiple layers of a city, and to build knowledge about the relationship between literature and social life. We read works by Naguib Mahfouz, Sunalla Ibrahim, Huda Barakat, Hanan Al Sheikh, Tawfic Yussuf Awad, Sinan Antoun, and Ghassan Kanafani. We read the novels as both individual and collective experiences, and we discuss how the new literary genre reflected and participated in the process of social change.

Students in the NYUNY MEIS Dept: This course counts towards MEIS literature requirement

This seminar aims, on the one hand, to introduce students to the main theoretical and epistemological trends in the study of the Arab Crossroads region, and on the other, to offer practical examples of the types of methodologies used by scholars working in the humanities and the qualitative social sciences. The course begins with a critical engagement with the strengths and weaknesses of area studies, and the politics of producing knowledge on a region that is of such global economic and political importance. It then turns to specific areas of research that have attracted considerable attention in the fields of history, anthropology, literature, and politics, before exploring the various methodological approaches used by practitioners of these fields. The course assignments include response papers, short essays on specific debates in relevant scholarship, transcribed interviews, and culminate in an extended research proposal for a capstone project.

Arab Crossroads Studies majors may also petition to take an independent study course, a research experience in which a student works under the supervision of a faculty member. Students are required to submit a research plan identifying the significance and scope of the proposed project. At the close of the course, the student submits a 25-page research paper, which is assessed based on the strength of research (both primary and secondary materials), the robustness and originality of the argument, and the quality of the student’s writing.

Offered by application

Arab Crossroads Studies majors may also petition to take an independent study course, a research experience in which a student works under the supervision of a faculty member. Students are required to submit a research plan identifying the significance and scope of the proposed project. At the close of the course, the student submits a 25-page research paper, which is assessed based on the strength of research (both primary and secondary materials), the robustness and originality of the argument, and the quality of the student’s writing.

Offered by application

The culmination of the program is a two-semester capstone experience. The capstone experience provides seniors with the opportunity to work closely with a faculty mentor and to conduct extensive research on a topic of their choice. In Arab Crossroad Studies, majors are required to take Problems and Methods in Arab Crossroads Studies before they begin their capstone project. The program consists of a capstone seminar, taken in the first semester of the senior year, and a year-long individualized thesis tutorial. During the capstone seminar, students define a thesis topic of their choice, develop a bibliography, read broadly in background works, and begin their research. In the tutorial, students work on a one-to-one basis with a faculty mentor to hone their research and produce successive drafts of a senior thesis. The capstone experience culminates in the public presentation of the senior thesis.

 *NOTE: As of Fall 2013 Capstone under HUM-AD 400

The culmination of the program is a two-semester capstone experience. The capstone experience provides seniors with the opportunity to work closely with a faculty mentor and to conduct extensive research on a topic of their choice. In Arab Crossroad Studies, majors are required to take Problems and Methods in Arab Crossroads Studies before they begin their capstone project. The program consists of a capstone seminar, taken in the first semester of the senior year, and a year-long individualized thesis tutorial. During the capstone seminar, students define a thesis topic of their choice, develop a bibliography, read broadly in background works, and begin their research. In the tutorial, students work on a one-to-one basis with a faculty mentor to hone their research and produce successive drafts of a senior thesis. The capstone experience culminates in the public presentation of the senior thesis.

Everyone talks about memory, yet nobody knows quite what it is. The basic question, what is memory, is unresolved: is memory located in the brain, or is it a complex of activities characteristic of the mind or psyche? We speak of personal memories, repressed memories, communal memories—the list goes on. This course can only introduce the rich variety of ideas, activities, and artifacts all said to be about memory. Among them are memory and place, memory and time, how societies remember, the art of memory, remembering the future, memory and creativity, and metaphors of memory.

Description pending.

Humans have created a stunning variety of cultures, yet different civilizations have often developed in comparable ways. This course explores similarities and differences in the long run: are there patterns in world history, and why did civilizations develop the way they did? How did humanity come to grow together by forging connections over ever greater distances? We address these questions by taking a global view of humanity, from hunter-gatherers up to the beginnings of modern globalization 500 years ago. We examine the biological evolution of humans; the creation of art and religion; the origins of agriculture; the invention of hierarchy, gender inequality, and slavery; and the rise of cities, states, and empires.

Students in the NYUNY Classics Dept: This course counts for Classics Greek and Roman History and Culture elective credit

This course concerns the aesthetics and politics of translation, both as a historically and culturally situated practice and as a rich metaphor for cultural production, cross-cultural encounter, and other types of creation, appropriation, and change. The course emphasizes transformations that occur in cross-media translations, such as when poems are set to music and books are turned into films. In addition to writing a number of short, critical essays on translations broadly conceived, studies create literary and/or cross-media translations of their own. Students perform their translations at the end of the semester.

This course explores the artistic and intellectual avant-gardes, counter-cultures, and protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s from a global perspective, assessing their impact on individual identities, social and gender hierarchies, domestic politics, and international relations during the Cold War. It traces the history of the various protest movements and the plethora of national experiences with respect to domestic and transnational networks of dissent as well as global imaginaries. Taking into account the aesthetics and performativity of protest, the course examines the role of cultural practices, action repertoires, the media, visual representations, lifestyle and fashion, the politics of memory, and the impact of dissent on political decision-makers and society at large. Course materials draw on the most recent historiography, as well as literature, film, art, music, and oral history.

Students in the NYUNY History Dept: This course counts for History special topics lecture credit  

The aim of this course is to explore and draw inspiration from the scientific process, its representations, and data. The goal is to cultivate purposeful science communication and to encourage critical responses to scientific and technological practice in modern culture. Students will focus on a particular area of science and become familiar with its process, language, and data. From direct experiences with scientists and science students, students will propose their own art/science collisions and develop one idea as a media/interactive presentation for the final project.

With the growing numbers of immigrants and refugees from the Middle East/North Africa in cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Sao Paulo, the construction of “us” versus “them” can no longer correspond to one geography, simplistically imagined as “over there.” This seminar studies questions of displacement as represented, mediated, and narrated in a wide variety of texts. It focuses especially on memoirs, whether in written or audiovisual form, which confront exclusionary and essentialist discourses with a rich cultural production that foregrounds a complex understanding of such issues as “home,” “homeland,” “exile,” “hybridity,” and “minorities.”

Site suggests contexts that are spatial, temporal, narrative, and populated. Site-specific works require a frame for participants, a set of stories, and a point of entry. More than art within “the framework” of an art institution, site-specific, interactive, and community-based works require rigorous levels of observation, interrogation, and participation. Whether in the physical or the virtual public, frame and context are primary considerations in the work produced. This class is part studio and part reflection, using contemporary art examples and writings that engage and critique the local and the global, invert locale and involve the everyday as well as traditional urban studies of observation.

Humanism – which in some parts coincides with Renaissance – was a cultural movement initiated in Italy in the 14th century, spreading all over Europe until it reached its end in the 17th century. Its programmatic energy derived from the desire to remember something that seemed to have been obliterated and forgotten in the course of the Middle Ages, i.e. pagan antiquity. Basing their European – national and transnational identities – on something much older than Christianity, scholars (poets, painters, architects, composers and philosophers) revived and developed scientifically the Greek and Roman legacy and laid the founding stones for Enlightenment and Modernity.

At the global art market's most recent peak in 2007, American Pop artist Andy Warhol (1928-1987) edged out Pablo Picasso to become the world's highest earning painter at auction. Although he has recently ceded that position to Chinese artists Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) and Qi Baishi (1864-1957), Warhol remains one of the most influential forces in contemporary art worldwide, with an enormous retrospective on tour in five Asian cities over the next few years. From his famous Campbell's soup cans to his enduring aphorism that "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes," Warhol's art and thinking saturate contemporary culture. This seminar uses his diaries and other writing as a base-line against which we will examine his 25-year career as a painter, filmmaker, publisher and music producer, TV personality, and artistic mentor and collaborator, as well as his legacy in what has been described as our "Warhol economy." What can Warhol's output and reception tell us about class, gender and sexuality, religion, and media over the last half century? And how should we understand his role in the making of global culture today? 

Is there such a thing as global cultural heritage? This course resituates Herman Melville's Moby-Dick -- often described as "The Great American Novel" -- as a global text that is "worldly" in its outlook and its legacy. The course examines the novel's relation to Christian, Muslim, and Zoroastrian religious traditions; to Greco-Roman tragedy and epic; to Shakespeare; to Western and Eastern philosophical traditions; and to a variety of European, British, and American Romantic traditions. It also examines the novel's engagement with the visual arts. The course poses three sets of questions: 1) In what ways was Moby-Dick a “global” text in its own day, adopting a “worldly” approach that transcends its particular local milieu? 2) How has the history of the publication, criticism, and teaching of the novel transformed it into a global cultural work? 3) What is the cultural legacy of the book today throughout a variety of global media forms, including plays, films, novels, operas, and works of visual art?

Every society cares deeply about its children, but every society cares for its children differently. This global examination of children will discuss common themes and cultural variations. We will consider child labor, children in cities, children and war, and the changing historical nature of the family in America, Europe, and China. We will discuss education and health in global perspective, looking at children in the urban world of the 21^st century, with field trips to the Shanghai Children’s Palace, the Shanghai Children’s Hospital, a school, an orphanage.  Each student will report to the class on some particular theme of childhood in comparative cultural perspective.

One may well call European and especially German history in the 20th century eventful. As the German capital, Berlin saw the transition of the German Empire to a functioning if turbulent democratic state in 1918. The rise of the Nazis to power and their defeat in WW II led to the notorious division of the city which then belonged to two states. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, German reunification was imminent. The course will engage with Berlin as a city of memory as represented in places and reflected in literature. Visits include: Checkpoint Charlie; the Berlin Wall; the Reichstag; the Olympic stadium and village; the Bauhaus Archive and Museum; and the Gemäldegalerie.  

In the 15th and 16th centuries, the city of Florence was a center of immense creativity in every area of human understanding and endeavor. It was the center of that extraordinary moment we call "the Renaissance"—the revolution in art, architecture, politics, philosophy and science that has shaped our view of the world, and the place of human beings in it. In this seminar, we read representative writings from several of the great Florentine thinkers of the period—Alberti, Machiavelli, Pico, and Galileo. Our goal is twofold: to discover what was original in each, and to grasp how all were connected by a shared set of ideals and beliefs. Our readings and discussions are supplemented by visits to the main cultural monuments of Florence, where we see (among other wonders) the palaces and churches that Alberti designed, the telescope through which Galileo spied the moons of Jupiter, and the tomb where Machiavelli lies.

With astonishing speed—mere decades in the middle of the eighteenth century—Enlightenment not only transformed how we think about ourselves, through new concepts of individuality and community, liberty and verifiable truth, it also remade Britain’s cities and institutions. Imagine London without the British Museum (1759) or the Royal Academy (1768). Imagine our curriculum without Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) or the Encyclopedia Britannica (1768). 250 years later, we will use the resources of the Global Network University to recover how this revolution in methods, tools, and institutions recast inquiry and enterprise in the West and to consider what we might do with our Enlightenment inheritance now. Behind-the-scenes adventures into London’s museums, galleries, and civic societies allow us to add our own tracks to the intellectual map we will be drawing in class.

Builds basic skills in modern standard Arabic. A continuing study of Arabic at the Elementary level. Five weekly hours of instruction and drill, stressing the proficiency approach, plus work in the language laboratory.

A continuing study of Arabic at the Elementary level. Five weekly hours of instruction and drill, stressing the proficiency approach, plus work in the language laboratory.

A continuing study of Arabic at the Intermediate level, with increased emphasis on writing and reading from modern sources in addition to aural/oral proficiency.

A continuing study of Arabic at the Intermediate level, with increased emphasis on writing and reading from modern sources in addition to aural/oral proficiency.

Complements the students knowledge of Standard Arabic to include proficiency in one of the major Arabic vernaculars, with emphasis on daily life tasks, conversational fluency, and cultural sensibility.

Builds on the skills acquired at the Intermediate level of Arabic study, with emphasis on writing compositions and conducting research.

A continuing study of Arabic at the Advanced level, with emphasis on writing compositions and conducting research.

This course wraps up the student's sequenced language learning experience with an opportunity to explore the cultural and artistic diversity of the Arab world using the acquired language skills. Students cap their language achievement by accessing and studying such genres as literature, song, film, folklore, etc., in the original language. The course includes fourteen modules, twelve already set, and two final modules to be worked out over the semester by two student teams. The modules center on key texts in categories, like language, place, family, and customs, which inform and shape modern Arab identities, civilization(s), and consciousness.

This course introduces students to the main stylistic features of classical Arabic. Students get a flavor of an older yet essential register of Arabic through the most important texts of the Islamic tradition. These texts constitute the very core of Islam to this day: the Qur’an and the Hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad). The syllabus also includes samples from the Tafsir tradition (Qur’anic hermeneutics), Sufi/mystical literature (poetry and prose), philosophical novels, and pious tales from the popular sphere (the Arabian Nights tradition). The Qur’an provides a sustained focus for the course, with particular attention being paid to how it has influenced all categories of Arabo-Islamic literature: linguistically, stylistically, thematically and doctrinally.

Description pending.

The array of organisms that populates the globe is astounding in its diversity and adaptability. This course uses fundamental concepts from the Foundations of Science curriculum to examine essential elements of animal physiology, including adaptations to environments such as deserts. This course develops an understanding of the relationship between structure and function of the organism; how structure develops through evolutionary and developmental processes; and how structure is related to the environment surrounding the organism.

A lecture and laboratory course that addresses the physiological and anatomical bases of behavior. Lectures and laboratory experiments will emphasize mammalian sensory, motor, regulatory, and motivational mechanisms involved in the control of behavior, and higher mental processes such as those involved in language and memory.

Understanding the fundamental methods for growing and studying cells—the smallest units of life—is basic to biology. This course introduces students to the methods used to study cell structure and function. In the laboratory, students study the fundamentals of cell biology and the experimental approaches used to examine the cell. Topics cover cellular, subcellular, and macromolecule localization; biochemical analysis of the cell; and cell culture techniques. Accurate record-keeping, reports, and presentations are emphasized.

Molecular biology has revolutionized biological research during the past few decades and has formed the basis for all high-throughput and genomics technologies. This course combines lecture, class discussions, and lab experiments to explore applications of molecular biology in modern biological research, particularly high-throughput biology and genomics. The course engages students in a guided research project to learn basics and advanced high- throughput molecular biology techniques, as well as scientific writing and data reporting. In particular, students will carry out high-throughput cloning and sequencing of a set of several hundred cDNAs that encode transcription/chromatin factors from the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. The results will be analyzed to assess cloning success, accuracy of gene annotation and gene expression under specific growth conditions.

Multicellular organisms undergo a series of complex temporal and spatial changes in gene expression following fertilization, which results in the highly organized, coordinated cell divisions needed for growth and development. This course introduces students to the principles and experimental strategies of developmental biology. It covers the cellular and molecular basis for patterning in the embryo; the determination of cell fate; cell differentiation; the genes controlling these events; how the genes are identified and studied; and the cellular proteins that effect shape, movement, and signaling among cells.

Evolution encompasses the patterns and mechanisms that explain the diversity of organisms we observe today and during the millions of years of the geological record. Evidence is reviewed that demonstrates the common ancestry of all living things, including humans, and the mechanisms, such as natural selection, that are required and sufficient to explain this pattern of ancestry, diversification, adaptation, speciation, and biogeographic distribution. The course also uses computer and mathematical modeling to explore the fundamentals of population genetics, molecular evolution, phylogenetic systematics, and the evolution of developmental systems.

Why do offspring often exhibit physical features of their parents? Why do combinations of certain features in offspring translate into specific  characteristics that either enhance or diminish the organism’s fitness? Answers to questions such as these fall partly within the discipline of genetics, which is the study of heredity. Principles from the Foundations of Science curriculum and Organismal Biology provide a framework for learning about classical genetics, chromosome structure and mutation, gene function and regulation, and aspects of molecular and developmental genetics. Recent studies in human genetics and their applications, particularly to health-related issues, are also investigated.

Fueled by recent advances in technical approaches to data collection and analysis, the biological sciences have entered a new era in which vast amounts of genome-scale sequence and functional data are becoming available for a large number of species. These data are allowing scientists to explore biological function on an unprecedented scale. Familiarity with the fields of genomics and bioinformatics, which impact society on all levels, is vital for the next generation of scientists. This survey course introduces students to a broad range of topics in the fields of genomics and bioinformatics through lectures and hands-on exercises that use fundamental principles of chemistry, computer science, mathematics, and physics to understand organismal diversity through analyses of genomes.

Organismal complexity is reflected in part by the way the individual biochemical pathways, organless and cells function together to permit environmental adapatation. This course will cover the computational techniques used to access, analyze, interpret, and integrate the diverse data of complex networks and pathways developed from genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics and to understand how they work together forming a system with definable phenotypes. Global approaches as well as mathematical and statistical modeling to data collection and analyses are performed.

A lecture course that provides students with broad exposure to current questions and experimental approaches in cellular neuroscience. Lectures are organized into three areas: cell structure and organization of the vertebrate central nervous system, mechanisms underlying neural signaling and plasticity, and control of cell form and its developmental determinants.

Whereas biology studies life in its variety and complexity, describing how organisms acquire the nutrients they need, communicate, sense the environment, and reproduce, physics seeks mathematical laws of nature and makes detailed predictions about the forces that drive idealized systems. Spanning the distance between the complexity of life and the simplicity of physical laws is the challenge of biophysics. Looking for the patterns in the world around us and analyzing them with math and physics is a powerful way to gain insights into the fundamental principles that govern the processes of life.

This course introduces students to biophysics, laying the foundations for the work that is expanded upon in Drug Discovery and Delivery. The course includes a rigorous investigation of the cell, biological macromolecules, including the structure and function of proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates and lipids. This then leads to the investigation of enzyme structure, including their mechanism of action and regulation, moving toward a deep understanding of information flow in cells via detailed biophysical studies of replication, transcription and translation. The course also deconstructs current and emerging diseases in terms of the malfunctioning of nucleic acids, proteins, membranes and the interactions between them. Finally, the course introduces high resolution and novel biophysical techniques, and shows how these can be used to dissect diseases at the atomic level, emphasizes how a basic biophysical understanding of diseases can guide the rational design of therapeutics.

A lecture and laboratory course addressing the application of computational techniques to the understanding of neural processing. Topics include cable theory and computation by single neurons, learning in artificial neural networks, small networks for the control of motor behavior, and neural processing of visual information. For each topic area there is an introduction to the scientific principles, a review of research, and a sequence of computer laboratories designed to familiarize the student with computational research methods used in that area.

Description pending.

This course is intended for students who are highly motivated and seek the opportunity to work in field or laboratory research with a faculty sponsor from the NYUAD Program in Biology. Students with the necessary background in course work and who, in the opinion of a faculty sponsor, possess intellectual independence and ability may register for this course. The student must approach a faculty member in his or her field of interest to obtain sponsorship. Typically, this course is only open to students with a minimum overall GPA of 3.5 and a minimum major GPA of 3.7, and registration requires permission of the sponsoring faculty member. Forms for Guided Study in Research in Biology are available from the Office of the Dean of Science.

This course is intended for students who are highly motivated and seek the opportunity to work in field or laboratory research with a faculty sponsor from the NYUAD Program in Biology. Students with the necessary background in course work and who, in the opinion of a faculty sponsor, possess intellectual independence and ability may register for this course. The student must approach a faculty member in his or her field of interest to obtain sponsorship. Typically, this course is only open to students with a minimum overall GPA of 3.5 and a minimum major GPA of 3.7, and registration requires permission of the sponsoring faculty member. Forms for Guided Study in Research in Biology are available from the Office of the Dean of Science.

This course covers current topics and approaches in the life sciences. Topics can include systems biology, bioinformatics, new laboratory and computer approaches in the life sciences, and current problems. Emphasis is placed on reading and evaluating primary literature and examining how the topic is addressed in the popular press.

Description pending.

Focuses on the art of scientific problem-solving through theoretical analysis and/or experimental and technical design. The Capstone Project provides an opportunity for student teams to use their knowledge and skills to identify and solve a problem or answer a question in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. The members of each team, which may well include majors from a wide range of disciplines that include students from the humanities and social sciences, design and execute a project under the guidance of a faculty mentor. The projects end with student presentations.

 *NOTE: As of Fall 2013 Capstone under SCIEN-AD 400

Focuses on the art of scientific problem-solving through theoretical analysis and/or experimental and technical design. The Capstone Project provides an opportunity for student teams to use their knowledge and skills to identify and solve a problem or answer a question in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. The members of each team, which may well include majors from a wide range of disciplines that include students from the humanities and social sciences, design and execute a project under the guidance of a faculty mentor. The projects end with student presentations.

Every animal on the planet is a master of its universe. Bats fly with great precision in total darkness. Honeybees find their way home using a path they have never seen before. Baby songbirds retain the memory of hearing their father’s song for several months before they actually are able to sing that song themselves. All these animals rely on specific mechanisms in their brains to endow them with these remarkable abilities. Understanding these mechanisms can provide deep insights into how all brains, including our own, are shaped by evolution to be fantastic problem solving machines. In this course we will explore the unique worlds of a several animals, highlighting first the specific environmental problems that a particular animal must solve, and second, the amazing ways the brains of these animals implement imaginative solutions to these problems. This course does not presume a strong background in biology. But two things will help: an appreciation of the beauty of the animals around us, and a genuine curiosity about how in the world they are able to do what they do.

This course studies the fundamentals of how human groups function and evolve over time and what scholars and practitioners have learned over the last 50 years about making them more effective. The course examines how size, longevity, surrounding social context, member composition, and emergent social norms dramatically shape how a group behaves and how effectively it operates. Then the course turns to study how group behavior can be shaped and changed over time. Particular attention is paid to issues of group culture, status and power structures, communication patterns, member diversity, and the effects of new member entry and member departures.

This course studies the fundamentals of marketing—from determining what it is that consumers want and need, translating those wants and needs into products and services, and selling those products and services in a highly competitive global marketplace. Depending on the instructor, different topic areas are emphasized, including, for example, the role of consumer research, product design and pricing, branding, and communications and promotional strategies in effective marketing.

This course is taught by leading management and economic scholars from around the world who are in residence in Abu Dhabi. The content is oriented toward the scholar’s expertise and the evolving international landscape of business, management, and competitive strategy.

This course uses an interactive, problems-based approach to study the structure and bonding of organic materials, conformational analysis, stereochemistry, and spectroscopy, topics that partly trace their roots to the development of quantum theory. The topics covered include basic reaction mechanisms such as substitution and elimination, and the reactions of aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbons, alcohols, ethers, amines, carbonyl compounds, and carboxylic acids. The course incorporates modern analytical methods that are the cornerstone of contemporary organic chemistry.

Students in the NYUNY Chemistry Dept: This course is equivalent to CHEM-UA 225 Organic Chemistry I and Lab; CHEM-UA 227 Majors Organic Chemistry I and Lab; CHEM-UA 9243-9245 Organic Chemistry I and Lab (London)

This course is the second semester of a comprehensive and rigorous survey of aliphatic and aromatic organic chemistry, with particular emphasis on reactions from both a synthetic as well as a mechanistic viewpoint. The topics include: aromatic compounds, including phenols and aryl halides as well as a thorough discussion of delocalized chemical bonding; aldehydes and ketones; amines; carboxylic acids and their derivatives; lipids such as fatty acids and triglycerides; and carbohydrates. The course is a continuation of Organic Chemistry 1, with an emphasis on multifunctional organic compounds, including topics of relevance to biochemistry and biological systems, such as carbohydrates, amino acids, peptides, and nucleic acids. The course continues the emphasis on modern analytical methods that are the cornerstone of contemporary organic analysis, with added emphasis on their application to biology and biological chemistry.

This course covers two of the most fundamental “classical” approaches in physical chemistry: equilibrium thermodynamics and chemical kinetics. The definition and the interpretation of some of the most fundamental physical concepts which are used in common “chemistry language” such as internal energy, transition state, chemical potential, reaction rate, phase transition or catalyst, are described in detail. This course uses an extensive mathematical apparatus. It aims at providing chemistry and chemistry-related majors with firm theoretical and practical knowledge that is necessary to resolve typical chemical problems (for instance, in organic chemistry or biochemistry) by focusing on the deeper understanding of their physical foundation and meaning.

Most of the material in this course will be devoted to quantum mechanics, a theory which currently plays a central role in structural chemistry, theoretical chemistry and spectroscopy. The course provides detailed insight into the modern approaches employed to explain the structure and spectra of atoms and molecules. After completion of this course, students will be able to understand the origin and meaning of some contemporary key chemical concepts, including terms such as wavefunction, atomic orbital, electron energy level, atomic valence, atomic and molecular spectrum, and electron spin. They will also be able to interpret various spectra—electronic (UV-visible), rotational, infrared and nuclear magnetic resonance—and to correlate these to the structure of atoms and molecules.

The course introduces the principles and practices of modern experimental methods that are widely used in contemporary analytical, organic, physical, and biological chemistry laboratories. Students become familiar with instrumental methods, such as ultraviolet/visible spectrophotometry, fluorescence spectroscopy, infrared spectroscopy, and nuclear magnetic resonance. Students learn about interfacing computers and instruments for data collection and data analysis, and computer modeling of molecular structures.

This course is intended for students who are highly motivated and seek the opportunity to work in field or laboratory research with a faculty sponsor from the NYUAD Program in chemistry. Students with the necessary background in course work and who, in the opinion of a faculty sponsor, possess intellectual independence and ability may register for this course. The student must approach a faculty member in his or her field of interest to obtain sponsorship. Typically, this course is only open to students with a minimum overall GPA of 3.3 and a minimum major GPA of 3.5, and registration requires permission of the sponsoring faculty member. Forms for Directed Study in Research in Chemistry are available from the Office of the Dean of Science.

This course is intended for students who are highly motivated and seek the opportunity to work in field or laboratory research with a faculty sponsor from the NYUAD Program in chemistry. Students with the necessary background in course work and who, in the opinion of a faculty sponsor, possess intellectual independence and ability may register for this course. The student must approach a faculty member in his or her field of interest to obtain sponsorship. Typically, this course is only open to students with a minimum overall GPA of 3.3 and a minimum major GPA of 3.5, and registration requires permission of the sponsoring faculty member. Forms for Directed Study in Research in Chemistry are available from the Office of the Dean of Science.

The course introduces the principles and practices of modern experimental methods that are widely used in contemporary analytical, organic, physical, and biological chemistry laboratories. Students become familiar with instrumental methods, such as ultraviolet/visible spectrophotometry, fluorescence spectroscopy, infrared spectroscopy, and nuclear magnetic resonance. Students learn about interfacing computers and instruments for data collection and data analysis, and computer modeling of molecular structures.

This course offers deeper and more complete treatments of the chemistry of living cells and biological chemistry than in the Foundations of Science courses. Topics include structure and function of proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids; enzyme structure, mechanism and regulation of enzyme activity, and membrane structure and transport; mechanisms of cellular processes and cellular physiology, including ion channels and pumps, cell motility, and the immune response.

Building of the lessons of Biochemistry 1, Biochemistry 2 emphasizes analysis of basic metabolic pathways, including glycolysis, electron transport, and oxidative phosphorylation, as well as mechanisms of metabolic regulation and integration.

Introduction to molecular analysis of biomolecules. Selected experiments and instruction in analytical techniques used in biochemical research, including chromatography, spectrophotometry, and electrophoresis; isolation and characterization of selected biomolecules; kinetic analysis of enzymatic activity; and analysis of protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions that direct basic biochemical pathways.

Applications of physical and chemical principles to topics of biochemical and biological interest with an emphasis on the basic principles underlying biophysical techniques that are used to study important macromolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. Topics include molecular spectro- scopic techniques such as light absorption, fluorescence, and circular dichroism, as well as nuclear magnetic resonance and vibrational spectroscopy. Applications of these methods to important biophysical, biochemical, and biological problems of current interest such as protein folding, imaging, and protein-DNA and protein-protein interactions are discussed.

Studies of methods in inorganic chemistry that make use of symmetry to describe bonding and spectra of inorganic compounds with an interdisciplinary emphasis whenever feasible. Reactions and kinetics are also discussed for inorganic, organometallic, and bioinorganic compounds. Selected topics in main group chemistry are also included.

Covering a broad range of topics at the interface between organic chemistry and biology, this course focuses on current advances in bioorganic chemistry, chemical biology, molecular pharmacology, functional genomics, and molecular evolution. Students are expected to enter the class with previous coursework in the chemical structure and conformation of polypeptides and nucleic acids.

Description under development

A seminar course providing in-depth treatment of an area of current interest in chemistry. Lectures present background material and address current problems in the area related to the topic. Students read and discuss review articles and current literature on the topic. Course content is determined on a semester-by-semester basis and focus on interdisciplinary topics in the spirit of the Foundations of Science courses.

Focuses on the art of scientific problem-solving through theoretical analysis and/or experimental and technical design. The Capstone Project provides an opportunity for student teams to use their knowledge and skills to identify and solve a problem or answer a question in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. The members of each team, which may well include majors from a wide range of disciplines that include students from the humanities and social sciences, design and execute a project under the guidance of a faculty mentor. The projects end with student presentations.

 *NOTE: As of Fall 2013 Capstone under SCIEN-AD 400

Opened to students with little or no training in Chinese, this course is designed to develop and reinforce language skills in listening, speaking, reading, and writing as it relates to everyday life situations. The objectives are: to master the Chinese phonetic system (pinyin an tones) with satisfactory pronunciation; to understand the construction of commonly used Chinese Characters (both simplified and traditional) and learn to write them correctly; to understand and use correctly basic Chinese grammar and sentence structures; to build up essential vocabulary; to read and write level-appropriate passages; to become acquainted with aspects of Chinese culture and society related to the course materials.

A continuation of Elementary Chinese I. The course is designed to reinforce and further develop language skills in listening, speaking, reading, and writing as it relates to everyday life situations.

This course is designed to consolidate overall listening and speaking proficiency, with the focus gradually moving toward semi-formal usage of Chinese language in topic-oriented discussions. The objectives are: to be able to obtain information from extended conversation; to both express and expound on, in relative length, feelings and opinions on common topics; to expand vocabulary and learn to decipher meaning of compound words; to develop reading comprehension of extended narrative, expository, and simple argumentative passages; to solve non-complex textual problems with the aid of dictionaries; to write in relative length personal narratives, informational narratives, comparison and discussion of viewpoints with level appropriate vocabulary and grammatical accuracy, as well as basic syntactical cohesion; to continue being acquainted with aspects of Chinese culture and society related to the course materials.

A continuation of Intermediate Chinese I, focusing on semi-formal usage of Chinese language when discussing more academic-flavored cultural or social topics.

This course is designed to further develop proficiency in speaking and writing through readings on and discussions of socio-cultural topics relevant to today’s China. The main focus is the improvement of reading comprehension and writing skills. The objectives are: to further improve oral communicative competence by incorporating semi-formal or formal usages; to acquire vocabulary and patterns necessary for conducting semi-formal or formal discussions of socio-cultural topics; to increase reading speed of texts with more advanced syntax; to learn to make context-based guesses about the meaning of a new word, conduct sentence analysis and solve textual problems with the aid of dictionaries; to write and present more fully developed narratives or reasoned and structured arguments in length; to learn to employ basic rhetoric methods; to learn to appreciate stylistic usage of Chinese language.

Continuation of Advanced Chinese I. Designed to reinforce and further develop students knowledge of formal usage of Chinese language.

This course explores the sound and significance of the human voice. We examine a number of ways in which the voice has been framed as the result of a complex physiological process; as a quasi-mystical aesthetic object; as a vehicle for communication; as a gendered, racialized, and essentialized text; as a technologically mediated commodity; and as a master trope for identity, human agency, immediacy, and truth. Students read a number of seminal texts on voice; write several focused essays; complete a multimedia project; and, more importantly, use their own voices to make a chorus of sounds in class.

Students in the NYUNY Music Dept: This course counts for Music elective credit

* Please note the duration of this course during summer 2013 is 28 May-14 June

The course explores the portrait as a pivotal human artifact for artistic expression, private identity formation, and public self-fashioning. It traces a series of thematic issues central to the idea of the portrait through history in different cultures, media, and techniques. Themes to study are: image and likeness from antiquity to Facebook; the portrait as real and surrogate presence; portraiture and psychology; the “face of power”; portraits without a face; the work of art as self portrait; digital identity and the private portrait in the public domain; animal portraits and their owners; masks and casts; the unintended portrait; anthropomorphisms and readymades; the better self: face-lift and Photoshop; after life and afterlife.

Students NYUNY: This course counts for Expressive Culture (Morse Academic Plan) credit.

This course explores the ways in which the portrait has been used as a vehicle for artistic expression, for the construction of social identity, for self-examination, and for the representation of cultural difference. It examines many kinds of portraits and self-portraits in painting and photography from different times and cultures and encourages engagement with a range of major issues that include the nature of personhood, of private and public identities, and of art itself. The course draws upon the rich resources of London’s museums and galleries, especially the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum and the Queen’s Collection.

Students NYUNY: This course counts for Expressive Culture (Morse Academic Plan) credit.

Musical instruments have been created by humans for at least 35,000 years. How do diverse musical cultures view the significance of the sounds and playing techniques of musical instruments? From instrumental story-telling in Siberia, Central Asian shaman-bards, dervish flutes, folk, Gypsy and classical fiddling, dulcimers, psalteries and keyboards to drumming in several parts of the world, the course examines why musical cultures need instruments; how these instruments interact with or take the place of vocal music; where they are connected to dance and where they have evolved far from dance; how diverse cultures attribute positive or negative moral values to different instruments and their players; and how a single musical culture may feel the need to exchange, develop or exclude particular musical instruments over time.

Students NYUNY: This course counts for Expressive Culture (Morse Academic Plan) credit; For the NYUNY Music Dept: This course counts for Music ethnomusicology elective credit

The Garden of Eden haunts the history of the peoples of the Book—Jews, Christians, Muslims—as primal site of creation, bounty, betrayal, and loss, as spur to repentance and redemption, as preview of heaven and model of earthly Utopia. The exile of Adam and Eve from the garden that God planted for the first man and filled with all the Earth's creatures and plants set their descendants on an infinite quest to find, describe, and recreate it. The course studies the efforts by people of the Abrahamic religions to specify the site, form, and meaning of the first Garden, in theology, literature, visual art, film, and garden design. It seeks convergences and differences among these interpretations across millennia and media, and ask whether the Garden of Eden continues to hold productive meanings today. All students participate in a garden design project. This course includes field trips to gardens in Abu Dhabi and abroad.

This course explores photography’s relationship to language and narrative by examining photography’s rich interactions with literature and film. How do images complement, replace, challenge, or exceed language in narrative works? Can images create alternative forms of narrative? What kind of narratives do photographs generate in fiction? What is the relationship of photography and memory in works of autobiography or of photography and witnessing in social documentary? In what form are such dialogues present in films? We look at a variety of works from around the world which are entirely or almost entirely visual; works in which images and text are combined in creative partnership; and works which are about photographs but in which no images are actually reproduced.

Popular culture—culture that appeals to or reaches a mass audience—can help connect people of divergent nationalities, experiences, and identities, thereby facilitating cosmopolitan ideals. In this seminar, we look at the changing role of the artist as world citizen over the course of the late 20th and early 21st  century. The main thrust of the course is music: we deal with the rise of the “world music” concept in the 1980s, and students investigate postcolonial musicians who have grappled in differing ways with the challenge of cosmopolitanism. We also look at cosmopolitanism as it is deployed in contemporary film, television, literature, and food; and the impact of emergent technology forms on globalism. Students engage with the cosmopolitan sounds and sights of the region as we stop to consider the evolving contemporary pop cultural scenes of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

This course is a practical exploration of collaboration as fundamental creative working method. Taught by a collaborative artist, the course looks at  collaboration as it has emerged from the recent history of art, literature, and science to become an essential method of contemporary social experience. Course projects and materials are based around the use of the iPad. Working with the device on creative, co-authored projects, students gain first-hand experience in considering how collaboration is structured and managed in the production of creative works and how a consideration of collaborative and interactive methods changes the way we think about the nature of the finished creative project.

Students in the NYUNY Steinhardt Studio Art Dept: This course counts is equivalent to ART-UE 1910 Interdisciplinary Projects

This course explores how the mythology, poetics, imagery, and emotion associated with romantic love have varied dramatically over time and in different cultures. Spanning several millennia and many continents, our  material challenges us to think about gender, family, biology, and faith as manifestations of an attempt to reconcile human needs and desires. We work with ancient texts like the Ramayana, the Upanishads, and the Song of Songs; the poetry of Kalidasa, Rumi, and Neruda; plays by Zeami, Euripides, Shakespeare, Lorca, Tennessee Williams, and Sarah Kane; the music of PJ Harvey, Antony & The Johnsons, and Thom Yorke; the photography of Cindy Sherman; and the films of David Lynch. Students move towards creating their own inventions, employing creative writing, physical improvisations, ensemble performance, and photography.

The scapegoat, however unwillingly, has played a role in human culture since the earliest times. This course examines the phenomena of scapegoating from both a historical and psychological perspective, and examines its treatment in films, literature, music, and new technology. Tracing the origins of scapegoating as a tribal rite and as one of the defining aspects of Greek tragedy, this course ultimately poses the question—what is it, in the human psyche, that causes us to demonize and dehumanize the “other,” and demand, in the most extreme cases, witch trials throughout the centuries, mob lynchings, the Holocaust, and the more recent genocide in Rwanda. This course also touches on the technological forms of scapegoating such as cyber-bullying and examines how the Internet itself is often used as a scapegoating device.

How does the idea of catastrophe shape artistic studies in the 21st-century? This interdisciplinary course explores catastrophe through a variety of thematics. Students use creative works (film, literature, reportage, photography, and comics) as well as critical discourses (aesthetic and social theories) to explore a range of real or fictional disasters in modern times. Can catastrophe serve as a lens to understand notions such as the sublime, bare life, trauma, capitalism, risk society, multiculturalism, empire, and network?

Students NYUNY: This course counts for Expressive Culture (Morse Academic Plan) credit.

What are maps, and what do they tell us? From prehistoric cave paintings to Mercator projection maps to contemporary mobile apps, maps combine the innovation and rigor of art and science. Maps interpret space in and over time. This course examines maps from the ancient and modern worlds, alongside reinterpretations of mapping in paintings, films, video games, and new media, to understand ways that maps produce knowledge visually.

Can we capture the unpredictable evolutionary and emergent properties of nature in software? Can understanding the mathematical principles behind our physical world help us to create digital worlds? This class focuses on the programming strategies and techniques behind computer simulations of natural systems. We explore topics ranging from basic mathematics and physics concepts to more advanced simulations of complex systems. Subjects covered include forces, trigonometry, fractals, cellular automata, self-organization, and genetic algorithms. No computer programming experience is required; the course starts with the basics of code using the Processing environment.

Students in the NYUNY ITP Dept: This course is equivalent to ITPG-GT 2690 The Nature of Code

Underlying performances of all kinds—theatre, dance, music, the performances of everyday life, sports, and popular entertainments—are ritual and play. These must be understood from multiple perspectives. In the course, we investigate roots
of human ritual and play in animal behavior; human religious and social rituals; and children and adults at play. Examples include the Taziyeh of Shi’a Islam, the Ramlila of Hinduism, the Olympic Games, Noh Drama of Japan, American baseball, “deep” and “dark” play.

The ability to communicate has been central to humanity from the beginning of time. While speech may have been the first great revolution in human  communication it certainly is not the last. Throughout our history, the forms of communications we have employed haven’t been limited to our innate capabilities but have been extended by technology. Technology has allowed humans the ability to overcome time and distance enabling ever more sophisticated and rich forms of communication. In this course we examine the history of human communication culminating with the current state of communication technologies that are being developed online and in the mobile world. 

Scholarly approaches to Renaissance art have traditionally focused on what it inherited from the Roman world. What happens to our understanding of the Renaissance when we highlight its relationship to Jerusalem, Constantinople, and other cultural centers in the Eastern Mediterranean? This course investigates the interpretive implications of this shift in orientation, exploring the West’s fascination with objects and images produced by Byzantine and Islamic artists, and the complications of identity produced by pilgrimages to the east, both real and imaginary.

Students in the NYUNY Art History Dept: This course counts for Art History elective credit.

Gesture lies at the interface of the verbal and the non-verbal in human communication and expression. Through bodily movement, intonation, and stress gesture can transcend the distinctions between normal speech, poetry, song, and dance. Gaining a deeper understanding of the multiple meanings of gesture in a variety of media across different cultures enables the student to approach fundamental means of human expression, and to learn to recognize constants in human communication within the myriad of culturally specific conventions of language, prosody, music, and dance.

Students NYUNY: This course counts for Expressive Culture (Morse Academic Plan) credit.

Inventions have played a pivotal role in the development of history, mankind, and culture. Inventors articulate problems and find creative solutions, often by combining concepts that are not typically linked. This class examines inventions and the process of inventing through case studies. We consider the historical context of inventions and how the use of inventions can change from one culture to another. Some of the inventions we explore are the bow and arrow, the lever, the bicycle, dynamite, the fax machine, and the computer. Students are presented with problems and asked to create prototypes and invent new tools.

Rhythm has been described as patterns of events in time and space, and is a prominent feature of life and learning. This interdisciplinary course examines what rhythm is and how it manifests itself in a wide variety of domains that range from music traditions spanning cultures across the globe and throughout history, to how it emerges in, and is informed by, areas such as mathematics, computer science, music theory, music technology, biology, psychology, linguistics, sociology, evolution and human migrations, ethnology, crystallography, nuclear physics, calendar design, radio astronomy, architecture, computer graphics, and the visual arts. Students read from books and journal articles, solve problems, listen to music, drum with their hands on their desks, learn how to use computer software systems to analyze as well as generate rhythms, solve puzzles of musical time patterns, and write on a variety of topics. They complete an individual research project that showcases the application of knowledge in their selected discipline and culture to an open question concerned with rhythm. They discuss progress on their projects during the term, and present their results to the class at the end of term. No computer programming  experience or musical training is required.

Of what can we be certain? The course explores the role of doubt throughout history and in various cultures.  It will explore the capacity of doubt to endow human experience and knowledge with complexity and dimension.  While belief can provide the scaffolding of a life, a community, and worldview, doubt has, throughout history, and in every part of the world, wrestled firmly held beliefs toward new invention and discovery creating pivotal moments of scientific, cultural, social and personal development.  The course will also focus on the role of conviction and doubt in storytelling, examining precepts and dramatic principles that employ conviction and doubt toward a greater plurality.  Through our readings and discussion students will examine the role of doubt and conviction in their daily lives.  Close readings of select essays, texts, fables, koans, poetry, novels, plays, short stories and films will serve to map this exploration.  Texts include Plato, Timaeus and Critias;  Aesop's Fables; Mahabarata; Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty;  Athol Fugard, The Road to Mecca; and John Patrick Shanley, Doubt.   

Desert Odysseys, Dark Continents, Virgin Lands, Harem Fantasies; this interdisciplinary course explores the role of visual culture in shaping our outlook of “other” geographies and cultures as “exotic.” We analyze the role of the diverse technologies in mediating between distant geographies, and making the unknown known. Moving across various texts, arts, media, and institutions – museums, maps, photographs, films, TV programs, and digital spaces – the course reflects on how our imagination of ourselves is intertwined with the ways that we imagine other places. The reading includes: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad; David F. Dorr, A Colored Man Round the World; Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days; and The letters of Gertrude Bell.

This seminar is devoted to the interrelated issues of colonialism, postcolonialism, comparative race, and multiculturalism as apprehended through diverse disciplines, media, and colonial histories. Throughout our focus will be comparative, transnational and transdisciplinary, mingling the theories and methods of media studies, literary studies, philosophy, and social studies. The goal is to reflect in a polycentric way on a multicultural world still shaped by the legacies of (post) colonialism, as reflected, refracted, translated and resisted by the media.

This course will probe the heuristics of human innovation as understood by ancient and modern inventors and philosophers. The central question of this course are the following, What are the sources, requirements, and factors that influence human ingenuity? Is creativity a gift or a skill? How does creativity differ from innovation? To address these questions, we will consider the earliest human inventions such as spears and simple tools; technological innovations that affected the course of human history; and inventions that shape our modern world. Throughout the course, a strong emphasis will be placed on developing a personal philosophy and methodology for creativity.

Historian Leo Braudy notes that: “the history of fame is also the history of the shifting definition of achievement in the social world.” We will track early discourses of heroism and immortality as they pertain to mythologized figures like Alexander the Great to the chatter around today’s reality celebrities like Kim Kardashian. Beginning with concepts of fame in antiquity, we investigate Virgil’s The Aeneid, The Bible, Homer's The Odyssey, and Shakespeare’s King Richard III. Ultimately, we study the rise of contemporary stars across film, television, and theatre, and we think about the ways in which celebrities help manage historically conditioned categories of classification, such as gender, sexuality, race, class and nationality. Do celebrities register and reflect changes in the way we understand identity or do they have a powerful hand in shaping those very changes?  In addition, we’ll engage case studies of non-Western celebrities, as we consider the formatting of modern stardom in Asia (Jackie Chan and Jet Li), Africa (Fela Kuti), and the Middle East (Umm Kulthum). By the end of the course, students should be well equipped to analyze a celebrity as an embodied social text and to consider the way celebrities contribute to, or distract us from, the progressive negotiation of human freedoms.

This class examines the representation and theorization of the human body as evident in acting theory and performance practices. We will be particularly attentive to the international circulation of ideas of the body. To what extent are the commentaries of Ibn  Rushd (Averroes) on Galen and Plato important to Renaissance Europe’s understanding of the performing body? How has Tadashi Suzuki’s interest in Noh, Kabuki , and Ancient Greek theatre informed his collaborations with major figures of the European theatre? Authors will include: Ibn Rushd, Plato, Zeami, Shakespeare, Diderot, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Brecht, Suzuki.

This course will consider representations of social and historical realities within which notions of cultural identity, citizenship and power are imagined and presented. Using examples from the performing arts, film and photography, we will explore formal technologies of creating representations and cultural modes of interpreting them, and compare how reality is abstracted and codified by representations from different parts of the world. Some of the examples are films such as Lawrence of Arabia, Mother India, Xala and Al Za’eem; plays such as The Road, Al-Malik huwa I-Malik, and St Joan; photographs by Annie Liebovitz, Brian Duffy and Yousef Karsh. Basic semiotic, materialist and reception theories will offer prisms for our study. Key essays such as “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for the Pastness of India” by Dipesh Charkravorty, “Fictions of the Pose” by Harry Berger, “Imperialist Nostalgia” by Renato Rosaldo, and “Theorizing the Male Gaze” by Edward Snow will be read side by side videos of performances, films and slides of photographs.

Machines have provided the means for artists to dream different worlds into existence.  Machines impact how we structure our thoughts, our language, and even our bodies. We will examine how writers, visual artists, filmmakers and performers have creatively engaged both obsolete and emerging technologies—mirrors, camera obscuras, phonographs, photocopiers, projectors, telephones, computers, and satellites — to communicate shifts in how we perceive time, movement, space, similarity and difference among human beings, and operations of political power.  We will study a variety of philosophers, scientists, anthropologists, cultural theorists, visual artists and playwrights including Horace, Euripides, Walter Benjamin, Donna Haraway, Michael Taussig, David Hockey, Ingres, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Chuck Close, films by the Lumiere Brothers and Jean Rouch, Apple Computer television commercials, and web-based performance/installation art by Stelarc, Electronic Disturbance Theatre, Emily Jacir, and Ai Weiwei.

The course will explore how image-based representations, written texts, and aspects of the built environment reflect certain conceptions of identity. The course considers paintings, photographs, video, ego documents, and journals. We will focus on artistic practices that examine and/or demonstrate personal or preconceived notions of identity through acts of self-representation. Questions we will focus on will include: Why do artists from a particular region privilege certain issues over others? What extenuating circumstances may influence an artist's practice? How do artists consider Identity through examination of place? What role does gender or gendered stereotypes play in the production of art? How do artists represent themselves in order to challenge gender or cultural stereotypes?


Through weekly slide lectures, readings, class discussions, and practical assignments, this course will explore several media and methods of self-representation in artistic practice. Basic visual criticism techniques and theory will be introduced in order to understand and differentiate between a wide range of artistic practices and intentions. The course will consider of the work of artists from the USA, Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. The class will include visits to local museums, galleries, and artist studios.

What is perception and how is it mediated by culture and technology? To what extent do objects of perception look and sound the same across individuals, cultures, and means of representation? How much of music is a function of the way our auditory system works and how much is learned as a part of culture? This class approaches these questions by looking at the scientific literature (to understand the basics of perception), by examining cultural objects such as musical instruments, scales, and performances (for specific examples that bring the ideas into focus) and by contrasting the various technologies for storing and reproducing sound.

* Please note the duration of this course during summer 2013 is 26 May-20 June

Prerequisites: None.

This course analyzes what we understand as “music.” Drawing on music of different styles from all over the world, we will explore what constitutes musical meaning, how it is produced, and how music expresses feelings. Taking advantage of the multicultural nature of NYUAD, we will explore the cultural and universal mechanisms at play when we listen and understand music. A lab portion of the class guides students through basic musical elements such as notation systems, scales, and simple compositional techniques.

Lying is an integral part of human communication. It is only in contrast to lies that we are able to construct the concept of truth and “choose” our perception of reality. From white lies and exaggerations to advanced techniques of persuasion such as propaganda and brainwashing, this course will examine the psychological, philosophical, ethical and social aspects of several contexts in which lying commonly occurs: Art, Culture, Literature, Science, Politics, Advertising, Journalism, Relationships, Digital World and History. We will discuss and analyze the motives, techniques, technology and outcomes of some of the biggest lies and liars throughout history, from mythological 
gods in ancient Greece through fake alchemists in the Islamic Golden Age to contemporary schemers. We will study examples of lying in texts, films, biographies, cartography, visual arts, internet, social networking, mass media, advertisement as well as guest liars and lying experts.

Death is a universal fact of human life, powerfully defining the exigencies of our experience. From ancient times until the present, artistic works have registered changing attitudes towards death in the stories they tell. In this seminar, we will examine artistic responses to mortality across a wide range of historical and
cultural contexts—including in the myths of Orpheus and Osiris, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the text of the Ramayana; the poetry of Darwish, Neruda, and Rilke; stories by Tolstoy, Mishima, and Benjamin; and music of Dowland, Wagner, and Adams. Selected films and plays, including the Noh Drama of Japan, will also be considered. Students will develop a collaborative or individual artistic project and related critical paper demonstrating their engagement with the topic.

While seemingly inhospitable to life, the desert teems with animals and plants that have evolved to cope with an arid environment. This course addresses fundamental questions related to desert climates and the species that populate them. What geographic conditions generate a desert terrain? How rapidly does the terrain change over time? What are the special attributes of the plants and animals that thrive in desert climates, and how do these populations change as the desert changes? This course uses the local terrain as a laboratory to address these questions, and team projects requiring field work form the core of the learning experience.

Satisfies Experimental Discovery in the Natural World

Why is Earth the only object in the solar system with obvious signs of life? How did the building blocks of life form on Earth? What is the likelihood that there are other forms of life out there? This course addresses these questions and more, by covering the chemical evolution of the Universe, the formation of our solar system, the search for and study of extra-solar planets, and the possible cosmological implications of life’s existence.

Satisfies Science, Society, and History

I want to live forever! Since antiquity, humans have confronted physical immortality in song, literature, theater, and science. Indeed, the alchemists sought an elixir of life with curative powers that would prolong indefinitely the lives of those who consumed it. And even as alchemy gave way to chemistry, and science evolved into a modern discipline that focuses on understanding the natural world through strict rules of experimentation, the notion of immortality did not disappear. In fact, biologists often asked—and continue to ask—the related question: Why must we die? The results are often surprising. This course examines immortality and, by necessity, death, principally from the view of science, but also using literature and film. In doing so, fundamental human concerns are confronted—birth, growth, aging, sickness, and death—as the course explores immortality and the human desire to live forever.

Satisfies Science, Society, and History

While the 20th century has often been characterized as the Century of Physics, many have already named the 21st century as the Century of Genetics. Important markers highlight the speed and drama of the molecular genetic revolution. These include the technique of somatic nuclear cell transfer (with the realization of mammalian cloning and the specter of human cloning) and germ-line gene therapy (with its specter of altering the genetic makeup of future generations). Alongside these markers is the promise of stem cell cures for many human ailments and diseases, and DNA identification technology to exonerate the innocent and convict the guilty. But this is only the beginning, since the newest developments promise to go far beyond “cure” to delve into human “enhancements” of mental acuity and physical prowess. This course examines these and other developments, lodging the heated debates that each generates in both social and cultural histories and current incarnations.

Students in the NYUNY Sociology Dept: This course counts for Sociology elective credit

Satisfies Science, Society, and History

We often don’t know for sure whether something will happen (or has happened). Probability provides a way of thinking about the uncertain. We look at the fundamentals of the mathematics of probability, including such important results as the Law of Large Numbers and the Central Limit Theorem. We study the inferences that one should make, and the decisions that one should take, when the evidence leaves it uncertain what is true. We also examine some of the foundational philosophical issues about the concept of probability—is it something objective or subjective? And does genuine randomness exist in the world?

Satisfies Science, Society, and History

At the beginning of the 20th century, a scientific revolution started that was destined to change radically the way we think about the physical world. Einstein’s theory of relativity completely altered notions of time and space, laying the theoretical foundation for the use of nuclear power. At the same time, a new quantum theory was developed to describe the behavior of atoms and nuclei. It led to great technological advances, with much modern technology crucially exploiting quantum effects. But the revolutionary advent of relativity and quantum mechanics came with significant consequences: Physics became detached from the public’s everyday experiences and intuition. Challenging that notion of inaccessibility, this course analyzes some of the basic concepts of relativity and quantum theory.

Satisfies Science, Society, and History

What is the current state of Earth in terms of human well-being and human impact on Earth’s natural systems? Issues such as energy, CO2, climate, agriculture, water, and material fluxes are intricately tied together as a global system that has expanded by about 3% per year. This growth rate will lead to a world in 2050 in which the average world citizen will have a life approximately equal to that of the average European or Japanese today and about four times the average Chinese today. Will this be possible and what will be the implications for the issues above? In this inquiry-based seminar, substantial portions of the course will require students to conduct research by locating, using, and sharing technical papers and data bases, synthesizing facts and viewpoints, making presentations, and writing short technical papers that will be peer-reviewed by the other “researchers” in the class. The course includes field trips relevant to the topics above.

Satisfies Science, Society, and History

This course provides a gentle introduction to the fundamentals of programming, which is the foundation of Computer Science. It is intended as a first course for students from different disciplines; no prerequisite is needed. Programming has revolutionized every aspect of our lives from art and other media to education, business, and the core sciences. Students learn the basics of how computers “think” and how computer programs (software applications) are created. We develop simple and fun applications involving graphics, sound, text processing, animation, basic interactive game techniques, networking, and web interfaces. Students produce short programs and one final project using Python, a  relatively easy programming language with powerful visual and graphics capabilities.

Students in the NYUNY Computer Science Dept: This course is equivalent to CSCI-UA.0002 Introduction to Computer Programming

Satisfies Experimental Discovery in the Natural World

The very word “mutations” tends to raise fear and apprehension since it is so often associated with physical deformities or exposure to harmful agents, including radiation. Perhaps such fear is warranted since many human diseases, including cystic fibrosis and cancer, are caused by “mutations”, which are mere changes in the genetic information in DNA. Starting with basic concepts, this course explores important cellular macromolecules, such as DNA, and proteins as well as their three-dimensional structures that endow them with their specific functions. In fact, understanding how mutations induce alterations to  macromolecular structures often sheds light on the characteristic symptoms and prognoses of some human diseases and syndromes. Laboratory projects, which focus on introduction to computer modeling, emphasize visualizing in a three-dimensional environment the normal and altered macromolecules associated with some common but complex human maladies.

Satisfies Experimental Discovery in the Natural World

This course probes the heuristics of human innovation in the ancient world. We study the earliest human inventions such as spears and simple tools; ponder the methods that might have been used in the construction of monolithic structures such as Stone Henge, Egyptian obelisks, and pyramids; and explore examples of technological innovations that affected the course of human history. Throughout the course, the emphasis is on developing personal approaches to creativity and innovation by studying specific examples of these attributes from the ancient world.

Satisfies Science, Society, and History

Yeasts are among the world’s oldest industrial microbes. These single-celled organisms are involved in the preparation of various foods, most notably bread and beverages. Indeed, the use of yeast in the baking industry is found in many societies throughout the world. In this course, the diversity and functions of yeasts are examined using modern experimental approaches. Students begin by learning the fundamentals of the biological molecules that comprise the cell, such as DNA, RNA, proteins, and carbohydrates. In the laboratory, students then use a variety of methods, including DNA isolation, polymerase chain reaction amplification, gel electrophoresis, sequencing, and metagenomic analysis to study these microorganisms that are so globally important in providing fundamental sustenance.

Satisfies Experimental Discovery in the Natural World

* please note the duration of this course during summer 2013 is 26 May- 20 June

The Arabian Peninsula offers images of camels, palm trees, and deserts that meet the sea. This terrain provides a rich opportunity to understand a unique ecological niche and to gain an understanding of the organisms that inhabit it. The course examines the diverse animals and plants that inhabit the local landscape and considers issues related to the region’s preservation as its cities and population grow. Water as a resource plays a focal point in many discussions. This course relies on field work to gain the best understanding of the terrain.

Satisfies Experimental Discovery in the Natural World

Knowing the three-dimensional structure of a molecule is important for understanding its functional properties. Is it indeed possible to visually analyze a molecule and use the observed experimental data to build a three-dimensional model? This structural information can be obtained using a variety of analytical techniques such as X-ray crystallography, and can lead to significant breakthroughs in pharmaceutics. Students grow crystals of different colors, shapes, and sizes and harvest them for physical and morphological  characterization in order to understand the basic principles of atomic structure and theory, chemical bonding and reactions, thermochemistry, periodicity, and solution chemistry.

Satisfies Experimental Discovery in the Natural World

When the gene was discovered and our ability to manipulate it became apparent, a new era in science began. The Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, led to the identification of the genes in human DNA. As a result, gene therapy, genetic food modification, and organismal cloning emerged, all with the hope of improving the social, economic, and physical quality of human life. This course travels through the world of genetics and examines the successes, controversies and challenges of genetic research, with a particular focus on the Human Genome Project.

Satisfies Science, Society, and History

E=mc2: One simple equation encapsulates the power to grant life and death in equal measure. Life associated with fusion in the sun, radiation therapy, and nuclear energy; death via nuclear bombs and nuclear disasters. This course uses nuclear physics as a prism for exploring science as a human endeavor, focusing on the physics of the atomic nucleus and its technological applications. Arguments for and against nuclear power plants are analyzed, while the power and threat of nuclear weapons are assessed. The international treaties designed to limit the spread of nuclear weapons are scrutinized, emphasizing the challenges that lawmakers and citizens face in determining and guiding the uses of nuclear power as we grapple with the moral responsibility that all of us—scientists, politicians, and citizens—must bear for ourselves, our nations, and ultimately, for humanity.

Students in the NYUNY Physics Dept: This course counts for Physics and Astronomy minor credit

Satisfies Science, Society, and History

In 1754 the antiquarian Horace Walpole coined the word serendipity based on the Persian fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip,” whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” In the ensuing centuries, the word has had a colored history. Many of the major scientific and technological developments that shape our modern economy and culture had serendipitous components, including X-rays, penicillin, nylon, vulcanization of rubber, Post-Its, Velcro, saccharin, Nutrasweet, Teflon, insulin, the Pap test, super glue and a host of others. In this course we examine the history of serendipity, the synergism between the scientific background and experience of the individual scientist and researcher, and some of the many serendipitous breakthroughs that have changed and extended our lives and continually improve our standard of living.

Satisfies Science, Society, and History

Cyberspace is playing an increasing role in our lives, and our society is rapidly becoming structured around the 24/7 availability and trustworthiness of information systems. We already entrust cyberspace with our privacy, national security, physical safety, and digital identities.  Maintaining an orderly, peaceful, safe, and productive society will increasingly depend on maintaining trust in information systems. However, trust cannot be realized by technology alone. This course adopts the viewpoint that cyberspace is essentially a social system that relies on important technical components.  The course will begin with a discussion of trust, risk and deception as developed in the social sciences and examine how traditional notions apply or fail to apply to interactions in cyberspace. In the second part of the course we will examine the technical underpinning of cyberspace and the mechanisms that have been developed to create trustworthy systems.  In the third and final part of the course we will examine the interplay between the technical and social aspects and see how better policy and systems can be developed to tackle cybercrime, cyberespionage, cyberwar and cyberterrorism. A computer science or engineering knowledge is not necessary for taking this course.  

Satisfies Science, Society, and History

Before Copernicus, the earth was regarded as the stable center of the universe. Coming to accept the earth’s rotation and motion around the sun was one of science’s greatest shocks to humanity’s understanding of our place in the order of things. We investigate the structure of the theories that preceded Copernicus, and the various sorts of arguments—empirical, conceptual, and even religious—that were made for and against his account. Our aim is to appreciate how scientific theories of the world are constructed, criticized and defended. Texts include relevant parts of Aristotle and Ptolemy, Galileo’s Starry Messenger and On The Two Chief Worlds Systems, Thomas Kuhn ‘s The Copernican Revolution, Bertold Brecht’s Galileo, and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method.

Satisfies Science, Society, and History

Many problems in science, business, and politics require heuristics -- problem solving techniques that often work well even if not perfectly. This course teaches heuristics as they have applied in the design of scientific experiments, the solution of problems global power politics, and in the resolution of economic negotiations. While being exposed to heuristic techniques, students work in small teams that compete with one another to design strategies to solve new puzzles better than other teams. You are given computational tools as needed, but the course has no programming prerequisite. To take this course, you should love to think both qualitatively and quantitatively.  Among the specific problems we will tackle include the design of currencies, leasing strategies for oil exploration, optimal matchmaking, and efficient experimental design. The intent is to make you better able to face complex problems in any field you choose.

Satisfies Experimental Discovery in the Natural World

Over 80% of the Australian population lives within 100 km of a coast and virtually all major Australian cities occur on coastlines. As a result, Australia's coastal environments have been substantially modified to suit human needs. This course will use the built and natural environments of Sydney, Australia's largest city, as a case study to examine the environmental and ecological implications of urban development in coastal areas worldwide. Using Sydney's terrestrial, marine, and built environments as a natural laboratory for field research, students will collect environmental data throughout the city and use geographic information systems (GIS) to examine the spatial patterns of human impacts to Sydney's environment and to compare their results with patterns observed in other coastal cities. 

Satisfies Experimental Discovery in the Natural World

How do solar cells work? What is “green” chemistry? What are “smart materials” and why are they important?  Focusing on the intersection of the natural sciences, materials science, ecology and sociology, this interdisciplinary course will tackle these and other energy-related issues that are central to the ideal of a sustainable society. The future social and technological advancements and prosperity of mankind are directly linked to renewable energy resources, which are rooted in the quest for new, advanced functional materials with superb physical properties. The course will provide a holistic overview of the current issues with inexpensive energy resources and the challenges with alternative energies. It will provoke the creative input of students and will include undergraduate research projects, field work and brainstorming discussions aimed at possible alternative solutions.

Satisfies Experimental Discovery in the Natural World

What we consider modern human society represents a tiny and very peculiar blip in the very long history of human beings on this planet. Whether we consider the 10,000 year history of settled civilization, the 200,000 year history of anatomically modern humans, or the 6 million year history of “proto-humans” since our divergence from our closest species relatives, to fully understand human society is to consider the incredible journey that has led our species to where we are now. In this class we will explore this deep history of our humanity alongside the more recent intellectual history of the idea of evolution. Using films, myths, historical texts and scientific research we will at once explore the epic journey of our species, the legacy it has left on us, and how this controversial story of human origins has battled its way to acceptance, and redefined how we look at our world and ourselves.

Satisfies Science, Society, and History

Tropical Africa conjures up thoughts of high biodiversity and relatively low economic development. We will use a course sited in Africa to study the major principles of biodiversity, such as ecology, biochemical cycles, wildlife population dynamics, and conservation. We will also look at human impacts on biodiversity, as affected by economic well-being, through production of energy, food, water, and pollution. How does Ghana compare with other regions of Earth? Portions of this inquiry-based seminar will require students to conduct and share research using technical papers and data bases, presentations and writing. The course will include field trips relevant to the topics above.

When is it legitimate to conclude that A causes B? In human history, causality was sometimes the province of the gods as in there is lightening because a god is throwing bolts at the earth. The introduction of Aristotelian logic permitted the development of deductive logic and the notion of consistency. Because deduction manipulates knowledge but does not add to it, natural science uses induction in which universal causal laws are believed because of experiments at a few times and places. This course begins with a discussion of the history of the arguments for causality, then it embarks on a detailed discussion of certain great experiments and the conclusions that resulted. In the process, we discuss how the progress of science determines what is accepted as a cause, from the "taint" of an ancestral line to the psychological impacts of childhood. Next, we discuss the inference of causality by machine. Students will work on projects involving the construction of experiments (either ones we have discussed or others), the discovery of the laws of a simulated world that the instructor has created, and then playing a game in that world.

To take this course, you should love to think both qualitatively and quantitatively. Because causality goes to the heart of understanding how the world works, you will be conducting your own physical or social experiments. Whereas you will do some programming in the language python (in a team of two if you wish), there is no programming prerequisite and you will be taught everything you need to know.

Prerequisites: None.

* Please note the duration of this course during summer 2013 is 28 May-14 June

TBA

This course will consider the origins of science in ancient cosmologies. What principles are preserved? Considering the classical Chinese, Indian and Western traditions, the question of how and to what extent culture determines the paradigms of science will be investigated. We begin with formative texts from the Chinese, Indian and Western traditions, including the Rig Veda, the Upanishads (India), the I Jing, Dao De Jing, and the neo-Confucian synthesis (China) and the pre-Socratic Ionian physicists (Western), then turn to the development of modern science.  Representative works of Bacon, Descartes, Galileo and Newton will be read in parallel with seminal texts describing the rise of modern science in China and India. The course will conclude with a survey of contemporary cosmological theories to see how some ancient ideas are retained in modern science.

This course will examine the Earth's climate and in particular how it evolved in the past and is likely to change in the future.  We will first consider weather patterns around the globe and ask whether the occurrence of “weird weather” corresponds to the emergence of worldwide disruption.  Then we will study physical processes, such as radiation, clouds, and wind, that are at the core of both weather and climate, and discuss how human activities can affect them. Finally, we will use this understanding to consider predictions of future climate change, the impact  on different parts of the globe, possible remedies and how they might be implemented.

Daily experience attests that the briefest of glances at other people often suffices to furnish a wealth of socially relevant information about them. From minimal visual cues, for instance, we can infer group memberships (e.g., sex and age), emotional states, personality traits, and even a person’s intentions. The dexterity with which humans deduce such knowledge has fascinated ancient philosophers and contemporary thinkers alike. As a result, much thought has been dedicated towards a process that typically unfolds within less than a second. Based on this work, films, literary texts, and scientific evidence will be presented to explore the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional mechanisms that underlie common snap judgments in person evaluation. The accuracy of these judgments, their neural foundation, and the societal consequences of rapidly assessing others will be discussed.

How does one “visualize” vision? This course examines the scientific
tools developed to study the visual system and highlights the
visualization methods that are now integral in communicating scientific
research. Today, scientists are required to be well-versed in
visualizing their data due to the increasing demand to encapsulate
research data in imagery or short videos. Students will learn about
the visual techniques used to paint cellular life. They will address
questions about visual perception: How do retinal cells detect and
respond to signals in the external environment? What cues activate the
phototransduction cascade? And what is the neuronal circuitry that
connects the retina to the brain? In a final project, students will be
asked to “record” data and present it as a visual narrative.

“In the year of 1657 I discovered very small living creatures in rain water.” This quote is attributed to Anton van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch merchant whose skillful use of glass lenses allowed him to peer into a world of microorganisms that would otherwise be invisible to the naked eye. His careful observations gave way to advances in microscopy that have allowed scientists to observe detailed 
structures of plants, viruses invading cells, intricate crystal lattices and the seemingly chaotic motion of small particles. In this course, microscopy is explored, first by examining the fundamental optical systems used to magnify objects, and eventually by using sophisticated microscopes to make observations. A special emphasis will be placed on capturing images of seven wonders of the invisible world, natural animate and inanimate phenomena that include micro-animals, plant and animal cells, bacteria and viruses, fungi, proteins and naturally-occurring crystals; understanding what these images tell us about nature; and exhibiting them to reveal the wonders of the invisible world to others.

Millions upon millions of people, especially children, die each year from preventable disease.  This course will study the strategies and campaigns currently underway on the different continents to confront this tragic reality.  Along the way, students will learn the history of disease, the medical and scientific breakthroughs  behind today's life-saving drugs and vaccines, and the successful campaigns that eradicated massive killer diseases like Small Pox and now are moving against the likes of AIDS, Malaria, and Polio.  The course will focus, in particular, on the vision, the cooperation, the cultural understanding, and the resources needed to launch medical initiatives around the globe.  Students will read in a wide range of disciplines, while honing their skills through a series of critical essays and research projects.

For centuries The 1001 Nights (or Arabian Nights) has served as a point of encounter between Middle Eastern literary traditions and the cultural politics of Western literary and artistic production and translation. This course examines the much-debated history of the Nights and the cross-cultural exchange that has seen the tales adapted for distinct audiences in medieval Egypt and Syria, modern Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East.

Students in the NYUNY MEIS Dept: This course counts towards MEIS literature requirement

For centuries The 1001 Nights (or Arabian Nights) has served as a point of encounter between Middle Eastern literary traditions and the cultural politics of Western literary and artistic production and translation. This course examines the much-debated history of the Nights and the cross-cultural exchange that has seen the tales adapted for distinct audiences in medieval Egypt and Syria, modern Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East.

Students in the NYUNY MEIS Dept: This course counts towards MEIS literature requirement

Across all cultures, stories are fashioned to withhold information at first, holding our attention through suspense. They then produce disclosures at crucial moments of denouement. For Aristotle, this dynamic movement from ignorance to knowledge is essential, especially when it takes the form of the discovery—or recognition—of previously unknown identity. Tracing an arc from the ancient world to the present day, students study how the epistemology of modern storytelling across cultures disturbs the familiar patterns of clear and comforting revelation associated with classic genres. Readings include: Aristotle’s Poetics; Oedipus Rex; selections from the Odyssey, the Jacob and Joseph stories from the Old Testament; the Gospels of Mark and John; selections from the Qur’an; the Arabian Nights; Shakespeare’s King Lear; Naguib Mahfouz; and films from the 1940s to the present.

The search for knowledge has been linked historically to the traveler’s experience of new places and peoples. Travel necessitates the creation of translations that reveal how knowledge of otherness necessarily involves comparison to home and self. Drawing on texts that represent travel in realistic, figurative, and fantastic terms, we explore the idea that a journey entails the discovery, not only of a destination, but also of the self. As Rilke wrote, “There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.”

From a timeless classic such as The Bacchae to an international bestseller such as The Life of Pi, literature has used stories of non-human encounters to articulate both the limits and the possibilities of human nature. We read some of the world’s most imaginative mappings of the borders between human beings and the “others” in contrast to whom they define themselves: gods, animals, nature, and machines. We look at creation myths and foundational epics, such as Gilgamesh, The Ramayana, and Genesis; we explore the varieties and meanings of anthropomorphism in such works such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; we read literary accounts of solitary nature, such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Thoreau’s Walden, and counter-edenic fables, like Huxley’s Brave New World.

Globalization, the acceleration of transportation and information technologies, transforms the experience of distance, producing perceptions of proximity and inter-connectedness across nations. It foregrounds movement and simultaneity, blurring boundaries between “real” and “virtual” worlds. Through texts emphasizing home, homelessness, migration, diaspora, transnationalism, tourism, we examine how literature, film, games, graphic novels, and new media guide readers in this new landscape by charting new concepts of space and place, community, and global citizenship.

Students in the NYUNY Comparative Literature Dept: This course counts for Comparative Literature elective credit or for the Literary and Cultural Studies Track

The world seems to be pervaded by ghosts: the narratives of demons or devilish illusions and the spirits of the dead are omnipresent. Indeed all human civilizations appear to have constructed an immaterial world inhabited by spiritual beings and vapors. Consequently, one can find extensive narratives and visualizations of ghosts in word and image up to our present day. The course will follow up a wide range of texts, pictures and films from antiquity to the present day, including Homer, Plato, the Bible, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Kant, Thomas Mann, the Arabian Nights, the Tale of Genji and various Chinese sources.

Students in the NYUNY Comparative Literature Dept: This course counts for Comparative Literature elective credit or for the Literary and Cultural Studies Track

Cities hold a special fascination for writers as the most complex form of social organization. This course investigates the various ways in which writers have represented the dynamics of city life. Topics to be investigated include the use
of cities as philosophical points of departure by such thinkers as Plato and St. Augustine; the development of mnemonics as a response to the challenges of urban space; the decline in representations of the city during the European Middle Ages; the inescapability of the city in post-Enlightenment Western Literature; and the depiction of cities in non-Western texts and films.

Students in the NYUNY English Dept: This course counts for English advanced elective credit

This course investigates the representation of other worlds in texts and films. Whether depicted as matters of fact (as in cosmography), as a projection of ideal conditions in opposition to one’s own world (as in utopias), or as a mixed blessing when a person meets with circumstances that put everything he knows about the world at risk (as in travel accounts), other worlds offer the opportunity to investigate the encounter with difference as a fundamental aspect of human experience.

Drawing from literature of the past 200 years, this course considers basic questions: What does it mean to be human—and who do we include in our definitions of "human?" What is the relationship of people to their landscape and environment? What is the relationship of technology to cultural production? How do gender and sexuality define or liberate us? And, ultimately, does the artist have an obligation to address any of these issues in his/her work? As a guide to our explorations, we look at the ways in which monsters and the monstrous illuminate particular cultural moments and reflect on whether the monsters of two centuries ago shed light on our own cultural preoccupations.

Students NYUNY: This course counts for Expressive Culture (Morse Academic Plan) credit.

Drawing from literature of the past 200 years, this course considers basic questions: What does it mean to be human—and who do we include in our definitions of "human?" What is the relationship of people to their landscape and environment? What is the relationship of technology to cultural production? How do gender and sexuality define or liberate us? And, ultimately, does the artist have an obligation to address any of these issues in his/her work? As a guide to our explorations, we look at the ways in which monsters and the monstrous illuminate particular cultural moments and reflect on whether the monsters of two centuries ago shed light on our own cultural preoccupations.

Students NYUNY: This course counts for Expressive Culture (Morse Academic Plan) credit.

There is no life without law. Nature has its laws. Religions have theirs, societies theirs, families theirs. Business has its rules and contracts. How do people understand the laws that are as much a part of life as the weather? Literature—the work of the imagination—guides our great journey towards understanding. Writers dramatize the relations among law, justice, and freedom. Writers also show the effect of law on the fates, fortunes, and feelings of people. The course explores the power of literature to show us what the law is, what it should not be, and what it might be.

Originating in the idea of the world citizen and conceived in contradistinction to nationalism, cosmopolitanism can be understood as a perspective that regards human difference as an opportunity to be embraced rather than a problem to be solved. Does this perspective lie behind all "great" literature, which asks its readers to experience otherness by opening themselves up to another person's words and thoughts? This course uses novels, poems, plays, and films to explore the cosmopolitan impulses behind the literary imagination.

Students in the NYUNY English Dept: This course counts for English advanced elective credit

* please note the duration of this course during summer 2013 is 26 May- 20 June

Tragic drama originated in ancient Greece and it has been central to both the aesthetic and the philosophical traditions of the West. At the same time, many classic works of Western tragic drama have been adapted by cultures all over the world for their own ends. This course examines key works of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, critical, historical, and philosophical reflections on these works, and versions of some of these works from non-Western cultures, especially in film.

Students NYUNY: This course counts for Expressive Culture (Morse Academic Plan) credit.

Students in the NYUNY Comparative Literature Dept: This course counts for Comparative Literature elective credit or for the Literary and Cultural Studies Track

Students in the NYUNY English Dept: This course counts for English advanced elective credit; For the NYUNY Comparative Literature Dept: This course counts for Comparative Literature elective credit or for the Literary and Cultural Studies Track; For the NYUNY English Dept: This course counts for English advanced elective credit.

This class considers case studies in a global history of modernism in relation to two competing models of place: the ethnographic turn toward place that began in the late eighteenth century and continues in a wide array of projects today and, on the other hand, the idea of frictionless internationalism manifest in early twentieth-century modernism, and most of all in the slightly later concrete poetry movement.

Students in the NYUNY English Dept: This course counts for English advanced elective credit

In postcolonial literature, representation and revolution intersect, as writers re-invent literary forms and seek to reconceive colonialism, nationalism, and modernity. We compare British, Caribbean, Latin American, South Asian, and African texts, including travelogues, whose maps envision fantasies of the other; adaptations and translations of novels, in which mimicry and magical realism reveal how “the Empire writes back”; and memoirs and short stories, whose fragmentary and experimental forms express how memories of violence, displacement, and exile shape individuals today.

Students in the NYUNY Comparative Literature Dept: This course counts for Comparative Literature elective credit or for the Literary and Cultural Studies Track

Using some classics of children’s literature from countries around the world, including several novels from the Harry Potter series, students examine the ways in which children’s literature offers insight into contemporary culture, particularly concerns about power and politics. Course readings include fairy tales and myths from around the world, as well as writings from theorists and philosophers who have used these “children’s stories” to analyze and explain aspects of the human experience. Focusing on questions of genre, influence, and intertextuality, students explore how—or if—“children’s literature” ultimately offers a more cosmopolitan perspective than literature intended solely for adults.

Students in the NYUNY English Dept: This course counts for English advanced elective credit

This course uses texts and films to explore the speculative impulse behind narrative. Through the analysis of science fiction, utopian and dystopian narratives, texts from political theory, and even works considered to be “realist” in their orientation, students consider the ways in which works of fiction present their readers with thought experiments that pose different kinds of “what if” questions. Is it possible to conceive of speculative fiction as, in fact, the type of all fiction?

The family has often been described as the nucleus of society. The course studies the representation of families—both biological and symbolic—as a source of blessings and burdens, bonding and betrayal in literary texts from around the world, starting with the Odyssey and moving on through the Middle Ages to modern writing. The course also investigates modern theories of the family as found in the works of such thinkers as Engels, Freud, and Foucault.

This course examines a wide variety of literary texts on black-white couples, interracial families, and biracial identity, from classical antiquity to the present. Works studied include romances, novellas, plays, novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction, as well as some films and examples from the visual arts. Topics for discussion range from interracial genealogies to racial “passing,” from representations of racial difference to alternative plot resolutions, and from religious and political to legal and scientific contexts for the changing understanding of “race.”

Among the more significant activities of human beings is that of giving shape to fears and desires through art.  All cultures participate in this form of emotional exteriorization, including creating “doubles” and “masks” through myths, literature, and other media.  Concentrating on doubles and masks in several different cultures, we will chart the meaning and impact of the archetypal masked figures of the commedia dell’arte in French and British theatre; the obsessive concern with the grotesque (the monstrous mask) in French romanticism and in Haitian magical realism; zombification, carnival figures, and ghostly doubles in Latin American, North American, and African cultural forms.  We will build a repertory of approaches to interpreting and uncovering the many layers of masking and doubling by reading in anthropology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and literary theory. 

How do we respond to news that some among us are ill, and that the illness is, perhaps, contagious? Are the healthy ethically obliged to tend to the sick? What are the relationships between contagious disease and verbal communication: rumors, medical information, stories about the dying and the dead? How has illness literally and metaphorically participated in the reimagination of community, kinship, and sexuality in different times and places? This course examines the intersections of contagious disorder and storytelling in a range of cultures, settings, and forms, from ancient Greece to contemporary South Africa, from the Black Death, influenza, and AIDS to the proliferation of zombies and vampires in global popular culture today.

What is the relationship between history and storytelling?  How do we fashion meaning in epics, chronicles and historical accounts, and interpret other civilizations?  This course looks for answers to these questions in the first great works of history, Herodotus's Histories and Sima Qian's Records of the Historian.  Addressing the civilizations of Greece, Persia, and China and their neighbors, these works gave historical narrative a textual authority previously enjoyed only by epics and chronicles.  They also yielded model accounts of cultural difference that have influenced other narrative forms in fiction and non-fiction, textual and visual culture - to this day.  In addition to Herodotus and Sima Qian, readings include selections from Homer and early Chinese chronicles, as well as contemporary historical fiction (such as Gore Vidal’s Creation), the films Hero and The Emperor and the Assassin, and journalist Ryszard Kapuściński's memoir and travelogue Travels with Herodotus.

This course offers a comparative approach to the work of Shakespeare, a world author whose influence can be felt throughout many cultures. In addition to exploring Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, the course also examines texts and films (e.g., Cesaire’s A Tempest, Robbins’s West Side Story, and Kurosawa’s Ran) that appropriate, rewrite, or write back to Shakespeare’s work and consider the processes that have made Shakespeare into an institution of culture worldwide.

The advent of the novel marked a break with a magical way of thinking. "A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world," writes Milan Kundera, "Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore the curtain." Is enchantment possible after modernity? And if so, what form might it take? A reenchantment as foreseen by religious cosmography, in which the human realm intersects with that of jinn or other supernatural beings? Or might the discoveries and technologies of the modern world--including the laws of physics and breakthroughs in science--themselves be conceived as enchanting? This course looks at attempts from various cultural vantage points to reconcile magic and realism in the aftermath of secularism and modernity. Must enchantment survive only as an escape from reason? Or might it be compatible with the Enlightenment and scientific inquiry? We will look at responses to the riddle of magic in modern society in the art, theatre, film and fiction of Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East. (Note: this course is unlikely to be available to students who have already completed LITCW-AD 120 Magic Realism)

Reading the body in terms of physiognomy used to be a respected field of (natural) philosophy as well as common practice from ancient times onwards and around the globe. A (pseudo-)Aristotelian treatise and Pliny’s extensive writing on the subject in his ‘Natural History’, Chinese Tang-period perceptions and Japanese/Korean scholarship (as documented in ‘The Tale of Genji’) give sufficient proof of the ubiquity of the subject’s dignity. The course will trace physiognomic patterns as a means to establish individual identity (e.g. Genji, Parzival) as well as otherness (e.g. Polo, Staden), starting with these texts and continuing through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It was only in the age of Enlightenment that severe criticism arose, branding physiognomy a pseudo-science and leaving only body language and facial expression as serious fields of empirical study. Modern cognitive science, however, has brought the subject back with a vengeance.

We will be reading a wide-ranging selection of works from different cultures and chronological periods that have framed in memorable, though often contradictory, ways some basic questions about human existence, the problem of death, the nature of religion, the value of our emotional attachments to others, and the benefits and dangers of human knowledge. Throughout the semester, students will have the opportunity to become more practiced in understanding the nature of aesthetic argument and in what used to be characterized as the proper use of one's solitude, that is, examining what it means to be a human being faced with death.  Readings will include Homer, Ramayana, Cao Xueqin, Proust, Sophocles, Euripides, Ibn Tufayl, Teresa of Avila, and Tolstoy.

The nation is as much cultural concept as political ideology. The formulation ‘nation and narration’ envisages both the construction of the nation as narration and the imaginings of the nation in narrative (historical and literary). To capture a sense of the wide-ranging connections between nation and narration we will track, through a variety of texts across cultures, periods and genres, the spread of the idea of the modern nation from Europe to the rest of the world; the struggles of anti-colonial nationalisms; the birth of postcolonial nation-states; their subsequent trials and tribulations; the rhetoric of nationalism; the critiques of nationalism; the voices of minorities, immigrants and indigenous peoples that disrupt a homogeneous ‘national culture’; the phenomena of transnationalism and globalization and their implications for the future of the nation-state. Readings and films to be studied include: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun; Assia Djebar, Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade; Dave Eggers, What is the What; D.W. Griffith, Birth of the Nation;  Michael Ondaatje, English Patient; Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children;  William Shakespeare, King Henry; and Rabindranath Tagore, Home and the World. 

Societies develop cultural behaviors that indicate the relative value of its members. Social acceptance has been historically dependent on its mutually constitutive term—ostracism—as members act on how they perceive and maintain their status in relationship to others. In this class, we will read novels, memoirs and plays that examine and deconstruct how systems of social worth operate, and how the nuances of those systems create and enforce devalued categories of people.  Readings focus on works that consider the specific attributes that adhere to the historically stigmatized categories of illness and disability.  We will discover how stigma affects feelings of self-worth and mediates engagement with others. Sociologist Erving Goffman observed that stigma creates “spoiled identities.”  Using ideas offered in Goffman’s seminal text on stigma, anthropologist Mary Douglas’s work on pollution and taboo, our readings will focus on authors who deconstruct experiences of stigma, and who write in order to destabilize, revise, and repair the personal and social damage stigmatizing categories and behaviors inflict.

Humanity’s need to make sense of itself and its place in the universe has generated the world’s oldest creation stories and its most enduring myths. The quest for knowledge has itself also been a perennial theme of world literature. This course will examine the impulse to construct knowledge in a variety of time periods and cultural traditions, raising questions about how human communities around the world have conceived of the nature, conditions, limits, and means of acquiring knowledge. Readings include ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian myths, The Epic of Gilgamesh (Mesopotamia), The Bhagavad Gita (India), Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” (Greece), Farid ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds (Persia), Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (Japan), Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber (China), Sigmund Freud’s “Dora” (Austria), Alberto Mussa’s The Riddle of Qaf (Brazil), and short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle (Britain), Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), and Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt).

Storytelling is a way for humans to understand the world and their position in it. This is particularly true for those who write to tell their own life stories. In this course, we will explore how these self-narratives allow their authors to comprehend their position in a globally connected world. We will read autobiographies by public figures and private citizens from different traditions and time periods who travel away from home and then write about their experience. Readings include Augustine’s Confessions (4th century), Al-Ghazali’s Deliverance from Error (11th century), Margery Kempe’s memoirs (15th century), Catalina de Erauso’s Memoirs of a Basque Lieutenant Nun (17th century), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (18th century), Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (18th century), N.O. Body’s Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years (1907), Buchi Emecheta’s Head Above Water (1986), Edward Said’s Out of Place (2000), and Sophia Al-Maria’s The Girl Who
Fell to Earth (2012).

In earlier centuries, living in a state of exile was a common experience for many writers and intellectuals. Diaspora has also been a recurring feature of human history since the dispersal of Jews from the Middle East, of Africans during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, or of the Irish during the time of the Great Hunger. In the past two centuries, millions have migrated from their homelands to work or resettle or find refuge in far-away countries with cultures very different from their own. How do human beings come to terms with such conditions and transformations in their lives? Has the experience of exile, diaspora and migration been conceived in a consistent way, driven by a preoccupation with location and the desire to conjure the homeland into existence, or has it been mediated and particularised by different historical circumstances? What are the cultural, emotional, and intellectual effects of being exiled for whatever reason from your place of birth? How far can the sense of loss be compensated for by the idea that something can also be gained? Does exile lead to an intense experience of self-discovery, while migration produces a preoccupation with cultural difference and the clash between tradition and modernity, as other authors claim? In this course we will consider the possible connections as well as the differences between the experiences of exile, diaspora and migration by examining stories and writing about them in texts that will include the Bible, the Odyssey, together with writings by Plutarch, Ovid, Liu Zongyuan, Dante, Byron, Dostoevsky, Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, Aimé Césaire, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, George Lamming, Alejo Carpentier, Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said, Julia Alvarez and Kiran Desai.

From mythological figures such as Coyote in North America, Hermes of Greek Myth and Eshu in West Africa, to modern icons of global pop culture like Charlie Chaplin, Bugs Bunny, and Bart Simpson, humans have long been fascinated with trickster characters who transgress boundaries, break rules, and unsettle fixed truths. Seemingly heedless of cultural norms, these characters in their many different guises point to the important role of play and disruption in the making of culture. In this course, students will consider rogues, outlaws, and outsiders of various types from around the world and their portrayal in stories, novels, dramas, songs, and films. Building a repertoire of trickster characters, types, and tropes, students will examine how these characters’ dynamic roles relate to central problems of art, creativity, and life.

As the Arabic saying goes, “Health is a crown worn by the healthy and seen only by the ill.” Throughout history, literature has staged the human struggle with disease and the related search for a cure. This course depicts the literary representation of pathologies and their medical treatments, ranging from eighteenth-century European treatises on the “English Malady” to the depiction of tuberculosis and leprosy in twentieth-century Japan. In the attempt to restore health, the relationship between patient and doctor is of central importance and will therefore constitute a thematic focus for this course. Readings will include: George Cheyne’s The English Malady, Franz Kafka’s “Country Doctor,” Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” Yahya Hakki’s Lamp of Umm Hashim, Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man, Albert Camus’ The Plague, Sigmund Freud’s Dora, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper,” Ernest Hemingway’s “Indian Camp,” Gail Tsukiyama’s The Samurai’s Garden, and Sanjay Gupta’s Monday Mornings.

Most of us agree that we should be tolerant. Often the call for tolerance is grounded in relativism—the thought that there isn’t a fact of the matter. After all, on what basis could we insist that others share our beliefs if those beliefs are subjective, a function of upbringing or our peculiar tastes and concerns? But should we accept relativism? Can relativism justify tolerance? If not, then how can we justify tolerance?

This course examines the determinants of economic development in the modern world. The course is divided into two parts. The first reviews theories that place factors of production such as labor and technology as the main cause of cross-country differences in economic wealth. The second part of the course investigates the role of institutions, culture, religion, geography, and luck as deeper causes of comparative development. The main questions addressed throughout the course are: Why are there such large differences in income per capita across countries? Why have some countries developed steadily over the past 200 years while many others have not? Why do some governments adopt policies that promote economic development while others set up barriers to economic activity? These questions are analyzed from a theoretical and empirical perspective.

The course focuses on the concept of truth, addressing such central questions as whether there is such a thing as “absolute” truth; what truth is; why it is worth searching for; and how we can find it. Answers from a variety of intellectual and cultural traditions are considered. They are assessed for their adequacy in dealing with a range of domains in which truth is at issue—including science, morality, politics, religion, and aesthetics.

This course covers historical and contemporary scientific approaches to understanding prejudice, specifically prejudice that exists between social groups (for example, ethnic prejudice, religious prejudice, etc.) across different cultures. Readings draw from multiple social scientific perspectives, and cover topics including the origins of prejudice, the justification of prejudice, the different forms of prejudicial expression, the identification of prejudice in individuals and institutions, the consequences of being a victim of prejudice, and the value (or not) of different prejudice reduction strategies.

Students in the NYUNY Psychology Dept: This course counts for Psychology elective credit

This course examines the relationship between government and religion. To this end, the course concentrates on the interpretation, meaning, application, and wisdom of 16 words from the American Constitution: "Government shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." These 16 words serve as a starting point for the course because they broadly prohibit government entanglement with religion while simultaneously bestowing government with the responsibility to protect religious freedom. The primary texts of the course are the opinions of the United States Supreme Court, the highest Court in the United States, and final authority on interpretations of the Constitution. Prior knowledge of the subject matter or the United States is not a prerequisite for this class. This course is continued into the second semester.

This course extends over two semesters and both CORES-AD 05a and CORES-AD 05b must be completed to secure credit for the course.

Students in the NYUNY Politics Dept: This course counts for Politics in the political theory field.

This course examines the relationship between government and religion. To this end, the course concentrates on the interpretation, meaning, application, and wisdom of 16 words from the American Constitution: "Government shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." These 16 words serve as a starting point for the course because they broadly prohibit government entanglement with religion while simultaneously bestowing government with the responsibility to protect religious freedom. The primary texts of the course are the opinions of the United States Supreme Court, the highest Court in the United States, and final authority on interpretations of the Constitution. Prior knowledge of the subject matter or the United States is not a prerequisite for this class. This course is continued into the second semester.

Students in the NYUNY Politics Dept: This course counts for Politics in the political theory field. This course extends over two semesters and both semesters must be completed to secure credit for the course.

How have diseases, and efforts to control them, shaped the nature and course of human societies? Are diseases actors in their own right? What determines who falls sick and who dies? This course explores the complex relationship between disease and society, between the natural and social worlds. Our focus is on understanding how people have explained, argued about, and responded to diseases in different social contexts over time. The course readings consist of books drawn from a range of disciplines.

This course considers the intellectual, ethical, and political stakes of incorporating animal-centered perspectives into frameworks of social scientific inquiry. We examine how animals are socially or culturally constructed in “traditional” and “modern” societies, and consider proposals for studying animals as minded social actors. Readings include religious, scientific, philosophical, and political texts from Arabic/Islamic, Chinese, and Judeo-Christian literatures.

In this seminar, we will explore one of the great intellectual encounters that has shaped the history of Western thought. On the one side are the pagan Greeks, with their ideas of wisdom and excellence, and their belief in the eternal order of the world. On the other are the children of Abraham &emdash; those who affirm the existence of a transcendent creator God; who deny the eternality of the world; and who insist on the supremacy of will over reason. Since Tertullian in the second century CE, the clash between these two systems of ideas has been known as the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem.

The human sciences, born of the Enlightenment’s quest to recreate Man in its image, gave rise to a paradox. In brokering reconfigurations of the essence and boundaries of the human, new models for socio-political organization, and claims to inalienable human rights, they also demarcated and fortified the supposedly ‘natural’ fault lines between sexes, races, cultures, and peoples. The course provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of cultural distinction and the historical development of the Image of Man in a variety of global case studies, from the eighteenth century to the present.

Students NYUNY: This course counts for Societies and Social Sciences (Morse Academic Plan) credit.

We live simultaneously in an age of science and an era of great religious faith, when reason and revelation are often depicted as being in inherent and eternal tension. In this course we trace the history of the relationship of religion and science in Christendom and Islamdom from the Middle Ages to the present day, drawing on primary sources and secondary readings from religious studies, the history of science, and anthropology.

Students in the NYUNY MEIS Dept: This course counts towards MEIS history requirement; For the NYUNY Religion Dept: This course counts for Religion elective credit

The course grapples with love, a blind spot in social theory, and its relation with religion, transcendence, sacrifice, and faith. On the one hand, sexuality and gender have become objects of intense concern, politicized by religious movements around the world from the fundamentalist Christians in America to Islamists and pietists in the Islamic world. On the other hand, for large numbers of young people in the Western world not only has sexuality become increasingly unhinged from love, but love has become a troubling category, something uncertain and dangerous to believe in. This course examines the relation between love, sex, and religion as they reverberate in both the private and public spheres.

Students in the NYUNY Sociology Dept: This course counts for Sociology elective credit

The definition of marriage has come under intense political scrutiny as groups worried about preserving “traditional family values” have challenged those pushing for sexual and reproductive rights.  But is there a traditional family?  What does it mean to be a "man" or a "woman" within specific forms of family? How is one to be a  "good" father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter, grandparent, grandchild, cousin or in-law as gender roles and ideas of sexuality change?  How is the significance of the extended family changing in the modern world?  We will explore the complex politics of the family by considering the diverse cultural forms that families take and exploring their social and emotional dynamics within specific historical, religious, political, and economic settingsThe definition of marriage has come under intense political scrutiny as groups worried about preserving “traditional family values” have challenged those pushing for sexual and reproductive rights.  But is there a traditional family?  What does it mean to be a "man" or a "woman" within specific forms of family? How is one to be a  "good" father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter, grandparent, grandchild, cousin or in-law as gender roles and ideas of sexuality change?  How is the significance of the extended family changing in the modern world?  We will explore the complex politics of the family by considering the diverse cultural forms that families take and exploring their social and emotional dynamics within specific historical, religious, political, and economic settings.

Students in the NYUNY Sociology Dept: This course counts for Sociology elective credit

There are many different ways in which human beings represent themselves. I represent myself as a living being, as belonging to a given society and culture, as having a given character, and so on. But do I have a representation of myself as the author of those representations? Exploring this question casts light on central questions of philosophy, for instance the relation between mind and body, the relation between self and other, or the belief that we have freedom of the will. Readings may include selections from Western philosophy and Buddhist philosophy as well as neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis, and literary works.

Cities are probably the most efficient social networks. They allow for increased communication and innovation. They are natural spaces for deliberation and collective action. This course explores the reasons why cities rise and decline, the mechanisms of formal and informal urban planning, skyscrapers and suburbs, urban nature and urban design. In-class sessions will alternate with workshops on Abu Dhabi, visits to the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council, and mini-fieldwork in the city.

Being part of a family and of being related, or kin, to other human beings is a universal human experience; it is fundamental to our sense of ourselves. Yet what we mean by family or by kinship changes dramatically across societies and through time. This course introduces social scientific approaches to and methods for understanding and analyzing this diversity; it therefore asks students to explore the relationship between the universal and what is specific to particular societies and cultures.

Students NYUNY: This course counts for Societies and Social Sciences (Morse Academic Plan) credit; For the NYUNY Sociology Dept: This course counts for Sociology elective credit

This is a course about how and why finance matters. From credit derivatives to pyramid schemes, home mortgages to credit cards, finance both underwrites the aspirations and lines the underbelly of the contemporary economy. Finance also shapes the urban environment, producing new city forms and social structures. Drawing on sociology, anthropology, fiction, and film, our seminar examines finance as a mode of social relations and cultural meaning in contemporary capitalism. We pay special attention to the financial turbulence in Argentina, and visit sites in Buenos Aires where citizens, economic experts, and political officials engage important questions about culture and economy.

What does gender as category of analysis indicate? How does gender intersect with other axes of identity such as class, nation, and ethnicity in a globalized world?  This course considers the ways women around the globe have responded to both the benefits and costs of globalization through political, economic, and social lenses. We begin with a review of the debates that surround globalization emphasizing their gendered nature. The course introduces students to select women’s issues – employment, political participation, reproductive rights, and healthcare -- that have emerged in the global context and the international debates around them. Lastly, the course looks at the relevance of women’s representation to address gender issues in the ‘democratic process’ as well as the shortcomings of democratic mechanisms to achieve women’s rights and some proposed solutions to these limitations.

Students in the NYUNY Sociology Dept: This course counts for Sociology elective credit

“Culture,” wrote Raymond Williams, “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” Modernity, arguably, is another. Moreover, “culture” and “modernity” are often held to be at odds with one another; if modernity can be defined by its claim to universal applicability, then culture(s) mark the disjunctures and discrepancies that repeatedly disrupt this narrative. This course examines the (cross-) cultural politics and imaginaries of “modernity” to ask: What does it mean to be modern in the global present?

Financial systems direct flows of capital between savers and borrowers, but they also shape contemporary values and understandings of the self and others. This course compares the theories implicit in the U.S. and UAE financial systems and describes how they work in practice. Whereas credit and interest are central to U.S. banking, Shari’ah law forbids interest, so Islamic banking uses profit- and loss-sharing to organize investment. By comparing these two systems, we seek to understand how financial systems mediate competing values in a global context.

This course explores the ways in which urban landscapes have traditionally served as fragile repositories for collective memory from the first monuments of Near Eastern civilizations to the modern architecture of contemporary global cities. Some cities seek to preserve their pasts, while others aggressively brush aside older forms and structures to make way for the new. Students examine the “politics” of urban memory, exploring historical and contemporary debates about the conflicting demands of preservation and modernization in a variety of cities from around the world.

Gift giving occurs in all cultures. A gift can be a material object or money, but it can also be an act of kindness or love. A gift is free but it can also come with the expectation that it will be matched by a return gift. Gift giving is therefore part of a complex structure of economic and social exchange. This course considers gift giving from the perspectives of anthropology, history, and the arts; it explores gift exchange through ethnographies as well as texts on market economies and art, gender, death, altruism, risk, and the impacts of colonialism on traditional exchange societies. Readings will include seminal works on gift exchange by Marcel Mauss, Bronislaw Malinowski, Franz Boas, and others.

What are the foundations of political legitimacy and to what extent do governments abide by them? In this course, we will explore these questions using both classical and contemporary accounts. The first half of the course will focus on political systems in Ancient Greece, Rome, Medieval Europe, and Early Modern Europe through the lens of great thinkers, including Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Burke, Weber, and Marx, as well as a series of primary source documents. We then proceed to the “post-1789” world and discuss legitimacy in the context of democratic government. Topics covered include the role of legislators, issue representation, descriptive vs. substantive governance, and the ongoing debate between advocates of majoritarianism and those of proportionalism. 

This course traces the development of philosophical, religious and secular theories of peace from antiquity to the present. It explores questions of peace and justice, nonviolence, the idea of a “just war,” as well as notions of peace in international relations, economics, and psychology, examining how those spurred peace activism and the ideology of pacifism. To that end, students analyze literary, visual, and organizational representations of peace across national and cultural boundaries and the emergence of peace and conflict studies as an academic discipline. Readings include works by Laotse, Thucydides, St. Francis of Assisi, Immanuel Kant, Henry David Thoreau, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., A.J. Muste, Johan Galtung, Alma Myrdal, and Petra Kelly, among others.

The institution of property describes one of the fundamental relationships between people: the relationship between people as it pertains to things. In this seminar, we explore how understandings of property have been influenced by cultural and ethical norms in different civilizations; how property rights have evolved with technological progress and changes in the demands of the environment; how property is affected by and influences the sphere of individual freedom, the relation between the individual and the state, and the organization of productive activity.  As examples, we will look at property in the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Rome, and consider the views on property expressed in Christianity and Islam as well as the role that changing views on property played in the Declaration of Independence, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution. We will use our insights to debate contemporary issues in property rights of interest to seminar participants. These might include intellectual property rights, rights to genetic material, inheritance, airwaves, financial regulation, the rights of indigenous tribes of the Amazon rainforest, claims on the Arctic, or the trade-off between rights to privacy and freedom of the press.

The philosophy and science of consciousness. Topics covered may include: The concept of a neural basis of consciousness and how we could discover what it is; whether there are different kinds of consciousness;  the relation between consciousness and attention, cognitive accessibility, intentionality and agency; the function of consciousness; the unity of consciousness; whether the representational contents of perception are just colors, shapes and textures or include “rich” properties such as facial expressions and causation.  The course will also cover some theories of consciousness such as mind/body dualism, behaviorism, functionalism, physicalism and theories of consciousness as representation.  Readings from philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers and neuroscientists such as Hakwan Lau and Stanislas Dehaene.

Political governments claim to exercise authority and not merely power.  What is the distinction between authority and power, and the basis of governmental claims to legitimately exercise authority?  The course will examine theories of legitimate authority.  Some claim that political authority derives from God.  Others hold that political authority derives from the consent of the governed. Still others argue that political authority is never legitimate.  We shall explore the classical views of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and the anarchist tradition embodied by Robert Paul Wolfe, and read in both western and non-western traditions, secular and the non-secular traditions.

Polarization has been a feature of societies around the world since the inception of human civilization. To this day, individuals routinely sort themselves in to groups based on share political, social, religious, or cultural beliefs. In turn, these sorted groups often find themselves at polar extremes from one another, something that has often led to intense, and sometimes violent, conflict. In this course, we will explore the history, emergence, and pervasiveness of various kinds of polarization: ethnic, linguistic, religious, political, and geographic. We will begin the course by defining polarization and looking at examples of it from antiquity to the present. Thereafter, we will look at the consequences of polarization for politics, social interactions, and economics. The course will be taught using classical works by kings and statesmen (e.g., Constantine of Rome, Louis XIV of France, Woodrow Wilson), as well as contemporary scholarship from a diverse group of scholars: historians, demographers, political scientists, biologists, and economists. Special attention will be given to social media and social networking, a pervasive aspect of contemporary social polarization; it will serve as the basis for a course-long project.

Prerequisites: None; some familiarity with social networking (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn) and Microsoft Excel would be useful, but not required.

* Please note the duration of this course during summer 2013 is 26 May-12 June. This is a June term alternative course

Life is rife with hard choices. Should you become a doctor or a lawyer? How much should you sacrifice in order to help others? Should you marry and have children? This course examines the phenomenon of hard choices by focusing on two questions: (1) what makes a choice hard? and (2) what should/does one do when faced with a hard choice? We explore answers to these questions from a variety of perspectives – philosophical, religious, literary, psychological, and neuroscientific.

The question of God(s) pertains to the existence, manifestations, meaning, and attributes of the sacred.  Although conceptions about the sacred are inevitably shaped by history and culture, the fundamental question of God(s) has had an enduring presence throughout human experience.  This course takes up this perennial human question from the context of some of the world’s major religious traditions including Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Taoism.  What similarities do these great traditions share, and how does their understanding of the sacred differ?  Additionally, the course explores the relation between reason and faith.  How does the empirical verification characteristic of an increasingly pervasive scientific and technological worldview impact on belief in God(s)?  Readings for the course are drawn from a variety of disciplines with a focus on primary sources and seminal works.

This course introduces students to the foundations of computer science. Students learn how to design algorithms to solve problems and how to translate these algorithms into working computer programs using a high-level programming language. The course covers core concepts including: basic computation; data structure; control structure; iterative structures; file I/O and exception handling; recursion and functions. Students also learn the elements of Object Oriented Programming (OOP), such as objects, classes, inheritance, abstraction, polymorphism, and Interface. Students produce programs focusing on scientific concepts, graphics, games and web CGI implementation, and in a final project, they develop a fully functioning, interactive, fun game that employs a clean design, intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), simple to moderate strategy, and event-handling techniques.

Students in the NYUNY Computer Science Dept: This course is equivalent to CSCI-UA 0101 Introduction to Computer Science

This course treats the design of data structures for representing information in computer memory. Topics include abstract data types such as asymptotic notation; iteration and recursion; stacks, queues, and dictionaries (operations, implementations, time analysis, and applications); fundamental graph algorithms; and sorting.

Students in the NYUNY Computer Science Dept: This course is equivalent to CSCI-UA 102 Data Structures

The course focuses on understanding lower-level issues in computer design and programming. Basics of low-level programming: data representation, von Neumann model, machine language, assembly language, input-output. C language programming: functions, pointers, memory allocations and structures. Basic digital logic: gates and combinatorial circuits.

Algorithms lie at the very heart of computer science. An algorithm is an effective procedure, expressed as a finite list of precisely defined instructions, for solving problems that arise in applications in any domain of knowledge. All computer programs are translations of algorithms into some programming language. Often the most difficult parts of designing an algorithm are to make sure that when it is programmed in a computer, it runs as fast as possible and does what it was designed to do. This course gives an introduction to the design and analysis of algorithms for solving problems that arise in a variety of applications such as robotics, artificial intelligence, music, bioinformatics, sorting and searching data, arithmetic, algebra, and geometry.

CS-AD 103 is a co-requisite for this course; MATH-AD 131 Discrete Mathematics is a pre-requisite for this course. For Spring 2013, students who have not completed MATH-AD 131 must take CS-AD 5 Algorithms Math Recitation as a co-requisite

Linkers and loaders. High-level design of key operating system concepts such as process scheduling and synchronization; deadlocks and their prevention; memory management, including (demand) paging and segmentation; and I/O and file systems, including examples from UNIX/ Linux and Windows. Programming assignments may be written in C, C++, Java, or C#.

Students examine the latest Web techniques from creating and manipulating graphics to writing programs using HTML, XHTML, Photoshop, CSS, UNIX, JavaScript, PHP, and others. Since the technology of the Web is constantly changing, new tools and techniques will be introduced as they evolve.

Developing applications for mobile devices is a popular tool platform. In this course, students learn to develop applications using popular technologies for mobile devices such as the iPhone and the Google/T-Mobile phone.

This course introduces principles and applications of database design. Students learn to use a relational database system; learn Web implementations of database designs; and write programs in SQL. Students explore principles of database design and apply those principles to computer systems in general and in their respective fields of interest.

Introduction to Game Programming exposes students to game design and programming for the World Wide Web. Students create their own interactive games using popular Web technologies such as JavaScript and Java applets.

This course covers basic cryptography, security/threat analysis, access control, auditing, security models, distributed systems security, and theory behind common attack and defense techniques. The course will go over formal models as well as the bits and bytes of security exploits with emphasis on real-world techniques.

This course is an intense hands-on study of practical techniques and methods of software engineering. Topics include advanced object-oriented design, design patterns, refactoring, code optimization, universal modeling language, threading, user interface design, web and mobile development, and enterprise application development and development tools. All topics are integrated and applied during the semester-long group project. The aim of the project is to prepare students for dynamics in a real workplace focusing on web and mobile applications.

The contents of this course will be regularly revised to track the developing technologies, so the following are only representative topics. Basic Unix tools, such as shells, windowing systems, awk, grep, and tar. Security using PGP and Truecrypt. Scripting languages, such as Perl. Collaborative tools such as version control systems and wikis. Typesetting systems such as LaTex. Computational tools such at Matlab. Web development tools, such as HTML, Javascript, and CGI.

An in-depth examination of the four major categories of programming languages: imperative, object-oriented, functional, and logic languages. Specific languages will be chosen for illustration. Fundamental issues of programming languages, such as type systems, scoping, concurrency, modularization, control flow, and semantics, are discussed.

There are many cognitive tasks that people do easily and almost unconsciously but that have proven extremely difficult to program on a computer. Artificial intelligence is the problem of developing computer systems that can carry out these tasks.
Topics to be covered include problem solving; automated reasoning; reasoning with uncertainty; machine learning; and applications such as computer vision, natural language processing, and planning.

Fundamentals of computer design. Topics include instruction-set architecture, pipelining, branch prediction, dynamic scheduling, hardware speculation and super scalars, VLIW, memory system (cache and main memory), multiprocessing (snooping protocol and directory protocol), interconnection networks, and case studies.

Database-system architecture. The course can cover modeling an application and logical database design, the relational model and relational data definition and data manipulation languages, design of relational databases and normalization theory, physical database design, query processing and optimization, transaction processing focusing on concurrency and recovery.

Topics include structure of one-pass and multiple- pass compilers, symbol table management, lexical analysis; traditional and automated parsing techniques including recursive descent and LR parsing; syntax-directed translation and semantic analysis, run-time storage management, intermediate code generation; and introduction to optimization, code generation; and interpreters.

Problems and objectives of computer graphics, including vector, curve, and character generation; interactive display devices; construction of hierarchical image list; graphic data structures and graphics languages; hidden-line problems; windowing, shading, and perspective projection; curved surface generation display.

The course focuses on the design and implementation techniques essential for engineering both robust networks and Internet-scale distributed systems. The goal is to guide students so they can initiate and critique research ideas in networks and distributed systems and implement and evaluate a working system that can handle a real-world workload. Topics include routing protocols, network congestion control, wireless networking, peer-to- peer systems, overlay networks and applications, distributed storage systems, and network security.

The goal of this class is to develop the ability to evaluate and write mathematical claims in computer science, so as to be able to judge when a problem is solved (and equally important, when it is not yet solved) and to explain such mathematical claims clearly and precisely. The specific topics covered will include proofs techniques; finite automata and regular languages; pushdown automata, and context free languages; turing machines and decidable and undecidable problems; and computational complexity.

Advanced courses, varying each semester. Topics may include: computer vision; cryptography and security; game programming; machine learning; software engineering; and user interfaces.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor

This course is intended for students who are highly motivated and seek the opportunity to work in field or laboratory research with a faculty sponsor from the NYUAD Program in computer science. Students with the necessary background in course work and who, in the opinion of a faculty sponsor, possess intellectual independence and ability may register for this course. The student must approach a faculty member in his or her field of interest to obtain sponsorship. Typically, this course is only open to students with a minimum overall GPA of 3.3 and a minimum major GPA of 3.5, and registration requires permission of the sponsoring faculty member. Forms for Directed Study in Research in computer science are available from the Office of the Dean of Science.

This course is intended for students who are highly motivated and seek the opportunity to work in field or laboratory research with a faculty sponsor from the NYUAD Program in computer science. Students with the necessary background in course work and who, in the opinion of a faculty sponsor, possess intellectual independence and ability may register for this course. The student must approach a faculty member in his or her field of interest to obtain sponsorship. Typically, this course is only open to students with a minimum overall GPA of 3.3 and a minimum major GPA of 3.5, and registration requires permission of the sponsoring faculty member. Forms for Directed Study in Research in computer science are available from the Office of the Dean of Science.

Focuses on the art of scientific problem-solving through theoretical analysis and/or experimental and technical design. The Capstone Project provides an opportunity for student teams to use their knowledge and skills to identify and solve a problem or answer a question in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. The members of each team, which may well include majors from a wide range of disciplines that include students from the humanities and social sciences, design and execute a project under the guidance of a faculty mentor. The projects end with student presentations.

 *NOTE: As of Fall 2013 Capstone under SCIEN-AD 400

Recitation focusing on Discrete Mathematics for students who have not completed MATH-AD 131 Discrete Mathematics prior to taking CS-AD 105 Algorithms

*This 0 credit course is a co-requisite for students taking CS-AD Algorithms, who have not completed the MATH-AD 131 prerequisite

This course offers students an introduction to how economists look at the world and approach problems. It focuses on individual economic decision-makers (households, business firms, and government agencies) and explores how they are linked together and how their decisions shape our economic life. Applications of supply and demand analysis and the role of prices in a market system are explored. Students are also exposed to game theory, the theory of the competitive firm, the idea of market failure, and policy responses. The course relies on cases and examples, and incorporates readings from classical and contemporary sources to shed light on modern economic principles and their application to solving the problems that face the global economy. (Note: This course was previously titled Introduction to Economic Thinking)

Students NYUNY: This course counts for Societies and Social Sciences (Morse Academic Plan) credit; For the NYUNY Economics Dept: This course is equivalent to ECON-UA 2 Economic Principles II

 This course introduces students to the study of modern aggregate economics as applied to analyses of national economies in the long and short runs of time. The course begins with a discussion of some basic tools and data used to analyze the relationships between macroeconomic aggregates such as production, inflation and unemployment. Next, determinants of long run growth in national per capita incomes are discussed followed by introductory models of fluctuations (booms and recessions). The course concludes with analyses of the tensions inherent in the formulation of monetary and fiscal macroeconomic policies, the relationship of an aggregate economy with its financial sector and the pitfalls and opportunities afforded to nations within the context of an emergent global economy.

(note: this course was formerly titled The Global Economy)

Students NYUNY: This course counts for Societies and Social Sciences (Morse Academic Plan) credit; For the NYUNY Economics Dept: This course is equivalent to ECON-UA 1 Economic Principles I

Examining both macro and micro aspects of the globalization of world economies, this course begins with the fundamentals of trade: comparative advantage, gains from trade, the price of factors of production, and the implications of labor and capital mobility. The second part of the course covers the role of money and finance in global economic activity. Topics include: the roles of the exchange rate; current and capital accounts as key variables in international economic relations; purchasing power parity and interest rate parity; the international effects of macro policy and government exchange rate policies; the role of oil exports in the world economy; and the role of international economic organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization.

Students in the NYUNY Economics Dept: This course is equivalent to International Economics, ECON-UA 238

Building on the material in Principles of Macroeconomics, Intermediate Macroeconomics addresses in depth four foundational aspects of macroeconomic theory and policy: (1) theories of exogenous and endogenous growth in per capita incomes; (2) theories of fluctuations in output, employment and other macroeconomic aggregates with a focus on policy and other economic stimuli that can lead to booms and recessions; (3) determinants of inflation including capacity constraints, money, credit and expectations; (4) the aims, objectives and tools of monetary and fiscal policies and their relationship with financial intermediation and its regulation.

Students pursuing a specialization in theory must take Advanced Macroeconomics (ECON-AD 306), instead of Intermediate Macreconomics. For all other majors, this course may be substituted with Intermediate Macreconomics.

Students in the NYUNY Economics Dept: This course is equivalent to Intermediate ECON-UA 12 Macroeconomics: Business Cycles and Stabilization Policy

Intermediate microeconomics introduces the decision-making of consumers and firms, and then examines how markets allocate resources in an economy with different consumers and firms competing for scarce resources. The course begins by studying the objectives and constraints of consumers and firms in isolation, and then combines models of agent behavior to study individual markets under perfect competition, monopoly, and oligopoly. The course then explores how different markets interact in the economy to allocate resources, and emphasizes the efficiency properties of a competitive market system under idealized circumstances. The course concludes with an analysis of some of the circumstances in which competitive markets can fail to produce efficient outcomes, including externalities, public goods and asymmetric information.

Students pursuing a specialization in theory must take Advanced Microeconomics (ECON-AD 304), instead of Intermediate Micreconomics. For all other majors, this course may be substituted with Intermediate Micreconomics.

 Students in the NYUNY Economics Dept: This course is equivalent to ECON-UA 10 Intermediate Microeconomics

This course examines the root causes of the financial crisis and the ensuing economic recession. We place the crisis in historical context of the Great Depression and of the emerging market financial crises such as those that occurred in Latin American and East Asia. We contrast the European and American experiences. The course allows students to develop an analytical framework to understand the interactions of the housing market, the credit system, and the labor market. The policy responses are analyzed within the context of the political-economic environment.

Application of statistics and economic theory to problems of formulating and estimating models of economic behavior. Matrix algebra is developed as the main tool of analysis in regression. Acquaints students with basic estimation theory and techniques in the regression framework and covers extensions such as specification error tests, heteroskedasticity, errors in variables, and simple time series models. An introduction to simultaneous equation modes and the concept of identification is provided.

This course covers the roles of factor accumulation, technology, human capital and ideas in the growth process; the political economy of growth; the role of openness to international trade versus international trade barriers; and growth and income inequality. The course provides an overview of foreign aid in the economic development process and the policies of international institutions like the IMF and World Bank. The course also includes: the study of randomized experiments in evaluating aid projects and development interventions; rural land markets; credit markets in imperfect and fragmented capital markets; the household migration decision; and nutrition and fertility decisions.

This course will cover the international aspects of contemporary economic development and poverty reduction in developing countries, including the various dimensions of globalization (trade, migration, capital movements, knowledge transfer, global public goods ...), the potential conflicts of interest between developing and developed countries, the need for global governance and the role of international organizations.

This course offers a rigorous examination of the basic concepts and tools of modern finance. Students are introduced to cash flow analysis and present value, as well as basic concepts of return and risk, in order to understand how financial markets work and how financial instruments are valued. These instruments, including equities, fixed income securities, options, and other derivative securities, become vehicles for exploring various financial markets and their utilization by managers in different kinds of financial institutions to enhance return and manage risk.

Students in the NYUNY Economics Dept: This course counts for FINC-UB 2 in the Policy track; students who complete FINC-UB 2 or ECON-AD 302 may not take ECON-UA 368; students who have completed ECON-UA 368 may take FINC-UB 2 or ECON-AD 302,but it will not count towards the major

Students in the NYUNY Stern Economics Dept: This course is equivalent to ECON-UB 2 Foundations of Finance

This course introduces the student to selected problems and issues in financial management and corporate financial policy. Topics include: capital budgeting (strategy and techniques associated with the analysis and selection of capital projects, financial forecasting and financial planning) and corporate finance (the cost of capital and issues associated with raising capital, mergers and acquisitions decisions, corporate bankruptcy, managerial control, and compensation strategies). Problem sets and case studies are integral parts of this course.

This course introduces students to the field of behavioral economics or economic psychology. This is a field which seeks to insert non-standard assumptions about human preferences or beliefs into economic models. These assumptions are often motivated by psychological evidence. Throughout the course, we emphasize the interaction between theoretical predictions and empirical data. We explore various ways in which the predictions of the theory can be tested. The course is organized around four topics: social preferences, intertemporal discounting, prospect theory and heuristics and biases. The course requires a command of basic microeconomic theory and calculus. Some familiarity with econometric analysis of microeconomic data is also welcome.

Rigorous examination of consumer choice, profit-maximizing behavior on the part of firms, and equilibrium in product markets. Topics include choice under uncertainty, strategic interactions between firms in noncompetitive environments, intertemporal decision making, and investment in public goods.  Students pursuing a specialization in theory must take Advanced Microeconomics, instead of Intermediate Micreconomics (ECON-AD 105). For all other majors, this course may be substituted with Intermediate Micreconomics (ECON-AD 105).

Co-requisite: Statistics and Probability for the Social Sciences (SOCSC-AD 113)

Study of aggregate economic analysis, with attention paid to the determination of the level of income, employment, and inflation. Critically examines both the theories and the policies associated with them. This course involves more formal analysis than that used in ECON-AD 104.  Students pursuing a specialization in theory must take Advanced Macroeconomics, instead of Intermediate Macroeconomics (ECON-AD 105). For all other majors, this course may be substituted for Intermediate Macreconomics (ECON-AD 104).

Co-requisite: Statistics for the Social and Behavioral Sciences (SOCSC-AD 110)

Description pending.

This course is designed for advanced students in the Finance specialization and will be taught by leading scholars from around the world who are in residence in Abu Dhabi. The content will be oriented toward the particular scholar's expertise. Possible topics include: the analysis of market risk and credit risk management, the valuation of derivative and fixed income securities, the analysis of investment strategies, the structure of financial intermediaries, and the regulation of institutions and markets.

International alliances for the purpose of military defense, partnerships of doctors or lawyers, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and the members of clubs or social networks, are all examples of coalitions of agents with only partially converging interests, coordinating actions for their mutual benefit. Modeling the subtle mixture of strategic interactions across those “coalitions”, and equitable compromises within coalitions, is the difficult task of cooperative game theory. The course introduces the formal models of cooperative behavior, both from the normative viewpoint of sharing the benefits of cooperation, and the positive analysis of coalition formation. Applications include competitive markets, the provision of local public goods and the emergence of federations, cost sharing of joint ventures, routing games on networks, and more.

(Note: while not required, POLSC-AD 112 Introduction to Game Theory is recommended.)

This course focuses on the economic analysis of major policy issues in energy and the environment. Emphasis is on market solutions to various problems and market limitations in the allocation of environmental resources. Energy issues focus on: OPEC and world oil markets; taxation and regulation of production and consumption; conservation of natural resources; and the transition to alternative energy sources. Environmental issues include policies to reduce pollution. Substantial attention is paid to global warming as it relates to the consumption of fossil fuels.