MATH 112/ Precalculous II: Trigonometry/ Professor AJ Rise
CHN 410/510/ Dream of the Red Chamber/ Steve Durrant
Few would dispute the claim that the 18th century masterpiece Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as The Story of the Stone) is the greatest novel to have ever been written in China. The novel can be read primarily as a story of a love triangle, as an account of the decline of a wealthy aristocratic family, as the story of a Peter Pan-like boy who refuses to grow up, as an account of the interactions between Confucianism on the one side and Daoism/Buddhism on the other, as a kind of cosmic drama, as a virtual encyclopedia of Chinese culture in the 18th century, or in all of these ways at once. It is so rich that an entire discipline, known as “Red Studies” (Chinese hongxue 紅學) has developed around this text. For us, reading Dream presents a problem: the novel is approximately 2500 pages in its English translation. Students will read a 320-page abbreviation of the novel and then read a series of sample chapters in their entirety. There will be a considerable amount of reading, perhaps 750 pages, but students will leave the class with a good idea of this novel, and, I hope, an adequate foundation to become true “dreamers” by continuing on to read the entire text, should they wish to, in the years ahead.
GEOG 410/510/ Geography of the Mexican-American Borderland/ Professor Scott Warren
PSY 407/507/ Asking Psychological Questions and Interpreting Psychological Answers/ Professor Inga Schowengerdt
Learning how to think like a scientist about psychological issues will change your life because this ability is uniquely empowering, allowing people to evaluate data and claims about why people feel, think, and act the way they do. We all want to understand the psychology of ourselves and each other better, and people skilled in thinking like scientists about these questions can engage confidently with psychological research and writing because they understand how such research is conducted, how data is reported, how to draw their own conclusions about data and assess others’ claims and interpretations. When you are able to see psychological phenomena and findings in this way, you are also less likely to be misled or manipulated by bad research, pseudo-science, or misinformation, or to make common errors in judgment. It is a key skill set for those who want to increase their critical agency in an interconnected and data-driven world.
ENG 410/510/ Writing Life: Autofiction, Memoir, and Finding Truth through Fiction/ Professor Amanda Knopf