University Seminars

Please refer to the USEM course listing within SIS for course meeting times.

You should take this University Seminar if you would like to step outside your comfort zone and place yourself in the shoes of people who experienced some of history's profound assaults against humanity and wrote about it.

How does evil originate in history? Our readings and discussions will allow us to confront our own assumptions with discoveries of those who lived through extreme experiences – genocide, persecution, enslavement, concentration camps. What did they discover about being human? We will discuss the Bible, Plato, Elie Wiesel, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Witold Pilecki, Varlam Shalamov, Zhang Xianliang and others. Readings will be complemented by films.

You should take this University Seminar if you are interested in exploring literature, research and practices concerning death and bereavement.

This course is an exploration of thinking about dying, death and bereavement. Although western culture and American culture in particular has a reputation for being death denying, we do in fact confront images of and talk about death on almost a daily basis. This course will not be a study about death and dying in the news and popular media, rather it will about those who have thought about our mortality seriously and extensively.

You should take this University Seminar in order to understand the history of intelligence, espionage, and covert operations from ancient times to the end of the Cold War.

This course explores the history of intelligence from ancient times to the end of the Cold War. We will approach the topic through a series of case studies. Topics include: intelligence theory and practice in the ancient world; Renaissance Venice, Elizabeth I and the rise of Western intelligence; Ivan IV and the origins of Russian state security; intelligence and the Atlantic Revolutions; and intelligence during the world wars and the Cold War.

You should take this University Seminar if learning about a fascinating part of the world that on the surface it looks quite familiar to American audiences, but is truly distinctive, in terms of its history, politics, and culture.

Australia is a land of opportunity and paradox: a penal colony that became the richest country in the world within a hundred years; a nation independent of Britain for over a century, but with the King as its head of state; a vast continent with only 25 million inhabitants; among the most urbanized of global societies, but with a cultural identity largely shaped by rural idealism; a country with no history of slavery, but a troubled racial past.

You should take this University Seminar if you are passionate about grappling with big, beautiful, unanswerable questions.

This thing we call infinity fills our dreams and sparks our imaginations, yet it lies just beyond our reach, lurking in the shadows, evading our questions. Our curiosity compels us to ask: what is infinity? In this course, we will explore the infinite and the infinitesimal by looking through the eyes of poets, mathematicians, artists, writers, philosophers, and other great thinkers.