New Undergraduate Courses: 2018-19

This course considers the Black Atlantic as a socio-cultural economic space from the first arrival of Africans in the ‘New World,’ beginning around in the 15th century, through the rise of slavery in the Americas. During this class we will trace the origins and importance of the concept of the Black Atlantic within broad political contexts, paying special attention to the changing social, cultural and economic relations that shaped community formation among people of African descent and laid the foundations for modern political and economic orders.  Once we have established those foundations, we will think about the Black Atlantic as a critical site of cultural production. Using the frame of the Atlantic to ask questions about the relationship between culture and political economy. We will explore a range of genres--film, fiction, music, as well as formal scholarship--so as to explore questions of evidence in the context of the real and the imaginary. Topics to be covered include African enslavement and settlement in Africa and the Americas; the development of transatlantic racial capitalism; variations in politics and culture between empires in the Atlantic world; creolization, plantation slavery and slave society; the politics and culture of the enslaved; the Haitian Revolution; slave emancipation; and contemporary black Atlantic politics and racial capitalism.

This course is open only to Studio Art students and students with an Emerging Media Arts background. 

This course provides space and guidance for students to work on self-driven, individual and group projects in art and media. Course content consists of texts, site visits, presentations, workshops, and critiques built around each student's individual practice. Faculty and guest critics will hold regular studio visits to help guide students through their process. Students' material and technical investigations and theoretical inquiries will be addressed in group workshops and demonstrations. This course will culminate in a public presentation of students' work.

Wall labels, audio guides and informative maps are just some of the ways galleries and museums convey additional information about an art collection. How can we utilize new interactive mixed reality tools to design and deliver immersive experiences that breathe new life into an exhibit.  Augmented and virtual reality are powerful tools for new media production and storytelling, but how can these tools serve to enhance our gallery experience without distracting from the power and importance of a pre-existing collection? This production course seeks to experiment with new ways to experience a museum collection through mixed reality.  Topics covered include exhibition installation and curation, mixed reality production in Unity, mobile development for Augmented Reality.

This course grounds the understanding of the substantive criminal law through the study not just of the relevant legal rules, but also of the social and moral values which inform them. The course is organized around a number of themes which are explored in relation to particular sets of offences. These themes are: criminal law's conceptions of personal and sexual integrity and of personal and social interests in property; the status of general theories of criminal liability; the conception of criminal capacity and its relationship to the avoidance of criminal liability; and the modern state and conceptions of public and social order. These general issues are considered in relation to non-fatal offences against the person, sexual offences, property offences, homicide, the legal construction of criminal capacity, and offences against public order and the state. More generally, and through these themes and issues, the course traces the historical emergence of particular modern forms of criminal liability and  engages in a close analysis of the terms in which offences are framed and the patterns which mark their interpretation and enforcement.

The course aims to examine the effectiveness of the tort system in compensating individuals suffering personal injury, injury to reputation, psychological damage, economic loss or incursions on private property as a result of accidents, disease or intentional acts. Focusing on the tort of negligence in particular, the course explores the social, economic and political contexts in which the rules and principles of tort are applied. The course is divided into three parts. The first part will explore the historical development of tort, the nature of tort law and the relation between tort and other branches of the law of obligations and tort's relation with other legal systems. It provides an in-depth exploration of two organizing themes (fault and damage) within tort law drawing upon a range of examples from tort law and from the tort of negligence. Part two contains the core of the course and is an extensive exploration of the tort of negligence, with special emphasis on an examination of the duty of care concept. The final part of the course explores some intentional torts, with emphasis on torts aimed at the protection of reputation, confidential information and the quiet enjoyment of land.

Description forthcoming

Prerequisite: MA-UY 1124, MA-UY 1424 or MA-UY 1132

Note: Not open to students who have taken MA-UY 3044 or MA-UY 3054 or MA-UY 3083 or MA-UY 4204

MA-UY 2034 is an introduction to ordinary differential equations and linear algebra. The course develops the techniques for the analytic and numeric solutions of ordinary differential equations (and systems) that are widely used in modern engineering and science. Linear algebra is used as a tool for solving systems of linear equations as well as for understanding the structure of solutions to linear (systems) of differential equations. Topics covered include the fundamental concepts of linear algebra such as Gaussian elimination, Matrix Theory, linear transformations, vector spaces, subspaces, basis, eigenvectors, eigenvalues and the diagonalization of matrices, as well as the techniques for the analytic and numeric solutions of ordinary differential equations (and systems) that commonly appear in modern engineering and science.

Prerequisite(s): PH-UY 2121 and PH-UY 2023. Corequisite: PH-UY 2131G

This is the third course of a three-semester lecture sequence in general physics for science and engineering students. Water, sound and electromagnetic waves. Reflection, scattering and absorption. Standing waves and spectra. Superposition, diffraction and beats. Geometrical optics. Introduction to thermodynamics; temperature, heat, and entropy.

Prerequisite(s): PH-UY 2121 and PH-UY 2023. Corequisite: PH-UY 2033G  

This is the second course of two-semester sequence. Continuation of the introduction to the science of measurement and data analysis. The course accompanies PH-UY 2023. Experiments cover topics from PH-UY 2023 and PH-UY 2033.

Prerequisite: Calculus I or equivalent

Machine learning is an exciting and fast-moving field of computer science with many recent consumer applications (e.g., Microsoft Kinect, Google Translate, iPhone's Siri, digital camera face detection, Netflix recommendations, Google news) and applications within the sciences and medicine (e.g., predicting protein-protein interactions, species modeling, detecting tumors, personalized medicine). This course introduces undergraduate computer science students to the field of machine learning. Students learn about the theoretical foundations of machine learning and how to apply machine learning to solve new problems. Assuming no prior knowledge in machine learning, the course focuses on two major paradigms in machine learning which are supervised and unsupervised learning. In supervised learning, we learn various methods for classification and regression. Dimensionality reduction and clustering are discussed in the case of unsupervised learning.

Prerequisite: CSCI-UA 0201 Computer Systems Organization and experience with computer systems-level programming languages (e.g. C and C++ programming)  

Recommended Prerequisite courses include CSCI-UA 0202 Operating Systems and CSCI-UA 0480 Computer Networks. Experience with web development also helpful

Technology increasingly permeates every aspect of our lives (including communication, finance, health, utilities, etc.) and the security of the computer systems that enable these services has become a critical issue. This course will cover basic principles of computer security and security engineering. It will provide an introduction to fundamental cybersecurity concepts, principles, and techniques. The course will focus on security from an attacker's perspective (threat modeling) and the defender's perspective (building and deploying secure systems). Specific topics will included operating system security, network security, web security, security economics and security psychology. Course projects will focus both on writing secure code and exploiting insecure code.

In 2010 the "French gastronomic meal" was added to the UNESCO list of "Intangible Cultural  Heritage of Humanity", thus granting official recognition of the important place food holds in the lore, tradition, and lifeways of France. Food in France is both broader and more complex, however, than the official appellation of the gastronomic meal might suggest. In this course we consider food and the myriad rituals of food preparation and eating as a means to gain insight into French history and expressive cultures, and as a way also of addressing contemporary concerns related to rapid social, economic, and political change. Topics include regional and ethnic diversity, taste and distinction, invented traditions and national identity, urban ecology, globalization, and terroir. Students will be encouraged to make ample use of resources in and around Paris.

Some of the world's greatest non-Western art can be seen in Paris, in such museums as the Quai Branly, the Musée Guimet, or in the Sessions Pavilion of the Louvre.  Students learn about these art works in relation to their religious, political, and social meanings and functions. In addition, the course addresses questions of collecting and display, asking how these objects arrived in Paris and their significance for the Paris art and museum world. In English.

Pre-Requisites: Math-UA 123 Calculus III OR MATH-UA 213 Math for Economics III (for Economics majors) AND MATH-UA 140 Linear Algebra with a grade of C or better

This course is an introduction to rigorous analysis on the real line. Topics include: the real number system, sequences and series of numbers, functions of a real variable (continuity and differentiability), the Riemann integral, basic toplogical notions in a metric space, sequences and series of functions including Taylor and Fourier series.

Pre-Requisites:  Math-UA 123 Calculus III OR Math-UA 213 Math for Economics III (for Economics majors) AND one higher level course such as MATH-UA 140 Linear Algebra with grade of C or better

Complex numbers and complex functions. Differentiation and the Cauchy-Riemann equations. Cauchy's theorem and the Cauchy integral formula. Singularities, residues, and Laurent series. Fractional Linear transformations and conformal mapping. Analytic continuation. Applications to fluid flow, etc.

The relationship of the brain to behavior, beginning with the basic elements that make up the nervous system and how electrical and chemical signals in the brain work to affect behavior. Using this foundation, we examine how the brain learns and how it creates new behaviors, together with the brain mechanisms that are involved in sensory experience, movement, hunger and thirst, sexual behaviors, the experience of emotions, perception and cognition, memory and the brain's plasticity. Other key topics include whether certain behavioral disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can be accounted for by changes in the function of the brain, and how drugs can alter behavior and brain function.

Introduction to music education as a profession, exploring the issues and relevant literature that inform and challenge music educators in the context of a diverse and changing culture.

The purpose of this course is to acquire the basic knowledge and skills necessary to conduct choral and instrumental ensembles in rehearsal and performance. Special emphasis will be placed on skills such as fundamental beat patterns; preparatory gestures; basic score preparation, analysis and interpretation; basic rehearsal techniques and error detection; and use of the baton, posture, and stance.

This course will investigate the dominant critical perspectives that have contributed to the development of Environmental Communication as a field of study. This course explores the premise that the way we communicate powerfully impacts our perceptions of the “natural” world, and that these perceptions shape the way we define our relationships to and within nature. The goal of this course is to access various conceptual frameworks for addressing questions about the relationship between the environment, culture and communication. Students will explore topics such as nature/ wildlife tourism, consumerism, representations of the environment in popular culture and environmental activism.

The location of Israel at the geographic junction between the West and the East, between the Arab world and the Western world, against the background of the long historical complexity of this piece of land provides the context for the course Expressive Culture: Art and Culture in Contemporary Israel" which will offer a panoramic view of expressive cultures in modern Israel. This course will provide an introduction to Israeli culture and art by examining thematic crossroads and ideas, via problems and social conflicts which lie at the heart of those art works and are reflected by them. Themes to be addressed will include: religion and secularism, universalism/globalism versus localism, Jews and Arabs, Ashkenazic and Sephardic cultures, multiculturalism in Israel, Zionism and Post-Zionism, right and left political world views, questions of gender, historical perspectives on war and peace and the Holocaust. The students will explore the way different forms of art – visual, literary, and performance – reflect and shape the understanding of the "Israeli mosaic" while learning about the way the artists and writers internalize, consciously and unconsciously the complex Israeli reality. Towards this end, the course will incorporate an exclusive audiography, image bank and collection of video materials and will include excursions to cultural institutions and events in Tel Aviv-Jaffa.