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The stories of our lives are recorded in the spaces of our lives. In much the same way that literacy is both cultivated and preserved in books, cultural memory obtains legible shape in buildings. This course will study how architectural settings accommodate and express the events of our lives, particularly those events that occur in cities and their institutions, for cities have always been and remain culture's most efficient and eloquent articulation.
We will study buildings and cities from a wide range of regions and periods; roughly speaking, from antiquity to the present, in the Americas and Europe. Readings for the course will come from architect authors, as well as other writers who describe buildings and cities: poets, philosophers and historians. Students will analyze and discuss built works in four ways: weekly readings and written summaries, a preparatory tutorial with the professor, a class presentation, and a final interpretative essay. Because we will examine buildings, paintings and texts, the course will involve spatial, pictorial and verbal understanding.
Does not count towards the BFS seminar requirement. More information.
BENF-219-301
Judges and Judging
Gordon Bermant
T 1:30-4
During Fall Term, 2006, Judges and Judging will study the theory and practice of trials at law. We are overwhelmed with journalism and fiction of all sorts about trials. There is also addition a large academic literature that dissects trials, especially the performances of jurors and juries, from several perspectives. The intent of the seminar is to take a fresh look at trials by reading widely across the perspectives and arguing with all of them. Students will need to read rapidly and well. Assistance will come in the form of study questions distributed in advance of each week's meeting that students will answer in writing and submit as part of the course requirements. In addition to completing the weekly questions and participating in a lot of class discussion, students will write a term paper, chosen from among the topics raised in the readings, which will be due on the final day of the exam period.
This course will examine the interactions between human beings, their organs and cells, and various infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, and parasites. The biological and societal factors influencing these interactions will be analyzed and emerging infectious diseases will be particularly studied. Important infectious pathogenic agents will be surveyed in terms of their physiological functions, properties that permit them to be pathogens, pathogenesis of infections, clinical pictures of the disease states, therapeutic agents, and methods of prevention of infection. Each student will choose an infectious disease, and make an oral and written presentation on it.
This course will provide an in-depth examination of technology and its impact on medicine, with an emphasis on the intersection of engineering with medicine and health. Basic foundations of historical perspective, constraints on technological development, and the promise and peril of technological impact on medicine will be discussed. Modules will also focus on specific technological advances which have had significant impact on the field of medicine. These include: imaging and diagnosis of disease, genetic therapy and pharmacology, and rehabilitative devices, assistive devices and transplantation. The course is geared to all students interested in aspects of medicine and engineering and applied science. Reading will integrate topics of the impact of technology on medicine with specific major technologies, as well as examine societal issues related to effects on human nature and the future of biotechnology. The course will be discussion-based and structured around readings of primary sources, commentaries, and publications in the literature. Discussions will be augmented by guest lecturers in the fields of medicine and engineering, as well as those from technology driven research sectors. Throughout the term, students will be expected to select a specific technology to follow in the medical, scientific and engineering, as well as popular and lay literature and discuss its applications and impact.
Pre-requisite or co-requisite: First year college physics, chemistry, and biology or AP credits; Sophomore and higher classes only.
An advanced course for students who have had AP Chemistry in high school. Included in the course coverage are: quantum mechanics of atoms, molecules and crystalline solids; statistical mechanics of gases, liquids, and solids; and coordination chemistry.
This course will engage one of the most prominent and important figures in film history: travel. We will investigate this figure as it evolves historically from 1895 to the present and at the same time examine the particular practices and permutations it has inspired as travelogues and documentaries, movie genres such as the road movie, and film’s ideological and economic engagements with borders and globalization. Such a rich vehicle will additionally open numerous theoretical questions in film aesthetics: for example, about mobile and immobile spectatorship, about “traveling shots” and aesthetic realism, and about subjectivity and ethnographic filmmaking. Since our topic parallels the 2006-07 theme of the Penn Humanities Forum, we will also take advantage of the various university lectures, presentations, and exhibitions around the university as a way of broadening and complicating the issues we find in film history. In addition to gaining more intellectual mobility about film and the larger implications of “travel” as a mode of experience, we will, I am certain, become better writers and more independent researchers.
How does one write about oneself? Who is the “author” writing? What does one write about? And is it fiction or truth?
Our seminar on autobiographical writing will pursue these questions, researching confessions, autobiographies, memoirs, and other forms of life-writing both in their historical development and theoretical articulations. Examples will include selections from St. Augustine’s confessions, Rousseau’s Confessions, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, as well as many examples from contemporary English, German, French, and American literature.
COML-556-401
Ancient Interpretation of the Bible
David Stern
TR 10:30-12
Distribution III: Arts and Letters.
Course filled
Christianity and Judaism are often called "Biblical religions" because they are believed to be founded upon the Bible. But the truth of the matter is that it was less the Bible itself than the particular ways in which the Bible was read and interpreted by Christians and Jews that shaped the development of these two religions and that also marked the difference between them. So, too, ancient Biblical interpretation (Jewish and Christian) laid the groundwork for and developed virtually all the techniques and methods that have dominated literary criticism and hermeneutics (the science of interpretation) since then. The purpose of this course is to study some of the more important ways in which the Bible was read and interpreted by Jews and Christians before the modern period, and particularly in the first six centuries in the common era. We will make a concerted effort to view these interpretive approaches not only historically but also through the lens of contemporary critical and hermeneutical theory in order to examine their contemporary relevance to literary interpretation and the use that some modern literary theorists (e.g. Bloom, Kermode, Derrida, Todorov) have made of these ancient exegetes and their methods. All readings are in English translation, and will include selections from Philo of Alexandria, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Rabbinic midrash, the New Testament and early Church Fathers, Gnostic writings, Origen, and Augustine. No previous familiarity with Biblical scholarship is required, although some familiarity with the Bible itself would be helpful.
The purpose of this course is to provide a 1 CU educational experience which tightly integrates the theory and applications of discrete probability, discrete stochastic processes, and discrete statistical inference in the study of computer science. The intended audience for this class is both those students who are CS majors as well as those intending to be CS majors. The only prerequisite for this course is CSE 260. Specifically, it will be assumed that the students will know: Set Theory, Mathematical Induction, Number Theory, Functions, Equivalence Relations, Partial-Order Relations, Combinatorics, and Graph Theory at the level currently covered in CSE 260. This course could be taken immediately following CSE 260. Computation and Programming will play an essential role in this course. The students will be expected to use the Maple programming environment in homework exercises which will include: numerical and symbolic computations, simulations, and graphical displays.
The restriction to the discrete case, i.e., countable sample spaces and state spaces fits very nicely with the focus on discrete structures in CSE 260, 262, and 320. There will be a heavy emphasis on events defined in terms of strings. The segment on discrete stochastic processes will focus on finite-state Markov chains. We will also show how these processes are related to Finite-State Machines. The segment on discrete statistical inference will focus on parameter estimation and hypothesis testing for probability models for string generation, including finite-state Markov chains. While there will be no focus on models with continuous state spaces, e.g., , We will address Central Limit Theory ideas through exercises using both symbolic and numerical computation. We will introduce the Minimum Description Length Paradigm to unite basic ideas about randomness, inference and computation. The illustrations of the concepts and applications of the theory will all be selected from computer science. The segments on probability, stochastic processes, and inference will each be covered in a four-week period.
This seminar focuses on the ongoing data collection of Penn's Jerry Lee Program of Randomized Controlled Trials in Restorative Justice, the largest program of field experiments in the history of criminology. Since 1995, this research program has randomly assigned over 3400 victims and offenders to either conventional justice or restorative conferences of victims, offenders, and their families in Canberra (Australia, London, Northumbria, and Thames Valley, all in England. The offenders have all been willing to acknowledge their guilt to their victims (or the community) and to try to repair the harm they have caused. Key questions to be answered by the research program include the effects of restorative conferences on the future crime rates of offenders and victims, on the mental health and medical condition of both, and on the changes over time in these dimensions of the life course of both victims and offenders. Students will be the first data analysts to explore a new interview data set fro some 150 victims and some 900 offenders.
An introduction to game theory and its applications to Economic analysis. The course will provide a theoretical overview of modern game theory, emphasizing common themes in the analysis of strategic behavior in different social science contexts. The economic applications will be drawn from different areas including trade, corporate strategy and public policy.
Focusing on the relation between poetic form and content, this course will study the fascinating, obsessive, and often grotesque depiction of erotic desire in Renaissance lyric poetry. The lyric is the voice of contemplation and persuasion, and so it is an ideal vehicle for exploring the ambivalence, narcissism, insecurity, and hostility that almost inevitably accompany the seemingly beneficent emotion of love. And because the Renaissance saw a clear analogy between the relationships of man and woman, sovereign and subject, and Christ and Church, this poetry’s seemingly private utterances also offered a forum for discussing anxieties about knowledge, ambition, gender, politics, and religion. Given this rhetorical dimension, it is no surprise that the formal properties of lyric poetry (structure, rhythm, meter) register the dilemmas of desire and persuasion as such: what is the relation between convention and expression? at what point does charm become manipulation? can we ever hope to recognize our own true motives, much less those of others?
We will begin by examining the vicissitudes of the Petrarchan sonnet as it was translated into an English tradition by such authors as Surrey, Wyatt, Gascoigne, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Wroth. We will then look at the relationship between erotic desire and religious devotion in Mary Sidney Herbert’s psalms, Donne’s Holy Sonnets, and George Herbert’s and Richard Crashaw’s experimental verse forms. Finally, we will consider how the vocabulary of love allows such poets as Carew, Lovelace, Marvell, and Milton to participate in the political, intellectual, and religious debates of the English Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration. In addition to these primary texts, we will fill out the reading list with some current scholarship on the topic and some theoretical attempts to understand what love means (Plato and Freud, among others). A series of short writing assignments will culminate in a longer research paper.
ENGL-359-301
Topics in Modernism: Old Bonds, New Contracts, and the Problem of Freedom
Anne Hall
Distribution III: Arts and Letters
MW 2-3:30
“A large fortune means freedom, and I’m afraid of that. It’s such a fine thing, and one should make such a good use of it. If one shouldn’t, one would be ashamed. And one must keep thinking; it’s a constant effort. I’m not sure it’s not a greater happiness to be powerless.” -- Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady.
This course will examine Henry James’s consideration of American confidence in freedom. The consequences of an American commitment to Lockean individualism are felt most keenly when characters seeks to challenge the old bonds and write new contracts for themselves. We will watch James make his case for necessity of making the “constant effort” to “keep thinking.” We will first look at the contract theory of government in Hobbes’s Leviathan and Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Then we will look at the critique of Enlightenment confidence in rationality in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Finally, we will look at Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for a sifting of the strengths and weaknesses of the new American Republic. When we turn to James, we will read The Bostonians, Portrait of a Lady, and The Ambassadors.
A final paper of about 10-12 pp. and regular class participation.
ENGL-363-301
American Literature in the 1930s
Peter Conn
TR 9-10:30
Distribution III: Arts and Letters
An intensive introduction to American literature and society in the Depression decade. Readings will include canonical and non-canonical texts; among them The Big Money, The Grapes of Wrath, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Good Earth, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Absalom, Absalom!, Native Son, and the anthology Proletarian Literature in the United States.
The questions we shall discuss will include: the meaning of ideology and the relation of economic circumstance to aesthetic values; the social and political responsibility of the writer; the role of women in society and culture; the debate over race; the distinctions and the continuity between popular and elite culture; the gains and losses that are entailed in organizing literary study by politically defined periods (e.g."the thirties").
Requirements. (1) Attendance at every class is required, and active participation in class discussion is expected. (2) Each student will prepare a position paper (four or five sentences) in response to each assigned reading. This statement should identify a particular theme, conflict, or issue that could form the basis for discussion. (3) Working in pairs, each student will present one or two reports on some key historical and literary text [see reserve list]. (4) Each student will report on one of the major magazines published in the 1930s. (5) Each student will complete a research essay (fifteen or so pages), due in early December. (6) These essays will also form the basis for oral reports. (7) Quizzes may occur at any time. (8) There will be a final exam.
ENGL-392-401
Cinematic Travel
Timothy Corrigan
TR 9-10:30
Distribution III: Arts and Letters
Course Filled
This course will engage one of the most prominent and important figures in film history: travel. We will investigate this figure as it evolves historically from 1895 to the present and at the same time examine the particular practices and permutations it has inspired as travelogues and documentaries, movie genres such as the road movie, and film’s ideological and economic engagements with borders and globalization. Such a rich vehicle will additionally open numerous theoretical questions in film aesthetics: for example, about mobile and immobile spectatorship, about “traveling shots” and aesthetic realism, and about subjectivity and ethnographic filmmaking. Since our topic parallels the 2006-07 theme of the Penn Humanities Forum, we will also take advantage of the various university lectures, presentations, and exhibitions around the university as a way of broadening and complicating the issues we find in film history. In addition to gaining more intellectual mobility about film and the larger implications of “travel” as a mode of experience, we will, I am certain, become better writers and more independent researchers.
Despite the fact that lead has been removed from many products such as paint and gasoline, nearly 1.7 million young children have elevated blood levels according to recent Centers for Disease Control estimates. The incidence of lead poisoning has declined over the last 10 years, but thousands of Philadelphia children still have elevated levels. Philadelphia ranks second in the country as the city with the highest number of lead poisoned children. Most at risk are low income children living in poorly maintained homes built before the 1978 ban of lead based paint for residential use. According to the Philadelphia Health Department, there are about 1400 homes with dangerous levels of lead paint chips and dust awaiting cleanup in the city. Lead poisoning can cause learning disabilities, impaired hearing, behavioral problems and at very high levels, seizures, coma and even death. Young children up to the age of six are especially at risk because of their developing systems. They often ingest lead chips and dust while playing in their home and yards.
In ENVS 404, Penn undergraduates will learn about the epidemiology of lead poisoning, the pathways of exposure, and methods for community outreach and education. Penn students will collaborate with middle school and high school teachers in West Philadelphia to engage middle school children in exercises that apply environmental research relating to lead poisoning to their homes and neighborhoods.
Course requirements include regular attendance at all lectures, a thorough comprehension of the course readings, participation in class discussion, application of the readings and lectures to a problem-oriented research project. Each student will be required to identify a problem associated with lead poisoning, and to conduct research on that issue, for a final paper and a formal presentation.
Why you might want to take this course:
The goal of the course is to explore the visual aspect of the thinking process -- how representing information visually restructures your thoughts about a subject. While working on a topic of your choice, you will both write and make a book. This is also an opportunity for students who might not think of themselves as artists or designers to experiment with things normally restricted to the domain of specialized studio classes.
What you will do in this course:
From the beginning, we will emphasize visual representation of concepts. You already know how to display information in visual form -- everyone uses a napkin in a restaurant to show how one thing connects to another. The material part of the project is not to be thought of as producing art -- it doesn't matter how well you did in your fourth-grade art class. We don't really know how an object looks until we draw it (and the skill at drawing is not essential to the process): through visual representation, we articulate, re-state our understanding of the world around us -- of objects as well as of abstract concepts. This process provides the format for the constant re-evaluation of your work. That re-evaluation is then reabsorbed and restructures the way you think.
The projects naturally are diverse, ranging from introspection to scholarly investigation. You will see how your fellow students approach a problem. In the past, students have thought the most important part of the class was the opportunity to discuss each other's work. We will also invite visiting critics from other departments or from outside the university. We will explore technical methods of book production, ranging from computers to letterpress to collage, as well as simple bookbinding and paper crafts.
By the end of the course, you will produce a material book, which can range in format from a traditionally designed and bound book to an experimental one-of-a-kind form with foldouts and cutouts. The joy of making things with your hands can be directly connected with, and integral to, your "serious" research.
How this course may change your ideas:
You will learn to approach a project both with your goal in mind as well as with the openness for it to evolve in unexpected directions. You will learn how to pause when you encounter ideas in a serendipitous way: rather than dismissing them as obstructions or digressions, you might discover in them a new dimension of your project. Such openness is an essential aspect of creativity: your need fo maintaining complete control over your project will give way to a dialogue -- with your work, and with yourself.
An introduction to processes and forces that form the surface and the interior of the Earth. Changes in climate and the history of life. Earth resources and their uses.. Open to architectural and engineering majors as well as Ben Franklin Scholars. Field trips. Relations of rocks, rock structures, soils, ground water, and geologic agents to architectural, engineering, and land-use problems.
How does one write about oneself? Who is the “author” writing? What does one write about? And is it fiction or truth?
Our seminar on autobiographical writing will pursue these questions, researching confessions, autobiographies, memoirs, and other forms of life-writing both in their historical development and theoretical articulations. Examples will include selections from St. Augustin’s confessiones, Rousseau’s Confessions, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, as well as many examples from contemporary English, German, French, and American literature.
This multidisciplinary course surveys the history of American health care through the multiple perspectives of race, gender, and class, and grounds the discussions in contemporary health issues. It emphasizes the links between the past and present, using not only primary documents but materials from disciplines such as literature, art, sociology, and feminist studies that relate both closely and tangentially to the health professions and health care issues. Discussions will surround gender, class-based, ethnic, and racial ideas about the construction of disease, health and illness; the development of health care institutions; the interplay between religion and science; the experiences of patients and providers; and the response to disasters and epidemics. Skills for document analysis and critique are built into the course as is the contextual foundation for understanding the history of health care.
HSOC-404-401
Urban Environment: West Philadelphia
Richard Pepino
TR 1:30-3
Despite the fact that lead has been removed from many products such as paint and gasoline, nearly 1.7 million young children have elevated blood levels according to recent Centers for Disease Control estimates. The incidence of lead poisoning has declined over the last 10 years, but thousands of Philadelphia children still have elevated levels. Philadelphia ranks second in the country as the city with the highest number of lead poisoned children. Most at risk are low income children living in poorly maintained homes built before the 1978 ban of lead based paint for residential use. According to the Philadelphia Health Department, there are about 1400 homes with dangerous levels of lead paint chips and dust awaiting cleanup in the city. Lead poisoning can cause learning disabilities, impaired hearing, behavioral problems and at very high levels, seizures, coma and even death. Young children up to the age of six are especially at risk because of their developing systems. They often ingest lead chips and dust while playing in their home and yards.
In HSOC 404, Penn undergraduates will learn about the epidemiology of lead poisoning, the pathways of exposure, and methods for community outreach and education. Penn students will collaborate with middle school and high school teachers in West Philadelphia to engage middle school children in exercises that apply environmental research relating to lead poisoning to their homes and neighborhoods.
Course requirements include regular attendance at all lectures, a thorough comprehension of the course readings, participation in class discussion, application of the readings and lectures to a problem-oriented research project. Each student will be required to identify a problem associated with lead poisoning, and to conduct research on that issue, for a final paper and a formal presentation.
This discussion and research seminar will examine the competing and diverse currents of antistatist and radically individualist thought that have been a part of the Western dialogue from the nineteenth century to the present. The course requires active participations in discussion and two papers, one brief and one a longer research paper.
HIST-214-401
Urban University-Community Relations
Ira Harkavy
W 2-5
Inspired by Penn's founder, Ben Franklin, President Amy Gutmann has identified rising to the challenge of a diverse democracy and educating students for democratic citizenship as critical goals of her administration. Since the present undergraduate curriculum falls short in this regard, the seminar aims to synthesize numerous, unrelated, academically-based community service courses into an effectively integrated curriculum. As now envisioned, the new Penn curriculum developed by the seminar would have as a significant component, thematic, problem-solving clusters, i.e., interrelated, cross-disciplinary, complementary sets of courses designed to stimulate and empower students to produce, not simply consumer, societally-useful knowledge. By societally-useful knowledge, we mean knowledge actively used to solve global strategic problems of democracy and society, schooling and society, health and society, poverty and society, environment and society, culture and society, etc., as those global problems manifest themselves locally at Penn and in West Philadelphia/Philadelphia.
HIST-214-402
Immigrants, African-Americans, and Cities in Twentieth Century America
Michael Katz
M 2-5PM
This seminar examines the economic, demographic, and spatial transformations of American cities since World War II. Topics for analysis include the impact of deindustrialization and the emergence of an information-service economy, internal migration and immigration, ghetto creation, the origin and history of suburbs, and levers of change - politics, policy, social movements, and social reform. Assignments include reading approximately one book per week, short commentary papers, discussion leadership, and a final essay.
Christianity and Judaism are often called "Biblical religions" because they are believed to be founded upon the Bible. But the truth of the matter is that it was less the Bible itself than the particular ways in which the Bible was read and interpreted by Christians and Jews that shaped the development of these two religions and that also marked the difference between them. So, too, ancient Biblical interpretation (Jewish and Christian) laid the groundwork for and developed virtually all the techniques and methods that have dominated literary criticism and hermeneutics (the science of interpretation) since then. The purpose of this course is to study some of the more important ways in which the Bible was read and interpreted by Jews and Christians before the modern period, and particularly in the first six centuries in the common era. We will make a concerted effort to view these interpretive approaches not only historically but also through the lens of contemporary critical and hermeneutical theory in order to examine their contemporary relevance to literary interpretation and the use that some modern literary theorists (e.g. Bloom, Kermode, Derrida, Todorov) have made of these ancient exegetes and their methods. All readings are in English translation, and will include selections from Philo of Alexandria, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Rabbinic midrash, the New Testament and early Church Fathers, Gnostic writings, Origen, and Augustine. No previous familiarity with Biblical scholarship is required, although some familiarity with the Bible itself would be helpful.
This course presents law as an evolving social institution, with special emphasis on the legal regulation of business. It considers basic concepts of law and legal process, in the U.S. and other legal systems, and introduces the fundamentals of rigorous legal analysis. An in-depth examination of contract law is included.
LGST-210-301
Corporate Responsibility and Ethics
Waheed Hussain
TR 10:30-12
This course offers a multifaceted, philosophical introduction to business ethics. We begin with the “big” questions about economic life. What is the rationale for capitalism? Is it just? Who should make the most money? How should we decide who does the hard work? What role (if any) does deception play in our system? After looking at the big issues, we will look at more concrete questions about the obligations of corporations, managers and employees. Do corporations have any obligations besides making money for their shareholders? Can a manager fire an employee just because he doesn’t like him? If a multinational operates in a country where child labor is the norm, does that make it alright for the company to hire children? Readings will be drawn from moral and political philosophy, business reviews, economics, magazines, and popular literature. Special emphasis will be placed on issues relating to labor and employment.
Advanced study in selected topics in music theory. This class will survey some of the cognitive connections between music and painting. Evidence for why the two art forms have been linked throughout history comes from the geometric scaling of musical tones and colors in psychological experiments. Examining music from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, we will analyze tonal melodies of different sorts. In art we will discuss and analyze the use of color structures in abstract and minimalist paintings from the twentieth century. Prerequisite: Ability to read music.
Christianity and Judaism are often called "Biblical religions" because they are believed to be founded upon the Bible. But the truth of the matter is that it was less the Bible itself than the particular ways in which the Bible was read and interpreted by Christians and Jews that shaped the development of these two religions and that also marked the difference between them. So, too, ancient Biblical interpretation (Jewish and Christian) laid the groundwork for and developed virtually all the techniques and methods that have dominated literary criticism and hermeneutics (the science of interpretation) since then. The purpose of this course is to study some of the more important ways in which the Bible was read and interpreted by Jews and Christians before the modern period, and particularly in the first six centuries in the common era. We will make a concerted effort to view these interpretive approaches not only historically but also through the lens of contemporary critical and hermeneutical theory in order to examine their contemporary relevance to literary interpretation and the use that some modern literary theorists (e.g. Bloom, Kermode, Derrida, Todorov) have made of these ancient exegetes and their methods. All readings are in English translation, and will include selections from Philo of Alexandria, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Rabbinic midrash, the New Testament and early Church Fathers, Gnostic writings, Origen, and Augustine. No previous familiarity with Biblical scholarship is required, although some familiarity with the Bible itself would be helpful.
This multidisciplinary course surveys the history of American health care through the multiple perspectives of race, gender, and class, and grounds the discussions in contemporary health issues. It emphasizes the links between the past and present, using not only primary documents but materials from disciplines such as literature, art, sociology, and feminist studies that relate both closely and tangentially to the health professions and health care issues. Discussions will surround gender, class-based, ethnic, and racial ideas about the construction of disease, health and illness; the development of health care institutions; the interplay between religion and science; the experiences of patients and providers; and the response to disasters and epidemics. Skills for document analysis and critique are built into the course as is the contextual foundation for understanding the history of health care.
PHYS 170 is a difficult course, as one would expect for an Honors offering. It is possible to start in PHYS 170 and transfer to PHYS 150 in the first few weeks if you find the course too difficult. The instructor would prefer that you be co-registered in Math 240 or higher. It is no longer possible to place out of the predecessor math course, Math 114, purely on the basis of advanced placement scores, but the Math department offers placement tests at the beginning of the fall semester. Students co-registered in Math 114 (formerly Math 141) have done well in PH170 in the past, but they often need to do some extra work to make up for math topics they have not yet covered. Students co-registered in Math 104 (formerly Math 140) have usually done poorly in PHYS 170, so we suggest they register for PHYS 150. Note that you may pursue a major in Physics and Astronomy after taking either of these introductory sequences. Either of these sequences is also appropriate for majors in other physical sciences or engineering. Moreover, it is possible to take PHYS 171 (Honors Physics II) Spring 2004 instead of PHYS 151 if you do very well in PHYS 150 in the Fall.
An idea generating, research focused seminar on the question of how to assess the contributions of universities to democratic education and democratic political development. It is an interdisciplinary seminar with the participation of faculty from around the university. This fall the seminar will focus on targeted student populations at Penn on their democratic values, habits, competencies. The research will build on previous surveys on hundreds of students at Penn as well as at three other local colleges and universities. The primary assignments will be data analyses and written reports on research done both individually and in research groups. Students will be taught to use appropriate soft-ware programs.
This fall the seminar will also attempt, as it has in the past, to assess the impact of Penn on the community immediate surrounding Penn. The seminar will be divided into research task forces that will focus on a neighborhood and assess the role Penn has in developing social and political infrastructures for political engagement.
The results of the seminar are being disseminated to faculty/student seminars in other countries that are collaborating in a global research program on Universities as Sites of Citizenship. This research program is also involved with the Council of Europe and has collected pilot data in Australia, Korea, South Africa as well as 15 university sites in Council of Europe countries and 15 in the U.S
PSCI-395-301
Power Sharing
Brendan O’Leary
T 3-6
Course Filled
'Consociations' and 'federations' are often commended to share and divide power in territories with (past or present) national, ethnic and communal conflicts. This course examines conceptual, explanatory and normative debates over the merits and effectiveness of consociation and federation - and mixed systems. Case materials will be drawn from Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, India, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Northern Ireland and Iraq. The essential books for purchase are listed below. Other materials will be posted on the Blackboard web-site for this course'.
Decisions to have children are influenced by cultural norms and economic constraints. Cultural and economic conditions have changed drastically, and, as a result, recent years have seen a sharp, nearly worldwide decline in birth rate, and exceedingly low birth rates in contemporary Europe and Japan. The history, causes, and consequences of this "fertility transition" are the central topics of this seminar. Historical topics include the emergence of the concept of deliberate family size restriction, which fostered birth rate declines in some countries long before the introduction of efficient contraceptives. Causes include the escalating cost of rearing children. Consequences include population aging and resultant difficulty funding pensions for retirees. (The “social security crisis” is much worse in Europe and Japan than in the USA.) The seminar also considers contemporary women's career-family conflicts, which illustrate some of the psychological, sociological, and economic factors with which the seminar is concerned. Additional information is available at http://psych.upenn.edu/~norman/syl278p05.htm. Non-BFS students do not need special permission to enroll.
Christianity and Judaism are often called "Biblical religions" because they are believed to be founded upon the Bible. But the truth of the matter is that it was less the Bible itself than the particular ways in which the Bible was read and interpreted by Christians and Jews that shaped the development of these two religions and that also marked the difference between them. So, too, ancient Biblical interpretation (Jewish and Christian) laid the groundwork for and developed virtually all the techniques and methods that have dominated literary criticism and hermeneutics (the science of interpretation) since then. The purpose of this course is to study some of the more important ways in which the Bible was read and interpreted by Jews and Christians before the modern period, and particularly in the first six centuries in the common era. We will make a concerted effort to view these interpretive approaches not only historically but also through the lens of contemporary critical and hermeneutical theory in order to examine their contemporary relevance to literary interpretation and the use that some modern literary theorists (e.g. Bloom, Kermode, Derrida, Todorov) have made of these ancient exegetes and their methods. All readings are in English translation, and will include selections from Philo of Alexandria, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Rabbinic midrash, the New Testament and early Church Fathers, Gnostic writings, Origen, and Augustine. No previous familiarity with Biblical scholarship is required, although some familiarity with the Bible itself would be helpful.
This course consists of three parts. The first, “How to read Tolstoy?” deals with Tolstoy’s artistic stimuli, favorite devices, and narrative strategies. The second, “Tolstoy at War,” explores the author’s provocative visions of war, gender, sex, art, social institutions, death, and religion. The emphasis is placed here on the role of a written word in Tolstoy’s search for truth and power. The third and the largest section is a close reading of Tolstoy’s masterwork “The War and Peace” (1863-68) ¬ a quintessence of both his artistic method and philosophical insights.
Genetics has always had political meaning; think of the double meaning of the word “inherited.” In this course we will explore the past history and current politics of that double meaning. We will begin by looking at the scientific and political grounding of the eugenics movements of the early 20th century and will then move on to the development of medical genetics in the age of genomics.
Topics (for the second half of the 20th century) will be chosen from: arguments about prenatal genetic screening, neonatal screening and adult screening for genetic disease; arguments about genetic determinism with regard to intelligence, gender roles and sexuality; arguments about genetic enhancement, genetic therapy and—ultimately—cloning.
Each student will be expected to do a term paper on a topic of her or his own choosing. There will be two books assigned for the course: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Susan Lindee, Moments of Truth in Genetic Medicine. All other readings will be collected in a coursepack or placed on reserve.
In an investigation into "nation building," defined historically, and in accord with the logics of the 17th and 18th Century Enlightenment project, we will read two exegetical books about Alexis de Tocqueville and then embark on a "close reading" of his classic, Democracy in America (1835), the most influential exposition on the subject ever crafted. Our current adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, meantime, will afford us weekly opportunities to consider a number of recent dimensions of 'nation building' in contrast with de Tocqueville’s report, early in the 19th Century, as we head for (1) our 2008 federal election and the campaign, already underway, (2) that will bring us yet another chapter in the story of our own development as an identifiable "economic republic," our homegrown amended version of the "Athenian ideal;" readers of a major newspaper will enjoy this trip into the future during which we keep an eye on what we may see in a rearview mirror to our history.
SOCI-410-401
Experiments in Restorative Justice
Heather Strang
TR 1:30-3
This seminar focuses on the ongoing data collection of Penn's Jerry Lee Program of Randomized Controlled Trials in Restorative Justice, the largest program of field experiments in the history of criminology. Since 1995, this research program has randomly assigned over 3400 victims and offenders to either conventional justice or restorative conferences of victims, offenders, and their families in Canberra (Australia, London, Northumbria, and Thames Valley, all in England. The offenders have all been willing to acknowledge their guilt to their victims (or the community) and to try to repair the harm they have caused. Key questions to be answered by the research program include the effects of restorative conferences on the future crime rates of offenders and victims, on the mental health and medical condition of both, and on the changes over time in these dimensions of the life course of both victims and offenders. Students will be the first data analysts to explore a new interview data set fro some 150 victims and some 900 offenders.
Inspired by Penn's founder, Ben Franklin, President Amy Gutmann has identified rising to the challenge of a diverse democracy and educating students for democratic citizenship as critical goals of her administration. Since the present undergraduate curriculum falls short in this regard, the seminar aims to synthesize numerous, unrelated, academically-based community service courses into an effectively integrated curriculum. As now envisioned, the new Penn curriculum developed by the seminar would have as a significant component, thematic, problem-solving clusters, i.e., interrelated, cross-disciplinary, complementary sets of courses designed to stimulate and empower students to produce, not simply consumer, societally-useful knowledge. By societally-useful knowledge, we mean knowledge actively used to solve global strategic problems of democracy and society, schooling and society, health and society, poverty and society, environment and society, culture and society, etc., as those global problems manifest themselves locally at Penn and in West Philadelphia/Philadelphia.
URBS-220-402
Modern American Cities
Michael Katz
T 2-5PM
This seminar examines the economic, demographic, and spatial transformations of American cities since World War II. Topics for analysis include the impact of deindustrialization and the emergence of an information-service economy, internal migration and immigration, ghetto creation, the origin and history of suburbs, and levers of change - politics, policy, social movements, and social reform. Assignments include reading approximately one book per week, short commentary papers, discussion leadership, and a final essay.
This multidisciplinary course surveys the history of American health care through the multiple perspectives of race, gender, and class, and grounds the discussions in contemporary health issues. It emphasizes the links between the past and present, using not only primary documents but materials from disciplines such as literature, art, sociology, and feminist studies that relate both closely and tangentially to the health professions and health care issues. Discussions will surround gender, class-based, ethnic, and racial ideas about the construction of disease, health and illness; the development of health care institutions; the interplay between religion and science; the experiences of patients and providers; and the response to disasters and epidemics. Skills for document analysis and critique are built into the course as is the contextual foundation for understanding the history of health care.