For centuries artists and writers have created sketchbooks and journals inspired by Italy’s rich culture, physical beauty and history. Through direct observation and engagement with the natural landscape, architecture and culture of daily life of Tuscany and its surrounding regions, students will record their impressions and create personal travel journals that capture the “zeitgeist” (spirit) of Tuscany. We will explore a variety of writing, sketching, and mixed-media techniques, both traditional and experimental, to help students find their personal voice.

This course aims to provide students with an understanding of how cinema and other medias ‘construct’ expectations about masculinity and femininity and ideas about normal and deviant sexualities. The course will encourage students to reflect on the multiple axes of privilege, exclusion and inclusion within the production and consumption of media culture. The course explores some of the ways in which Italian cinema and media have made use of ideas about gender and sexuality as crucial components in the articulation of discourses about the nation, the family and the couple.

The term Neorealism refers to a set of films made in Italy at the end of World War 2. This was a time when the country was in ruins and the Italian film industry was on its knees: the main film studios in Rome (Cinecittà) had been expropriated and turned into refuge camps; equipment to shoot films was extremely hard to find and electrical power supply was very limited. Rather than making film production impossible, these obstacles actually instigated the emergence of a new way of making films.

This unique travel/study- field seminar features a wide-ranging exploration of the Dolomites, recently designated as World Heritage Site by UNESCO for the distinctive variety of their morphology, geology and landscape. These spectacular and monumental mountains retain traces of extraordinary interest for disciplines such as Geology, Paleogeography, Geomorphology and Paleontology.

This course examines the history of sex and gender in nineteenth and twentieth century England and Wales. We will explore the rich and varied lived experiences of British men and women using a wide range of primary sources, including written discourse, speeches, photographs, novels, and film. The course proceeds in a predominantly chronological fashion with case studies of key groups interspersed throughout. We will trace changes in the representations and expectations of sex and gender from the Enlightenment to the present day.

An intensive field course in Panama focused on tropical coastal biology and environmental issues. The course will integrate biology of 3 distinctive coastal habitats/biomes (coral reefs, mangroves, and seagrass meadows) and consider relevant human environmental issues on global and local scales. The course will be offered in Panama at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s (STRI’s) Bocas Research Station (BRS), located on Isla Colon along the northwestern Caribbean coast of that country. All of these habitats are abundantly present within minutes to ½ hour boat ride.

This course aims to provide students with an understanding of how cinema and culture ‘construct’ ideas about gender and sexuality and of how these ideas become meaningful to audiences through media representations.We will examine some of the narrative and aesthetic procedures that have been used to construct different forms of masculinity and femininity by considering, for example, questions of genre, point of view and mise en scène.

This course offers the opportunity for students to learn and practice the correct pronunciation of Spanish with the aim of obtaining greater security and confidence in interacting on a daily basis with Spanish-speakers.  More specifically, the course focuses on teaching students basic concepts of phonetics, spelling and intonation of Spanish with the aim for them to be able to identify and reproduce both oral and written versions of all the phonemes of the Spanish language.In the Spring Semester this course is offered in Block B.

Students will study the current special education system in Mexico, be provided and will teach in publicly funded school programs for students with disabilities with the support of locally interpreters. Before departure students will prepare lesson plans and all teaching materials necessary to implement their lesson plans in Spanish.