This semester, students can analyze popular films, study Shakespearean plays, and learn programming for Droid applications as the University offers a variety of new courses for the fall. The last day to register for fall classes is August 28. For more information about registration, click here.
USTU 1999
Title: College Movies
Dr. H. Lyn White Miles, 425-4440, Tuesday 3:00 – 3:50 p.m., Brock 403
Description: College students watch and discuss feature films with themes about college life, and relate them to their own experiences. Films include Animal House, School Daze, Rudy, The Social Network, Legally Blonde, and Accepted. Popcorn optional.
CPSC 4999 and 5910
Title: Group Studies & Special Topics
Katherine Winters, 425-4378, Thursday 12:15 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
These courses offered at the undergraduate and graduate level will explore mobile computing and will concentrate on Droid programming. We will explore current issues in mobile computing including security issues as well as develop a Droid application. Some programming experience is necessary.
ENGL 4980
Literature, Commerce, Culture: The Booker Prize and Contemporary Fiction (Senior Seminar)
Dr. Greg O’Dea, 425-4116, Thursdays, 1:40-2:55 p.m.
As a capstone experience for senior English majors, this course considers the culture of literary prizes and the politics of literary competition, taking the prestigious Booker Prize as its primary example. Students will review the 40-year history of the prize, but focus on a few particularly intense, instructive prize years that help define the idea of literature as a commercial and political commodity. Students will read novels by Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day), Martin Amis (Time’s Arrow), Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient), Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin), Peter Carey (True History of the Kelly Gang), Zoe Heller (Notes on a Scandal), and Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children). By emphasizing research in the popular press, literary scholarship, and marketing campaigns, the course is especially valuable for students of contemporary literature and cultural rhetoric, creative writers, journalists, and more.
ENGL 4970
Title: Hamlet’s Cousins: Renaissance Revenge Tragedy
Dr. Bryan Hampton, 425-2274, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 1-1:50 p.m.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is considered by many to be the finest early modern play. This course seeks to place it within its cultural and literary moment, by examining the genre of Revenge Tragedy. Reading will begin with the Roman playwright Seneca, whose plays influenced the genre in Shakespeare’s day. Hamlet, in its different quarto versions, is the centerpiece of the course, but students will consider Hamlet‘s “cousins,” including Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Chapman’s The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy and The Atheist’s Tragedy, Webster’s White Devil, and Middleton & Rowley’s The Changeling.
ENGL 4870
Title: Environmental Rhetorics
Dr. Joe Wilferth, 425-4621, Tuesday, Thursday, 9:25-10 a.m.
There is a rich literary and rhetorical history in the United States surrounding the subject of nature and the natural environment. The texts that punctuate this history—film, speeches, poetry, essays, letters, works of fiction as well legal treatises and policies—are the focus of this course. This course, focused on uniquely-American conversations about environmental issues, challenges students to read and analyze a variety of texts that fall under the rubric of environmental rhetoric as it invites students to become proficient at analyzing past and current environmental conversations as they read historical documents, as they study environmental organizations and campaigns, and as they read works of fiction and non-fiction to determine how rhetorical patterns within these environmental texts have influenced contemporary thinking about human/nature relationships. Students will read works from writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, Rick Bass, and Terry Tempest Williams.
PSYC 4999
Title: Group Studies: Positive Psychology
Dr. Lynn Ourth, MWF 1:00-1:50 p.m., Holt 124
This course is an evidence-based approach to the positive possibilities in our adult lives. Key words for the course are well-being, meaningfulness, interest, efficacy, positive regard, optimism, flow, love and happiness. The nature, process, effects and sustainability of each of these nine concepts will be studied and applied. Our culture’s regard for these phenomena is mixed; there is a good deal of implicit suspicion of things positive, and a strong belief in the reality and predominance of things negative. This course challenges this self-fulfilling cultural presence. The course process includes topical power-points, key word specialist guest speakers, large and small group discussion and in-class activities.
SPAN 4000
Title: Spanish Modernism & Post-Modernism
Dr. Lynn C. Purkey, 425-4147, BROCK 206, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 2:00 – 2:50 p.m.
UTSM 2010
Title: Knowing and Learning
Dr. Richard L. Metzger, 425-5472, Tuesday and Thursday 9:25 -10:40 a.m.
Psychological foundations of learning; problem solving in mathematics and science education utilizing technology; principles of expertise and novice understanding of subject matter; implications of high stakes testing; and foundations of formative and summative assessment.
UTSM 2020
Title: Classroom Interactions
Dr. Janetta L. Bradley, 425-4789, Monday 2:00 -4:30 p.m.
Principles of delivering effective instruction in various formats (lecture, lab, cooperative settings); examination of gender, class, race, and culture in mathematics and science education; overview of policy related to mathematics and science education.
PHYS 4300
Title: Physics of Living Systems
Dr. Kristin B. Whitson, 425-1766, Tuesday and Thursday, 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
Introduction to basic biophysical processes occurring at the cellular level. Emphasis on energy transformations, and survey of experimental techniques of biophysics.
BIOL 4999
Title: Microscopy
Dr. Ethan Carver, Tuesday/Thursday 9:25-10:40a.m., Holt 305
A comprehensive and intensive course in light microscopy and electron microscopy. This course provides a systematic and in-depth examination of the physics of optics; history, construction and application of light microscopy, and the development of microscopy beyond visible light and light emissions altogether.
BIOL 4999, ESC 4999, ESC 5010
Title: Global Change Biology
Dr. Jennifer Boyd, 425-5638, Tuesday and Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Global change biology is thestudy of interactions between organisms and current environmental changes. It may be considered a sub-discipline of ecology, which is more basically the study of interactions between organisms and their environment. Such interactions work both ways, meaning that the environment influences organisms and that organisms influence their environment. Understanding such interactions currently is very important given the increasing role of human activities in producing unprecedented environmental changes. Although we will focus largely on global climate change in particular, this course will also cover other aspects of global change, including habitat destruction and the availability and quality of the earth’s resources. During class, we will focus on how biological communities in a variety of ecosystems have changed with global environmental change from an historical perspective and how they are projected to change in the future. Specifically, we will investigate the use of various proxies to learn about the earth’s environmental and biological past and discuss various models that are being used to predict the earth’s environmental and biological future.
WSTU 4550
Title: “Secret Agency: Women in Espionage”
Gale Mauk, (425-2535), Time: Wednesday 5:30-8 p.m., Holt 307
This is a new topic for the existing course Topics in Women’s Studies. The course centers upon a fascinating historical fact: that across times, places and cultures, even in societies that openly, aggressively attempt to restrict women to home and hearth, when war threatens, leaders set aside their cherished beliefs about the physical, mental and moral implications of gender and call upon women to risk their lives for God and country without so much as the protection of military status or official acknowledgement.
In the class students will explore the contradictions presented in historical and contemporary religious, scientific and sociological debates about the role of women that coexist with documented cases of extraordinary courage and cunning by actual women engaged in various sorts of espionage. Course covers Civil War to present day.
