In this course, we explore Africa's recent events, predicaments, and accomplishments. We learn how late nineteenth-century colonialism, anti-colonial resistance, nationalism, independence, modernization, post-colonialism, and neo-colonialism have affected and shaped modern Africa. One way to try to understand the reality of modern Africa is to see multiple aspects of that reality through the eyes of Africans themselves as well as through the eyes of outside observers. We thus turn to writers, scholars, and filmmakers to gain a critical understanding of Africa's historical and contemporary events and experiences.

*Offered on Durham Campus

This interdisciplinary course begins with the Ming dynasty in China and the Ashikaga Shogunate in Japan. A major focus of this course is the experience of East Asian societies as they confront internal challenges and Western colonizers. Primary texts include Zen parables, Kenko's “Essays in Idleness,” Basho's poetry, Journey to the West, Dream of the Red Chamber, and Outlaws of the Marsh. The second part of the course presents a radically changed and dynamic landscape. We explore the upheavals of the early twentieth century, including the world wars and revolutionary restructuring of East Asian politics and societies. We explore the significance of modernism and postmodernism in contemporary Asian cultural expressions with an emphasis on the cartoon visions found in manga and anime. Texts may include Kawabata's Snow Country or Tanizaki's Naomi, manga and anime, writings of Mao Zedong, CCP propaganda posters, Ai Wei Wei's art, kung fu and samurai film clips, and Zhang Yimou’s To Live. The class consists of a creative mix of lectures, discussions, and verbal and written analyses of moving and still images. Students continue to develop their writing skills by writing academic and interpretive essays on interdisciplinary topics as well as creative works that emulate East Asian genres. Students also collaborate on projects where they produce their own artwork (such as kung fu and samurai film scripts reflecting East Asian geopolitical realities, visual depictions of futuristic dystopias drawing from techno-Orientalist stereotypes, etc.) to demonstrate their understanding of East Asian cultures and accomplishments.

*Offered on Durham Campus

Asian American and Pacific Islander people are playing an ever-increasing role in shaping American society. These diverse peoples are complexly connected to more than fifty cultures and societies, including but not limited to the Pacific Islands and South, Southeast, Western, and East Asia. This interdisciplinary course addresses key themes in Asian American history and considers many different kinds of Asian American texts, including novels, poetry, plays, short stories, film, pop culture, primary historical texts, and interdisciplinary scholarship. Through these texts and more, students will explore how Asian Americans navigate the challenges, privileges, and possibilities that they experience at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, indigeneity, and new forms of belonging and identity in a global age. In the face of stereotypes, racism, violence, militarization, and multiple forms of colonialism and empire, how do Asian Americans nevertheless affirm their identities, enjoy their lives, and act with integrity and agency?

*Offered on Durham Campus

This course explores Latin American literature and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries through short stories, novels, essays, poetry, music, and film. Much of the cultural production from this time period blurs the borders of reality in response to societal fears and tensions related to political violence, racism, and misogyny. We will use this framing to explore genres and techniques such as magical realism, the gothic, the fantastic, science fiction, and the supernatural as we work our way through Latin American modernism, the “Boom” of the 1960s and 70s, the post-boom, and the contemporary literary landscape. We will also pay particular attention to how writers are experimenting with language to develop new forms. In addition to movies such as Argentina, 1985 and Roma and music by artists such as Rita Indiana, Selena, and Calle 13, authors of study may include Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Rosario Castellanos, Julio Cortázar, Ámparo Dávila, Julián Delgado Lopera, Mariana Enriquez, Gabriel García Márquez, Rita Indiana, Wingston González, Clarice Lispector, Valeria Luiselli, Fernanda Melchor, Mónica Ojeda, and Mayra Santos Febres. Much of the literature we read in this class is highly original and experimental, sometimes wildly so. Developing the skills and confidence required to read, think about, discuss, and make sense of complex and rich texts is a central concern of this course.

*Offered on Morganton Campus

This course explores the emergence of the modern world, the modern self, and the modern state, along with revolutions in politics, literature, philosophy, and the visual arts that lead to a culture of alienation in which individual selves increasingly feel themselves to be alone, even in the midst of oceans of humanity in cities of dizzying size. We begin with phenomenon of self-fashioning, not only in characters like Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, who barters his soul for knowledge, or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who finds himself imprisoned in the private spaces of his mind, but with self-fashioning in religion with the Reformations of the sixteenth century and in revolutionary changes in the visual arts and architecture. Readings from Montaigne, Galileo, and others point the way toward a subjectively constituted, demystified world. Topics include the emergence of secular philosophy in Descartes and Locke; the origins of modern theories of the social contract in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; and Romanticism, with its emphasis on the world of feeling. We encounter the alienating world of industrial culture, and new theories about nature and history in Marx and Darwin. We examine Modernism in all its forms—in psychology, in narrative, in the visual arts and architecture, in social planning, and in cinema. We also examine the impact of world wars, globalism, the newest versions of cultural imperialism, and the modern world's obsessions with self and self-revelation, and the attendant culture of celebrity. Readings include Rousseau, the English Romantics, Darwin, Marx, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud, Thomas Mann, Heidegger, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett as well as contemporary writers as various as Patti Smith and Donna Tartt. Grades are based on a series of essays and on class participation. In WECS, we use the essay as a tool of thought as we write and discuss our way to knowledge.

*Offered on Durham Campus

This is a course for students who get excited about language, who feel compelled to copy down poems and song lyrics in the pages of their journal, who find language the most natural form of expression. In this introduction to the composition and reading of creative writing, students will build a solid foundation for the craft of writing in multiple genres. To learn about the current field, students discuss a wide range of contemporary creative writing by “reading like a writer”—gleaning writing lessons from mentor texts and practicing those lessons in their own work. In addition to reading creative works, students ponder theoretical and historical questions of creative writing: How does cultural bias impact what readers consider ‘good writing’? How do genre conventions evolve, and what does it mean to work outside traditional genres? Students work individually on assignments, discuss readings as a class, and collaborate with peers in workshops where burgeoning writers encounter an affirming and constructive audience for their work. Assignments focus on developing the tools for writing in many genres and styles, along with developing the habits to enable the generation of ideas, the ability to trust intuition, the construction of narrative and image, and the process of revision. To give back to the writer’s community, students may also write book reviews or conduct interviews with authors. A final project, either a portfolio or longer work, is accompanied by a critical reflection that asks students to identify their influences and aesthetics. By the end of this course, students will have both a polished portfolio of their best work and the skills to engage deeply in a creative process that results in powerful writing.

*Offered on Durham & Morganton Campuses

In A Room of One’s Own, after realizing that there was nothing known about women or women writers before the eighteenth century, Virginia Woolf wrote, “Let me imagine, since the facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.” In this course, we will continue Woolf’s efforts in understanding the struggles of women’s literature and women in literature both in the past and present. The course content covers the literatures of women globally, with a broad focus on various genres and periods, and provides literary, historical, and sociological context for women’s writing. Throughout the semester, we will engage with literature from diverse cultural backgrounds to explore the interdiscursivity of womanhood and identify connections between movements for women’s rights. Our conversations will include themes such as the origins of women’s writing, literary traditions, the history of subordination, the clash of cultural identities and womanhood, the dynamics of gendered oppression, transgenerational relations of women, trauma narratives and narrative strategies, and social class issues. To unfold the women’s history of ideas and literatures, we will read both theoretical and creative works by authors, such as Sappho, Lady Murasaki, Virginia Woolf, Anna Julia Cooper, Zabel Yessayan, Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, Fatima Mernissi, Urmila Pawar, Elif Shafak, and others. Students will demonstrate what they learn through interpretive writing assignments and creative projects. The course will also include presentations and online discussion forums.

*Offered on Morganton Campus

In her 2010 poem, "What Can I Say," Mary Oliver wrote, “Take your busy heart to the art museum and the / chamber of commerce / but take it also to the forest.” Five years later, Oxford University Press removed from its Junior Dictionary 50 words related to nature. Words such as “acorn," “clover,” and “heron” were replaced by “blog," “broadband," and “cut and paste." In our precarious time of climate change, disconnection from nature, and environmental violence, perhaps we should all contemplate and be in forests more, so that we may consider the power of an acorn. Using literary and historical texts as the primary guides, this course will explore a variety of relationships between humans and the natural world. Students will engage with poems, essays, novels, and other primary and secondary texts to consider how we conceive, construct, and fulfill our relationships to the natural world and how heritage and culture impact humans' relationships with the environment. We will also explore the history and politics of environmental protection and sustainability within several crucial frames, including those of race, class, and gender. We will examine impacts of colonization on land management policies and the reemergence of Indigenous practices with land, water, and food systems management. The course will include regular experiential learning opportunities in nearby natural spaces.

*Offered on Durham Campus

From “[W]hat do I want with golden, woven fancies? Black is my wear!” in Medea to “I, Oedipus, whom all men call the great” in Oedipus Rex, so much of our modern stage and screen remains rooted in the development of drama in Greece’s Golden Age. This course, Greek Drama and Performance, will undertake two primary aims: 1) an academic aim to immerse ourselves in a chronological study of Greek dramas from Aeschylus to Aristophanes to see the rapid development of theater in Greece’s Golden Age and in so doing better understand Greek culture from the time and 2) a performance aimed to showcase these ancient, yet extremely relevant, texts through multiple public performances. This course entails careful attention to close reading, critical thinking, and writing as well as performance considerations such as costuming, ideating props, and script production. Students will demonstrate their learning through written assignments, a final exam, and their participation in two Greek tragedies and a Greek comedy in public performance.

*Offered on Morganton Campus

Science fiction doesn’t predict the future, but it can help shape it. Good science fiction, in the words of Philip K. Dick, takes a new idea and makes it “intellectually stimulating to the reader. . . . It unlocks the reader’s mind so that that mind, like the author’s, begins to create. Thus science fiction is creative and it inspires creativity.” In this course, we will follow a series of writers and filmmakers as they attempt to unlock our minds and open them to the potentialities and problems of artificial general intelligence. As scientists around the world work to enhance machine learning capabilities and as figures ranging from Elon Musk to Henry Kissinger warn of the dangers of AI, this course will look to science fiction as a laboratory of ideas, one in which creative minds ask us to consider a number of different ways that AI is and could transform our society. Students will thus be asked, and generate their own answers to, a variety of questions that will accompany the development of general intelligence. Such questions include: How will researchers know when they have actually created a general intelligence? Will it be sentient? If so, what rules and laws should govern our treatment of AI, or AI’s treatment of humanity? What’s the difference between a human and algorithm trained to perfectly mimic that human’s speech patterns? Can AI make art? And do androids dream of electric sheep? In this class, we will explore the answers our most imaginative artists have come up with to those questions.

*Offered on Durham Campus

This course explores twentieth-century philosophy, literature, the visual arts, and the thematic ties that bind them together. After the mid-1840s, in both texts and images, painters, literary artists, and philosophers increasingly present the self as inherently unstable, reality as a construction, history as a fiction, and the universe as random and chaotic. We read Kierkegaard, who believed that escape from despair lay in taking a “leap” into an “absolute beginning,” and Nietzsche, who embraced an ecstatic vision of the self as a product of will and desire. Heidegger, Sartre, Althusser, Baudrillard, and Deleuze provide other perspectives on the self as a freely constructed project. In painting, we trace the retreat from the Real in artists like Picasso and Matisse, and the longing to reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary in Magritte—a desire that is pervasive in the novels of Virginia Woolf. Literary texts may include Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, Marguerite Duras' Hiroshima Mon Amour, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Samuel Beckett's Company, along with readings in Sartre, Woolf, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Gertrude Stein, and Donna Tartt. Films include Ingmar Bergman's Kierkegaardian Winter Light and Woody Allen's Dostoevskian Crimes and Misdemeanors. Classes are conducted as seminars, with group discussions, background lectures, and presentations. Grades are based on a series of comparative essays and on class participation.

*Offered on Durham Campus

If “it's wanting to know that makes us matter,” as Tom Stoppard suggests in Arcadia, then it's little wonder that the endeavors of STEM fields to understand the mysteries of our universe have proven such fertile ground for dramatists. In this page-to-stage course, we examine how theatrical art wrestles with the implications and repercussions of STEM discoveries to explore larger questions of our humanity, purpose, and meaning. In addition to plays that include Life of Galileo, Copenhagen, and Arcadia, we consider a range of historical, literary, and scholarly texts that inform and contextualize these works. Through close reading, we strengthen our communication skills by analyzing and critiquing the way an author orients a lay audience to complex STEM concepts and connects them to larger thematic ideas. In a broader sense, our chief concern is to investigate how the efforts of science, mathematics, and the humanities to explain our world intersect, inform, and challenge one another—how in mapping the stars, we might also map our hearts and minds. Creative, stage-related projects and formal academic writing assignments provide substantial opportunities for students to experiment with their own ideas and demonstrate their learning throughout the course.*

*Offered on Durham Campus

This interdisciplinary course introduces students to the rigorous pleasures of research in the humanities. Through work in and out of class, including visits by guest lecturers and trips to local archives and museums, students learn the basic skills of research, including the identification of a compelling intellectual interest and the transformation of that interest into a question that at once requires and excites research of the highest quality. Students then answer this question, in a provisional way, by work that leads first to the statement of a thesis (the answer to the question), then to the initial development of that statement in a shorter paper of ten to twelve pages. Successful completion of the course may also lead to summer research, internships, or apprenticeships with local scholars. Following this course, optional enrollment in EN4610 Research in the Humanities offers selected students the opportunity for more substantial work in their chosen fields of scholarship.

*Offered on Durham & Morganton Campuses

“Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage.” – Victor Kiam. This course provides the necessary background material and a structured opportunity for students with ideas for products or services to bring their ideas from conception to market through this real-life activity of entrepreneurship. A thematic focus for the products or services is announced each year. Students submit their thematically-related ideas to a proposal evaluation committee which reviews the applications and selects the student teams for that year's course. Students then learn and apply the steps involved in marketing their ideas including market analysis, business plan development, and presentation to potential investors.

*Offered on Durham Campus

The experiences of immigrants to this “nation of immigrants” have a profound influence on our nation’s history and on the development of what it means to be an American. Immigration patterns and policy play key roles in these experiences, However, the United States has a fraught relationship with its own immigration history and remains divided about immigration policy. In this course, we examine 20th and 21st-century public policy and how political decisions affect and reflect the realities faced by immigrants, particularly immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. In addition, by reading fiction by authors including Chimamanda Adichie, Fae Myenne Ng, Yuri Herrera, Valeria Luiselli, and Neel Patei, we examine how stories tell personal as well as political truths about the immigrant experience. By collecting oral histories from friends, family, and community members, students will contribute to current scholarship on immigration and will create work that can be contributed to the University of Minnesota immigration archive.

*Offered on Durham Campus 

Black Studies implements an interdisciplinary format to examine the cultural, political, and economic development of Black America. The course begins with the African Diaspora and culminates with the rise of Hip Hop culture. On one hand, the course examines a long history of white supremacy in Anglo-American thought and action that exploited black labor and delegitimized black lives. On the other hand, the course interrogates Black America's persistent fight for full citizenship and cultural autonomy—a domestic crusade that draws strength and meaning from anti-colonial struggles abroad. Students will continually ask: What defines "whiteness" and "blackness"? What functions do racial classifications serve? Overall, students locate the origins and development of the conflicts and commonalities at the heart of the Black American experience.

*Offered on Durham & Morganton Campuses

This course introduces the interdisciplinary field of American Indian and Indigenous Studies and explores some of the diverse Native cultures, knowledge systems, histories, and research methods that make the field a dynamic and increasingly popular area of research. The course will explore the perspectives of Native peoples through literature, film, oral tradition, academic scholarship, and material culture. Using these expressions, students will analyze the significance of topics including land, community, sovereignty, treaty rights, self-determination, and environmental justice. Through research and reflection, students will leverage Native perspectives to unpack dominant historical narratives that facilitate settler colonialism and stereotypes of Native people that permeate popular portrayals. By the end of the course, students will apply interdisciplinary American Indian and Indigenous Studies research methods and analysis to examine a contemporary issue or topic that resonates with their interests.

*Offered on Durham Campus 

When you think about "technology" you probably don't think about the humanities, but inventions from the alphabet and the printing press to the internet browser, apps, and e-readers are all technologies that have shaped not only what and how we read but how we think. In the twenty-first century, texts and technologies are inextricably intertwined. Computational data analysis, topic modeling, GIS mapping, and data visualization give us more tools with which to explore the rich field of humanities, as we strive to understand what it means to be humans who read, write, interpret, and share texts. In Digital Humanities, students learn and apply a wide variety of computing methods and tools to the study of literature, history, art, and other subjects in the humanities and social sciences. A main feature of the course is the opportunity for students to apply these methods and tools to explore their own interests and areas of inquiry in a culminating research project. Digital Humanities lies at the intersection of the study of the humanities—literature and language, history, economics, psychology, sociology, and the arts—with the technologies, techniques, and tools of computational science.

*Offered on Morganton Campus

In its statement on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the World Economic Forum claimed that we are entering “a new chapter in human development, enabled by extraordinary technology advances” “merging the physical, digital and biological worlds in ways that create both huge promise and potential peril.” Since data-driven AI and deep learning models are at the forefront of this revolution, what ethical implications do they have for individuals and societies? How should we conduct our lives in a world of dataveillance without sacrificing human dignity, autonomy, and fair allocation of resources? Can we develop agency in creating and shaping narratives with our own data? What is data sovereignty, and how can it be achieved by impacted groups and communities? This course will use an interdisciplinary humanities lens to engage students in exploring moral dilemmas posed by Big Data in the age of AI. It will address the pressing need to connect the technical aspects of this industrial revolution to issues of social justice. Students will explore broad theoretical frameworks of ethics and apply them to real-world cases embedded in the different stages of the data-to-knowledge cycle. We will investigate a wide variety of diverse resources that may include Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, Joy Buolamwini’s activism in the Algorithmic Justice League, Chris Wiggins and Matthew Jones’s history of data science, and international initiatives of the Alan Turing Institute; conduct independent project-based research; and collaborate on creative interpretations of data visualization. Students will gain a better understanding of how to become educated participants in the global data economy, ethically-grounded creators of future AI-based technologies, and responsible citizens in a datafying world.

*Offered on Morganton Campus

Filmmaker Orson Welles once said, “A film is a ribbon of dreams. The camera is much more than a recording apparatus; it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world that is not ours and that brings us to the heart of a great secret. Here magic begins.” In a culture that increasingly relies on visual information, a comprehension of how meaning grows out of the moving image is essential. This course is a historical and critical survey of the motion picture both as a developing art form and as a medium of mass communication. The course entails systematic analysis of how filmmakers use sound and image to tell stories on the screen. Students view selected films as case studies to understand the relationship between theory and practice in filmmaking. Through explorations of the historical, social, and political dimensions of filmmaking, students learn to read and write more effectively, to look at the world with a critical eye, and most importantly, to develop a critical audio-visual literacy. Students demonstrate what they have learned through analytical writing assignments. The course may also include individual or group projects, presentations, creative writing, or short exercises in filmmaking.

*Offered on Durham Campus

Erich Maria Remarque composed his famous novel All Quiet on the Western Front to “try and tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.” World War I, what those who lived through it called “The Great War,” destroyed not only tens of millions of human lives but also the entire European worldview of the 19th century. The war was the first in which the combatant nations fully mobilized their societies in a “total war” in which industrialism and machines dominated the conflict. The war fundamentally altered the geopolitics of the modern world, spelling the beginning of the end of European colonialism and the rise of American global power. It also drastically changed how we understand the world around us. From the metaphors we use (“over the top”; “no man’s land”) to the shape of literature and philosophy, to our understanding of the roles of nationalism, rationalism, and science, the war’s impact on global culture has been profound and continues to the present day. Beginning with a study of the war itself, this course will explore the lasting geo-political, literary, cultural, and philosophical impacts of the war on our lives today. Sources will include histories of the conflict as well as the poetry, literature, and philosophical and cultural artifacts. A century after it ended, we are still living with The Great War’s legacy.

*Offered on Morganton Campus

Topics in Humanities: History of Science will explore the historical transformation of our understanding of the natural world by highlighting select paradigm shifts or scientific revolutions of the past five hundred years. After a brief survey of global scientific traditions and their spread around the pre-modern world, we will focus on various case studies that will allow us to answer questions such as: How did the discovery of the Americas and revival of classical learning transform our understanding of the natural world? How did science become a social and collective enterprise? How did new ideas about the origins of man and the antiquity of the Earth lead to social and intellectual change? How did the modern connections between science and business develop in mid-twentieth century California? We will end the course by exploring issues like Global Warming, Nuclear Winter and tobacco smoking that illuminate the intersections of political and scientific controversy.

*Offered on Morganton Campus

In critically examining our own minds we will distinguish several basic mental activities. Most basic is INTUITING as looking at or beholding any sensate thing, and even as contemplating mathematical truths or meaning expressed in images or symbols. SUFFERING is also a basic mental activity, as a being subjected to wide ranges of experience and feeling, as presupposed for knowing how another is feeling and even for recognizing and responding to irony and jokes. DREAMING is meaningful lived experience while sleeping, AESTHETIC SENSE is perception of beauty, and ETHICAL AWARENESS is perception of “ought” as “not is,” as presupposing some degree of freedom. Earliest in life is APPERCEPTION as an infant’s experience of being looked at, by mother, as a continuity of being. Even EXPERIENCING NONSENSE may be creative. THINKING is grasping a manifold into a concept; JUDGING is joining concepts into a statement; REASONING is putting statements together logically; AI as computer logic depends on and expresses these three mental acts. In this course, we will read and discuss original texts describing mind: Plato on recollection; Aristotle on cause; Augustine on time; Anselm on belief; Descartes and Leibniz on thinking; Kant and Husserl on intending awareness; Winnicott on apperception; Mme de Condorcet and Mme de Lambert on feeling. Six two-page papers, one class presentation, no final exam.

*Offered on Durham Campus

An interdisciplinary introduction to the field of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, this course explores feminist perspectives on intersecting inequalities. Topics include: work and labor; sexuality and sexual identity; gender relations; images of women and gender in literature, science and technology, religion, and art; family structures and domestic roles; and the history of feminist struggles. Course readings are drawn from the humanities and the social sciences. We will use discussion, lecture, film, reading, written texts, and popular culture to help students continue to develop their skills in reading, critical thinking, writing, presenting, and working collaboratively with their peers to answer questions such as: How do the experiences of women and other subordinated groups help us to understand gender norms, identity categories, and sexuality? How might one perform, analyze, interrogate, and challenge what has been constructed as “normal” in contemporary western culture? This class explores a multitude of feminist perspectives on the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, physical ability, nationality, age and other categories of identity. Students will interrogate these categories as socially-constructed while acknowledging that these constructions have real effects in subordinating groups, marking bodies and creating structural, intersectional inequalities.

*Offered on Durham & Morganton Campuses

AP Psychology introduces students to the systematic and scientific study of the behavior and mental processes of human beings. We explore a range of issues, concerns, and specialties in psychology. Initially, we spend a considerable amount of time discussing the psychological perspective and the role of theory and research in psychology. Then we move into an in-depth study of key components of psychology. We learn about some of the explorations and discoveries made by psychologists over the past century, and we compare, contrast, and assess some of the differing approaches adopted by psychologists, including biological, behavioral, cognitive, humanistic, psychodynamic, and sociocultural perspectives. Most importantly, we come to an understanding and appreciation of how psychologists think and the kind of critical analyses of human behavior that psychologists espouse and model in their words and actions. This course prepares students for the AP Psychology exam.

*Offered on Durham Campus

This course offers students an opportunity for immersion in a fascinating discipline and in logical thinking. This immersive process involves an introduction to general economic theory and more specific macroeconomic theory. Graphical analysis will play a major role in understanding the relationship between economic variables. The course will frequently consider international applications and scenarios while studying macroeconomic topics such as productivity measurement, fiscal and monetary policy, interest rates, inflation, and unemployment. Students pursue these topics through case studies or strategic problems involving national macroeconomic policies for a globalized marketplace environment. Thus, the curriculum content and processes of analyses are organized around holistic, ill-structured, real-world "problems,” and case studies. These experiences are designed to be of an integrated and multi-layered nature and provide opportunities to discover and apply the microeconomics concepts from our readings and discussions. In taking this consciously constructivist approach, we integrate other disciplines into the study of macroeconomics. Elements from the fields of psychology, history, political science, and mathematics all have roles to play as we propose resolutions to our macroeconomic problems and case studies.

*Offered on Durham Campus