Spring 2026 Course Offerings

Elizabeth Barrios 
3 credits. 
Spring 2026
Thursday 11:15am-1:45pm

Plastics are a staple of everyday life. Yet, the oil and petrochemicals that make them possible remain largely out of sight. Their afterlife either as microplastics inside our bodies, or as trash that will take centuries to decompose, are subjects of fear and avoidance. This course explores why plastics are everywhere, how they affect our societies and cultures, and how artists, thinkers, and activists across North and South America are working to imagine alternatives to a life dependent on plastics and other petrochemicals.

Also COML 4713/6713

Leif Weatherby
3 Credits
Spring 2026
Tuesdays 11:15am-1:45pm

This course compares narrative method and statistical modeling historically, teaching the history of predictive data techniques from the 19th century to the present while reading short-form literature – Aesop, Gogol, Dickinson – to compare the stories the numbers tell to narrative itself. The intent is to illuminate the rhetorical forms that prediction uses while studying the development of its quantitative techniques.

Ernesto Bassi
3 credits
Spring 2026
M 11:15am-1:45pm 

This seminar will introduce students to some of the classic and more recent works that have allowed historians to re-think geographical and temporal scales, paying particular attention to the definitions, possibilities, and limitations of microhistory, world history, global history, and big history and the multiple geographical scopes of regional histories. We will start by analyzing how historians have thought about scale as a useful tool to recast grand historical narratives, before moving to readings that offer critical takes on how microhistory, world history, and global history have been defined and used. We will then read a variety of case studies that have productively played with scale to uncover worlds that tended to be eclipsed by approaches that favored national or conventional area studies frameworks.

Michell Chresfield
3 credits
Spring 2026
Tuesdays, 2-4:30pm

Race is but one of many ways that we classify ourselves and others as we navigate the world. But what role has science, technology, and medicine played in shaping our understanding of race as both a concept and aspect of our personal identity? This course investigates how ideas about race have been constructed and deployed at various scales in both social and scientific contexts. Students will trace the historical production of racial meaning from the 18th century to the present, exploring topics such as: individual projects of racial self-fashioning, national projects of technological racial surveillance, and even global networks of genomic data. Rather than focusing solely on scientific authority, this course will underscore how marginalized communities have challenged scientific scrutiny and engaged as co-producers of racial knowledge.

Shaoling Ma
3 Credits
Spring 2026
Tuesdays 2:00-4:30pm

Labor is a universal human activity that orders societal hierarchies and determines value. Cinema and television, by zooming in and out of labor paid or unpaid, masculine or feminine, tedious or pleasurable, individual or collective, manual or intellectual, variously highlight the dual nature of work and workers as scaled objects on screen, and scaling agents off screen. This course introduces students to North American, European, and Asian films and television series that raise questions about what it means to work, and how work has shaped the way we think about time, space, identities, and social relations.