First-Year Courses
This course develops students' understanding of diversity and will build that understanding through the production of creative work relating to media art that is focused on gender and sexuality. Looking at the different ways that people express their gender and sexuality using media - including but not limited to: video and film, digital media, images, analog media, etc. - this course surveys the diverse ways that people express their sexuality and gender through creative expressions that are also connected to social change, resistance, and difference. Surveying a wide range of queer and feminist media, the course asks students to examine the relationship between gender, sexuality and colonialism, race and racialization, ethnicity, globalization, religion, and nationalism through the formats of creative expression. The course draws heavily on building creative assignments on topics relating to gender and sexuality, including self-reflexive projects that ask students to think about their own relationship to these categories through creative mediums. Class assignments are designed to connect analytic tools from readings and class analysis of media objects to the creative process of making media art works. Students will also create art works in the class, such as making their own animated GIF, a performance video, and a final media project, all paired with reflexive writing assignments.
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Empires dominate and control resources over broad geographical areas, establishing systems (administrative, religious, and intellectual) to perpetuate and justify that control. The course will survey the archaeological remains of the principal empires of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, emphasizing both the modes of control and the themes or messages used to justify it.
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We will explore the arts - painting, sculpture, architecture, and the decorative arts - that flourished in Italy between 1250 and 1590. The renaissance is one of the great epochs of western culture; this course offers an introduction to the visual evidence that reveals the development of new attitudes about human life and its meaning. Emphasis will be on works of those revolutionary individuals who transformed the arts - Giotto, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Bellini, titian, and Palladio, to name only the most important.
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This course is an introduction to the social, political, and artistic issues surrounding the creation and interpretation of public monuments and public art. We will focus on our local urban environment, particularly the rich collection of works in and around Oakland, but we will also put these local works in larger national and global contexts. The course emphasizes hands-on learning, through multiple site visits, encounters with the works of art in their real urban contexts, and individual and group exercises building on these encounters.
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This course will introduce students to American painting, sculpture, and architecture, with an emphasis on painting, from the colonial period to the post-World War II era. Students will also learn the vocabulary of visual analysis and become familiar with the scope of art historical methodology. Students should leave the class with a broad understanding of the contexts in which American artists worked, a fund of information about artists and monuments of art in the American heritage, skills in visual analysis, and the capability to focus several types of critical questions.
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The famous Chinese landscape painter named Kuo Hsi of the Song Dynasty (960-1126) asked, "Why the virtuous man takes delight in landscapes?" He reasoned that contemplation of a painting of landscape could refresh the mind and heart in as compelling a fashion as wandering among the mountains themselves. The Chinese landscape painter who in his pictures satisfies this longing depicts not merely the outward and visible forms of nature, but the inner life and harmony that pervade them. This course attempts to discover the sources of the symbolic language.
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This course will introduce students to the field of Exercise Science and its related professions. This course is intended for those students considering Exercise Science and its related professions as an academic major and for career placement. This course will involve exposure to the history and contemporary opportunities within Exercise Science that will involve both lecture and applied experiences.
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The greatest part of the first term will be devoted to the presentation and practice of the basic sound patterns of the language, its fundamental sentence patterns, and sufficient vocabulary to illustrate and practice them. An introduction to the writing system will be offered together with the opportunity to acquire elementary writing and reading skills.
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This class will examine how Britain came to Ireland and why in the context of that period (16th and 17th centuries). It will also examine the very complex relationships between the Catholic church and the British crown in the 17th century, as these relationships played a great role in the Cromwellian era. This will lead us to the heart of the class where we will trace the very complex relationship between modern Irish republicanism and Cromwell.
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The causes of WW II are surveyed, including World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascist regimes. The determinants of German expansionism will be discussed and related to the outbreak of war in 1939. The military struggle receives attention, but such topics as economic mobilization, propaganda, occupation policies, resistance movements and the Holocaust are also discussed. The course concludes with an analysis of war time diplomacy, the Postwar settlement, and the onset of the Cold War.
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This course is devoted to the exploration of the historical experience of the lands between Germany and Russia from the time the region was first settled by Nomadic tribes to the present. During these one thousand years Eastern Europe was transformed from feudalism to communism and our emphasis will be to understand the ways in which the interaction of social, economic, intellectual, cultural, demographic and political processes contributed to this metamorphosis.
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This course introduces major themes in the history of East Asia. It analyzes the relationships between East Asian thought systems; political, economic, and social institutions; and foreign influences for the purpose of understanding the forces that shaped the East Asian tradition. The course focuses on how this distinctive tradition produced two very different societies in China and Japan.
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The history of the war, 1937-1945, between Japan on the one hand and China, the United States, the soviet union and great Britain on the other. The course stresses the ideological, economic, political, social, diplomatic and military forces in those five countries, and how these forces led to a disastrous war beginning in the late 1930s. The course concludes with a discussion of the allied occupation of Japan and Japan's postwar recovery.
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History of the Latin American republics from independence, in 1825, to the present.
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