Architecture and Urban Design 19, Seminar 1
A City is a Living Thing: Building Digital Cities
Diane Favro
Nothing can supplant the experience of being in a city. Films, stories, paintings, and physical models are mere approximations. How, then, can a scholar study the experience of walking through ancient Rome, of smelling the incense as one approaches a pilgrimage church in Spain, of hearing the bustling sounds in a Jamaican port? Advances in digital technologies have now produced tools for examining urban experience. The UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Lab has modeled dozens of historic environments worldwide. Viewers are able to move through the recreations in real time, studying the effects of changes in lighting, climate, and sounds, as well as evolving physical alterations. Displayed in the state-of-the-art Visualization Portal, such submersive digital environments make it possible for viewers to re-experience the past. Students in this course will explore and evaluate models from diverse periods. Class lectures will provide a framework of analysis by assessing the research and educational value of VR historical models, and theorizing their production.
Diane Favro is a professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design. Her research focuses on Roman architecture and urbanism, methods and pedagogy of architectural history, and women in the profession. Professor Favro's monograph, The Urban Image of Augustan Rome (Cambridge University Press 1996), analyses the symbiotic relationship between physical interventions and conceptual shifts in the imaging of a capital city. Other publications explore Roman municipal legislation, administration, imagery. She was co-editor of Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space (UC Press 1994), for which she also wrote a chapter on the urban impact of Roman triumphal parades. In 1995 she received The Parthena Award for her efforts to promote women and their contributions to the built environment. Currently Professor Favro is associate Director of the UCLA CVR Lab which creates virtual reality computer models of historic environments.
2002-04 Professor Favro served as the elected President of the Society of Architectural Historians.
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Asian 19, Seminar 1
Demystifying East Asian Languages and Cultures
Hongyin Tao
East Asian languages and cultures, as represented chiefly by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, are often presented in the West as inferior, mysterious, or inscrutable. For example, the Chinese character writing system, widely used in Asia, has been labeled a block to modernization, and Chinese and Japanese have been portrayed as unreliable since they say "yes" when they mean "no," and say "no" when they mean "yes." This seminar will expose some of the most commonly held mysteries about East Asian languages and cultures, and will provide balanced viewpoints in understanding the linguistic and cultural characteristics of East Asia.
Hongyin Tao is an Associate Professor of Chinese language and linguistics, and applied linguistics. He specializes in spoken discourse analysis, working primarily with Chinese and English language data. Prior to UCLA, he was a faculty member at the National University of Singapore, and Cornell University.
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Classics 19, Seminar 1
The Emperor and the Slave: The Stoic Philosophy
of Life According to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius
David Blank
How should I live? How can I control my life in a world, which often seems to be against me? Two men of very different backgrounds, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius and the Roman slave Epictetus, shared the same Stoic philosophy, and their answers to these questions have been the subject of much interest recently. Their books are reported to be on the bedside tables of magnates and politicians. Their philosophy of Stoicism has also been revived as a respectable option for the modern philosopher. This seminar will examine the Stoicism of Marcus and Epictetus to understand its principles and to see how satisfactory it would be as a way to govern one's life today. Topics of particular interest will be: knowing what is up to us and what is not; the place of the individual and of moral responsibility in a world ruled by fate; moral virtue
as the sole good; ethical writing and spiritual exercise.
David Blank studies ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy. His particular interests lately have been
in the philosophy of language and in the reconstruction of the papyrus rolls from Herculaneum.
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Comparative Literature 19, Seminar 1
The Short Works of Franz Kafka--or How
the Modern World Works…
Kathleen L. Komar
This seminar will examine the short works of one of the world's most famous authors, Franz Kafka. Kafka has been labeled everything from an existentialist to a realist, from a mystic to a comic. We will look at the implications that Kafka's unique perspective has for our own times. The course will be graded P/NP. A pass will be based on class participation. You must attend and participate in at least 8 of the 10 sessions in order to receive a passing grade. For each class, students will write 3 questions, based on the readings. These questions will help shape our discussion each week. We will also do a good deal of very close reading of some very enigmatic texts.
Kathleen Komar is a professor of Comparative Literature who works primarily in German, American and French literatures. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Komar has published on a wide variety of topics from Romanticism to the present in both American and German literature. Her books include Pattern and Chaos: Multilinear Novels by Dos Passos, Faulkner, Döblin, and Koeppen, and Transcending Angels: Rainer Maria Rilke's "Duino Elegies". She co-edited with Ross Shideler the volume Lyrical Symbols and Narrative Transformations. A recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1989.
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Comparative Literature 19, Seminar 2
Women Warriors: Amazons and Others from
Ancient Greece to Modern Times
Katherine King
Using art as well as literature, we will first look at the society of Amazons as imagined by ancient Greek cultures. We will next, for comparison, examine women warrior figures from some other cultures, mainly through literature. Finally, we will analyze the women warrior in modern American culture, through literature, film and television.
Katherine Callen King is professor of Comparative Literature and Classics. She also teaches in the Women's Studies program and the Honors Collegium. She received a Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992.
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English 19, Seminar 1
Hoffmann's Golden Pot and Tales of Madness
Frederick Burwick
Hoffmann's tales of hallucination and delusion are so detailed that even Freud made use of them as "case studies." In this seminar, attention will be given to five of Hoffmann's weird tales of hallucinatory experience and the breakdown of "normal" behavior. Emphasis will be given to the ways in which Hoffmann's characters become entrapped in their own fantasies, how they confound the real and the imaginary, and whether they manage to regain sanity.
Frederick Burwick is a Professor in the Department of English. With an interdisciplinary approach to literature, he explores the interactions of literature with art, science, music, and theater. Author and editor of twenty five books, one hundred articles and twenty reviews, his research is dedicated to problems of perception, illusion, and delusion in literary representation and theatrical performance. His essay, Edgar Allan Poe: The Sublime and the Grotesque, appeared in Prisms (2000), and his book, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (1996) received the Outstanding Book of the Year Award presented by the American Conference on Romanticism. He has been named Distinguished Scholar by both the British Academy (1992) and the Keats-Shelley Association (1998).
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English 19, Seminar 2
Myths, Fairy Tales, and New Worlds of Possibilities
Jenny Sharpe
An examination of the literary rewriting of oral stories, myths, and legends in short fiction from around the world. We will address such topics as the transformation of narrative across space and time, the postmodern rewriting of traditional tales, the magic of modern fairy tales, and the creation of new cultural identities for a modern world. The authors whose short stories we will be reading include Maxine Hong Kingston, Jorge Borges, Jamaica Kincaid, and Salman Rushdie.
Jenny Sharpe is a Professor in the Department of English. She teaches courses on non-Western literatures in English, Comparative Literature, and Afro-American Studies. She is the author of two books, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (1993) and Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archeology of Black Women's Lives (2003).
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English 19, Seminar 3
Epic Heroes and Their Audiences
Joseph Nagy
An examination of heroes and heroines from epic traditions (such as the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh, the Greek Achilles and Odysseus, and the Indian Rama) in terms of their roles as performers and promoters of their own stories. Convergences between the figure of the narrative hero and that of the performer in contemporary cultures (including film) are also to be explored. Among the questions to be asked: to what extent is heroism a performance? Who constitute(s) the audience for which the traditional hero "performs"? Do singers of epic and tellers of heroic tale share in the hero's reputation by perpetuating it?
Joseph Nagy is a professor of English, teaches courses on folklore and mythology, and Celtic Studies; publishes on medieval Celtic literatures and Indo-European mythology.
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English 19, Seminar 4
Revolution, Terrorism, and Joseph Conrad's
"The Secret Agent"
Vincent Pecora
This course will focus on the reading and discussion of Joseph Conrad's novel, The Secret Agent. Published in 1907, the novel is perhaps the first to include a detailed portrait of a terrorist suicide bomber. But the terms "terrorism" and "terrorist" derive from the French Revolution, and so we will begin with a brief look at the fourth of Edmund Burke's Letters on Regicide Peace, one of the earliest texts to use the term "terrorist." We will conclude with a brief look at Carl Schmitt's idea of the state of exception as a response to threats like terrorism.
Vincent Pecora is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Director of the Center for Modern and Contemporary Studies. His most recent book is Nations and Identities: Classic Readings, an anthology of writings about national identity over the last four hundred years. He is currently preparing a book on religion, secularization, and modern culture.
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English 19, Seminar 5
Word Up: The Oral Tradition in African
American Poetry
Richard Yarborough
For decades, the oral tradition was the primary mode of literary expression for blacks in the U.S. With the spread of written literacy, however, the number of African Americans producing fiction, poetry, and autobiographies grew dramatically. Toward the end of the 19th century, black authors began to turn back to oral expression for thematic and formal models, and this trend has continued to the present day. In this seminar, we will consider how African American writers have adapted sermons, folktales, and other vernacular forms in their work and how they drew as well upon black music (specifically, blues, spirituals, and jazz) for inspiration. Although our primary focus will be on Langston Hughes, we will also look at such authors as Nikki Giovanni, Margaret Walker, and Gil Scott-Heron, and at contemporary rap and spoken word poetry.
Richard Yarborough is an Associate Professor of English and a Faculty Research Associate in the Center for African American Studies. Associate general editor of the Heath Anthology of American Literature, he is also the director of Northeastern University Press's Library of Black Literature reprint series. He received UCLA's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1987, and from 1997 through 2001 he served as Director of the Center for African American Studies.
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English 19, Seminar 6
Our Favorite Writers: Conversations
with Contemporary Authors
Mona Simpson
Reading from works of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Lorrie Moore. Attend scheduled readings by authors at the Hammer Museum, then meet with authors and engage in conversations with them about their work. (Special note: The class meets at the UCLA Hammer Museum on five irregular days and times for two hours, beginning First Week. The five meeting dates are: September 30, October 14, November 5, November 18, and December 2. For detail schedule information please refer the Schedule of Classes.
Mona Simpson is the award-winning author of four novels, including Anywhere But Here (1987) and Off Keck Road (2000). Knopf will publish her new novel, My Hollywood, later this year.
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English 19, Seminar 7
The Beautiful, the Grotesque, and the Mundane: Albrecht Durer at Hammer Museum
Jonathan Post
Introduction to works of one of Europe's greatest Renaissance artists, through a selective study of engravings on exhibition at the Hammer Museum.
Jonathan Post, former Chair of the English Department, is a specialist in Renaissance studies, is the author of a number of studies of poetry, and the director of the summer London-Stratford Shakespeare Program.
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Ethnomusicology 19, Seminar 1
Rhythm in World Music
Tara Browner
For many non-music majors taking classes in music, ethnomusicology, and music history, musical terminology relating to rhythm is often abstract rather than meaningful. Using percussion instruments as a performance medium, students engage in an in-depth study of rhythm, timbre, and multi-voiced musical textures. Beginning with basic concepts of pulse and beat, we will add syncopation, polymeter, and polyrhythm, playing different parts on such diverse instruments as conga drums, agogo bells, and ganzas (shakers). No musical experience is necessary, but hand coordination and a willingness to play a variety of instruments (as assigned) are essential.
Tara Browner is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology, and has been playing percussion instruments for over thirty years. Specializing in timpani performance, she has played in such groups as the Sacramento Symphony and Colorado Wind Ensemble. Currently, her interests are in Brazilian percussion-based music (Samba), and she is the faculty advisor for the UCLA student group BatUCLAda.
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Film and Television 19, Seminar 2
Creating a Hollywood Star: Josef von Sternberg
and Marlene Dietrich
Janet Bergstrom
Austrian-American director Josef von Sternberg was one of cinema's great visual stylists. Study of his unique blend of visual and story design as they helped shape a new star, Marlene Dietrich, first in Germany with The Blue Angel, and then in Hollywood, where her gender-bending role in Morocco established her as an international icon. View a beautiful 35mm print of Morocco and learn how it was restored by UCLA Film Archive. Work with DVDs for scene-by-scene study and comparisons with other Dietrich-Sternberg films, and an examination of rare censorship files at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library.
Janet Bergstrom is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film, TV and Digital Media. Her research involves archivally-based studies of European directors who worked in more than one national cinema, such as Jean Renoir, F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, as well as contemporary French/Francophone directors Claire Denis and Chantal Akerman. She published a DVD, Critical Historical Commentary for Murnau's TABU (Milestone 2002; also distributed by Kino), and she made the documentary, Murnau's 4 DEVILS: Traces of a Lost Film as a special feature for the Sunrise DVD (Twentieth Century Fox Films 2003). This documentary has been shown at numerous international festivals during the past year. She is an editor of Film History and was a founding co-editor of Camera Obscura.
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French & Francophone Studies 19, Seminar 1
Africa in a Global Context
Dominic Thomas
This course will focus on important issues in Africa today: genocide, female genital mutilation, conflict diamonds, oil politics, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, AIDS, child soldiers and Africa in the media.
Dominic Thomas is an Associate Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies, and is on the faculty at the African Studies Center. His courses and research focus on contemporary Africa and questions of racism and immigration in Europe. He is the author of Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa.
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French 19, Seminar 2
Sampling French Fiction: Short Stories
from the French-speaking World
Patrick Coleman
Introduction to literature of France and other French-speaking countries. Each week, we read two or three short stories in English translation (no knowledge of French required). We sample both classic French authors such as Balzac, Sartre, and Camus, and contemporary and more experimental writers from such countries as
Haiti, Canada, Algeria, and Senegal. Acquaints students with a broad variety of French fiction writing in the hope they will want to explore the field further on their own.
Patrick Coleman is Professor of French and Francophone Studies and has taught at UCLA since 1975. He is the author or editor of seven books on the literature of France and French Canada. He has also edited three works in translation for the Oxford World's Classics series. He is currently the editor of the journal Québec Studies and serves on the editorial board of Eighteenth-Century Studies.
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Islamic 19, Seminar 1
Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?
Ismail Poonawala
Are Islam and the West on a collision course, as the author of Clash of Civilizations claims? Images of Islam as a militant, fundamentalist, and an anti-American religion, as portrayed by mass media, have gripped the minds of our government. But these monolithic perceptions about Islam stem from a long history of mutual distrust and hostility. In an attempt to dispel the stereotypical images, and to demonstrate the vitality and diversity of Islamic revival, this seminar will examine the West's relationship with Islam from the very beginning.
Ismail K. Poonawala is a Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. His books and articles deal with various aspects of Islam. He also teaches Contemporary Islamic Thought.
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Italian 19, Seminar 1
Cinema and Conscience: Italian Neorealism
Thomas Harrison
A study of one of the most striking bodies of European film, and generally considered the highpoint of Italian cinema, which arose as a reaction to Mussolini's dictatorship and the catastrophe of World War II. We will study a handful of films by Rossellini, De Sica, and others in the context of social and film theory of the age.
Thomas Harrison is a scholar of 20th century Italian and Comparative Literature, as well as cinema. He teaches the annual GE course called Italian Cinema and Culture (Italian 46).
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Music 19, Seminar 1
The Music We Love
Roger Bourland
Each seminar will involve the participants bringing in music to play for the class. The presenter will give a brief background of the artist or performers, their influences, their aesthetic, and any other pertinent information. Finally, the student will discuss what it is that speaks to them in the music. Members in the seminar will be expected to respond to each presentation. The goal will be to become exposed to new music from a variety of genres and aesthetics.
Roger Bourland (Ph.D., Harvard), a Professor in the Department of Music, has composed music for orchestra, wind ensemble, chorus, chamber music, film, theater, dance, and radio, which have been performed throughout North America and Europe. His teachers included Gunther Schuller, John Harbison, Leon Kirchner and Earl Kim. His most recent composition, The Crocodile's Christmas Ball and other Odd Tales for chorus and wind ensemble, was premiered by five groups around the country in December 2002.
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Music History 19, Seminar 1
Staging Race in the American Musical
Raymond Knapp
A consideration of how race and ethnicity have been depicted and embodied on the American musical stage, from blackface minstrelsy and The Mikado to Show Boat, Porgy and Bess, The King and I, West Side Story, and Fiddler on the Roof.
Raymond Knapp is Professor of Musicology, specializing in the symphonic tradition from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and, more recently, in the American Musical, on stage and in film. He is currently working on projects involving Haydn, Beethoven, and the American Musical; the first of two books on the latter subject is due out in Fall 2004.
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Turkic Languages 19, Seminar 1
(Seminar Canceled)
Growing Up in the Imperial Court - 1500
Years Later: Legends about Attila the Hun
Andras Bodrogligeti
At four, playing in the sand, I found his box of petty cash. At eleven, planting trees in the garden, I found the graveyard of his heroes. In junior high school, I found a huge jaw-bone of a Hun warrior. Was it his? These all happened on my father's estate that included the site of Attila's headquarters. Thrilled by the jaw bone, Endre Nagy, my geography teacher and I, decided to find Attila's grave. He suspected that the Hungarian Coman Hills might hide the King's body in a gold casket, inside a bronze casket, inside an iron coffin. I took a different path, and studied Attila's legends for clues to his resting place. Long years later, both of us came up with different but equally exciting discoveries. Using this as background, twelve of Attila's legends will be discussed, and where possible, illustrated from folk literature, Hunnic artifacts, national epics, operas by Wagner and Verdi, and from a recent Hungarian rock opera.
Professor Bodrogligeti, Ph.D., Budapest Iranian and Turkish studies. At UCLA since 1970 (by invitation). UNESCO Fellow:East-West Major Project, IRan, Turkey, Afghanistan. Guggenheim Fellow: The Chagatay Language. For twelve years director of the John D. Soper Central Asia Language Institute. Recent works: A Grammar of Chagatay (2001); The Golden Cycle. John D. Soper Memorial volume, 2003, Academic Reference Grammar of Modern Literary Uzbek (2004)
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Scandinavian 19, Seminar 1
"The Hobbit": Tolkien's View of Good & Evil
in the Community
Jules Zentner
The Hobbit will be read and analyzed in terms of J.R.R. Tolkien's view of the battle between Good & Evil as it affects the world, individuals, and members of communities.
Dr. Zentner received his doctorate from UC Berkeley after doing much of his preparation at the University of Uppsala and the University of Stockhom in Sweden. He has taught at Berkeley, the University of Minnesota, and UCLA.
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Scandinavian 19, Seminar 2
"The Fellowship of the Ring": Tolkien's View of Good
and Evil in the Community
Jules Zentner
The Fellowship of the Ring will be read and analyzed in terms of J.R.R. Tolkien's view of the battle between Good & Evil in the world, the individual, and the community.
Dr. Zentner received his doctorate from UC Berkeley after doing much of his preparation at the University of Uppsala and the University of Stockhom in Sweden. He has taught at Berkeley, the University of Minnesota, and UCLA.
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Anthropology 19, Seminar 1
Mother Knows Best
Joan Silk
Humans are mammals, odd mammals to be sure, but mammals nonetheless. This simple fact defines one
of the most important relationships in the lives of
every human being---the relationship between mother and child. For millions and millions of years, natural selection has shaped the relationship between mother and child. Evolutionary forces acting on mothers and their children have produced solicitude and closeness between mothers and their children, but it has also produced conflict and competition over time, energy, and resources. In this course we will take a comparative view of the complex dynamics of parental attachment and filial devotion in humans---looking across time, across cultures, and even across species. Mother knows best, and now you'll know why.
Joan Silk is a Professor of Anthropology. She studies the evolution of behavior in non-human primates and does fieldwork on baboons in Africa.
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Anthropology 19, Seminar 2
The Anthropology of Dreams
Douglas Hollan
All people sleep and dream at night, but sleep experiences and beliefs about dreams vary widely cross-culturally. A review of contemporary research on dreams and the dreaming process, with a focus especially on anthropological perspectives.
Douglas Hollan is Professor and Chair of Anthropology, and the Luckman Distinguised Teacher at UCLA, and an instructor at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of two books and numerous articles that examine the relationships between the cultural and psychological processes.
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Economics 19, Seminar 2
Napster, AIDS and Intellectual Property
David K. Levine
Controversy surrounds the downloading of music over the internet, and the aggressive response of the RIAA to protect their copyrights. Included in this is the lawsuit against Napster, and more recently the bringing of lawsuits against individual music lovers. Also controversial is the patent protection afforded AIDS drugs, resulting in such high prices that they are unavailable in Africa, the area most devastated. Copyrights and patents are justified in the U.S. Constitution by Article I Section 8: "The Congress shall have Power To...to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The goal of this seminar is to examine from an economic perspective to what extent modern intellectual property law does in fact promote "the Progress of Science and useful Arts." To colonial conquest and the slave trade; the Africans' fight against ecological degradation; their battle for economic, social and political justice; and the war against AIDS.
David K. Levine is the Armen Alchian Professor of Economic Theory at UCLA. He is co-director of CASSEL, co-editor of Econometrica, co-editor of NAJ Economics, a fellow of the Econometric Society, member of the American Economic Association Honors and Awards Committee and member of the Sloan Research Fellowship Program Committee. Professor Levine's current research interests include the study of intellectual property and endogenous growth in dynamic general equilibrium models, the endogenous formation of preferences, institutions and social norms, learning in games, and the application of game theory to experimental economics.
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Economics 19, Seminar 6
Bargaining, Haggling and Fairness across Culture
Naomi Lamoreaux
This course gets students to explore the nature of trust and fairness in bargaining situations via the simple 'ultimatum' bargaining game. This game is useful for exploring how self-interested individuals are in bargaining situations (and many others). It has been conducted in many countries (rich and poor) over the last decade with the discovery that most cultures appear to have strong norms of fairness (the only exception are certain very primitive cultures). That is, rigorous self-interest, even in an obviously commercial setting like haggling, is rare.
Professor Lamoreaux holds a joint professorship with the departments of History and Economics at UCLA, where she has been professor since 1994.
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Economics 19, Seminar 7
Understanding the Stock Market
Bryan Ellickson
This course provides an introduction to economic theories of the stock market, primarily the random walk model and the capital asset pricing model (CAPM). The class will meet once a week in the computer classroom. Students will be asked to perform several projects using Eviews and Mathcad software. Although no mathematics background will be assumed, this course will be of particular interest for students considering
the Mathematics and Economics IDP.
Bryan Ellickson's research interests include finance, general equilibrium theory and urban economics. He is the author of a book on Competitive Equilibrium (Cambridge University Press) and numerous journal articles. He served three years as Chair of the Economics Department. Professor Ellickson is heavily involved with the Mathematics and Economics IDP. He is a past winner of the UCLA Alumni Association Distinguished Teaching Award.
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Geography 19, Seminar 1
Place and Memory in Los Angeles
Denis Cosgrove
Memory is an important part of our identity as individuals and as members of a group. Memory is stimulated by a smell, a song, a face...But memory is elusive, selective, and unstable. We seek to fix memory through making and visiting places. Personal memory places evoke very powerful emotions. This is true also for shared or social memory, where public places become significant for recording events that a group holds to be important. Memory has a geography. This seminar will examine the relationships between memory and place, especially as brought into sharp focus, and the tensions between honoring memory in place and continued everyday use of a location. Students will explore situations and circumstances where conflicts exist between different uses and meanings of place. This issue has been the subject of growing interest in recent years as more groups have sought to establish public markers of their collective memory, and is highlighted by the desire to remember the 9/11 attacks.
Denis Cosgrove is Professor in the Geography Department. He teaches cultural geography courses on landscape, mapping and cartography. His books deal with the relations between culture and landscapes - real, imagined,and in pictorial images.
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History 19, Seminar 1
Dystopias of the Twentieth Century
Teofilo Ruiz
This seminar will focus on the historical context to the writing of two famous dystopian works of the twentieth Century: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, and George Orwell, 1984. Emphasis will be on issues of freedom, property, the family, and the relationship between community (the state) and the individual. The seminar will be centered on a close reading of the two texts. I will provide historical context to our readings.
Teofilo Ruiz is a professor and Chair in the Department of History. He is the author of seven books and numerous articles on late medieval topics dealing with medieval and early modern Spain. He has taught four previous Fiat Lux seminars. The first one was on September 11.
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History 19, Seminar 2
Scientific Revolutions
Theodore Porter
We often think of science as advancing methodically and relentlessly. But in one of the most influential academic books of the last half century, Thomas Kuhn argued that scientists are quite tenacious, and in a way, conservative, in holding to their core assumptions, and that scientific chance sometimes occurs by radical breaks, or revolutions. We will read that book, along with a few papers about key episodes of scientific change, and talk about how our understanding of
science should change in the light of its history.
Professor Theodore Porter teaches history of science in the Department of History at UCLA. He has written books and articles about how the ideas and practices of science participate in the larger cultural and political environment, and especially about the uses of numbers, measures, and statistics in science and in public life.
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History 19, Seminar 3
The Enlightenment: How We Got to Be Modern
Margaret Jacob
The seminar examines 18th century European thought with an eye to understanding some of the basic values that shape our society: freedom of expression, religious toleration, intellectual creativity and a willingness to give and take criticism. None of these values just happened; they had to be put in place historically, remain fragile and are easily contested. We will read among famous as well as clandestine writers from the period between roughly 1680 and 1780.
Margaret Jacob is a professor in the Department of History at UCLA. She has written extensively on the Enlightenment, on freethinking and freemasonry, as well as on the impact of science in the period.
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History 19, Seminar 4
Celluloid Cities: Urban History on Film
Janice L. Reiff
This course will use films (both commercial and documentary) to consider how cities changed over the course of the twentieth century, and how film makers have presented cities differently. As seminar participants "visit" these cities across time, they will also explore how contemporaries experienced those cities and how films can be used as valuable historical sources.
Jan Reiff teaches urban history, social history, and 20th century American history, as well as teaching in the 1960s cluster. Her fascination with cities turned her from chemistry to history, and she has researched and written on several of the cities we will consider in the class.
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History 19, Seminar 5
The History of an African-American Community
in Los Angeles
Kevin Terraciano
This course seeks to explore the history of an African-American community in the middle of Los Angeles, called Ujima Village, and to contribute to its special relationship with UCLA. Namely, the Ujima Village and UCLA Residential Life are working together with the UCLA Center for Community Partnerships to enhance the quality of undergraduate education and life in Los Angeles. The seminar will invite residents of Ujima Village to share their thoughts with students on the issues that concern their community the most. Other members of the UCLA Faculty-in-Residence Program will contribute their expertise as guest speakers on the history and culture of Los Angeles, and related topics. This seminar is the first of a year-long, interdisciplinary series on the Ujima-UCLA partnership. The objectives of the course are to enhance students' understanding and appreciation of our city, and to contribute to the success of Ujima's relationship with UCLA for the benefit of both communities.
Kevin Terraciano is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received his Ph.D. in 1994. He is also vice-chair of graduate affairs in the Department of History. He specializes in Colonial Latin American history, especially the indigenous cultures and languages of central and southern Mexico, and issues of race and gender.
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Honors Collegium 19, Seminar 1
C to the E to the O: Hip Hop Moguls
from P Diddy to Jigga
C. Adolfo Bermeo and La’Tonya Rease Miles
This course examines the political and cultural influence of three key figures--self-described hip hop "moguls." It traces the ascendancy of these icons and also pays careful attention to their representation in a variety of popular texts, including music video and song. The mogul figure marks a key cultural shift in the role of hip hop and politics. We will ask: How do these figures define masculinity? What is the relationship between class and race? Seminar restricted to first year transfer students only. Enrollment by instructor permission.
C. Adolfo Bermeo, Associate Vice Provost for Student Diversity and Community College Partnerships and Director of the Academic Advancement Program (AAP) at UCLA. He has been a forceful advocate for educational opportunity and academic equity at UCLA. He has moved AAP, UCLA's nationally recognized undergraduate retention program, from a pedagogy of remediation to a pedagogy of excellence and contributed to significant increases in the number of underrepresented students involved in UCLA's Honors and Student Research programs, the number of underrepresented students graduating from the university, and the number of underrepresented students going on to graduate and professional schools. Dr. Bermeo is on the faculty of the Cesar Chavez Center for Chicano/a Studies at UCLA. He is particularly interested on the impact of immigration on the cultural, political, social, and economic experience of Latino immigrants to the United States and has been a strong advocate for Latino immigrants. He is the recipient of the Chancellor's Fair and Open Academic Environment Award.
La’Tonya Rease Miles is a PhD candidate in English. An award-winning teaching assistant, she is the project coordinator for AAP graduate mentoring programs and the McNair Research Scholars Program. Her research interests include a wide spectrum of sports, music and other cultural forces that shape contemporary youth.
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Honors Collegium 19, Seminar 2
LGBT is Not a Sandwich, or Straight Talk
about Gay Issues in America
Ronni Sanlo and Suzanne Seplow
The course explores the ways in which American culture is affected by sexual orientation and gender identity issues. Topics include an overview of the historical perspective; legal and political issues specifically relating to education; sexual identity development; the impact of bullying and harassment in schools and colleges; the relationship between sexual orientation discrimination and all other forms of discrimination; how to be an ally; and the impact of sexual orientation issues on all people regardless of their sexual orientation.
Ronni Sanlo is the Director of the UCLA LGBT Campus Resource Center and lecturer in the Graduate School of Education. Her three books - Working with LGBT College Students: A Handbook for Faculty and Administrators; Unheard Voices: The Effects of Silence on Lesbian and Gay Educators; and Our Place on Campus are published by Greenwood Press. She is the originator of the award-winning Lavender Graduation, an event that celebrates the lives and achievements of LGBT students. She lives on the campus of UCLA as a member of the Faculty-in-Residence program.
Suzanne L. Seplow, Ed.D., is a graduate of the GSEIS Educational Leadership Program at UCLA. Her focus is on maintaining living/learning communities that foster positive impacts on student learning. She specializes in learning communities, environmental influences and student development theory.
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Honors Collegium 19, Seminar 3
The Struggle to Understand, the Struggle to Respond
C. Adolfo Bermeo
Using films and readings, the events of September 11 and the War on Terrorism will be examined in the historical context of U.S. foreign policy, the relationships between the developed and underdeveloped worlds, the rise of political Islam, and the use and nature of terrorism since WWII. Students will consider possible U.S. responses to terrorism and defend what the U.S. should do and why. Seminar restricted to first year transfer students only. Enrollment by instructor permission.
C. Adolfo Bermeo, Associate Vice Provost for Student Diversity and Community College Partnerships and Director of the Academic Advancement Program (AAP) at UCLA. He has been a forceful advocate for educational opportunity and academic equity at UCLA. He has moved AAP, UCLA's nationally recognized undergraduate retention program, from a pedagogy of remediation to a pedagogy of excellence and contributed to significant increases in the number of underrepresented students involved in UCLA's Honors and Student Research programs, the number of underrepresented students graduating from the university, and the number of underrepresented students going on to graduate and professional schools. Dr. Bermeo is on the faculty of the Cesar Chavez Center for Chicano/a Studies at UCLA. He is particularly interested on the impact of immigration on the cultural, political, social, and economic experience of Latino immigrants to the United States and has been a strong advocate for Latino immigrants. He is the recipient of the Chancellor's Fair and Open Academic Environment Award.
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Information Studies 19, Seminar 1
Images of War in Literature for Children
Virginia Walter
How do children make sense of war? This course focuses on children's books as social artifacts that reveal prevailing values. We will read and discuss contemporary children's novels and picture books about war in an effort to understand the messages and information being communicated to children.
Virginia Walter is a former Children's Librarian, a published author of books for children, and a member of the 2004 Newbery Committee, charged with selecting the most distinguished American book written for children in 2003. She teaches and writes about social issues in children's literature.
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Law 19, Seminar 3
Law & Peace
Kenneth Graham
The word "peace" occurs frequently in the law---"justice of the peace," "peace officers," etc. But how does law relate to peace? What can we infer when we see "peace officers" battering people who seek "justice"? Does law encourage violence when it uses violence against non-violent protest? So far as I have been able to determine, such questions get little attention in law classes or legal writing. In this class we will explore in preliminary fashion, through discussion and reading, what we can discover about these questions.
Professor Kenneth W. Graham, Jr., has taught at the UCLA Law School since 1964, primarily litigations subjects such as evidence and civil and criminal procedure. He once served as a "peace officer" when he prosecuted cases in the Ventura County District Attorney's Office. He is officially a Korean War Veteran, though the shooting had stopped long before he was drafted. A more detailed biography appears on the Law School website.
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Law 19, Seminar 5
Inequality, Tax Policy and Distributive Justice
Kirk Stark
seminar will examine the growing inequality of income and wealth in the United States and ask what, if anything, tax policy should (and can) do about it. Topics to be discussed include the progressivity of the income tax, taxing inheritances, the flat tax, progressive consumption taxes, how the tax system should treat low-income households, and redistributive school finance reform.
Professor Kirk Stark teaches Federal Income Tax, Taxation & Distributive Justice, Multistate Taxation, and Property. His research focuses on broad issues of tax policy relating to fiscal federalism, state and local taxation, and school finance reform. Professor Stark was elected "Professor of the Year" in 1999 and 2002, and received the University Distinguished Teaching Award in 2003.
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Law 19, Seminar 6
Introduction to Negotiation
Russell Korobkin
Everyone negotiates in their personal and professional lives, but most do so based solely on instinct. This seminar will provide an analytical structure for understanding the negotiation process that combines insights from economics, psychology, and law, and give students an opportunity to employ that structure to develop their negotiation skills.
Russell Korobkin is professor of law at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), where he teaches Negotiation, Contracts, Health Care Law, and Law and Behavioral Science. Prior to joining the UCLA faculty in 2001, he held appointments at the University of Illinois College of Law and the University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs, and he taught as a visitor at the University of Texas School of Law. Professor Korobkin is the author of the textbook Negotiation Theory and Strategy (Aspen Law & Business, 2002), as well as more than 25 scholarly articles on negotiating in the transactional and dispute resolution contexts and other topics that combine law, economics, and psychology. Prior to entering law teaching, Professor Korobkin received his B.A. and J.D. degrees from Stanford University, clerked for the Honorable James L. Buckley of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and worked as an associate at the law firm of Covington and Burling in Washington, D.C.
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Law 19, Seminar 7
Gay Law
William Rubenstein
Gay rights issues are in the news every day: same-sex marriage, gays in the military, sodomy law repeal. This seminar is designed to consider these issues in greater depth. We will examine the legal situation lesbians and gay men confront in five different areas of their lives: sexuality, identity, working, coupling/marriage, and parenting. The seminar will cover several areas of constitutional law (Due Process, First Amendment, Equal Protection), as well as statutory protections such as non-discrimination laws. The reading will consist of actual judicial opinions, supplemented by non-legal materials about gay people's lives drawn from a variety of sources (history, psychology, philosophy, poetry, fiction, interviews, etc.). The seminar will thus constitute an introduction to both the law and to lesbian/gay studies. Students interested in pursuing work in either of these disciplines, or both, are encouraged to enroll.
William B. Rubenstein, a Professor at UCLA School of Law, is a leading national expert on sexual orientation law. Professor Rubenstein directed the ACLU's national Lesbian and Gay Rights Project before becoming a law professor. He litigated precedent-setting cases aimed at combating discrimination against lesbians and gay men throughout the country. Professor Rubenstein has taught courses on gay law at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford Law Schools. At UCLA, he teaches and writes about the subject, and is the faculty chair of the Charles R. Williams Project on Sexual Orientation Law, the nation's first "think tank" on sexual orientation law.
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Management 19, Seminar 2
An Introduction to Human Resource Management
(This course will be team-taught by five faculty from the Anderson School of Management)
Sanford Jacoby, Samuel Culbert,
Chris Erickson,
David Lewin, Daniel Mitchell
Human resource management (HRM) is the study of employment relationship in private and public organizations. It ranges from a focus on interpersonal interactions at work, to the administration of employment, to interaction of organizations with government and labor market. This course is intended to provide an introduction to some key concepts in HRM. Topics include the origins of HRM; pay practices; HRM and business performance; diversity; and negotiations. The course will be offered every other week for two hours per session. Each session will be taught by a different professor from the Anderson School of Management. The course may whet your appetite to pursue a concentration in Labor and Workplace Studies and/or to major in a discipline closely related to HRM, such as economics, psychology, or sociology.
This course is team taught by five full professors from The Anderson School of Management. Each faculty member has done extensive research in their area of specialization, which are: history of management (Jacoby); pay practices (Mitchell); human resources and business performance (Lewin); diversity (Culbert); and negotiations (Erickson). For more complete information, please visit the website of the Department of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior.
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Management 19, Seminar 4
Health and Happiness
Martin Greenberger
Had our Founding Fathers been fitness buffs, the inalienable rights they declared might have included pursuit of health as well as happiness. So we find interesting the Harvard article announcing a marvel
of modern medicine that regulates gene transcription, helping prevent heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity, and twelve kinds of cancer. It improves strength, balance, and blood lipid profiles. Bones become stronger, and new capillaries grow in the heart, skeletal muscles, and brain, enhancing blood flow and the delivery of oxygen and nutrients. The attention span increases, the appetite is moderated, and healthier foods become more desirable. The body feels better and tests younger. Blood volume increases and fats metabolize more efficiently. Even the immune system is stimulated. Steroids? No. Exercise? Yes. We'll discuss stress and fitness on the way to health and happiness, and see what the psychologists and ethicists have to say.
Martin Greenberger is IBM Professor of Technology and Information Systems. He leads two graduate seminars at UCLA: Frontiers in Biotechnology, and Investing in Health: Nine Perspectives. He is president of the Council for Technology and the Individual, a nonprofit foundation concerned with the human and organizational side of technology. He has been on the faculty of the UCLA Anderson School since 1982.
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Sociology 19, Seminar 1
Zen and the Art of Cooperation:
Buddhist Approaches to Peacemaking
Peter Kollock
This seminar examines Zen Buddhism, not in the context of religion, but as a system of social psychology that has evolved over 2500 years. We will examine Zen Buddhist practices for developing cooperation and peace in one's self, one's relationships, and the larger society. A key element of the seminar will be a weekend retreat at a Zen Buddhist monastery in Southern California (Nov 5-7).
Peter Kollock is Professor of Sociology at UCLA. His research focuses on cooperation, trust, and risk in groups. He studies a wide range of situations in which group members gain by cooperating, but where a temptation to behave selfishly exists, examining the factors that encourage or discourage the emergence of cooperation, community, and trade. His recent work has concentrated on studies of online communities and markets. He received UCLA's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992.
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Sociology 19, Seminar 2
Musical Mainstreams and Margins
William Roy
Music has an uncanny ability to express who we are. The ability to define certain kinds of music as mainstream or marginal has been a means of pushing various social groups to the edge of society. But music also validates the culture of some marginal groups as "authentic." This seminar will explore how music has been used in the past and present to marginalize or validate various social identities including race, gender and class. In doing so, we will examine how features
of the music itself--its sound--interact with its social context to understand music's remarkable ability to affect social life.
William G. Roy is a Professor of Sociology. His works include Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America, and Making Society: The Social Construction of Our World. His current research includes a book about American folk music, social movements and race to be entitled Reds, Whites and Blues. He is the winner of the Luckman Award for Distinguished Teaching at UCLA and the American Sociological Association Contribution to Distinguished Teaching Award.
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Sociology 19, Seminar 3
Why is There a Shortage of Girls in China?
William Mason
Of all countries, China has the world's most extreme shortage of girls relative to boys. This seminar will examine immediate and deeper causes of the imbalance.
We will ask two basic questions: (1) What do families do to create the girl shortage, and how do they do it?
(2) What are the forces that drive families to create the girl shortage? To answer the second question we will look to numerous factors, including son preference, low fertility, technology, compulsory family planning, the "one-child" policy, and the lack of a state sponsored safety net in rural China. The first question concerns female infanticide, sex-selective abortion, and differential treatment of boys and girls at young ages. We will look at the evidence for these phenomena.
William Mason has been a sociologist, demographer, and statistician for more than 30 years. He taught at
The University of Chicago, Duke University, and for many years at The University of Michigan, before coming to UCLA. He is currently doing research on sexually transmitted diseases in the United States. He
is also conducting a study of migration in China, and research on missing girls and infant mortality in China.
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Sociology 19, Seminar 4
Changing U.S. Families
Judith Seltzer
U.S. family life changed dramatically during the twentieth century. The rise in single-mother families
due to divorce, childbearing outside of marriage, increasing cohabitation, and mothers' employment,
has altered children's family experiences. Some claim the family is in trouble; others offer more optimistic interpretations of these trends. We all are experts in our own families. Most people have less experience thinking about families as social institutions, the perspective adopted in this course. The seminar provides a basic understanding of the experiences of U.S. families; what is myth and what is reality, and what facts and tools help distinguish between myth and reality. It asks students to use these facts and tools to support their stand in debates about such questions as: Is cohabitation good
for marriage? Should same-sex couples be allowed to marry? Should public policies encourage unmarried parents to marry?
Judith Seltzer is a Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the California Center for Population Research. Her research interest includes kinship patterns, intergenerational obligations, relationships between non-resident fathers and children, and how legal institutions and other policies affect family change. She is a member of a new cross-university interdisciplinary consortium of researchers on "Designing New Models for Explaining Family Change and Variation," and an investigator on the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey. She teaches family sociology and social demography at the undergraduate and graduate levels, although more of her recent teaching has been at the graduate level for programmatic reasons. She enjoys working with undergraduates and looks forward to the opportunity to teach a Fiat Lux course.
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Sociology 19, Seminar 5
Asian American Youth:
Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity
Min Zhou
The Asian-origin population in the U.S. constitutes
the fastest growing ethnic group. As of 2000, this group constitutes 4 percent of the total U.S. population, roughly 12 million. As a result, Asian American
youth are quickly growing into their own subculture
and carving out their own identity in American culture.
This course explores the important topics concerning Asian American youth as a distinctive social group,
such as immigration, assimilation, intermarriage, socialization, sexuality, cultural production/consumption, and ethnic identification.
Min Zhou, Ph.D., is a Professor of Sociology and Chair
of Asian American Studies Interdepartmental Degree Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her main areas of research are immigration and immigrant adaptation; immigrant youths; Asian Americans; ethnic and racial relations; ethnic entrepreneurship and enclave economies; and the community and urban sociology. She is the author
of Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave (Temple University Press, 1992); co-author of Growing up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States (with Bankston, Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1998); co-editor of Contemporary Asian America (with Gatewood, New York University Press, 2000); and Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity (with Lee, Routledge, 2004).
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Women's Studies 19, Seminar 1
Sexual Harassment Law and Policy
Christine A. Littleton
State and federal law prohibit sexual harassment at work and at school. What counts as sexual harassment? What’s the difference between flirting and harassment? Can men be sexually harassed? Is racial harassment similar or different? What legal remedies are available for someone who is being harassed? How does UCLA's policy against sexual harassment work? Should anti-harassment procedures focus on punishing harassers or on helping those who are harassed? What other methods could be used to reduce or eliminate sexual harassment? Some of these questions will be answered; all will be discussed.
Christine Littleton, Esq., is a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, Chair of UCLA's Women's Studies Program, and Interim Director of the Center for the Study of Women. She teaches both law and women's studies, is a nationally recognized theorist in feminist jurisprudence and an expert on sexual harassment. Littleton was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the California Women's Law Center,
and is currently of counsel there.
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"I really enjoyed this seminar. It gave me a chance to experience and explore a part of the world that was foreign to me. It made me think, it made me angry, sad, and it gave me hope. Great seminar."
Student comment
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"Students are held accountable for their ideas in smaller group discussions. They must come to trust their own minds. Fiat Lux seminars encourage students to think and do."
Faculty comment
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Astronomy 19, Seminar 1
The Origin of the Universe
Edward Wright
Modern results have turned cosmology from a speculative subject into a quantitative science. In this seminar we will study and discuss some recent books on cosmology written for a non-technical audience.
Edward L. Wright got his Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard University and then taught in the MIT Physics Department for six years before coming to UCLA. He has worked on infrared astronomy and cosmology, primarily using instruments in space. He has worked on COBE, WMAP and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
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Astronomy 19, Seminar 2
To Boldly Go: NASA, Your Money in Space
Jean Turner
In this seminar we will consider the premise “Space exploration is cool, and deficit moaners are nerds.”
To research this question, we will explore the many activities of NASA and its place in the national budget. Students will make up their own minds about whether or not NASA has enough or too much money, and is spending it wisely. The seminar will include a tour of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena so that students may see NASA action live. Aimed at non-science majors but open to all.
Jean Turner is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Her specialty is radio and microwave astronomy. In her research, she uses the Very Large Array in New Mexico and UC's Keck Telescope in Hawaii to study the formation of stars and large stellar clusters in galaxies.
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences 19, Seminar 1
Clouds in the Sky Whither the Wind
Bjorn Stevens
Clouds are metaphors for the ephemeral. They help dramatize our culture, whether it is in paintings, literature, or popular media; color our moods; and stimulate our imagination. Clouds also play a vital role in maintaining life on Earth. They redistribute water, heat, and radiant energy. Despite their importance, relatively little is understood about clouds. For instance, why do some clouds rain and not others? How will cloudiness change in response to global warming? Do little clouds matter? We try to make sense of these questions and deepen our understanding of one of Mother Nature's more majestic phenomena. We do so in a way which is accessible to curious students from all backgrounds (i.e., using words and pictures rather than equations).
Professor Stevens' research is devoted to understanding the role of clouds in the climate system. He uses a variety of tools ranging from numerical simulation, field and satellite observations, and simple theory to help understand clouds and their interaction with the environment. His recent work has been in understanding the role of rain in shaping the distribution of clouds with modest vertical extent. As part of this research, he will be spending six weeks in the Caribbean co-leading a large international field study of tropical clouds. Professor Stevens received his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from Colorado State University in 1996, and served as a postdoctoral fellow of the advanced study program of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado, and as a Humboldt Fellow visiting the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg Germany, before coming to UCLA. In 2002 he was awarded the Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award by the American Meteorological Society for outstanding contributions by a young atmospheric scientist.
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Biomedical Engineering 19, Seminar 1
NeuroEngineering: The Technology That Could
Enable the “Matrix”
Jack Judy
Brain-computer interfaces portrayed in “The Matrix” movies make use of neuroengineering technologies, many of which already exist. Implantable devices
that interface directly with human senses, such as allowing the deaf to hear, are a commercial reality. Research efforts are now underway that will enable
the blind to see, and the paralyzed to move. Direct brain-computer interfaces are future goals Topics include past, present, and future neuroengineering technologies and devices, and their possible social implications.
Dr. Judy is an Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department. He is also the co-director
of the UCLA NeuroEngineering Program, an NSF-funded training program in the Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience Programs. His interests include a variety of neuroengineering research projects: electrode arrays for retinal prosthetics, wireless neural transceivers, microprobes for Parkinson's disease research, and MEMS-enabled hydrocephalus shunts,
as well as neural control systems for spinal cord injury, ocular motility, and deep brain stimulation.
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Chemistry and Biochemistry 19, Seminar 1
Serendipity in Science
Herbert D. Kaesz
An inquiry into unexpected discoveries in science that have had significant impact on society and an analysis
of the circumstances, which brought these about. Serendipitous, i.e., fortuitous observations become significant only where the observer can recognize or correctly interpret the discovery, as in the case of the mold metabolite penicillin discovered by Fleming in 1928, giving rise to a new class of antibiotics. Discoveries in medicine, which derive from an indigenous oral tradition prior to their entry into Western European practice, will also be discussed. A librarian will address the seminar regarding use of library and computerized search facilities.
Professor Kaesz received an A.B. from N.Y.U. and
his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. Professor Kaesz began his career at UCLA in 1960;
his research interests are in the field of organometallic chemistry. Prof. Kaesz received the Tolman Medal
from the So. Calif. Section of the American Chemical Society, has held two foreign fellowships, one from
the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and
one from the Humboldt Foundation (Germany), and
has twice held the post of Professeur Invité in France. Prof. Kaesz received the American Chemical Society Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement
of Inorganic Chemistry.
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Civil & Environmental Engineering 19, Seminar 1
(Seminar Canceled)
Learning from our Mistakes: Catastrophic Failure
of Structures through the Ages
Ertugrul Taciroglu
Engineers constantly strive to perfect their designs by careful analysis and experimentation, and to reach new frontiers in a constant battle with the elements of nature. This constant push, and the ever-present limitations in our understanding of the physical world, occasionally leads to unfortunate and catastrophic failures.
Dr. Taciroglu received a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
in 1998. Prior to joining UCLA in 2001, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets at the University of Illinois. His research interests include response of structures under extreme loading such earthquakes, blast and impact. At UCLA, he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on solid and structural mechanics.
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Computer Science 19, Seminar 1
Machines that See
Stefano Soatto
This seminar will explore various aspects of machine vision that is the process of determining spatial properties of the world from images of it. These range from visual recognition (how to tell an apple from a person in an image) to motion estimation (how to navigate through an unknown environment) to image synthesis (how to generate virtual views of a scene), to vision-based control (how to make a machine capable of moving and interacting with the environment using vision as a sensor).
For instructor’s Biography, please visit his web:
www.cs.ucla.edu/~soatto.
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Earth and Space Sciences 19, Seminar 1
California's Most Dangerous Volcano
Emily Brodsky
Long Valley Caldera, on the eastern edge of the Sierra, is renowned as one of the world's most restless and closely-watched volcanic complexes. We will spend a weekend in the area studying the geological records of past eruptions and observing the signs of what is to come. Over two days we will examine bubbling pools, steaming rocks and ancient lava flows. Each student will become an expert on a particular topic relevant to the trip and will help educate the class while we visit the remnants of one of the largest eruptions known.
Schedule information: There will not be any regular weekly meetings for this field class. The class will meet for one organizational meeting on campus and then spend the entire weekend of October 9-10 in the field.
Dr. Brodsky studies the physics of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. She specializes in uncovering how earthquakes begin and uses volcanic areas as a natural laboratory for these studies. She has worked in areas ranging from remote Kamchatka to the nearby and relatively civilized Long Valley caldera complex.
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Earth and Space Sciences 19, Seminar 3
Giant Crystals of Southern California
Edwin Schauble
Since the gold rush of 1849, California has been renowned for the wealth and variety of its mineral resources. Southern California, in particular, has a remarkable concentration of pegmatites, an unusual
type of rock that contains large, often gem-quality crystals of minerals like feldspar, zircon, tourmaline, spodumene and beryl. How do these crystals form, and why do they grow so large? Brief lectures and student presentations will examine the origin of pegmatites,
with a particular emphasis on their relationship to the geologic history of southern California. Students will also survey the structure, chemistry and uses of the minerals they contain. We will spend a day at the Pacoima Canyon pegmatite in the nearby San Gabriel Mountains, collecting mineral samples for more detailed examination in class.
Edwin joined the UCLA faculty in July 2003 as an Assistant Professor of Geochemistry and Astrobiology. He is interested in understanding how natural processes partially separate the isotopes of a variety. His research is particularly focused on the isotope geochemistry of heavy elements and transition metals like iron and chromium, where recent technological advances have made accurate isotope ratio measurements possible. Using techniques from statistical mechanics and ab initio quantum chemistry, he is working out a theoretical framework for planning and interpreting measurements of natural samples, in order to obtain information on the origins and chemical impacts of ancient life, the fate of groundwater pollutants, and budgets of reactive and greenhouse gases in the modern atmosphere.
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Ecology and Evolutionary Biology 19, Seminar 1
By Fire or By Ice: Climate Change Past, Present
and Future
Glen M. MacDonald
Are anthropogenic increases of Carbon Dioxide and other greenhouse gasses causing the earth's climate
and environments to change? Some scientists envision significantly increased temperatures in 100 years while others argue we might even trigger a new ice age and plunging temperatures. Are these projected future changes in climate any different from past natural changes? In this seminar we will explore how past changes in climate and the environment from the last Ice Age to the present can be reconstructed using fossils, tree-rings, historical records and other means. Students will also visit UCLA paleoecology laboratories to see how techniques of fossil analysis and tree-ring analysis are carried out. We will then consider the history of past natural climate changes and their impacts on the environment and human societies in the past. We will also consider the lessons the past provides for our future.
There will be five two-hour seminars which will include a laboratory experience.
Glen MacDonald is a Professor in Organismic Biology, Ecology and Evolution and Professor and Chair of Geography. He has conducted research on climatic change and its impacts in the western United States, Canada, northern Russia and Siberia. For his research,
he has been named a Life Member of Clare Hall at Cambridge, a two-time winner of the Henry C. Cowles Award for Excellence in Publication from the American Association of Geographers, a winner of the University of Helsinki Medal, and an Astor Visting Lecturer at Oxford. He has also won the university teaching awards at McMaster University in Canada and at UCLA.
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Ecology and Evolutionary Biology 19, Seminar 2
Ecology of Coral Reefs: Research Opportunities
in Marine Biology
William Hamner
Coral reefs are beautiful, complex, and diverse marine ecosystems. They have contributed significantly to principles of ecology, evolution and conservation. Unfortunately, most coral reefs world-wide are now threatened by pollution, over fishing, global warming, and disease. Individual coral reefs require individual attention, yet there are not enough tropical marine biologists in the world to investigate most of these habitats before they disappear. We will compare pristine coral reefs to reefs under stress through readings of original reports from the recent scientific literature, via films, and via one field trip to the Long Beach Aquarium to view living corals and coral reef fish and invertebrates. Special presentations will be made to the class by UCLA Junior and Senior Marine Biology Majors about their own recent coral reef research during the UCLA 2004 Marine Biology Quarter at the UC Marine Laboratory in Moorea, French Polynesia. This freshman seminar is intended to recruit future marine biologists.
Dr. William Hamner received his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from UCLA. His research is on behavior of marine animals via use of SCUBA, research submersibles, and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) for studies of undisturbed individual animals in their own environment. Dr. Hamner was Professor of Zoology at UC Davis until 1974 when he moved to Australia to conduct research at the Australian Institute of Marine Science on coral reef ecosystems. After Australia, he and his family lived for 2 years in Palau, an island nation in the western Pacific, where he worked in the saltwater lakes of Palau. His research in Jellyfish Lake in Palau is featured in the IMAX film, The Living Sea. Since 1979, Professor Hamner has been at UCLA in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He continues to do field research on marine animals off the coast of California, the Gulf of California, Palau, Moorea, and Indonesia. Dr. Hamner taught the UCLA Undergraduate Marine Biology Quarter, Spring Quarter 2004, in Moorea, French Polynesia.
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Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology 19, Seminar 1
Utopian Visions of Human Biology
John Merriam
Nature-nurture, eugenics, genetic determinism, gene therapy, and now, human cloning continue to produce controversy. We will evaluate the scientific merit of different positions in that controversy, and the moral and ethical limits over using DNA science.
Professor Merriam has been a professor of genetics
since 1968, and regularly teaches introductory genetics, advanced human genetics, and advanced genetics laboratory of model organism. His graduate training emphasized combining human genetics with studies
on model organisms.
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Nursing 19, Seminar 1
101 Ways to Be Healthier: Living an Evidenced-based
Healthy Lifestyle
Chandice Covington
This Fiat Lux Freshman Seminar, in keeping with the ideal expressed by our university's motto, Let There be Light, illuminates the many paths of discovery explored by UCLA faculty. In this seminar, health and prevention are examined as a holistic outcome of being and becoming “healthy” as a result of genetics, activity, diet, habits, and relationships. This seminar considers such health questions as: Is coffee, wine, and chocolate really bad for you? How much exercise is enough? And what's really up with those trans-fatty acids? This course will explore the top health consumer myths and truths about a healthy lifestyle nominated by the students. By the end of the term, the student will be armed with a clearer perception about evidenced-based healthy living.
Professor Covington is a nurse scientist. Her search for trusted data and her native heritage suggest that health is a blend of genetics, activity, diet, habits, and relationships. She has published and researched on health care prevention and promotion in at risk populations. For more information, please visit her
web site.
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Pediatrics 19, Seminar 1
Being a Doctor for Children with Heart Problems: Diagnosis, Treatment, Physiology
Daniel Levi
Medical school without any stress! Are you curious how the human heart works? Would you consider being a doctor for children with complex heart problems? Pre-med or undecided, this may be the course for you. You will be treated as if you were in medical school or even in residency, without the long hours. Real patient cases from Mattel Children's Hospital at UCLA will be presented as a springboard for teaching students the basics of history-taking, and diagnosis by physical examination. These cases will be used to demonstrate the operation of a normal heart, and the consequences of congenital cardiac abnormalities. Several sessions will be spent in the medical center observing open heart surgeries, echocardiograms, pediatric heart catheterizations, and in the pediatric cardiothoracic intensive care unit.
Daniel S. Levi, M.D., is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Cardiology. While his clinical focus is pediatric interventional cardiac catheterization, his research interest is in the development of new transcatheter devices for children with heart defects. He is developing a thin film nitinol heart valve. He received his B.S. from Stanford University, and his M.D. from UCSF. He completed a Pediatrics Residency at UCSF, and his Pediatric Cardiology Fellowship at UCLA.
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Physics 19, Seminar 1
The Phases of Venus: From Myths to Knowledge
Claudio Pellegrini
The observation of the phases of Venus by Galileo,
near the end of 1610, demonstrated for the first time in human history that the Earth is not the center of the universe, as almost everybody believed at that time. It can be considered the starting point of modern science, and the beginning of our knowledge of the universe based on science and not on philosophical-religious ideas. The course will discuss the history of this momentous event, the connection of this discovery to the flourishing of renaissance culture, and its scientific, social and environmental consequences. Among the last, we will debate in particular the growth in life expectancy, global population, and energy use.
Claudio Pellegrini is a Professor of Physics, and is also interested in the history of science and the connection between culture, society and scientific development. He has taught Honors Collegium's courses on these subjects in the past. His main scientific work at present is the development of an X-ray free-electron laser to study matters at a time and space scale characteristics of atomic and molecular processes, including those important for biology. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and has received the International Free-electron Laser Prize and the American Physical Society Wilson Prize.
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Psychology 19, Seminar 1
Stress! Causes, Symptoms, and Remedies
Carlos V. Grijalva
This seminar is intended to gain a better understanding of “stressors” in our lives and the impact they can have on mental and physical health. The causes and symptoms of stress will be examined and stress management techniques will be highlighted.
Carlos V. Grijalva is a professor of behavioral neuroscience in the Department of Psychology. He
has been on the faculty since 1982, and has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in behavioral neuroscience, and on the psychobiology of emotion
and stress. He served as Associate Dean in the Division of Honors and Undergraduate Program, College of Letters and Science from 1991-1996.
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Psychology 19, Seminar 2
Just Say No? Drug Addiction and
the Neural Basis of Will-power
J. David Jentsch
Years ago, addiction was characterized as a manifestation of laziness and a deficit of will power. Later, it was described as a ‘trap’: a continuous struggle to avoid the withdrawal states produced by chronic intake of drugs. But clearly, addiction is much more complex than either of these early characterizations. In this seminar, we will work to understand that drug abuse is fundamentally a disorder of reward and cognition, wherein addicts progressively lose the capacity to make good decisions about their actions. Our focus will be on neural systems mediating decision-making and how drugs alter those neuronal processes. Furthermore, we will grapple with how factors that affect sensitivity to addiction, such as genetic predispositions, personality variants, comorbidity and stress, exert their influences on behavior. The ultimate goal of this seminar is to develop a more sophisticated scientific view of addiction and of the addict.
Dr. Jentsch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Brain Research Institute. He earned his Ph.D. in Neurobiology from the Yale University School of Medicine in 1999. He has conducted basic neuroscience research on the neural basis of cognition and decision making, with a special emphasis on how addictive drugs alter the circuitry of attention, memory and inhibition.
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Psychology 19, Seminar 3
Sating and Marriage: Current Controversies
Letitia Peplau
Many controversies surround love and relationships in the 21st Century. Can men and women be just friends? Is living together a good preparation for marriage? Can long-distance romantic relationships be successful? Does the Internet help or hurt relationships? Should same-sex marriage be legal? Is divorce harmful to children? An examination of eight current controversies, drawing on findings from scientific research to inform our analysis. A debate format is used to stimulate class discussion. Short weekly readings are assigned from a published anthology.
Anne Peplau is a Professor of Social Psychology. Her research concerns friendship, dating, marriage, and gay/lesbian relationships. She is particularly interested in the many ways that gender and culture influence contemporary relationships.
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Statistics 19, Seminar 1
The Value of Money
Nicolas Christou
How much will one dollar today be worth next month? Or next year? Or in ten years? It depends on how much interest the investor earns if the dollar is deposited in a bank account. Or it depends on where the dollar is invested. There are investments that yield a higher return than that of a bank's savings account but they are also associated with some risk. How do we measure and manage risk? Real life examples will be used, such as those involving the present and future value of money (credit cards, car loans, home loans, student loans), and stock market investments, will allow us to address the previous questions, and to better understand the value
of money.
Nicolas Christou received his Ph.D. in Statistics in 2000 from the Stern School of Business, New York University. Since then, he has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor with the Department of Statistics at UCLA. His current research interests include spatial statistics, applications of statistical models in Finance, and teaching of Statistics.rved as Associate Dean in the Division of Honors and Undergraduate Program, College of Letters and Science from 1991-1996.
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Statistics 19, Seminar 1
Zen and the Art of Cooperation:
Buddhist Approaches to Peacemaking
Peter Kollock
This seminar examines Zen Buddhism, not in the context of religion, but as a system of social psychology that has evolved over 2500 years. We will examine Zen Buddhist practices for developing cooperation and peace in one's self, one's relationships, and the larger society. A key element of the seminar will be a weekend retreat at a Zen Buddhist monastery in Southern California (Nov 5-7).
Peter Kollock is Professor of Sociology at UCLA. His research focuses on cooperation, trust, and risk in groups. He studies a wide range of situations in which group members gain by cooperating, but where a temptation to behave selfishly exists, examining the factors that encourage or discourage the emergence of cooperation, community, and trade. His recent work has concentrated on studies of online communities and markets. He received UCLA's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992.
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Statistics 19, Seminar 2
Order and Organization in the Chaotic Universe
Ivaylo Dinov
This multidisciplinary course will connect ideas
from the fields of neuroscience, philosophy, physics, engineering, social sciences, biology, genetics, mathematics, engineering and statistical modeling.
The marriage of determinism and chance can be found all around us and in each of these areas. We will discuss how we can model and introduce limited “order” in the seemingly chaotic Universe. Various principles will be discussed, relating trade offs between quality vs. amount of information, statistical vs. practical significance, population vs. sample analysis, etc.
Dr. Dinov was trained in pure mathematics, probability and statistics. Later, he moved into the areas of computational neuroscience, brain mapping, applied statitics and biomedical research. Dr. Dinov is currently on a joint appointment with Statistics (UCLA College) and Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (Neurology, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine).
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Statistics 19, Seminar 3
Chance in Baseball
Juana Sanchez
Baseball is the most statistical of all sports, since players are identified and evaluated by their corresponding hitting and pitching statistics. People in the baseball community use more and more statistical methods to learn about performance and strategy. In this seminar we will discover how some simple statistical methods can take us beyond the numbers to understand deeply the game and to make good predictions for the forthcoming season. Seminar participants will analyze baseball data throughout the quarter and will interpret results in small weekly reports and discussions. We may even go to a baseball game one week. The following is required
to pass: (a) attendance; (b) participation in the group discussion of the methods and statistical results and making sense of them;(c) write-up of small report of discussion each week and turn it in the following week; (d) participate in all 4 lab sessions.
Juana Sanchez, Ph.D. Washington University, St. Louis, 1989. She taught at the University of Missouri before coming to UCLA, Department of Statistics. Her research interests include Statistics Education, Time series, Bayesian Probability Theory, and applications
of Statistics in Diabetes Research. She has published in several journals, such as the Journal of the American Cancer Institute, Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, and Advances in Econometrics.
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Statistics 19, Seminar 5
The Future of Los Angeles: A Statistical Profile
Vivian Lew
Love it. Hate it. If you are reading this, chances are, you call the Los Angeles metropolitan area “home.” Using a variety of data sources, we will explore the statistical profile of the larger community surrounding UCLA. Addressing topics ranging from births to deaths (and taxes...), we will assess the availability and reliability
of information on short and long term trends in Los Angeles. A statistical profile will provide a better understanding of the community and assist us in identifying its strengths and weaknesses.
Dr. Vivian Lew, Ph.D. UCLA, 1996. She worked at
the UCLA School of Public Policy before she became
a lecturer in the Department of Statistics at UCLA.
Her research interests include the teaching of Statistics, statistical consulting, and demographic methods.
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Statistics 19, Seminar 6
(Seminar Canceled)
Statistics and Self-assessment
Maryam Esfandiari
The objective of this seminar is to use statistics and testing theory to help the students assess themselves
in terms of the attributes that are key factors for leading happy and successful lives. The students will be introduced to a series of surveys in areas such as self-concept, career aspiration, achievement motivation, leadership skills, team work, and stress management, etc. They will be taught how to use the knowledge of testing and statistics to interpret the survey results.
The students will take the surveys of their choice, and use the knowledge that they have acquired to do a self-assessment. Through engaging in this process, not only will they acquire technical knowledge, they will also learn more about who they are. The awareness that results from this experience will help them work toward happier and more successful lives.
Dr. Maryam Esfandiari has many years of experience teaching and conducting research in the areas of testing, measurement, statistics, evaluation, education, and cross-cultural education. During the last decade she has evaluated numerous educational, social, entrepreneurial, civic and law-related programs involving thousands of students all over the United States.
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"I feel like the professor really did a good job probing issues and pushing us to think about things critically. She really challenged us to look at issues from different perspectives and consider them in different ways."
Student comment
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"The class size of 15 made every class a personal experience with direct interaction between faculty and students."
Faculty comment
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"This was the most intensely interactive
class I have had at UCLA."
Faculty comment
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"The professor prodded us to think deeply about the stories we had read and a general discussion ensued during each section. The intimate atmosphere allowed most people to open up and share their feeling."
Student comment
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