Twenty residential college seminars will be offered next semester, up from 13 this fall.
As the residential college seminar program underwent a review this calendar year, professors could not propose new courses for the program and fewer courses than usual were offered. But next semester, 14 of the 20 residential college seminars will be new, Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs George Levesque said in a Friday email.
The new courses cover topics from the neurobiology of obesity to technology in modern culture. “Great Big Ideas,” an interdisciplinary course featuring video lectures that more than 300 students shopped this fall, and “Understanding Politics and Politicians,” a course co-taught by Howard Dean, are among the repeat seminars offered.
Levesque said that because the residential college program only featured repeat courses in fall and spring 2011, there was a “backlog” of proposals for new courses and the number of seminars in spring 2012 is “a little higher than usual.” Going forward, around 15 seminars will be offered in a given semester, with one sponsored by each residential college and a handful of “Yale College” seminars sponsored by the program itself.
The spring 2012 seminars were approved at a Dec. 1 faculty meeting.
Read the full list of seminars that will be offered below:
New seminars:
CSBR 260b, “The Role of Real Estate in Economy and Society”
CSCC 260b, “Fictionalizing History”
CSJE 260b, “Music in the Theater from Monody to The Book of Mormon”
CSMC 260b, “Science and Pseudoscience in Psychology”
CSPC 260b, “Entrepreneurship”
CSSM 260b, “Technocultures”
CSSY 260b, “Religion and the American Constitution”
CSTC 260b, “The Screenwriter’s Craft”
CSTD 260b, “Atheism and Skeptical Thought in the West”
CSYC 260b, “Neurobiology of Obesity and Addiction”
CSYC 261b, “The Biology and Treatment of Cancer”
CSYC 262b, “Philanthropy in Action”
CSYC 263b, “International Human Rights and Politics”
CSYC 264b, “The Science of Materials”
Repeat seminars:
CSBK 260b, “Child, Family, and State”
CSDC 260b, “The Film Director’s Craft”
CSES 260b, “Twentieth-Century American Comic Performance”
CSYC 265b, “Great Big Ideas”
CSYC 266b, “Understanding Politics and Politicians”
CSYC 267b, “Trials of the Century”