This course analyzes what role the government plays and should play in a market economy. It covers topics such as tax policy, health care policy, retirement policy, environmental protection, and state and local policy. The course emphasizes recent empirical research on policy issues and teaches students how to conduct such studies. Much of the material we will cover relates directly to ongoing policy debates.

What good is art history in the face of environmental destruction and climate change? How can the close investigation of works of art, produced in times and places far removed from our own, address the vast “failure of collective imagination” that novelist Amitav Ghosh has identified as the core obstacle to our ability to respond ethically and effectively to our non-human co-habitants on earth? This intra-disciplinary seminar intentionally entangles scientific and art historical approaches to real objects in both the art collections of the Harvard Art Museums and the living collections of the Arnold Arboretum. We will focus on how one special class of especially long-lived earthly beings— namely trees—provide living links to distant pasts and futures that no single human can experience, what their persistence can reveal about relationships between other humans and other environments, and what individual case studies can show us about our role as members of a vast embodied network of living beings. During the semester students will have the opportunity to meet with a number of faculty and professionals, including museum curators, conservators, and exhibition designers, as well as the Director of the Arnold Arboretum, its Keeper of Living Collections, and the editor of Arnoldia, the Arboretum’s journal.

We will examine the specificity of modern anxiety by exploring literary responses to total war, technology, climate change, psychopharmacology, race, sexuality, upward mobility, and more.

In this course, we will discuss successful case studies of use of AI for public health, environmental sustainability, public safety and public welfare.

This course tries to understand why this is so by examining the role that nationalism plays in peoples’ identities and the effects of globalization on nations and nation-states.

How did our planet become so urban, and how can our cities be more vital, livable, and sustainable?

The course is designed as an in-depth study of the place of Central Asia in Eurasian and global politics, and the policies of key external actors, such as Russia, the United States, China, the European Union, Turkey, Iran, Japan, South Korea and India, toward the region.

We will read leading social science books and articles (from sociology, political science, economics, and psychology) that define the problems, discuss their causes and consequences, and propose solutions.

This course introduces the fundamentals of circuit theory for the analysis of electrical circuits and the fundamentals of semiconductor devices for the understanding of transistors circuits and other useful actuators and sensors (i.e., transducers).

This course will provide formal definition, as well as quantitative and qualitative measurement tools utilized in this emerging area of study that intersects environmental health with implementation, effectiveness, and dissemination science.  Some of the key concepts that will be discussed in this course are risk communication, health literacy, and numeracy. Furthermore, students will learn the principles for how to communicate environmental health science in a way that is equitable, rigorous, and accessible for the public based on principles of EHL.   

Leaders and change agents of all kinds often must engage effectively with people whose worldviews are very different than their own. Conflicts involving deeply held values and other fundamental differences in perspective present special challenges and may require adjustments to approaches to negotiation we use in other situations. Through interdisciplinary readings, presentations, negotiation simulations, dialogue experiences, exercises, discussion, and reflective practices, this practice-focused, workshop style course aims to help participants become more aware of how their own and others’ worldviews influence conflicts involving identity-defining value differences and to help them become more effective negotiators.

This research seminar examines the impacts of globalization on attempts to address key social, political, and environmental problems, including climate change, focusing in particular on the roles played by multinational corporations.