Fall 2023 Undergraduate Courses
The following undergraduate courses in food and agriculture will be offered this fall.
| Course Code | Course Instructor(s) | Term | Course Name | Description | School |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AFAM 205 | Alison Kibbe | FA23 | Writing American Studies: Food as Story & Critical Lens | This writing seminar examines food as an entry to the interdisciplinary approaches of American Studies. We explore how food can help us think critically about our world, as well as how we can write critically about food. Food serves as a useful entry point to interdisciplinary American and Ethnic Studies because centering food requires that we think across history, cultural studies, anthropology, science, ecology, aesthetics, embodiment, and more. Through food studies we gain a unique understanding of the peoples, cultures, plants, animals, mobilities, and flavors that shape societies, communities, and individuals. With a focus on Caribbean, Black, Latinx, and indigenous perspectives, we use critical food studies to examine questions about place, history, racial formations, migration, and above all, different approaches to writing, drafting, editing, and re-writing. | YC |
| AMST 439 | Gary Okihiro | FA23 | Fruits of Empire | Readings, discussions, and research on imperialism and "green gold" and their consequences for the imperial powers and their colonies and neo-colonies. Spatially conceived as a world-system that enmeshes the planet and as earth's latitudes that divide the temperate from the tropical zones, imperialism as discourse and material relations is this seminar's focus together with its implantations—an empire of plants. Vast plantations of sugar, cotton, tea, coffee, bananas, and pineapples occupy land cultivated by native and migrant workers, and their fruits move from the tropical to the temperate zones, impoverishing the periphery while profiting the core. Fruits of Empire, thus, implicates power and the social formation of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation. | YC |
| ANTH 236 | Claudia Valeggia, Katherine Daiy | FA23 | Fat: Biology, Evolution, and Society | The goal of this course is to provide an interdisciplinary approach to learning about obesity as a biological and social phenomenon. We use biology as a scaffolding to understand obesity, yet also discuss the social, cultural, and psychological elements that shape our relationship with food and body size. The coursework focuses on three perspectives—the biological pathways over the lifetime that lead to obesity, the evolutionary origin of obesity, and the cross-cultural and societal meanings of obesity. Briefly, topics include adipose tissue as a regulatory and endocrine organ, human body composition variation in differing ecologies, the developmental origins of obesity, efficacy of obesity interventions and political economies’ influence on obesity. This class has a “leminar” format, in which lectures are mixed with active, student-centered, in-class discussions. | YC |
| ANTH 244 | Erik Harms | FA23 | Modern Southeast Asia | This course offers a comprehensive introduction to the extraordinary diversity of Southeast Asian peoples, cultures, and political economy. Broadly focused on the nation-states that have emerged since the end of World War II (Brunei, Burma [Myanmar], Cambodia, Indonesia, East Timor, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam),the course explores the benefits and limits to a regional perspective. Crossing both national and disciplinary boundaries, the course introduces students to key elements of Southeast Asian geography, history, language and literature, belief systems, marriage and family, music, art, agriculture, industrialization and urbanization, politics and government, ecological challenges, and economic change. In addition to providing a broad and comparative survey of “traditional” Southeast Asia, the course places special emphasis on the intellectual and practical challenges associated with modernization and development, highlighting the ways different Southeast Asian nations contend with the forces of globalization. The principle readings include key works from a multidisciplinary range of fields covering anthropology, art, economics, geography, history, literature, music, and political science. No prior knowledge of Southeast Asia is expected. | YC |
| ANTH 331 | Harvey Weiss | FA23 | The Ancient State: Genesis and Crisis from Mesopotamia to Mexico | Ancient states were societies with surplus agricultural production, classes, specialization of labor, political hierarchies, monumental public architecture and, frequently, irrigation, cities, and writing. Pristine state societies, the earliest civilizations, arose independently from simple egalitarian hunting and gathering societies in six areas of the world. How and why these earliest states arose are among the great questions of post-Enlightenment social science. This course explains (1) why this is a problem, to this day, (2) the dynamic environmental forces that drove early state formation, and (3) the unresolved fundamental questions of ancient state genesis and crisis, –law-like regularities or a chance coincidence of heterogenous forces? | YC |
| ARCG 242 | Gregory Marouard | FA23 | Ancient Egyptian Materials and Techniques: Their Histories and Socio-Economic Implications | This seminar investigates in detail ancient Egyptian materials, techniques, and industries through the scope of archaeology, history, and socioeconomical, textual as well as iconographic data. When possible ethnoarchaeological and experimental approaches of the antique chaîne-opératoire are discussed in order to illustrate skills and professions that have now completely disappeared. This class is organized according to various themes within a diachronical approach, from the 4th millennium BC to the Roman Period. Copper and precious metals, construction stones, hard stones and gems, glass and faience production, imported wood or ivory, we explore multiple categories of materials, where and how they were collected or exchanged, the way these products were transported, transformed, refined or assembled and the complex organization of the work involved and administration that was required in order to satisfy the tastes of Egyptian elites or their desires to worship their gods. Some other vernacular savoir-faire linked to the everyday life and the death is explored, through food production and mummification practices. The aim of this seminar is not only to give an overview of the history of techniques for this early civilization but, beyond how things were made, to acquire a more critical view of ancient Egyptian culture through the material culture and as well the strong economic and sociologic implications linked to their objects and constructions―rather than the usual focus on its temples and tombs. | YC |
| ARCH 337 | Mae-Ling Lokko | FA23 | Field to Building, and Back | From plant fibers to peat particles, cellulose to lignin, fungi to carbon-neutral concrete– the use of a broad renewable material ecology from the field is becoming the feedstock of the 21st century materials revolution. On the one hand, the design of such renewable material streams are framed within today’s carbon framework as ‘substitutes’ within a hydrocarbon material economy and on the other, such materials are proposed in direct resistance to these very systems, as ‘alternatives’ to such ‘development’. The seminar explores the spectrum of biobased design histories and pathways within Arturo Escobar’s pluriversal framework. From the North Atlantic Scottish blackhouses, equatorial Tongkonan to the wetland ecologies of the Totora, the course begins with an exploration of field materials through vernacular architecture and agricultural practices. The second part of the course explores the relative levels of displacement of field materials from today’s material economies in response to empire–both botanical and industrial. Finally, students investigate continuation of local narratives alongside the relocalization of global narratives of three materials–timber, biomass and fungi-based building material systems. | YC |
| CENG 411 | Paul Van Tassel | FA23 | Separation and Purification Processes | Theory and design of separation processes for multicomponent and/or multiphase mixtures via equilibrium and rate phenomena. Topics include single-stage and cascaded absorption, adsorption, extraction, distillation, partial condensation, filtration, and crystallization processes. Applications to environmental engineering (air and water pollution control),biomedical-chemical engineering (artificial organs, drug purification),food processing, and semiconductor processing. | YC |
| ENG 114 | Alison Coleman | FA23 | Writing Seminars: What We Eat | You are what you eat. Taking inspiration from a dictum that is widely repeated but multifariously interpreted, this course will draw on a range of disciplinary perspectives and modes of writing to explore how our dietary and culinary practices connect to larger questions of biology, selfhood, and civilization. Readings, discussion, and paper assignments will be organized around a trio of thematic areas: the history of food and nutrition science; agricultural practice, sustainability, and our interrelationship with the foods we consume; and the role of food and eating in shaping individual and cultural identity. Texts will include articles and book chapters by Jiayang Fan, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Steven Shapin, among others. We also will look at the genre of contemporary food writing, and in addition to research-based essays, participants will complete a creative essay or multimedia project about a dish or recipe of personal significance. | YC |
| ENGL 114 | Caitlin Hubbard | FA23 | Writing Seminars: Plastic Planet, Plastic People | Plastic is the material of the modern world. We come into contact with it innumerable times within a single day: from the moment we roll out of bed and grab our toothbrush to the moment we turn off the lights at the end of the night with a flick of a plastic switch. Debuting commercially in the 1930s and exploding during the time of the Second World War, plastic is now a defining feature of the Anthropocene. This course will ask students to explore how plastic, as both a material and a concept, has transformed the human experience: on the level of culture (art, clothing, consumerism, plastic surgery, food preservation/cooking),as well as on the level of environmental and human health. Should plastic be considered as significant as Climate Change in our battle to maintain a habitable planet? What would a world without plastic look like? How can our understanding of plastic’s deep infiltration of modern culture help us build solutions to lessen our reliance on this toxic substance? In this course, students will look at both scholarly and public-facing writing on plastic from a variety of disciplines: environmental studies; art history; political theory; cultural history; public health; and marine biology. Students will learn a range of writing techniques suited to different disciplines and audiences, and will develop a final writing project based on their individual interests. | YC |
| ENGL 114 | Rasheed Tazudeen | FA23 | Writing Seminars: Black and Indigenous Ecologies | Instruction in writing well-reasoned analyses and academic arguments, with emphasis on the importance of reading, research, and revision. Using examples of nonfiction prose from a variety of academic disciplines, individual sections focus on topics such as the city, childhood, globalization, inequality, food culture, sports, and war. | YC |
| EPS 101 | Mary-Louise Timmermans, Noah Planavsky | FA23 | Climate Change | An introductory course that explores the science of global climate change. We analyze processes that regulate the climate on Earth, assess the scientific evidence for global warming, and discuss consequences of climate change. We explore Earth’s climate history as it relates to the present climate as well as future climate projections. Uncertainty in the interpretation of climate observations and future projections are examined. | YC |
| ER&M 316 | Hi'ilei Hobart | FA23 | Indigenous Food Sovereignty | What does it mean to be food sovereign? Are contemporary American diets colonial? This course takes a comparative approach to understanding how and why food is a central component of contemporary sovereignty discourse. More than just a question of eating, Indigenous foodways offer important critiques of, and interventions to, the settler state: food connects environment, community, public health, colonial histories, and economics. Students theorize these connections by reading key works from across the fields of critical indigenous studies, food studies, philosophy, history, and anthropology. In doing so, we question the potentialities of enacting food sovereignty within the settler state, whether dietary decolonization is possible in the so-called age of the Anthropocene, and the limits of working within and against today’s legacies of the colonial food system. | YC |
| ER&M 359 | Anne Eller | FA23 | Gender and the State in Latin America and the Caribbean | This seminar offers an introduction to historical constructions of gender identity and gendered polities in Latin America and the Caribbean from pre-colonial native societies into the twentieth century. We begin with an analysis of gender in the Inca empire and several lowland societies, focusing on spirituality, agriculture, and land tenure particularly. The arrival of Spanish colonialism brings tremendous and complex transformations to the societies that we consider; we analyze discourses of honor, as well as how various subjects navigated the violence and the transforming colonial state. Our readings turn to Caribbean slavery, where studies of gendered experiences of enslavement and resistance have grown considerably in recent decades. Building on these insights, we analyze the gendered experiences of abolition and inclusion into contentious new Latin American and Caribbean nations of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, we consider some of the most salient analyses of the growth of state power, including dictatorships, in multiple sites. Throughout we maintain an eye for principle questions about representation, reproduction, inclusion, political consciousness, sexuality, migration, kinship, and revolutionary struggle through a gendered lens. | YC |
| ER&M 391 | Daniel HoSang | FA23 | Eugenics and its Afterlives | This course examines the influence of Eugenics research, logics, and ideas across nearly every academic discipline in the 20th century, and the particular masks, tropes, and concepts that have been used to occlude attentions to these legacies today. Students make special use of the large collection of archives held within Yale Special Collections of key figures in the American Eugenics Society. Students work collaboratively to identify alternative research practices and approaches deployed in scholarly and creative works that make racial power visible and enable the production of knowledge unburdened by the legacies of Eugenics and racial science. | YC |
| EVST 109 | Varies by section | FA23 | Climate & Environment in American History: From Columbian Exchange to Closing of the Frontier | This lecture course explores the crucial role that climate and environmental conditions have played in American history from the period of European colonization to the end of the 19th century. Its focus is on the dramatic changes brought about by the encounters among Indigenous, European, and African peoples in this period, the influence of climate and climate change on these encounters, and the environmental transformations brought about by European colonization and conquest and the creation of new economies and polities (including chattel slavery). The lectures offer a new framework for organizing and periodizing North American history, based on geographical and environmental conditions rather than traditional national and political frameworks. The course provides a historical foundation for understanding contemporary American (and global) climate and environmental issues. | YC |
| EVST 234L | Kealoha Freidenburg | FA23 | Field Science: Environment and Sustainability | A field course that explores the effects of human influences on the environment. Analysis of pattern and process in forested ecosystems; introduction to the principles of agroecology, including visits to local farms; evaluation of sustainability within an urban environment. Weekly field trips and one weekend field trip. | YC |
| EVST 244 | Mary Beth Decker | FA23 | Coastal Environments in a Changing World | The effects of human action and natural phenomena on coastal marine ecosystems. Methods used by coastal scientists to address environmental issues; challenges associated with managing and conserving coastal environments. | YC |
| EVST 294 | Molly Brunson | FA23 | Ecology and Russian Culture | Interdisciplinary study of Russian literature, film, and art from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, organized into four units—forest, farm, labor, and disaster. Topics include: perception and representation of nature; deforestation and human habitation; politics and culture of land-ownership; leisure, labor, and forced labor; modernity and industrialization; and nuclear technologies and disasters. Analysis of short stories, novels, and supplementary readings on ecocriticism and environmental humanities, as well as films, paintings, and visual materials. Several course meetings take place at the Yale Farm. Readings and discussions in English. | YC |
| GLBL 313 | Jessica Faieta | FA23 | The United Nations on the Ground | This course explores the role and functioning of the United Nations at the country level from the perspective of the three mandates or pillars of the UN Charter. 1) Peace and Security, and in particular the Peace-keeping operations: how do they work? Who decides to send a UN mission to a country? what do they do in each country? 2) Development: How does the UN helps countries achieve the Sustainable Development Goals? Which are the different UN agencies, funds, and programs and how do they work in reducing poverty, advancing gender equality, preventing violence, fighting climate change and protecting the environment or ensuring food security? and 3) Human rights: How does the UN respond to humanitarian crises, such as natural disasters or refugee crisis? What is its role in protecting vulnerable populations such as children, ethnic minorities or indigenous peoples? How does the Organization monitor human rights compliance or helps avoid human rights violations? | YC |
| GLBL 319 | Daniel Wilkinson | FA23 | Human Rights and the Climate Crisis | As climate change takes a mounting toll on the lives and livelihoods of people around the globe, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting “climate resilience” have become, arguably, the most pressing challenges of our era. This seminar examines the climate crisis through the lens of human rights. How is climate change impacting people’s rights? And how can advocacy for people’s rights contribute to efforts to address climate change? We explore the scientific, political, and legal bases for attributing responsibility for climate impacts to governments and corporations, examine how international human rights norms obligate them to address these impacts, and assess the strategies, tactics, and tools employed by rights advocates to compel them to meet these obligations. More broadly, we consider how the exigencies of the climate crisis could ultimately undermine—or actually strengthen—the international human rights regime. Students are encouraged to question and critique positions taken by a range of climate activists, while simultaneously equipping themselves with the knowledge and analytical tools necessary to advocate effectively for ambitious, rights-respecting climate action. | YC |
| HUMS 247 | Jeffrey Alexander | FA23 | Material Culture and Iconic Consciousness | How and why contemporary societies continue to symbolize sacred and profane meanings, investing these meanings with materiality and shaping them aesthetically. Exploration of "iconic consciousness" in theoretical terms (philosophy, sociology, semiotics) and further exploration of compelling empirical studies about food and bodies, nature, fashion, celebrities, popular culture, art, architecture, branding, and politics. | YC |
| MB&B 365 | Karla Neugebauer | FA23 | Biochemistry and Our Changing Climate | Climate change is impacting how cells and organisms grow and reproduce. Imagine the ocean spiking a fever: cold-blooded organisms of all shapes, sizes and complexities struggle to survive when water temperatures go up 2-4 degrees. Some organisms adapt to extremes, while others cannot. Predicted and observed changes in temperature, pH and salt concentration do and will affect many parameters of the living world, from the kinetics of chemical reactions and cellular signaling pathways to the accumulation of unforeseen chemicals in the environment, the appearance and dispersal of new diseases, and the development of new foods. In this course, we approach climate change from the molecular point of view, identifying how cells and organisms―from microbes to plants and animals―respond to changing environmental conditions. To embrace the concept of “one health” for all life on the planet, this course leverages biochemistry, cell biology, molecular biophysics, and genetics to develop an understanding of the impact of climate change on the living world. We consider the foundational knowledge that biochemistry can bring to the table as we meet the challenge of climate change. | YC |
| WGSS 260 | Maria Trumpler | FA23 | Food, Identity and Desire | Exploration of how food—ingredients, cooking practices, and appetites—can intersect with gender, ethnicity, class, and national origin to produce profound experiences of identity and desire. Sources include memoir, cookbooks, movies, and fiction. | YC |