Spring 2024 Undergraduate Courses
The following undergraduate courses in food and agriculture will be offered in Spring 2024. Graduate-level courses during the same semester may also be of interest.
| Course Code | Course Instructor(s) | Course Name | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| AFAM 205 | Alison Kibbe | 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. |
| AMST 364 | Charles Musser | Documentary and the Environment | Survey of documentaries about environmental issues, with a focus on Darwin's Nightmare (2004),An Inconvenient Truth (2006),Food, Inc. (2009),GasLand (2010),and related films. Brief historical overview, from early films such as The River (1937) to the proliferation of environmental film festivals. |
| ANTH 384 | Jessica Thompson | Zooarchaeology | This course deals with the analysis of animal remains from archaeological sites (“zooarchaeology”). It covers the history and epistemological development of zooarchaeology, its theoretical underpinnings, major debates, approaches, methodological advances, and relationship to sister disciplines (e.g., paleoecology, paleontology). The course includes basic identification of the major groups of animal remains recovered from archaeological sites, with an emphasis on vertebrate bones and teeth. It offers tools and insights from taphonomy–the reconstruction of the processes that occur as organisms transition from living creatures into assemblages of archaeological remains. The first half of the class deals with specific methods in the context of major issues, and the second half examines “big” issues in zooarchaeology: early evidence for human consumption of animal tissues, ancient forager diets and environments, dietary resource intensification and animal domestication, and insights from animal bones into social identity. Discussions are followed by practical components that involves the identification and/or analysis of specimens using microscopic and macroscopic approaches. |
| ARCG 339 | Harvey Weiss | Agriculture: Origins, Evolution, Crises | Analysis of the societal and environmental drivers and effects of plant and animal domestication, the intensification of agroproduction, and the crises of agroproduction: land degradation, societal collapses, sociopolitical transformation, sustainability, and biodiversity. |
| ARCH 330 | Mark Gage | Creativity, Innovation, and “The New" | This seminar explores the role of “The New” in the design of our world. Through exploring the history of newness as an idea, its current understanding within philosophy, and examining its understanding in multiple creative fields today including art, architecture, product design, social microcultures, cars, food, fashion, and toys, students gain both knowledge about the role of “The New” in human society and are exposed to cutting-edge ideas in multiple disciplines. Through the study of emerging creative trends, detailed historic case studies, both philosophical and popular readings, and engaged group discussion we examine the very concept of “The New” from all possible angles—what it is, its history, why it is desired, the motivations of those that produce and promote it, who profits from it, and the morality of its continued rehearsal in a world with evolving ethics regarding the use of human labor and natural resources in the production of things. This course encourages students to consider these positions through not only research, presentations and discussion, but also speculative ‘making’ that challenges students to address the subject of “The New” themselves—through the very process of design. No particular skills or previous exposure to the design world is required. |
| CHEM104 | E. Chui-Ying Yan | Chemistry of Food and Cooking | Fundamental principles for understanding chemical structures and interactions as well as energy and speed of chemical processes. Application of these principles to food and cooking, including demonstrations. This course is designed for non-STEM majors. |
| CSYC 203 | Mark Bomford | Approaches to Sustainable Food and Agriculture | What makes food and agriculture “sustainable” in light of the worsening climate crisis? Can organic or regenerative farming capture and store carbon in the soil? Can lab-grown meat revolutionize animal agriculture? How might urban agriculture and vertical farming impact food security and hunger? This transdisciplinary seminar considers the multiple roots and possible futures of organic farming, local food, urban agriculture, controlled environment agriculture, and related concepts, contestations, trends, and fads. Drawing from writings in agrarian political economy, science and technology studies, human and environmental geography, and the work of activists, organizers, farmers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and beyond, we will examine the relations between land, labor, capital, technology, and society. The course includes three required Friday afternoon working visits to the Yale Farm at the end of the semester, which will ground our discussions in hands-on work in the soil. |
| EALL 205 | Pauline Lin | The Culture of Landscape in China | An introduction to Chinese philosophical, poetic, and visual explorations of landscape and the changing relationship between human beings and nature. Through texts, archaeological materials, visual and material culture, and garden designs from the 2nd c. BCE to modern times, we learn about the Chinese conception of the world, relationship to and experiences in nature, and shaping of the land through agriculture, imperial parks, and garden designs. We conclude with contemporary environmental issues confronting China, and how contemporary parks can help regenerate our ecosystem. |
| ER&M 240 | Hi'ilei Hobart | Introduction to Food Studies | Are we what we eat? 19th century French gastronomer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously stated as much in his Physiology of Taste (1825),but what does this mean within our increasingly globalized food system? The phrase “you are what you eat” suggests that the act of eating is one of entrenchment: food choices represent and intensify one’s own cultural and personal identity. But considering that issues of food access, public health, and unfair or illegal food labor practices within the food system cut across race and class boundaries, this may now be an inaccurate–or at the very least–uncomfortable maxim. This course interrogates themes of identity, ethnicity, race, land, and power to better understand the complexity of human relationships with food. We focus on how individual and group identity is constructed, affirmed, or refused through food choices by surveying foundational works within the field of food studies and connecting them to the pressing social issues of today, particularly as they manifest in the everyday act of eating. |
| EVST 189 | Paul Freedman | History of Food | The history of food and culinary styles from prehistory to the present, with a particular focus on Europe and the United States. How societies gathered and prepared food. Changing taste preferences over time. The influence of consumers on trade, colonization, and cultural exchange. The impact of colonialism, technology, and globalization. The current food scene and its implications for health, the environment, and cultural shifts. |
| EVST 189 | Paul Freedman | The History of Food | The history of food and culinary styles from prehistory to the present, with a particular focus on Europe and the United States. How societies gathered and prepared food. Changing taste preferences over time. The influence of consumers on trade, colonization, and cultural exchange. The impact of colonialism, technology, and globalization. The current food scene and its implications for health, the environment, and cultural shifts. |
| EVST 255 | John Wargo | Environmental Law and Politics | We explore relations among environmental quality, health, and law. We consider global-scale avoidable challenges such as: environmentally related human illness, climate instability, water depletion and contamination, food and agriculture, air pollution, energy, packaging, culinary globalization, and biodiversity loss. We evaluate the effectiveness of laws and regulations intended to reduce or prevent environmental and health damages. Additional laws considered include rights of secrecy, property, speech, worker protection, and freedom from discrimination. Comparisons among the US and EU legal standards and precautionary policies will also be examined. Ethical concerns of justice, equity, and transparency are prominent themes. |
| EVST 296 | Nataliia Laas | Chornobyl: A History of Energy and the Environment | Chornobyl often serves as a universal symbol of nuclear, ecological, and cultural catastrophe in modern history, comparable to only a handful of other watershed disasters such as the 1984 Bhopal pesticide plant gas leak in India or the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi meltdown in Japan. Did the Chornobyl reactor explosion simply reveal the fundamental weaknesses of the planned economy and the socialist state, or was it the first major challenge to the post-Cold-War order of global capitalism and atomic modernity? By exploring the moments of energy transitions from organic economy to fossil fuel (coal, oil, and natural gas) to atom, we consider how different energy regimes shaped our visions of the modern future. Under both capitalism and socialism, the construction of nuclear power plants and adjacent atomic towns exemplified the attempts to create utopian spaces, prototypes of either the free world or the communist society. This initial nuclear optimism regarding “peaceful atom” and the subsequent post-Chornobyl catastrophism and apocalyptic “post-progress” leads us to the discussion on how atomic energy modified the relations between humanity and the environment established during the nineteenth-century industrialization and whether we need a new environmental history of toxicity to grasp these shifts. We therefore engage with oral histories of refugees from the Chornobyl exclusion zone and the remaining residents, reporting on disaster tourism, stalker mass culture, and biomedical investigations to understand life in people-less wastelands and on the edges of “catastrophe” zones, to examine nuclear waste management, to track the migration of Chornobyl-produced radioactive elements through global chains of food and commodity supply, and to explore the political consequences of post-Chornobyl environmentalism for Ukraine, other Eastern and Central European states, and the world. |
| FILM 779 | Millicent Marcus | Italian Film Ecologies: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow | Landscape and the natural environment have never occupied “background” status in Italian film. Given the spectacular visual presence of its terrain—thanks to the relative proximity of mountain chains and the long seacoast—and given the pivotal importance of farming and pasturage in this traditionally agrarian economy, the synergy between the human and natural worlds has played a prominent role in Italian filmmaking since the very inception of the industry. Most recently, two developments have pushed this issue to the forefront of scholarly attention: the advent of ecocriticism, which found one of its earliest and most influential champions in Serenella Iovino, and the establishment of regional film commissions, grassroots production centers that sponsored cinematic works attuned to the specificity of “the local.” The course includes study of films that predate our current environmental consciousness, as well as recent films that foreground it in narrative terms. In the case of the older films, which have already attracted a great deal of critical commentary over time, we work to shift our interpretive frame in an “eco-friendly” direction (even when the films’ characters are hardly friends of the environment). Among the films considered are Le quattro volte, Il vento fa il suo giro, L’uomo che verrà, Gomorra, L’albero degli zoccoli, Riso amaro, Red Desert, Christ Stopped at Eboli, and Il ladro di bambini. We screen one film a week and devote our seminars to close analysis of the works in question. |
| GLBL 289 | Kaete Oconnell | Food & Power in US Foreign Relations | More than simply “sustenance,” food has played a pivotal role in the shaping of societies, the development of nations, and the waging of war throughout human history. This course examines the histories of food production and consumption in the United States, with a focus on how food guides American interactions with people, markets, and governments across the globe. Readings explore the many ways food, as a physical object and social symbol, shaped American foreign relations in formal and informal ways. Our patterns of consumption not only reflect how we see ourselves—we are what we eat—but also draw important distinctions between friend and foe, who we welcome at our table and choose to break bread with. Topics include empire and exploitation, government regulation, matters of taste, war and famine, agriculture and nutritional science, consumer politics, industrial food production, and the globalization of food systems. Students are introduced to the field of U.S. food studies and exposed to a variety of methodologies and styles to better understand how American agricultural abundance shaped U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century. |
| HSHM 467 | Ziv Eisenberg | History of the Body | What does it mean to have a “bad hair day?” How should you care for your skin? What happens when you eat a burger and drink wine? How are babies made? What happens when you die? The answers depend not only on who provides them, but also on where and when. This seminar examines historical production of systems of corporeal knowledge and power, as well as the norms, practices, meanings, and power structures they have created, displaced, and maintained. Structured thematically, the course familiarizes students with major topics in the history of the body, health, and medicine, with a particular focus on US history. |
| MB&B 565 | Karla Neugebauer | 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 two–four 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. |
| PSYC 775 | Laurie Santos | Research Topics in Animal Cognition | Investigation of various topics in animal cognition, including what nonhuman primates know about tools and foods; how nonhuman primates represent objects and number; whether nonhuman primates possess a theory of mind. |
| URBN 352 | Jacob Koch | Urban Lab: Citymaking and Food Policy | Food is an unusual issue for city governments and an everyday issue for people: we all have to eat. What we eat, where it is purchased, how it is prepared, the ways food is grown, processed, distributed, and how we dispose of it–these are all parts of the ‘food system’. This Urban Lab explores the food system through its many points of interaction with city government and the built environment. Engaging locally with food policy in and around New Haven, this Urban Lab embraces the illegible aspects of cities and resists looking at the city as a fixed concept. Rather, we approach the city as a site of ongoing processes–citymaking and policymaking as iterative, contested, and multi-sectoral practices playing out over generations and across political administrations. Beyond the local food system, we also look at global trends and Federal-level policies in food policy. The lab focuses on developing methods of relevance to the practice of urbanism, including site visits to develop a shared way of seeing, data gathering, documentation, and mapping with work critiqued collectively, and the use of non-academic documents. |