Technological innovations over the past several decades have greatly increased our ability to tell stories in which the reader's choices affect the narrative. These can range from text-based novels in electronic form that contain a couple of branching plot points, to episodes of television shows that require the viewer to select an option to advance the narrative, to sophisticated computer and video games featuring multiple alternative storylines. Historically, the term "interactive fiction" has tended to refer to computer-enabled stories that are text-based.

Wine is a simple thing. The idea of wine, however, is very complicated, since it reflects both wine itself and wine's complex and dynamic social and economic terroir of values, attitudes, and interests. Because wine intersects social processes in so many ways, the question of which idea of wine will prevail, or how the contractions between and among the different ideas will be resolved or not, has important implications.

Every opera's characters and situations reflect the times and societies in which they were created, and in performances decades or centuries later, they continue to adapt to reflect changing circumstances. A few operas go further, actually portraying people and events plucked from the history books, or even the headlines. This course considers a selection of operas "based on a true story." What is the true story, as far as we can discern? Who transformed the event into words, music, sets, costumes, and movement onstage?

Seeing (in contrast to mere "looking") involves a learned propensity to notice (or ignore) particular aspects of what is perceived through the lenses of one's culturally filtered perspectives.

The emergence of Islamic fundamentalism and Islamist political thought in the twentieth century has garnered much media attention in the last few decades. This course examines how Islamic fundamentalism developed in the first half of the twentieth century in the wake of Western colonization and why it gained so much support during the second half of the century.

CONN 290 introduces students to the artistic medium of film from various disciplinary perspectives. Through analytic and creative assignments and class discussions, students develop the expertise and vocabulary necessary to communicate intelligently and critically about cinema and contemporary media. Students consider key terminology and formal aspects of cinema, e.g., mise-en-scene, editing, and sound; apply those concepts to a wide variety of examples from the advent of film to the present; and consider critical approaches to the medium.

This course situates what is being called "the psychedelic renaissance" (the recent movement to legalize psychedelic substances for clinical use in treating a variety of mental illnesses) within several intersecting areas of study: philosophical idealism, religious mysticism, shamanism, Romantic era poetry, depth psychology and psychotherapy. While mainstream media outlets focus on the successes of psychedelic therapies in clinical trials, the decriminalization of psilocybin in several U.S.

The goal of this course is to provide an in-depth, accurate understanding of mindfulness, from both an academic and experiential perspective. The history of mindfulness is examined, including its roots in Buddhism, along with the more recent integration of mindfulness practice in Western psychology. The course explores what mindfulness is, common misconceptions about mindfulness and mindfulness meditation, how mindfulness works, and also the qualities and virtues cultivated in mindfulness practice.

This course in intellectual history draws upon history, religion, anthropology, and sociology in order to understand how the cagtegories of `religion' and `magic' have been shaped by the Western, and largely Christian-influenced, tradition. `Magic' and `religion' arose out of the history of the West's engagement with internal groups decried as `deviant,' such as medieval `heretics,' or Catholics in the Protestant imagination, and then, during colonialism, in response to other societies and cultures.

This course has as its subject matter the individual's relation to society and the relationships that arise among individuals, organizations, and institutions over questions of value. This course aims to enable the student to understand his/her relation to the social world considered as a web of complex and dynamic interrelationships among cultural, economic, psychological, political, ethical and social factors.