Health and Human Development will build a background in human biology and psychology affording students the knowledge to make analytical choices in their own life. We'll look at life-span human development in the fall from prenatal to adolescence and in the winter, from adulthood through aging to mortality. Concurrently, we'll cover development and aging from both biological, psychological and cross-cultural perspectives, as well as human evolutionary development. Attaining good health is a multifaceted process, therefore our exploration of healthy lifestyles will include an exploration of biological, psychological and even financial health.

Humans are spectacularly complex. An average adult's body contains roughly 10 trillion cells, each cell intricate enough to be an organism unto itself. The human nervous system alone contains hundreds of billions of cells, forming trillions of electrical connections. And this biological complexity is only the beginning. We live in highly intricate social units—families, tribes, political, ethnic and religious communities, etc. —each with its own history and structure. In this interdisciplinary program, we will study how these complexities develop over time and interact in healthy human lives. The program format will include workshops, lectures, films, seminars, guest presentations and group and individual projects. We will focus on clarity in oral and written communication, quantitative skills and the ability to work across significant differences.

Hortense Powdermaker, in her classic 1950 anthropological study of Hollywood, trenchantly observes that the Hollywood system "represents totalitarianism . . . In Hollywood the concept of man [sic] as a passive creature to be manipulated extends to those who work for the studios, to personal and social relationships, to the audiences in the theaters and to the characters in the movies."

HOLLYWOOD will study and critique the 20th-century Dream Factory. We will explore the studio system, the star system and the films that they produced. Beginning with the first silent films, we will engage with specific moments that grew out of the Hollywood cultural and economic system, such as the politics of representation and the work of D. W. Griffith; the Production Code and the Screwball Comedies of the 1930s; the Cold War and science fiction; the "kitchen sink" drama and the House Un-American Activities Committee blacklist of the 1950s; gender politics and sexualized starlets and the casting couch. In addition, we will look at aspects of the American and international film industries that attempted to create alternatives to the Hollywood machine.

Students should expect to analyze, discuss and write about film each week; read fiction, social science, film history and memoirs; complete a series of research projects in several media, from performance to multi-media; develop study guides and facilitate small seminar discussions of films; and conduct significant research on a program theme.

In what ways can the theory and practice of human rights enrich our understanding of literature, and how can literary studies broaden our understanding of human rights? We will think about literature as an ethical and political project, and consider what relation, if any, literature has to conventional forms of human rights work. We'll question the emotional impact literature can have on readers, and whether emotions such as empathy have a necessary relation to justice. Finally, we will consider how narrative enables or disables memory, truth telling, and justice in the aftermath of atrocity. Among our selected human rights topics, we will study torture, disappearance, sexual and gender rights, and poverty. Our reading will focus on human rights issues in the United States, with some reading about Sri Lanka, Haiti, Grenada, and possibly South Africa. Among the authors we will probably study are Ondaatje, Danticat, Allison, Brand and Cuadros.