What can music teach us about the truth?  In this seminar, we’ll explore how Mozart’s most famous opera interrogates the concept of truth through a complex dramatization of Enlightenment and deception.  In its shifting portrayals of good and evil, its blend of fantasy with rationality, the opera asks how truth is constructed, revealed, and communicated.  It also allows us a glimpse at a world—perhaps not our own—in which universal truth is best expressed in music.

This seminar considers the intersections of philanthropy, altruism, and charitable giving from the perspective of economics. We will explore the economic theories and empirical evidence surrounding philanthropic behaviors and their impacts on society. Key questions include: What motivates individuals to give? How do economic policies influence charitable activities? What roles do altruism and self-interest play in philanthropy? 

This seminar considers the role of the artist in shifting culture at a time of planetary urgency. How does contemporary ecological art contribute to information sharing and changing perceptions? How might it lead to increased participation in developing and supporting sustainable and equitable global futures? How is the impact of climate-themed art different than scientific or media communication? How do artists work collaboratively across disciplines to address both the physical and ethical dimensions of sustainability, challenging the separation of art and other fields? This seminar will revisit the role of the artist in society in a time of climate crisis.

The twenty-first century has been tough on democracy and shows no signs of easing up soon. Social scientists have tried to understand the forces at work behind contemporary democratic backsliding, while political theorists have undertaken the task of imagining what a more successful vision of popular government might look like. This seminar seeks to make this latter body of work more accessible to participants. It looks at theoretical questions at play in reinterpreting democratic rule, and it also suggests a number of institutional fixes that have excited theorists determined to reinvent democracy for the future. 

How should the U.S. Constitution be interpreted? Ever since the Constitution was drafted in 1787, this question has provoked enduring debate. In the last half-century, one particular approach to constitutional interpretation has caused particularly heated disagreement: originalism. Originalists, who now command a majority on the Supreme Court, maintain that the Constitution should be interpreted today in accordance with the meaning it had at the time of its inception. As a result, no theory of constitutional interpretation affords history more weight or authority, an emphasis that has locked originalists and historians in debate over the relationship between legal interpretation and the methods of history. This seminar considers originalism and its discontents.

Human languages are amazing communicative tools, but are filled with lexical and structural ambiguities. (Think about words like bank, mole, fan, ring, or consider sentences like ‘the landlord painted the walls with cracks’.) Yet our brains are able to recognize and handle such ambiguities — including many that we may not even consciously notice — and do so rapidly and impatiently, on the order of milliseconds. Today, scientists use technologies like eye-tracking to gain insight into ambiguity processing and how our brains process linguistic input more generally. This seminar looks at what’s going on "under the hood":  how the study of ambiguity is leading to ground-breaking discoveries about language processing and comprehension.

Fine art paintings and drawings provide some of the most sophisticated, subtle, memorable, important, and occasionally perplexing images ever created.  Recently, researchers versed in computer science and art history have applied computer methods to problems in the history and interpretation of such images.  In doing so, they have provided automated tools that empower art scholars to address a much wider range of interpretive problems as well as resolved long-standing debates resistant to traditional scholarly methods.

“There is nothing so confining as the prisons of our own perceptions.” Shakespeare's words nicely capture the circumstance in which we, and indeed all organisms, exist. The systems that humans, dogs, bats, and shrimp use to perceive the world are products of unique evolutionary histories: neurological adaptations tuned through natural selection to provide species with the information necessary for survival. This seminar will explore how scientists use clever behavioral experiments to investigate these exquisite adaptations, and consider the implications of these discoveries for understanding what it means to perceive reality.

The Grail first appears in Chrétien de Troyes twelfth-century romance Perceval, where it is a dish in the service of an other. But over the next few decades of Grail literature, during a time R. I. Moore has identified as the "formation of a persecuting society," this Grail becomes the Holy Grail and gets used to discriminate between peoples. We will explore this change with the help of Emmanuel Levinas who created an Ethics of the Other.

Why do we work? Necessity? A sense of calling? To bring meaning to our lives? For anthropologists of work, the answers always begin with workers themselves. Through ethnographic fieldwork—a combination of open-ended interviews and participant-observation—anthropologists seek to understand workers’ own experiences of the work they do and why they do it. In this seminar, we’ll use ethnographic case studies of U.S. workers to investigate broader questions around the meaning of work.

A critical problem facing the human race is climate change, driven by the massive burning of fossil fuels. Could a clean-energy future be found at the frontiers of chemistry – building nanostructures with controlled complexity that tame nature’s tendency to disorder? Which nanostructures are at the forefront of energy innovation? And what are the benefits and challenges in controlling their complexities at the atomic level? This seminar will examine the fascinating nexus between clean energy and nanotechnology.

Many human experiences—from childbirth to inattention in school to alcohol use—are thought of as medical issues at some times in some societies, and as natural processes or sins or crimes in other contexts. Why do societies define some aspects of life as medical issues, and not others? What are the consequences, for patients and for the broader community, of the historical trend of “medicalizing” a larger swath of human experience?

The music of Claude Debussy (1862–1918) is often described as “Impressionist,” borrowing a term from late nineteenth-century French painting. But Debussy also lived in a time of radical change in understandings of human psychology—an era of intense interest in the unconscious mind and in the physiological bases of perception and feeling. The radical nature of Debussy’s modernist music was a response to this fully embodied, material self as imagined by modern psychology.

Who gets to speak for iconic American spaces and whose voices define them? Can poems intervene in public memory and offer insights into erased histories? How does poetry represent Indigenous space in a way that rejects colonial mapping, reclaiming sites of dispossession and extraction? This seminar invites participants to consider such questions by focusing on Indigenous rewritings of the Mississippi River in the work of two contemporary poets, Joy Harjo (Creek) and Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe).

Astrophysicists are fond of saying we are all made of stardust. How is it possible that material in the far reaches of the Universe could be related to us? In this seminar we explore the Big Bang theory, which explains how the first three minutes of the Universe created the material from which we are all made. We shall discuss how precise “relic abundances” (quantities of specific elements from the periodic table) are generated, and how this connects to other cosmological relics, such as dark matter and dark energy. Finally, we shall look at cosmic inflation and theoretical controversies about what might have preceded the Big Bang.