Featured Courses

Instructor: Garnett Slatton

Business skills apply to fields far beyond commerce. Art, law, medicine, government, hospitality, and many others require a basic understanding of disciplines including selling, marketing, finance, strategy, operations, and management. This survey course introduces you to the fundamentals of running a business. Whether business is your career aspiration or you just want to learn the basics, this interactive and experiential course is for you!

Instructor: Allison Walker

This course will teach you how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is shaping research in chemistry and biochemistry. You will learn to program and build your own AI models and apply them to problems in chemistry and biochemistry, preparing you to navigate these fields in the emerging era of AI.

Instructor: John Ayers

What if the choices you make today determine the world you inherit tomorrow? In this course, you'll discover how scientific methods can be applied to understand & address pressing societal and environmental issues, from climate change to biodiversity loss to the inequitable health impacts of pollution. By exploring real-world challenges like energy production, resource management, and environmental justice, you'll learn why understanding these systems matters for your future. Whether you're concerned about the planet, curious about sustainability careers, or simply want to make informed decisions as a citizen, this course equips you with the knowledge to think critically about the environmental issues defining our time.

Instructor: Susannah Morey

Highly recommended for EES and CES majors interested in developing practical computation and coding skills with real world application to studying the Earth and environment. The skills that you will learn and practice in this course will help prepare you for a wide range of research, graduate school and career opportunities. Prior experience with Python or coding is not required.

Instructor: Sheba Karim

In this NaNoWriMo-inspired class, you will spend the semester writing your novel. While we'll read some essays on craft, complete writing exercises, and maintain a writing journal, these all work to the heart of this class: supportive and constructive feedback to help everyone produce a significant portion of their novel.

Instructor: Vera Kutzinski

Magical realism, a type of Speculative Fiction that has enjoyed remarkable popularity since the mid-20th century, began in Latin America and spread into a global phenomenon. Concerned with gender, sexuality, and race, it plays at and with the limits of reason and rationality, suggesting different ways of understanding and ordering our world. We'll explore the differences between realism and magical realism, and see how it offers escape, consolation, and sometimes revolutionary change for readers.

Instructor: Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller

Join an immersive, discussion-driven seminar on immigration, identity, and conflict in modern France. Drawing on films, literature, and historical sources, you'll investigate pivotal events—from the Dreyfus Affair to the 2015 Paris attacks—to understand tensions among Jews, Arabs, and Black Muslims in a society shaped by ties to Africa and the Middle East. This course is ideal for students interested in politics, history, global studies, and social justice.

Instructor: Julie Gamble

Gender is a central social relation that shapes cities and urban life. Gendered, racialized, and sexed power relations shape who can use cities, who is surveilled, and who benefits from them. Engaging directly in experiential assignments across Nashville, you will investigate the geography of gender relations in the city—between public and private, inside and outside, city center and suburb.

Instructor: Rebecca Epstein-Levi

What does it mean to live well? How ought one behave toward oneself, one's fellows, and one's community? Students will explore how one is shaped as a moral actor, and what gender has to do with that.

Instructor: Bairam Khan

Discover the beauty and depth of Urdu through its rich literary traditions. You will explore both classical and modern poetry, fiction, and performance in Urdu while engaging in seminar-style discussions, recitations, and creative responses. You will strengthen reading, speaking, and interpretive skills in Urdu and experience literature as a living culture—connecting themes of geopolitics, gender, history, cinema, society, and much more.

Instructor: Jesus Ruiz

Think the modern world was shaped only by Europe and the U.S.? Think again. In this course, you'll explore how colonialism, slavery, revolution, migration, and culture across the Americas created the global systems of race, labor, and power we live with today. Through an interdisciplinary lens bridging history, law, politics, and culture, you'll learn why Latin America and the Caribbean are central—not peripheral—to the story of modernity.

Instructor: Gretchen Selcke

Why are Caribbean cities like Santo Domingo, San Juan, and Miami becoming increasingly important logistics hubs? How do trade policies and supply chain management intersect with local cultures? You will explore these questions in this course, which focuses on Spanish Caribbean port cities as commercial and cultural hubs. The course is eligible for the Business Minor.

Instructor: Albina Khabibulina

Encounter the Russian novel at the moment of its highest development. Through close reading and sustained conversation, students explore how Dostoevsky's The Idiot and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina confront love and desire, moral responsibility, violence, faith, and the sense of the sacred, while offering radically different narrative forms and moral visions. No knowledge of Russian is required.

Instructor: Mariano Sana

Demography is all around us: births, deaths, marriages, fertility, divorces, moves, the onset of disability, even graduations...all of that is demographic. This course will explore key questions such as why did our global population grow from a few to over 8 billion? Can we feed 9.7 billion people by mid-century? Why is there so much variation geographically in how long people live? Why do some people have many kids but others have one, or even none? Once you see demography... you can't unsee it.

Instructor: Arun Hendi

Why is U.S. life expectancy so abysmal? Will population aging destroy our economies and healthcare systems? Why is fertility so low in Korea and so high in Kenya? Why do China and India have too many boys and too few girls? Can immigration solve population aging in Europe? Are Elon Musk and Bill Gates right? To address these questions, this course will examine the causes and consequences of population change, with a focus on the policy levers that are used to regulate fertility and migration, to improve health and living conditions, to manage population aging, and to reduce mortality. Students will learn basic demographic concepts, measures, and data sources and engage with longstanding debates about whether and how population growth promotes or undermines prosperity.