Courses

In this course, we will examine how commemorative traditions in Europe and the Americas have been invented and contested since the nineteenth century. We will discuss why certain events in the past rather than others have been the object of commemoration; what these creations stood for originally; how their meanings have changed over the time; and the lessons, if any, these commemorative practices continue to teach us today.

This course will tackle the topic of embodiment in Chinatown from the design-oriented perspectives of city planning, public art, cultural and cinema studies. The focus will be on how racialized bodies have been imagined and represented in colonial and post-colonial discourses since the 19th century during the emergence of mass global migration, often motivated by the search for work. The narrative of the Chinese in America will serve as case study during the transition from the commerce of enslaved bodies to the commerce of contracted bodies.

This course explores the foundational role of biology in various health professions, including careers as physicians, nurses, physician assistants, health policy experts, basic science research, social scientists, and health entrepreneurs. The course delves into the broader factors influencing health outcomes, such as politics, systemic racism, bias, social determinants of health, the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects of underrepresentation in healthcare.

Working to remove the myths about fundamental and translational research, this course focuses on informing students beyond the public perception of biology and biological research. Striving to develop students’ scientific communication skills, personal identity in science, and the intersection between research and community, we will engage students through collaboration with the Philadelphia community in addition to lecture and discussion based learning.

This course uses a biological foundation to explore general issues at the interface of biology and society. We will use both historical and contemporary reading materials, with an emphasis on the primary scientific literature, to inform discussions on often controversial issues in biology as well as the social responsibility of scientists to respond to these issues.

Rhetoric and the Community is a class designed to improve the quality of students’ speaking abilities. Through debates, impromptu speeches and various other types of oral reports, students develop their skills as speakers.

This course extends student experiences in the first-year Kite and Key courses. Students reflect upon, theorize, and integrate the different epistemologies of the humanities, arts, natural sciences, and social sciences. They will experience, and learn to facilitate, inclusive, evidence-informed learning environments that promote student success through dialogue, mentorship, collaboration, active learning, and reflective practice. Topics include: knowledge production in higher education; interdisciplinary and collaborative inquiry; the role and practice of dialogue and active learning strategies; and peer mentoring and advising.

When we read autobiographies, diaries or memoirs we expect the writing to be all about the individual writer. This Life Writing as a Dialogue course will use several autobiographical genres (autobiography, memoir, diary and auto fiction), to support students’ understanding of how relational dialogic processes are used in such genres to construct self and group identity.

This course will introduce the student to the many ways in which mindfulness is currently being implemented to support the health and success of students of all ages.  Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), in particular, which utilizes secularized practices from Asian and South Asian traditions for the remediation of various health concerns, has revolutionized behavioral medicine, and the scientific evaluation of MBSR has shed new light on the bio-mechanical pathways linking mind and body.

Faith, belief, spirituality and religious identity are central to the lives of so many people, and so building understanding about these aspects of life – encompassing the development of our personal convictions as well as our connections to (or challenges with) institutional religion and spiritual community – is essential to understanding our world.  But conversations on these topics can be complicated, confusing, even contentious.  The Interfaith Dialogue in Action course makes space for students of all religious and non-religious backgrounds to engage with one another, reflect together, and learn skills to build dialogue between people with different faith traditions, worldviews, practices, and beliefs.  

The twentieth century saw the rise and refinement of commercial sound recording, which gave rise to a proliferation of sound-based artistry. This course will examine how music, sound recording, and poetry influenced each other throughout the century.

From Socrates in the fourth century BCE to Galileo in the seventeenth, the dialogue—a form of writing that stages a conversation or debate between two or more speakers—was one of the most popular genres for disseminating observations and opinions about the world, particularly when they were new or controversial. Although scientists no longer use written dialogues to share their research today, discussion, disagreement, and debate remain important tools for advancing scientific knowledge, at least in theory if not always in practice.

This Capstone will begin by considering recent bioethical literature on the importance of lived experience in both scholarship and public policy debates, as well as the biases that attach to this type of knowledge. The course readings will center on case studies we will pick as a class that are grounded in equally valid, but conflicting, first-person accounts — possible examples include autism, cochlear implants, and physician assisted suicide.

Climate change and environmental degradation pose some of the most complex challenges of our time. Building a sustainable future requires active and creative leadership by individuals, organizations, governments, and business firms.

Designing to Care is informed by ideas and skills from across the disciplines of design, nursing, and health research. As an interdisciplinary and project-based course, it actively examines the connection between the design of healthcare, how we communicate health strategies, and the impact of both on individual, institutional, and community wellbeing.

This case study explores select integrative approaches to health and wellness, including Mind-Body Therapies such as ayurveda, yoga, mindfulness/meditation, taichi/qi therapy, chiropractic care, massage, acupuncture; Dietary Therapy, Naturopathy; and Art and Music therapy.

The early 1950s may have been the nadir for modern American conservatism. Conservative hero Robert Taft had lost the Republican nomination for President to a more moderate candidate for the third time, many in the Republican Party had moved to accept some of the most popular New Deal programs, and a moderate, internationalist consensus had taken hold in the country. Yet, from these ashes, conservatism rose to become a potent political force — maybe the driving force — in the United States over the last half century. This seminar explores the contours of that rise, beginning with infrastructure laid and coalitions forged in the 1950s and early 1960s. We will see how conservatives built upon this infrastructure to overcome Barry Goldwater’s crushing 1964 defeat to elect one of their own, Ronald Reagan, president in 1980. Reagan’s presidency transformed the public philosophy and helped shape subsequent American political development.

An advanced seminar in PPE offered by Paideia-affiliated faculty. As an advanced interdisciplinary seminar, this course is open to juniors and seniors with a declared PPE major (open to others by departmental permission). For a detailed course description visit: https://ppe.sas.upenn.edu/study/curriculum/advanced-interdisciplinary-courses

More than forty years after the normalization of relations between the United States and China, the relationship faces new and fundamental challenges with global implications. Designed as a policy task force, taught in coordination with a similar course to be taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing, this course will introduce students to the most pressing issues in U.S.-China relations –– including security, trade, climate, tech competition, and human rights. Each student will be required to complete a policy paper on some aspect of U.S.-China relations.

At the end of the course, students will travel to China to meet in-person with their Chinese counterparts at Tsinghua University, and to present their policy papers and recommendations to relevant interested Chinese audiences in Beijing and Shanghai.

Whether we think of ourselves as spiritual or religious or something else, there are some realities all of us share. We were born. We’ll die. We’ll do some living in between. We all do these things, but how we do them is shaped by such a wide variety of factors and forces that none of us lives or dies in the same way. Humans have long turned to the transcendent, mysterious, or invisible as one way of marking this human life cycle and making meaning in human history, but this turn has also been one of the ways we sort each other into insiders and outsiders, enlightened elites and plebs, righteous and damned. In this course, we’ll be asking how we can learn to move from the simple fact that religious and other differences exist to, as Diana Eck put it, ways of “living, connecting, relating, arguing, and disagreeing” in an often fractious world.

How can the arts help us build a more just society? How can the arts transform social structures and systems? Public health crises involving clean water (Flint), police violence (Baltimore), and a lack of economic and educational opportunity following reentry (Philadelphia) make legible the need for a new visual language that critiques these conditions and challenges entrenched structural inequalities. We will engage the work of creative practitioners who are mapping new relationships between art and social justice and directly impacting individual and communal well-being.

This course will focus on Baltimore using The Wire and its sequel, We Own This City, as core texts. Following the trajectory of The Wire, the course will explore the history and development of the city and its institutions with a thematic focus on the impacts of the War on Drugs and policing on Baltimore’s African American community, urban revitalization, violence and community trauma, and the role of the carceral state in American cities.

Philadelphia is the mural capital of the world, home to more than 4,000 community-created murals. Through conversations with muralists and community members, field visits to mural sites, and mapping neighborhood assets and histories to understand a mural’s place within the neighborhood’s ecosystem, students learn how public art emerges through collaboration and shared authorship.

How smart are you? How smart is your dog? We often measure intelligence by human standards – testing parrots on their ability to name shapes or timing dogs while they solve puzzles. Through this course, we’ll flip the script and put ourselves in animals’ shoes. We’ll mainly read Ed Yong’s recent book examining what various animals actually take in through their senses. Students may focus their research on the sensing, cognition, or communication of a specific species, or on the adoption of new tools, like AI, for improving our understanding of animals.

Who decides which voices trend and which get buried? Search engines and platforms like Threads, Instagram, TikTok, and X shape whose knowledge counts, whose communities get surveilled, and whose culture goes viral. This critical writing seminar treats digital platforms as rhetorical environments where race, gender, and power collide.

Do we need help choosing what to eat? How much to save for retirement? Whether to check the organ donor box at the DMV? Certain behavioral economists think so. This section will explore how everyone from city planners to nutritionists to the Internal Revenue Service engages, knowingly or not, in “choice architecture” that influences everyday decisions. 

Does tobacco cause cancer? The answer seems obvious now, but the debate over scientific facts—on which historic political decisions hinged—raged for years as tobacco companies developed a playbook that would be adopted by science deniers for decades to come. Today, arguments about what counts as evidence continue in debates over seed oils, vaccines, and even definitions of biological sex. Using Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s Merchants of Doubt, this writing seminar looks at the ways that politics and science intersect even in cases that seem to be straightforward matters of fact.