These courses are taught by members of the Technology and the Environment Research Cluster. For more information about any course, contact the instructor.
HSTS 413/513: History of Science. Stresses the interaction of scientific ideas with their social and cultural context. Development of modern science in the 18th and 19th centuries and to the present. Jacob Hamblin.
HSTS 414/514: History of 20th Century Science. Focuses on the organization, practice, and theories of the natural sciences in the twentieth century, with emphasis primarily on the European and American scientific traditions from the 1890s to the present. Jacob Hamblin.
HSTS 481/581: Environmental History of the US. A study of human interaction with the environment and the transformation of the landscape and ecology of North America from the Indian period to the present, with special attention to the progressive alterations induced by the modernizing world of agriculture, industry, urbanism, and their relation to the market system in the United States. Jacob Hamblin.
NMC 430: Media Theory. Specifies the concepts, hypotheses, and theoretical paradigms that have characterized the study of media since the early 20th century. The evolution of theory as new media has changed the media economy is emphasized, as well as the need for new concepts to describe phenomena unique to the Internet era. Josh Reeves.
NMC 437: New Media and Society. Traces the impact of new media–from the telegraph to the Internet–on American society. Emphasizes the way that existing social institutions (e.g., schools and churches) and opinion leaders (e.g., presidents and scholars) greeted the arrival of new media with an increasingly predictable mixture of fear and euphoria. Josh Reeves.
WR 362: Science Writing. Students learn and practice the conventions for writing scientific material for a variety of audiences. Involves writing and research assignments, multimedia presentations, lecture, and in-class and online activities. (Baccalaureate Core Course). Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder.
WR 462/562: Environmental Writing. Writing about environmental topics from multiple perspectives. Includes science journalism, research and writing on current scientific issues and controversies, and theories of rhetoric and environmentalism. (Writing Intensive Course) Tim Jensen, Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder.
WR 497/597: Digital Literacy and Culture. From pencils to pixels, telegraphs to texts, and semaphores to social networking, Digital Literacy and Culture focuses on the relationships between human expression and the technologies that provide context, meaning, and shape to those expressions. Kristy Kelly, Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder.