Though it’s only April and autumn may seem distant, it’s already time to start planning your fall semester schedule at Case Western Reserve University. Undergraduate students can begin enrolling for fall courses Monday, April 10, and some graduate students have already started.
Need some inspiration? Whether you’re looking to explore a new topic to stretch your mind or need to add a few additional credits you’re not sure how to fill, we’ve got you covered with 10 classes to consider.
These course suggestions—some of which were submitted by departments or schools—reflect a wide range of topics, categorized by these subject areas:
- Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
- Business, Law and Politics
- Health and Wellness
- Science and Tech
Looking for other ideas to develop your schedule? Visit the Student Information System (SIS) for additional course listings.
Ready to schedule? Log in to SIS.
Summer course registration is already underway. If you plan to take courses over the summer, make sure to sign up for classes soon.
Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
ARTH 382—Art, Eco-criticism, and the Environment
Offered as ARTH 382, ARTH 482 and ESTD 382
Instructor: Andrea Rager, the Jesse Hauk Shera Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Art
As issues of sustainability and environmental impact have become increasingly dominant concerns in contemporary society, eco-criticism has emerged as a vital methodological thread across the humanities. Motivated by ethical as well as scholarly concerns, eco-criticism not only enacts a fundamental examination of nature as an ideological construct, but also seeks to investigate the complex interrelationship between humanity and the environment.
Concurrently, there has been a marked interest in studying the role of “green issues” in contemporary art, particularly in tracing the development of earth art or eco-art from the early 1970s to the present. The goal of this seminar is to forge a link between these two emergent strands by tracing the complex relationship between art and the environment from the 19th nineteenth-century to the present, seeking to thereby assess the capaciousness of eco-criticism as a methodological approach to art history.
SASS 471—Introduction to Data Science for Social Impact
Instructor: Francisca García-Cobián Richter, research associate professor at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences
This is the first course in the Certificate in Data Sciences for Social Impact curriculum, a joint certificate between the Mandel School and the Case School of Engineering. The certificate is intended to prepare students to navigate and influence this new era of technology and data-driven solutions in social welfare and policy, ensuring proper ethical guidelines are developed and followed; and intersects social science, social work and data science in an increasingly critical field, bringing a diverse group of people to the table in order to shape the way technology is used to advance social justice.
ENGL 385/485—Special Topics in Literature: Literature of 9/11
Instructor: Thrity Umrigar, Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English
This multi-genre course will examine how different genres depict the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Students will study how contemporary artists used film, novels, graphic novels, journalism and poetry to grapple with this tragedy, and how each medium contributed to the national conversation.
Course discussions will center on the political event itself and the aesthetic response to it. Requirements include class participation, regular postings of responses on Canvas, a short paper, and a longer final research paper.
Some of the texts to be considered will include Don Dellio’s Falling Man, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Art Speilgman’s In the Shadow of No Towers.
Business, Law and Politics
LAWS 5771—Restorative and Transformative Justice
Instructors: Ayesha Bell Hardaway, co-director of the Social Justice Institute and associate professor of law; and Gabriella Celeste, policy director of the Schubert Center for Child Studies and adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology
Students in this course will be introduced to the concept of restorative justice as a tool for transformational change.
They will do this by examining historical and current literature on the indigenous roots of restorative practices and current applications in community-based settings and various systems—with a focus on youth, including schools, courts and law enforcement.
The course will be conducted with a restorative framework integrating dialogue/listening circles and specific communication tools with reading materials, guest speakers and role-playing exercises for students to engage with the material.
MGMT 205—Essentials of Personal Finance
Instructor: Mary Sasmaz, assistant professor in the Department of Accountancy
Prerequisites: Sophomore standing or higher
Open to students in all disciplines, this course aims to establish a foundation in personal finance, to help students prepare for the future as productive leaders in the workplace and financial literate citizens.
The course will target four core areas:
- Budgeting and saving;
- Investing;
- Obtaining credit and controlling debt; and
- Minimizing financial risk through insurance.
Students also will learn about personal taxation, retirement planning and estate planning.
A student may not receive credit for both MGMT 205 and MGMT 395 with the topic “Achieving Personal Financial Security.”
ECON 377—Topics in Monetary Policy
Instructor: To be determined
Prerequisites: ECON 102 and ECON 103
Central banks have become enormously powerful economic institutions in many countries, yet their purposes and functions are widely misunderstood. This course is designed to enrich students’ understanding of how central banks, such as the Federal Reserve System, actually operate; how they have been adapting to changes in the economic and financial landscape; and how they have been adapting to changes in technology.
The course will highlight current monetary policy and central banking issues in the United States and elsewhere. The course will emphasize the connection between economic theory and the practice of central banking.
Where relevant, topics will be examined from a multi-country perspective, so the practices of several different countries may be compared and contrasted.
Health and Wellness
NTRN 200—Case Cooks: Ethnic Eats; Sports and Performance; and Healthy Lifestyles
Offered as NTRN 200, NTRN 200S and NTRN 200H
Instructors: Multiple
Case Cooks is a series of courses aimed at learning about how food impacts health. In the fall, three different courses will be offered:
- Ethnic Eats: Focuses on cultural diversity exploring different regions of the world, including Africa, South America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
- Sports and Performance: Examines how food can impact peak physical performance.
- Healthy Lifestyles: Explores how nutrition impacts health.
BETH 210—Perspectives on Health: Introduction to Medical Humanities and Social Medicine
Instructor: To be determined
In this course, students will gain a broad overview of medical humanities and medical social sciences by engaging with materials from a wide range of disciplines.
Students will learn how to analyze which perspectives afford and obscure which types of knowledge relevant to health, illness and clinical practice. Students will learn how to identify epistemology, methodology, theory and data from various disciplinary perspectives.
This course is relevant for students engaged in pre-clinical education as well as those interested in medical humanities and medical social sciences.
Science and Tech
BIOL 321—Design and Analysis of Biological Experiments
Offered as BIOL 321 and BIOL 421
Prerequisites: Undergraduate and BIOL 216
Instructor: Jessica Fox, professor in the Department of Biology
In this laboratory course, students will learn how to use a computer programming language (MATLAB) to design, execute and analyze biological experiments. The course will begin with basic programming and continue to data output and acquisition, image analysis and statistics.
Students who are interested in carrying out research projects in any lab setting are encouraged to take this course and use the skills acquired to better organize and analyze their experiments.
No prior programming knowledge is assumed.
CSDS 312—Programming in Java
Offered as CSDS 132 and ECSE 132
Instructor: Harold Connamacher, the Robert J. Herbold Professor of Transformative Teaching in the Department of Computer and Data Sciences
This course offers an in-depth survey of modern programming language features, computer programming and algorithmic problem solving with an emphasis on the Java language.
Students will explore such topics as:
- Computers and code compilation;
- Conditional statements, subprograms, loops and methods;
- Object-oriented design, inheritance and polymorphism, abstract classes and interfaces;
- Types, type systems, generic types, abstract data types, strings, arrays and linked lists;
- Software development, modular code design and unit testing;
- Strings, text and file I/O;
- GUI components and GUI event handling;
- Threads; and
- Comparison of Java to C, C++, and C#.