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OUR PROGRAM

 

How we work

UCSB’s English Department encourages its students to pursue their particular interests while also developing a broad understanding of English, American, and Anglophone literature. Accordingly we offer an undergraduate specialization in “Literature and Mind.”  

 

UNDERGRAD COURSES

Students can specialize in Literature and Mind by taking, at anytime before graduation, four approved courses.

At least two of these must be courses taught by the English faculty (or affiliates) associated with the specialization. Two may be taken from a list of approved courses taught by instructors in other departments.

If you are interested in specializing in Lit and Mind you should contact the English Department’s Undergraduate Adviser, Thomas Huff.


WINTER 2022

Graphic Novel & Trauma (ENGLISH 128GN)

Russell Samolsky

The focus of this course is less with superheroes and more with the way in which the graphic novel engages the representation of global sites of conflict and atrocity. Starting with the Jewish Holocaust and working our way to Palestine, Lebanon, Israel and New York (9/11), we examine how the graphic novel takes up such ethical problems as the limits of representation, the relationship between fiction and testimony, as well as that between trauma, memory and mourning. We also deal with questions of moral responsibility and accountability with regard to acts of torture. While these will be our predominant concerns, we also look into how graphic novels self-referentially comment upon the process of artistic composition.


Literature and/of AI (english 146AI)

RITA RALEY

Agency, one of the key literary and philosophical problems, has a new dimension in the era of so-termed artificial intelligence. So, too, the old question—what is the value and purpose of human life—resonates differently when considered in light of mass automation. The imagination, and the realization, of artificial entities is not new (whether golem, monster, robot, or even mutant plant), but the exponential developments in machine and deep learning over the past decade, along with an evolving understanding of cognition, do invite us to reevaluate the mythologies we have built up around them. What texts and concepts inform our understanding of intentional action and life itself in the present? What might articulating an arc that bends from the mythological Galatea to DeepMind’s game-playing AI, MuZero, illuminate with respect to the categories of “human” and “machine,” and the relations between them? How, if at all, does the conversation shift if we introduce notions of plant sentience? How, in sum, does literature help us to think through non-human intelligence? No technological knowledge is presumed for this class, but students should be prepared for some research and discussion of unsupervised learning and natural language processing, with concrete reference to such topics as image recognition, machine translation, large language models, and deepfakes. However, primary course material will be films, art works, novels, stories, and essays. Reading will likely include Samuel Butler, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Norbert Wiener, William Gibson, N.K. Jemisin, Sue Burke, possibly Liu Cixin, and others.


Literature and the Human Mind (ENGLISH 171)

Sowon park

Of what relevance is cognitive neuroscience to literature? This course steers through the thickets of neuroscience and maps areas where the general principles of neurobiology directly inform core issues in literary studies. The aim is to introduce students to the dynamical relations between brain, body and culture while providing a grounding in the world literary classics. Topics include Visual Perception, Trauma, Memory, Language, Theory of Mind, Emotion and Identity.


Memory and Futurity in a Theatrical Jazz Aesthetic (English 183WP)

Stephanie Batiste

This course will focus on African American performance forms and guide students in writing and devising original writing for the stage based on required critical readings, memory, storytelling, and interactive performance exercises. This seminar will be devoted to reading primary sources, theory, and writing performance in experimental, critical, experience, historical, and imagination-based modes. We begin with exercises that ignite the imagination and spur our writing. We will discuss theoretical essays on theatrical jazz and solo performance in deepening our knowledge and insight into new plays and practices. Readings, screenings, and audio assignments include authors and performers Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, Sharon Bridgforth, and Langston Hughes among others. Performances and essays will serve as models and provide prompts for our original work. We’ll write and critique passages and presentations of text, script, description, and poetry generated by participants during the quarter.


FALL 2021

Imagination and Creativity (English 170IC)

Julie Carlson

What is creativity? How do creative ideas emerge? Is the "creative personality" depressed and more often than not distressed by the indignities of living? What is the relationship between creativity and social justice activism? Such questions are at the core of our readings and investigations into imagination and creativity. Our readings focus on brain-based, psychoanalytic, and ethical discussions of creativity that are illustrated, challenged, and deepened by texts of the most innovative writers, Anne Carson and Toni Morrison.


Affective & Embodied Experience on the Early Modern Stage (ENGLISH 231)

James Kearney

In this course we will consider affective experience on the early modern stage with an emphasis on embodiment and ethico-political life. What does "experience" mean in the early modern world and how is it understood in relation to affective and embodied knowledge? How do early modern dramatists entertain us with scenes and moments that stage experiments with bodily and affective experience, social and political knowledge? The literary texts we discuss may include Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam, Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl. As we explore these dramatic texts, we will touch on the thought of figures such as Seneca, Wright, and Descartes. We will also address more recent interventions in thought concerning experience, embodiment, and affect, including those of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adriana Cavarero, and Sara Ahmed. In our conversations about theater's attempts to stage affective and embodied experience – especially the coming to or arriving at lived or experiential knowledge – we will take up topics ranging from the passionate space of the stage to historical forms of gendered embodiment, from disability knowledges to the embodied experience of voice.


SUMMER 2021

Story and the Brain (english 170SB)

Aili pettersson peeker

An interdisciplinary course about the power of storytelling. The aim is to provide students with an understanding of how storytelling shapes our minds and how our brains shape the stories we tell. The course explores topics such as empathy, emotion, mindreading, memory, and imagination and how they relate to narrative. We will read foundational works from the cognitive sciences alongside literature and television from the 20th and 21st centuries by Lynda Barry, William Faulkner, Thomas King, Tracy K. Smith, and others. Designed to introduce students to think across disciplinary fields of literary studies, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.

 
 

 
 

Literature and Emotion (English 171LE)

Maddie Roepe

What are emotions? This course provides students with an opportunity to engage in detailed interdisciplinary study of significant developments in the history of "emotion." Examining literary texts from the early modern period up to the twenty-first century, we will be addressing the concept of emotion as presented in a variety of forms and genres, alongside key findings in cognitive neuroscience and psychology. Together, these materials refute the traditional opposition between emotion and rationality and reveal the extent to which emotion is an inextricable part of everyday cognition. Assignments for this course are designed to increase interdisciplinary literacy and develop skills of practical criticism.

 
 

Cognitive Approaches to World Literature (English 190CA)

Daniel Martini

Designed to enable students to use cognitive neuroscience to read world literature. Centered around two general issues: how our hunter-gatherer brain supports the production of a wide range of literatures and how the study of Introduces students to cutting-edge interdisciplinary research. Studying literature from across the globe together with cognitive neuroscience will also explain how universal cognitive capacities actually support local environmental variations in language, script and genre. Students use this foundational survey course to take specialized classes on literature and emotion, and storytelling and the brain.


SPRING 2021

reading jane austen’s mind (english 151ja)

kay young

Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion—we'll study these four novels in depth to read the mind of their author, Jane Austen—for how she novelizes the truth, for what she teaches us about the nature of the English language and the novel, and for why we continue to read Austen for help in reading the minds of others and of ourselves.

 
 

Mind Brain and Literature (english 170mb)

sowon park

This is an interdisciplinary course on the human mind. The main aim is to encourage an understanding of the range and richness of the ways in which the human mind has been conceptualised across the boundaries of literature, cognitive neuroscience and literary theory/philosophy. 

It is designed to provide students with an opportunity to:

  1. learn some of the more significant developments that have emerged from cognitive neuroscience on cognition, emotion, memory, the unconscious, mindreading, visual perception, violence, addiction and sex/gender

  2. relate the scientific findings to larger propositions about the nature and value of human experience found in literary classics

  3. develop skills of ‘practical criticism’.


The Meaning of Life (english 170Mt)

kay young

What does it mean to be a human being and to be alive? This is the fundamental question of literature and of our lives. This question and new attempts to answer it come to full consciousness in the late 19th - and 20th centuries in modern thought and literature. In this course we'll move from the philosophic narratives of Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, and Freud, to the aesthetic narratives of Charlie Chaplin, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Morrison, and Kundera to consider how they pose the question of life's meaning and how they suggest responses as stories to help us tell the story of our own search for meaning. This is a course for those who like to read and think long and hard about the nature of being.


WINTER 2021

The Body As Archive: Indigeneity, felt theory, and decolonial ways of knowing (english 134NA)

Candace Waid

This course finds its origins the work of queer Chumash/Esselen poet and scholar Deborah A. Miranda who declares “my body is an archive”. What does it mean to physically inhabit a difficult or silenced history? How does it feel to have your body or your ancestors’ bodies and stories collected by institutions? How is trauma lived and passed down through the body? What do our feelings, senses, and living in our bodies teach us that cannot be learned through the mind alone? How does language itself create and contain archives of cultural knowledge and relationships?

Miranda’s work invites us to engage in Indigenous ways of knowing and feminist inquiry into the issue of historical trauma through narratives of embodied, lived experiences of subjection and survivace. We will explore the relationship between documents and objects and the emotions, senses, and affective knowledges of living peoples related to them by critically examining archival logics, archival methods, and theorizations of the archive. This is a course designed to shift disciplinary perspective. Course materials will cover a broad interdisciplinary terrain from literature, performance, poetry, and visual arts/film to legal, historical, and cultural studies. Much of this is short form and will be available through Gauchospace. We will be reading a few book length works (novels, theory, and memoirs) by authors such as Deborah A. Miranda, Saidiya Hartman, Dian Million, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Guest lectures will include field experts and visiting artists who are part of the syllabus.


Graphic Novel and Trauma (English 128gn)

russell samolsky

Our concern in this class will be less with superheroes and more with the way in which the graphic novel engages the representation of global sites of conflict and atrocity. Beginning with the Jewish Holocaust and working our way to Iran, Lebanon, Israel, and New York on 9/11, we shall examine how the graphic novel takes up such ethical problems as the limits of representation, the relationship between fiction and testimony, as well as that between trauma, memory, and mourning. We shall also deal with questions of moral responsibility and accountability with regard to acts of torture. The class concludes with an examination of historical and contemporary trauma in America. While these will be our predominant concerns, we shall also look into how graphic novels self-referentially comment upon their process of artistic composition as well as upon the very form of the comic itself.


Middlemarch and the Problem of Other Minds (english 197)

kay young

The greatest English novel of the 19th century, Middlemarch, will be the study of our 10-week seminar. Slowly, as we make our way through this encyclopedic narrative of 19th-century social realism, we will set our minds in relation to George Eliot’s mind in order to consider how Middlemarch creates the novel of “social realism” and imagines the nature of consciousness into being. The human mind’s capacity to feel empathy—Eliot’s fundamental topic—will be the focus of our study. While not required, I recommend that you read Daniel Deronda in tandem, the great finale of Eliot’s novel-writing career. This is a course for lovers of the 19th-century novel and the study of mind.


Imagination and Creativity (english 170ic)

julie carlson

What is creativity? How do creative ideas emerge? Is the "creative personality" depressed and more often than not distressed by the indignities of living? What is the relationship between creativity and social justice activism? Such questions are at the core of our readings and investigations into imagination and creativity. Our readings focus on brain-based, psychoanalytic, and ethical discussions of creativity that are illustrated, challenged, and deepened by texts of the most innovative writers, Anne Carson and Toni Morrison.


Literature of/and Artificial Intelligence (english 146ai)

rita raley

Agency, one of the key literary and philosophical problems, has a new dimension in the era of so-termed artificial intelligence. So, too, the old question—what is the value and purpose of human life—resonates differently when considered in light of mass automation. The imagination, and the realization, of artificial entities is not new (whether golem, monster, robot, or even mutant plant), but the exponential developments in machine and deep learning over the past decade, along with an evolving understanding of cognition, do invite us to reevaluate the mythologies we have built up around them. What texts and concepts inform our understanding of intentional action and life itself in the present? What might articulating an arc that bends from the mythological Galatea to DeepMind’s game-playing AI, MuZero, illuminate with respect to the categories of “human” and “machine,” and the relations between them? How, if at all, does the conversation shift if we introduction notions of plant sentience? How, in sum, does literature help us to think through non-human intelligence? No technological knowledge is presumed for this class, but students should be prepared for some research and discussion of unsupervised learning and natural language processing, with concrete reference to such topics as image recognition, machine translation, large language models, and deepfakes. However, primary course material will be films, art works, novels, stories, and essays. Reading will likely include Samuel Butler, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Norbert Wiener, William Gibson, N.K. Jemisin, Sue Burke, possibly Liu Cixin, and others.


FALL 2020

Shakespeare’s Feelings (english 197)

james kearney

In this seminar we will consider Shakespeare's feelings, or rather the emotional experiences he conjures for his audiences on the early modern stage. Our inquiry will take up the history of emotions – as well as what it means that emotions have a history – with a particular focus on the relation of reason to the passions. We will touch on thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Ahmed in the course of our discussions, but our primary focus will be Shakespearean drama. Plays we address may include: Macbeth, King Lear, Twelfth Night, and The Winter’s Tale. Requirements: careful reading, regular attendance, active participation, a final research paper, and a final exam.


global humanities (Comparative Literature 36)

Elisabeth Weber

What do literature and critical theory contribute to the reflection on human rights and the analysis of their violation? Inquiry into different ways in which the humanities can re-frame the debate on human rights and act as a social force.


SUMMER 2020

Literature and emotion (English 171LE)

maddie roepe

What are emotions? How are they communicated through art? What does it mean to be a thinking, feeling human being? This course takes as its focus the historical development of “emotion,” examining works ranging from the early modern period up to the twenty-first century in a variety of forms and genres. We will also be reading up-to-date work in contemporary cognitive neuroscience and psychology to inform our understanding of emotions. We hope to discuss and discover how contemporary studies of the mind are relevant to language and literature (and vice versa) and how we have imagined the mind at different times. Assignments for this course are conducted with the goals of increasing interdisciplinary literacy and developing skills of practical criticism.


Neurohumanities: Mind, Brain, Memory and the Musicoliterary (comparative literature 27)

john schranck and Juliana Acosta-Uribe

Memory has long been a subject of philosophical, artistic, literary and scientific inquiry, and with the rise of neuroscience, scientists have found themselves asking many of the same questions as their humanist counterparts. This course’s duo of instructors, one from the humanities, the other from the sciences, will guide us in pursuing such questions in tandem. How and why do we make memories? How and why do we lose them, and why does this loss strike at one of the core human emotions (fear)? How is sensory perception integrated into the creation and retrieval of memory? Why does music have a kindred relationship with memory and desire?


story and the brain (english 170sb)

aili pettersson peeker

What happens in the brain when we read fiction? This course examines the power of storytelling with reference to brain science and provides students with an understanding of how storytelling shapes our minds and how our minds shape stories. Course material includes 20th and 21st-century U.S. novels, short stories, television drama, plays and graphic novels by authors including Lynda Barry, William Faulkner, and Tony Kushner.


SPRING 2020

American Cultures of Mental Illness (ENGLISH 170MI)

JESSE MILLER

In this course we will explore representations of mental illness in modern America in its literary, cultural, political, philosophical, and medical dimensions. Looking at mental illness and trauma as it is experienced in diverse contexts and communities, we will ask: How have understandings and treatments of mental illness changed over time? How does literature add to neurochemical accounts of mental illness? What do representations of mental illness tell us about cultural ideals of freedom, rationality, and reason, and cultural anxieties about violence, disorder, and the unknown? Readings may include historical, sociological, and medical writings about mental illness, alongside literary works by writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Faulkner, Sylvia Plath, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Shani Mootoo. We will also consider how members of contemporary mad pride, anti-psychiatry, and psych-survivor movements are responding to popular representations and institutions for the treatment of mental illness today, and how can we make our campus a safer and more therapeutic space. Ultimately, our goal is to expand and complicate our understanding of mental illness, as well as to think broadly and creatively about the impact of literature on mental health, and effective ways to treat mental illness and trauma in our community to promote individual and collective well being.


experimental empathies: forms of fellow feeling in U.s. literature (english 165ee)

candace waid and aili pettersson peeker

This course explores narrative feeling and modes of evocation and provocation in 20th and 21st century literature. Experimental Empathies introduces students to cognitive discourses on emotion in order to explore the relationship between empathy and storytelling. We will analyze writers' strategies and readers' consciousness as experiments in “fellow” feeling and feeling fellowship—as experiments in empathy. Topics include compassion, empathy, enmity, and identification. Authors and auteurs include Charles Chesnutt, Lee Chang-dong, Joan Didion, William Faulkner, Terrance Hayes, Laila Lalami, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Tracy K. Smith.


CREATIVE CHAOS (C LIT 148)

cHRISTINA VAGT

Chaos: is it primordial mahem and confusion? Or does chaos permit the possibility of form and creativity? Course explores the order and disorder of chaos within literary, scientific, and philosophical narratives. From Hesiod and Ovid through Diderot, Wordsworth, and Pynchon.


WINTER 2020

THE BODY AS ARCHIVE: INDIGENEITY, FELT THEORY AND DECOLONIAL WAYS OF KNOWING (ENGLISH 134NA)

Amrah Salomón and CANDACE WAID

Studies in the literature of cultural and ethnic communities in the United States. Course on writing produced by, or associated with, cultural communities in America such as Afro-American, Chicano, Asian-American.


THE MEANING OF LIFE (ENGLISH 170MT)

KAY YOUNG

What does it mean to be a human being and to be alive? This is the fundamental question of literature and of our lives. This question and new attempts to answer it come to full consciousness in the late 19th - and 20th centuries in modern thought and literature. In this course we'll move from the philosophic narratives of Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, and Freud, to the aesthetic narratives of Charlie Chaplin, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Morrison, and Kundera to consider how they pose the question of life's meaning and how they suggest responses as stories to help us tell the story of our own search for meaning. This is a course for those who like to read and think long and hard about the nature of being.


LITERATURE AND THE HUMAN MIND (ENGLISH 171)

SOWON PARK and Kenneth Kosik

This course brings neuroscience together with literary representations of the mind, introducing students to the dynamical relations between brain, body and culture. This course is team-taught by Sowon S Park (English) and Kenneth Kosik (MCDB).


ATTACHMENT AND THE NOVEL (ENGLISH 197)

KAY YOUNG

We'll discuss theories of attachment, separation, loss from the perspective of developmental psychology and psychoanalysis in relation to 4 novels by contemporary women authors: Sula by Toni Morrison; My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante; Bel Canto by Ann Patchett; and The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. Our focus will be how the novel comes to terms with and for the emotional stories of our lives.


literature AND ATTACHMENT THEORY (ENGLISH 236)

KAY YOUNG

Attachment. Separation. Loss. These are the primary social experiences that define life—and literature. If literature gives verbal form to our feelings, no behaviors engender stronger feelings than those that accompany attachment, separation, and loss. We’ll read the groundbreaking research of John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, and Harry Harlow that first defined the field of attachment theory, followed by the work of infant researchers Daniel N. Stern, Colwyn Trefarthen, Beatrice Beebe, and Frank Lachman. We’ll turn to special topic off-shoots of attachment theory: “transformational object seeking” (Christopher Bollas); “earned secure attachment” (Alan Stroufe); “place attachment” (Altman and Low and others); attachment in the digital era (Linda Cundy, Sherry Turkle). As we read theory, so will we read literature—Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse or Elena’s Ferrante’s novel The Days of Abandonment. If time permits, we’ll view the films of J Robertson: A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital (1952) and by R.A. Spitz: Grief: A Peril in Infancy (1947)—documentaries that helped change the National Health Care’s hospital visitation policy in the UK. Each seminar participant will choose a work of literature of any genre to study, present, and write on in terms of attachment theory.


disability aesthetics (english 170da)

jesse miller

This course will provide you with an introduction to the field of disability studies through an engagement with literature, the arts, and culture. You will leave the class with an understanding of how social and cultural models of disability can impact our thinking about health, embodiment, identity, space, medical ethics, reading, and aesthetics.

What does it mean to be normal? What makes a body beautiful? How does disability shape narrative? What is Universal Design and how does it apply to social spaces like a classroom and aesthetic forms like a novel? How can the arts impact public health and lived experiences of (dis)ability? To answer these, and many more questions, we will consider the history of representations of disability in the arts, from the idealized bodies of classical sculpture and drama, to the grotesque figures of Southern Gothic literature. We will also examine the way contemporary disabled writers and artists create in order to challenge dominant cultural narratives of ability and disability by looking at poetry that proposes new languages of embodiment, autobiographical experiments that challenge commonplaces of medical ethics, and performances that explore the meaning of social interdependence. Finally, we will speculate upon how the tools of literary study can be used to address issues related to disability in our community by working together on a disability-related public project.


FALL 2019

Mind, brain, and literature (English 170 MB)

SOWON PARK

This is an interdisciplinary course on the human mind. The main aim is to encourage an understanding of the range and richness of the ways in which the human mind has been conceptualised across the boundaries of literature, cognitive neuroscience and literary theory/philosophy. 

It is designed to provide students with an opportunity to

1) learn some of the more significant developments that have emerged from cognitive neuroscience on cognition, emotion, memory, the unconscious, mindreading, visual perception, violence, addiction and sex/gender

2) relate the scientific findings to larger propositions about the nature and value of human experience found in literary classics

3) develop skills of ‘practical criticism’.

Course Requirements
The range of reading for the course is very wide. Students will expected to demonstrate detailed knowledge of a number of theoretical, scientific and philosophical texts as well as respond to the set literary works with historically, scientifically and aesthetically-informed relevance.

The core texts in Fall 2019 are:  Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, George Orwell’s 1984, Samuel Beckett’s Not I, and Iris Murdoch's Under the Net. Students should read the texts closely before the class in which they are discussed.


affect and the city: MILLENNIAL LITERATUREs of Los angeles (english 197)

stephanie batiste

This class investigates intersections of race and affect in the city. We’ll explore theoretical models of affect and its effects as an entry point to the nature of human response to incursions of violence and displacement on community, subjectivity, and politics. The course takes Los Angeles as a case study providing a specific location from which to consider race and urban experience in the nation and the world as racial difference and structures of otherness continue to determine human experience in cities around the globe. In Los Angeles’s history of gang warfare, police brutality, riot, geographical segregation and space-based inequality, we find a an opportunity to theorize racial, class, and immigration experiences that grate roughly against wealth and privilege. Literature becomes a site for reflection and imagination of feeling in the shaping of the subject, the city, and racial knowledge. Attention to affect reshapes racial, social, and interpersonal knowledge, an attention vital to projects of diversity and inclusion in the project of democracy.


shakespeare’s feelings (english 231)

james kearney

In this course we will consider Shakespeare’s feelings, or rather the emotional and affective relations and events, moods and experiences he conjures for his audiences on the early modern stage. Our discussions will touch on everything from the ancient rhetorical tradition of ethopoeia to contemporary affect theory as we address the various affective technologies Shakespeare employs. Embracing the enabling limits of the quarter system, we will read only a few of Shakespeare’s plays: King Lear, Timon of Athens, Twelfth Night, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, maybe Hamlet. Our reading will also take up the history of emotions – as well as what it means that emotions have a history – with a particular focus on the relation of reason to the passions. As we approach this history, we will attend to the thought of figures such as Aristotle and Seneca, Thomas Wright and David Hume. We will also discuss more recent interventions in thought concerning emotion, including those of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Brian Massumi, Sara Ahmed, and Sianne Ngai as we discuss topics ranging from the passion of the player to anger and stoicism, from the affective space of the stage to mourning, melancholy, and the experience of empathy.


fantasy and the fantastic (c lit 191/fr 153d)

dominique jullien

Course explores the creation of a space where a fantastic perception of reality developed and thrived, hesitating between the real and the supernatural, in the intermediate space of the unexplained and unexplainable. Works by Balzac, Poe, Stevenson, James, and Borges.


evolution and cognition (psych 155)

leda cosmides

An overview of theory and research in evolution and cognition. Explores ways in which the human mind can be seen as a collection of devices designed by evolution to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Topics may include: cooperation, mating, sibling jealousy, coalitional aggression.