This course will focus on less developed countries and will consider topics such as economic growth and personal well-being; economic inequality and poverty; intra-household resource allocation and gender inequality; fertility and population change, credit markets and microfinance; labor markets and trade policy. It will tackle these issues both theoretically and empirically.

This course introduces students to basic concepts from the study of public policy. It will serve as an introduction into SPIA and the many disciplines that make up its faculty. The course is designed to familiarize students with the broader issues involved in analyzing, designing, and implementing public polity. The course will a) introduce students to three approaches that policy makers use to design and evaluate policy; and b) allow students to apply these abstract notions to a variety of policy debates.

This undergraduate lecture course examines the effects, response to, and legacies of pandemics in the past -- their short term and lasting impacts on government, civil liberties, trust in experts, ethnic and racial tensions, social inequalities, and global and local economies. The course uses insights from these past cases of world-changing pandemics (from the plague through influenza, polio, AIDS, and COVID) to inform our understanding of current social, political, and economic challenges. Analysis of the past is also used to inform policy discussions about planning for the future.

Analyzes the historical construction of race as a concept in American society, how and why this concept was institutionalized publicly and privately in various arenas of U.S. public life at different historical junctures, and the progress that has been made in dismantling racialized institutions since the civil rights era.