Rodowick said the course, which he believes is the first VES course ever to be included in the Core, will be very similar to a VES course he offered last year.
“I’m including more contemporary films than before and I’m going to stress in lecture how to be visually sophisticated and read film,” said Rodowick, who taught Visual and Environmental Studies 170a, “Introduction to Visual Studies and Film Studies,” last year.
Recent star-hire Niall Ferguson, a professor of history and author of the best-selling books, “Colossus,” “House of Rothschild,” and “Empire,” will teach his first courses at the College next spring, when he will offer both History 10b, “Western Economies, Societies, and Polities from 1648 to the Present” and, with Saltonstall Professor of History Charles S. Maier, History 1965, “International History: States, Markets, and the Global Economy: Conference Course.”
“Europe will still be the center of gravity [in 10b], but only in as much as it genuinely was the dominant continent for most of the three centuries after 1648,” Ferguson said in an e-mail, “I’ll lay more emphasis on warfare, empires and economics.”
President Summers will no longer offer the lecture course he taught last year, Social Analysis 78, “Globalization and its Critics,” but first-years will have the opportunity to compete with hundreds of their fellow students for a handful of spots in his freshman seminar, “Globalization: Opportunities and Challenges,” which returns to the course catalog after a one-year hiatus.
“I did miss [teaching the Freshman Seminar],” Summers wrote in an e-mail. “I suspect in a year or two that I will again offer a large course.”
Molecular and Cellular Biology and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology courses are listed separately under Biological Sciences this year, just below the new introductory Life Sciences sequence.
Notable absences this year include Chemistry 15, “Inorganic Chemistry” and Economics 1030, “Economics and Psychology.” Professor of Psychology Daniel T. Gilbert, the popular teacher of Psychology 1, “Introduction to Psychology,” will not offer the course this year. It will be offered solely by Medical School Professor of Opthamology Jeremy M. Wolfe.
—Staff writer Adam M. Guren can be reached at guren@fas.harvard.edu.