Course Offerings and Descriptions

Friday, February 22, 2008   Class 1, 2:00–3:30 p.m.

Fathoming the Forbidden City: Emperors, Eunuchs and the Culture of Late Imperial China, Richard Smith China The expansive palace of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) dynasty emperors known as the Forbidden City was a microcosm of the vast and variegated Chinese empire. It also was a cosmic pivot around which everything in the entire universe revolved. This illustrated lecture explores the role of the Forbidden City in the politics and culture of late imperial China, two realms of life that were inextricably linked in the past and that remain closely linked in the present. Suggested readings: Jonathan Spence, Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of Kang-Hsi (1974). Richard J. Smith, China's Cultural Heritage: The Qing Dynasty, 1644–1912 (1994). Richard J. Smith is the George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities, professor of history, and interim director of the Newly established Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Center for Asian Studies at Rice University. A speacialist in modern Chinese history and traditional Chinese culture, with a strong interest in transnational, global and comparative studies, Smith has won 12 teaching awards while at Rice, including the Piper Professorship, the George R. Brown Certificate of Highest Merit, the Sarofim Distinguished Teaching Professorship, the Nicholas Salgo Distinguished Teaching Award and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Texas Professor of the Year Award.   Imaging with a One-Pixel Camera, Kevin Kelly '99 Tiny Endeavors Compressive sensing is an emerging field based on recent understanding that a small number of random linear projections of a signal or an image contain enough infomration for reconstruction of a high-resolution signal or image. This technique is already being applied to traditional imaging devices such as magnetic resonance imaging and neutron scattering. Inspired by the success of this technology, the one-pixel camera is capable of megapixel images while utilizing a single optical detector for acquisition. Benefits of our scheme include beyond the visible spectrum where high-resolution image sensor arrays are much more costly, as well as the rapid acquisition of multispectral information Kevin Kelly is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and a member of The Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology. He received a B.S. in engineering physics from Colorado School of Mines and Ph.D. in applied physics from Rice in 1999. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Materials Research in Sendai and in the chemistry department at Penn State University before returning to Rice 2002, where is lab focused on imaging and spectroscopy at the nanscale. Kelly's most recent research involves fundamental issues in imaging with the development of a one-pixel camera based on compressive sensing and was selected as one of the top 10 emerging technologies for 2007 by Technology Review Magazine. Improvisation and Team Building Through Drama, Christina Keefe That's Entertainment This lecture will be a hands-on, experiential class. participants will learn the techniques of improvisation and will work on open-ended scenes that will be performed for the class. Christina Keefe was recently named director of the Rice University Theatre Program, where she has been a lecturer since spring 2007, teaching acting and voice classes. Keefe came to Rice from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, where she was a Wolfston Visiting Professor in theater. In addition to her teaching responsibilities at Lehigh, Keefe directed "A Midsummer Night's Dream." A professional actor and director, working in regional theater and off-off Broadway, Keefe also was an artisctic associate at both the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival and The Warehouse Theatre in South Carolina. She is a member of the Actor's Equity Association, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Voice and Speech Trainers Association, Inc. Is the Time (Finally) Right for Health Care Reform in the U.S.?, Nicholas K. Iammarino Modern Health Care Health care reform in any nation is an evolving process. Brought about by demographic, technological, social, cultural, economic and political factors, all health care systems are continually confronting issues related to cost, access and quality. This lecture will explore our current health care crises, examine other countries approaches and consider whether it is time for a fundamental change. Suggested readings: Thomas W. O'Roarke, Nicholas Iammarino, "Future of Health Care Reform in the USA: Lessons from Abroad," Expert Review in Pharacoeconomics and Outcomes Research, 2(3) (2002: 279-291. American College of Physicians, "Achieving a High-Performance Health Care System with University Access: What the United States Can Learn from Other Countries," Annals of Internal Medicine 184(1) (2008): 1-21. Nicholas K. Iammarino is currently professor and director of health sciences and chairman of the Department of Kinesiology at Rice University. He also has served as the health porfessions advisor at Rice from 1984–2003. After earning his Bachelor of Scinece degree from the University of Dayton, he went on to receive a Master of Health Education from the University of Toledo and his Ph.D. in health education from The Ohio State University, specializing in preventative medicine. He holds several adjunct positions in area institutions, including adjunct associate professor in the Department of Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and adjunct associate professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at The University of Texas School of Public Health.

Class 2, 3:45–5:15 p.m.

Globalization and Chinese Popular Culture, Steven W. Lewis China This lecture will draw on several pioneering research projects at Rice University that explore how Chinese popular culture is evolving under globalization. What will be the future economic and political influence of an emerging transnational Chinse middle class? Chinese popular culture is the medium by which national and local governments; corporations; and international organizations and nongovernmental organizations are seeking to mobilize, inform and motivate a new middle class. This lecture will explore these topics through innovative studies of advertising and popular media in China and the Chinese diaspora conducted by Rice researchers and faculty. Suggested readings: Transnational China Project Steven W. Lewis is the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy's Fellow in Asian studies and faculty adviser for the Jesse Jones Leadership Center's Summer in D.C. Policy Research Internship Program. He also is associate director of the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Center for Asian Studies at Rice. His research is focuses on exploring the growth of a transnational Chinese middle class; the influence of advertisements in new public spaces in Chinese cities; the development of privatization experiments in China's localities; and the reform of China's energy policies, national oil companies and international energy relations. Lewis is widely published and a frequent commentator on Chinese affairs for U.S., Chinese and foreign media. He received his Ph.D. from Washington University is St. Louis. The Training of a Singer, Stephen King That's Entertainment! This will be an interactive class discussing the physiology of the singing voice, including live demonstrations by undergraduate and graduate students in the Shepherd School of Music who are training for careers in the professional singing world. Baritone Stephen King is the chair of vocal studies at Rice's Shepherd School of Music and a voice teacher for the Houston Grand Opera. King enjoys a varied career of performance and teaching that reaches from China to Italy and throughout the United States. His singing engagements include opera, oratorio, and song and have included roles such as Count Almaviva in Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro in Rome, Italy, and recitals in major Chinese cities at the invitation of the Chinese Ministry of Culture. His activities as teacher, clinician, and adjudicator, both nationally and internationally, led to his 2006 appointment as a member of the voice faculty of the Aspen Music Festival. Adventures in Electronic Voting Research, Dan Wallach Election 2008 This talk begins with an overview of our experiences with electronic voting machines in real elections, concentrating on where we have observed poor procedures, equipment failures and honest mistakes taht have posed a real threat to the accuracy of the final tally. We will take a closer look at a disputed primary election in Laredo, Texas, as well as the recent congressional election in Sarasota, Florida. The issues in these lections and others have motivated a new deisgn for a voting architecture called VoteBox. VoteBox networks voting amchines in polling locations, for replicated, timeline-entangled logs, which can survive malice and malfunction to provide a verifiable audit of election-day events. Dan Wallach is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rice University and is the associate director of the National Science Foundation's ACCURATE (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections). Wallach's research involves computer security and issues of building secure and robust software systems for the Internet. He has testified about voting security issues before government bodies in the U.S., Mexico and the European Union and recently participated in California's top-to-bottom audit of its voting systems.

Saturday, February 23, 2008   Class 3, 9:00–10:30 a.m. Introductions to Global Health Issues: The World's Urgent Health Problems and What We Can Do About Them, Rebecca Richards-Kortum Modern Health Care Studies estimate that 10 million children under the age of 5 die every year throughout the world. Ninety-eight percent of these deaths occur because people do not have access to appropriate health technologies, ranging from vaccines, to diagnositcs, to point-of-care water treatment. This lecture will discuss Rice University's new global health technologies initiatives, Beyond Traditional Borders and Rice 360°. It will cover the major global health challenges, promising new technologies to address these challenges, and what students and faculty at Rice are doing to develop and implement solutions. Suggested readings: Robert E. Black, Saul S. Morris and Jennifer Bryce, "Where and Why are Ten Million Children Dying Every Year?" (2003). Bill Gates, The Tech Museum Global Humanitarian Award (2006) Peter Singer, "What Should a Billionaire Give—and What Should You?" (2006) Owls Beyond Borders Student International Internship Blog from 2007 summer internships in Africa. Follow-up readings and recordings: Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997) Ruth Levine, Millions Saved (2004) Stephen Lewis, Race Against Time (2005). Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty (2005) Rebecca Richards-Kortum is chair and the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University. Her research centers on new, noninvasive optical technologies for cancer detection. As founding director of Beyond Traditional Borders, she engages undergraduates in finding solutions to global health challenges. Richards-Kortum is current working on Rice 360°: Technology Solutions for World Health, a new university-wide intiative to establish an institute focused on developing new technologies and educational programs that improve health around the world. Richards-Kortum has a B.S. in physics and mathematics from the University of nebraska and a Ph.D. in medical physics from MIT. She joined the University of Texas College of Engineering in 1990 and was a founding member of the Department of Biomedical Engineering in 2001. Richards-Kortum has received numerous national honors for teaching and research. The Rise of China and Global Energy Markets, Joe Barnes China China is already the world's second largest consumer of petroleum in the world, with imports running about four million barrels of oil per day. Both consumption and imports are poised to increase dramatically as China's economy continues to grow. Will increasing Chinese demand for petroleum set the stage for conflict between Beijing and Washington, D.C., over oil in regions like the Persian Gulf and Central Asia? Or will a common interest in the orderly flow of moderately priced petroleum provide the foundation for closer Sino– American cooperation? Suggested readings: David G. Victor, "What Resource Wars?," The National Interest, November–December 2007 Heinrich Kreft, "China's Quest for Energy," Policy Review, October 2006 David Zweig and Bi Jainhai, "China's Hunt for Energy," Foreign Affairs, September –October 2005 Joe Barnes has been a fellow at Rice University's James A Baker III Institute for Public Policy since 1995, where he has fcused on the geopolitics of energy. Barnes's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, Oil and Gas Journal, Energy Markets, the Newsletter of the Royal United Service Institute, the SAIS Policy Forum Series, Survival, and the National Interest. Barnes is a contributor to two recent books "Energy in the Caspian Region" and "Natrual Gas and Geopolitics from 1970 to 2040." From 1979–93, Barnes was a diplomat with the U.S. State Department. He is a graduate of Princeton University.

Divided America and the 2008 Presidential Election Earl Black Election 2008 This lecture will asses the ferocious national power struggle between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans as the outcome of distinctive political trends in five geographic regions. The Democratic strongholds are the Northeast and the Pacific Coast; the Republican strongholds are the South and Mountain Plains; and theMidwest is a swing region. Suggested readings: Earl Black and Merle Black, "Divided America: The Ferocious Power Struggle in American Politics" (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007) Earl Black is the Herbert S. Autry Professor of Political Science at Rice University. His focus is American politics with special attention to the changing politics of the American South. In partnership with his twin brother, Merle Black of Emory University, he has written three books for Harvard University press on southern politics. His new book, "Divided America: The Ferocious Power Struggle in American Politics," focuses on voters, parties and elections according to regional and national trends. Over his career, Black has given thousands of interviews with most major American newspapers and National Public Radio and has appeared on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, FOX, C-SPAN and the BBC.    Class 4, 10:45 a.m.–12:15 p.m. Faith in the Halls of Power: Evangelical Faith in American Public Life, D. Michael Lindsay Election 2008 Evangelicals, once at the periphery of American life, now wield power in the White House, on Wall Street, at Harvard and in Hollywood. How have they reached the pinnacles of power in such a short time? And does this mean for evangelicals—and for America? This class will delve into D. Michael Lindsay's award-winning research about religion among the American elite. It is sure to surprise and enlighten your perceptions about evangelicals, America's leadership cohort and the role of faith in public life. Suggested readings: D. Michael Lindsay, "Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elit" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) D. Michael Lindsay is a sociologist at Rice University, specializing in issues surrounding leadership, religion and culture. The author of several books, scholarly articles and research reports, Lindsay's work has been honored by two international scholarly societies and Publishers Weekly recently named his book "Faith in the Halls of Power," a Best Book of 2007.

Perception and Reality: How Our Eyes and Brains Inform and Deceive Us About the World, James R. Pomerantz Perception and Reality This class is an overview, complete with demonstrations, about how our perceptual systems give us a view of the world that is often highly misleading. James R. Pomerantz is a cognitive psychologist with a specialty in human visual perception and attention. After earning is B.A. in psychology from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. from Yale, he began his teaching career at Yale. He also taught at Johns Hopkins University and the State University of New York at Buffalo before joining the Rice Univesity faculty in 1988. Pomerantz joined Brown University in 1995 as provost and as professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences. He returned to Rice in 2000 as professor of psychology, director of neurosciences and director of Scientia, an institute for the history of science and culture. He is president of the Foundation for the Advamcement of Behavioral and Brain Sciences in Washington, D.C., and president-elect of Houston-based Psychology Works, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to improving the lives of individuals with disabling chronic disease and their families.   How Can Gold Nanoparticles Clean Up Water?, Michael Wong Tiny Endeavors One of the biggest challenges facing our world today is the availability of clean, affordable drinking water. This class will discuss the basics of nanoparticles made of gold and palladium and their properties relevant to water cleanup. We will look at how they are prepared, what their special "nano" properties are, and how they can destroy harmful contaminants in our water like the dry-cleaning solvent perchloroethylene. Suggested readings: Richard Booker, "Nanotechnology for Dummies" (2003) Follow-up readings and recordings: "37 Under 36: America's Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences," Smithsonian Magazine (Special issue, 2007) Michael Wong is an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Department of Chemistry at Rice University. he received his B.S. from Caltech, and M.S. and Ph.D. from MIT, all in chemical engineering. Wong joined the Rice faculty in 2001. His research group has most recently focused on designing more effective nanoparticle catalysts for groundwater cleanup. He recently received the Richard Smalley&ndsash;Bob Curl Innovation Award and Smithsonian Magazine's 37 Under 36 Young Innovator Award. In 2006, Wong was awarded an MIT Technology Review TR35 Young Innovator Award and the AIChE Nanoscale Science and Engineering Young Investigator Award.  Ballroom Dancing 101, Rice Social Dance Society That's Entertainment This class will be an interactive ballroom dancing class, focusing on several different styles of dance that may include the waltz, tango, foxtroswuickstep, Viennese waltz, paso doble, rumba, cha-cha, samba, jive and swing. The Rice Social Dance Society is an organization of students and professionals who gather for the fun of dancing. Since its inception nearly 10 years ago, participants compete nationally in ballroom competitions and hold annual spring and fall dance events. The students who will be teaching this course are all members of the ballroom competition team and are excited to have this opportunity to work with alumni and friends of the university.   Class 5, 2:00–3:30 p.m. The Ethics and Art of the Shortest Fiction, Deborah Harter Tiny Endeavors Two wonderful brief texts by Gabriel García Márquez and Susan Glasspell will help us to launch a larger discussion on the ethics and the art of the modern short story. There is a redemptive power in the stories we tell each other and the stories we read. They provide the beginnings we have forgotten and the endings we cannot witness to the narratives that are our own lives. Suggested readings: Gabriel García Márquez, "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" Susan Glasspell, "A Jury of Her Peers" Follow-up reading: Raymond Carver, "Cathedral" Deborah Harter is associate profesor of French studies and speaker of the Rice Faculty Senate. She teaches courses in 19th-century French literature, modern American and European short fiction, literature and psychoanalysis and the humanities. Harter has been the recipient of numerous teaching prizes at Rice and also has been awarded research fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the American Council of Learned Societies and fron the Center for the Study of Cultures at Rice. She earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley.

Voting Alone and Voting Together, Robert M. Stein Election 2008 An election is a form of collective action, that is, a decision-making process where people freely and fairly choose others to hold public office and govern for the whole. a question has arisen regarding the nature and operation of elections: When do we vote and does it matter that we don't all vote together? This class will examine this and other questions related to the societal voting behavior in relation to this and future elections. Robert M. Stein is the Lena Gohlman Fox Professor of Political Science at Rice University and is an expert on urban politics and public policy. His current research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and examines the impact of the federal aid system on the lectoral trajectories of office holders at both the subnational and congressional levels. Stein received his B.A. from Ohio Wesleyan University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.  Reality Ain't all It's Cracked Up To Be, David J. Schneider Perception and Reality What we take to be reality is a mixture of sensory information, itself a somehwat low fidelity representation of the physical world, faithful and distorted memories, our prior beliefs and values, and our motives and desires, as well as culturally and socially conditioned beliefs. This lecture will explore psychological principles that help us understand how we construct our relaities, both those that seem normal and those we regard as deviant. David J. Schneider is professor of psychology at Rice University, where he teaches courses in social psychology, the history of psychology, sterotyping and prejudice and the psychology of beliefs. He was chair of psychology at Rice from 1990–96. Schneider has taught at Amherst College, Stanford University, Brandeis University, The University of Texas at San Antonio and Indiana University. He is the author of several books including "Person Perception" and "The Psychology of Stereotyping." He holds a Ph.D. in social psychology from Stanford University.    Class 6, 3:45–5:15 p.m.

Presidential Prescriptions for the U.S. Health Care System, Karoline Mortensen Election 2008 Health care tops the list of domestic priorities in the 2008 elections. This course will provide an overview of the issues faced by the U.S. health care system and how the presidential candidates' platforms propose to remedy these challenges. Suggested readings: Jonathan Oberlander, "Presidential Politics and the Resurgence of Health Care Reform," New England Journal of Medicine, 357(21) (2007): 2101-2104 Karoline Mortensen earned a Ph.D. in health services organization and policy in 2006 from the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the differences in utilization of health care services among the uninsured, privately and publicly insured and the utlization patterns of the intermittently uninsured. Her current research examines the effect of Hurricane Katrina evacuees on emergency departments in the Houston area, as well as mental health status of evacuees remaining in Houston. She has published in the health policy journal Health Affairs and has taught classes in microeconomics, health policy, and environmental politics and policy. Real and Artificial Viruses for Gene Therapy, Junghae Suh Modern Health Care The Human Genome Project promises to identify a multitude of genes whose mutations are responsible for disorders that affect the healt of millions. Delivering healthy versions of mutant genes to target cells, or gene therapy, has the potential to prevent, treat or event reverse disorders ranging from cancer to heart disease. This lecture will examine the gene therapy field, including topics from technologies designed to deliver genes into humans to the first clinically approved gene therapy products. Junghae Suh is an assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering at Rice University. Before coming to Rice, she completed a two-year postdoctoral research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. Her research at Rice focuses on developing bio-inspired nanoscale devices for the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. Suh earned her B.S. in chemical engineering from MIT and her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.  Classical Chinese Literature and the West, Nanxiu Qian China This lecture will explore the interactions between classical Chinese literature and Western cultures. Our four groups of readings include excerpts from the Daoist classic "Zhuangai," "The Ballad of Mulan" and its Disney adaptation "Mulan," two adaptations of the poem "A Letter from a Merchant's Wife" and Xue Shoehui's (1866-1911) "Biographies of Foreign Women." Suggested readings and recordings: Excerpts from Martin Buber (1878-1965), "Chinese Tales:Zhuangzi:Sayings and parables and Chinese Ghost and Love Stories," (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1991) Anonymous, "The Ballad of Mulan," (China, Six Dynasties A.D. 220-588) translated by William H. Nienhauser, collected in Wu-Chi Liu's "Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry," Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1975) Disney, "Mulan" Animated Film (1998) Li Po, "Song of Chang-gan" (7456, Nanjing, China) Ezra Pound, "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" (1920, America), collected in Robert Pinskey and Maggie Dietz, editors, "Americans' Favorite Poems," (New York: Norton, 2000) Edward Hirsch, "The River-Merchant: A Letter Home" (1987, Houston), collected in "For the Sleepwalkers" (New York: Knoft, 1987) Bretyen Breytenback, "Reading Li Po" 1995, Saigon, translated from Afrikaans by Rita Dove, 1997) "Borrowing Foreign Mirrors and Candles to Illuminate Chinese Civilization": Xue Shaohui's (1866-1911) Moral Vision in the "Biographies of Foreign Women," special issue of "Nan-Nü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China" 6.1 (april 2004) Follow-up reading: Stephen Owen, editor, "An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911," (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996) Nanxiu Qian is associate professor of Chinese literature at Rice University. She received her M.A. from Nanjing University and her Ph.D. from Yale. Qian is the author of two books and numerous articles and has been recognized for her teaching on two separate occasions by Nanjing University. Additionally, she has received several research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.    Sunday, February 24, 2008   Class 7, 9:00–10:30 a.m. Political Genes and Political Brains, John Alford Election 2008 Genes have long been known to influence the physical traits of hujan beings, but growing evidence indicates that they also are highly relevant to variations in emotional and mental states of each individual. Recent research indicates that this genetic influence and variability extends into the political arena, helping to shape individual political attitudes and ideologies. In this class, we will be exploring this evolving field, with special attention to making the connection between political genes and poli