This course provides students with the key concepts underlying public health as a system and social endeavor. It will explore pressing public health challenges, including communicable diseases, environmental health, social inequalities in health, health care, public responses to emergencies, and reduction of unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, drinking, and violence.

Emphasizes social determinants of physical and mental health and cross-cultural experiences of illness and seeking care. Pays special attention to the unequal distribution of health and illness in the U.S, the role of culture in our understandings of health and illness, and the social organization of health care.

Analyzes the evolution of the U.S. health system and compares it with health systems of other selected countries. Examines health systems as social institutions, developing a broad, contextual understanding of health system development and change across a range of cultural, political and economic environments. Investigates the impact of social institutions on the structure of health systems, on policy choices, and on the provision and receipt of care.

This course introduces students to major topics in international relations: power politics, IR theories of the origins of conflict, war, and cooperation, international trade and markets, international organizations and law, North-South relations, global environmental problems, the commons, globalization, and terrorism. The course will cover contemporary issues in interstate relations.

Explores the nature and dynamics of psychological disorders including anxiety disorders, psychotic disorders, mood disorders, and addiction. Emphasizes the issue of individual psychological growth and the interrelationship of normal and abnormal phenomena.

(Previously Memory, Thought, and Language) Examines the mental processes that underlie perception, attention, memory, language, and reasoning from the perspective of psychological theory, experimental findings, and everyday experience.

How does music �play� the brain? Students will examine the neural mechanisms underlying the perception of the elements of music (e.g., pitch, melody, rhythm) and the effects of music on emotion, movement, cognition, social connection, and brain health.