Conference and Event Services

The department of Conference and Event Services (CES) is currently seeking qualified students to assist the professional staff in the daily operations for the summer 2025 camp and conference season. CES provides students the opportunity to enhance their academic learning experience in a work environment by learning the operational aspects of our department and to broaden their communication, social, listening and writing skills, all while providing superior customer service for one of the leading universities. Please visit our website for additional information.

Pre-College Programs

The Office of Pre-College Programs seeks to hire student leaders to support its robust summer programs, which include 12 academic programs, with over 800 high school students, and offers a life-changing immersive college experience, inside and outside of the classroom. 65 CMU undergraduate students are hired as Resident Assistants (RAs) and Community Advisors (CAs) to provide a well-rounded offering of programming, support, and community development enhancing the Pre-College Programs' residential experience. 

Pre-College RAs and CAs receive a financial stipend in addition to room and board, ongoing training, professional development, and time off.

Visit the Pre-College website for more information. Contact Meg Pryor at pclife@andrew.nbzhiai.com with any questions you may have.

03-121 Modern Biology

Summer Two

This is an introductory course that provides the basis for further studies in biochemistry, cell biology, genetics and molecular biology.  This course emphasizes the chemical principles underlying biological processes and cell structures as well as the analysis of genetics and heredity from a molecular perspective. This is the introductory biology course for all science and non-science majors.

03-132 Basic Science to Modern Medicine

Summer One (Remote) and Summer Two (In-Person)

The goal of this course is to give students an understanding of the biology that impacts their everyday lives. Disease can be a tragic part of human life, a fact that is even more apparent during a global pandemic. To understand how specific diseases like COVID-19 or cancer affect the human body, and how modern medicine can tackle them, this course includes a fundamental study of the basic molecular biology, genetics, and cell biology that underlies disease. This is a topics-based course, with topics chosen to cover aspects of biology and health that students are likely to encounter in their daily lives. The topics for summer 2025 will include COVID-19, genome editing, and cancer. We will explore these topics from both a basic science and a modern medicine perspective. Students will gain the expertise to critically evaluate media reports about biology and health, and to ask the questions that will help them to make educated decisions in their lives.

03-133 Neurobiology of Disease

Summer Two (In-Person)

This course will explore the biological basis of several neurological and neuropsychiatric diseases, with an emphasis on medical diagnostic tools and techniques. It will include discussions of the anatomical basis of neurological diseases as well as recent research into understanding the mechanisms of disease. This course is intended to broaden students' understanding of how diseases are diagnosed and studied.  Students will also learn how basic neurological and psychiatric evaluations are conducted.  We will discuss neurobiological research to serve as a basis for understanding brain structures and functional alterations in a variety of developmental, degenerative, neurological, and psychiatric disorders.

03-232 Biochemistry I

Summer Two (In-Person and Remote)

Prerequisite coursework: 09-105 Modern Chemistry I or 09-107 Honors Chemistry

This course provides an introduction to the application of biochemistry to biotechnology. The functional properties of amino acids, nucleotides, lipids, and sugars are presented. This is followed by a discussion of the structural and thermodynamic aspects of the organization of these molecules into higher-order structures, such as proteins, nucleic acids, and membranes. The kinetics and thermodynamics of protein-ligand interactions are discussed for non-cooperative, cooperative, and allosteric binding events. The use of mechanistic and kinetic information in enzyme characterization and drug discovery are discussed. Topics pertinent to biotechnology include: antibody production and use, energy production in biochemical systems, expression of recombinant proteins, and methods of protein purification and characterization. The course is an alternate to 03-231.

03-320 Cell Biology

Summer One (Remote)

Prerequisite coursework: 03-121 Modern Biology or 03-151 Honors Modern Biology AND 03-232 Biochemistry I or 03-231 Honors Biochemistry

This course provides descriptive information and mechanistic detail concerning key cellular processes in six areas: membrane function, protein targeting, signaling, cytoskeleton, cell division, and cell interaction. An attempt is made to introduce the methodology that was used to obtain this information and to discuss how our understanding of these processes relates to the treatment of human disease.

76-221 Books You Should Have Read by Now: 19th-Century American in Five Novels?

Summer Two (Remote)

Could five novels help us understand how literature began to take shape in a nascent nation or what concerns preoccupied nineteenth-century writers? What works and authors have become definitive of both the nineteenth-century canon and its counter-canons? And, most importantly, why should you read them? This course will ask you to grapple with some of the questions that came to preoccupy the American imagination in the 19th century—and why the novel, as a genre, became a space for exploring such ideas. In this class we will engage with two of the best-selling works of the century (Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin & Bellamy’s Looking Backward) as well as those by authors at the fore of the American canon (Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and counter-canon (Harper’s Iola Leroy ). Through reading, discussion, and student-led presentations, we confront deeply rooted debates of skepticism and sentimentalism, enslavement and freedom, utopia and dystopia, passing and miscegenation defining the first American century. 76-221 is a consistently popular summer offering, noted. Summer may offer students time to more fully engage with longer texts. I would also hope the title tease is a slightly provocative challenge: can 5 texts really give a glance of a century?  I am a nineteenth/early twentieth century Americanist by training, maintain a research agenda in the field (two articles forthcoming; incoming program chair for the Pauline E. Hopkins Society), and have taught many similar literature courses (including online) to undergraduate and graduate students at several other universities.

76-239 Intro to Film Studies

Summer One (Remote)

This course is an introduction to the history, technology, aesthetics, and ideology of film. Our main focus is the narrative fiction film, but we will also discuss documentaries, avant-garde work, and animation. The central organizing principle is historical, but there are a number of recurring thematic concerns. These include an examination of the basic principles of filmmaking, the development of film technology, the definition of film as both art and business, and the history of film as an object of critical and cultural study. The goals of this course are threefold. First, it will provide you with a solid grounding in the key issues and concepts of film studies. Second, it will expand your ability to knowledgeably critique individual cinematic works and their relationship to the larger culture. Lastly, it will provide you with experience in expressing your critiques in writing.

76-241 Intro to Gender Studies

Summer One (Remote)

Intersectional feminism. Structural oppression. Biological sex vs. gender roles. LGBTQIA+ rights. Consent. Masculinity. #metoo and gender-based violence. Sexual politics. Global feminism. This course offers students a scholarly introduction to these social and political issues through critical readings, literature and film. In this discussion-based class, students read and discuss contemporary gender studies that speaks to questions of identity, race, nation, sexuality, and disability. Critical readings include work by Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Sara Ahmed, Eve Sedgewick, Raewyn Connell, Mari Matsuda, Mona Eltahawy, Rosemarie GarlandThomson, and Kate Bornstein. Fiction might include Toni Morrison, Ocean Vuong, and Alison Bechdel.

76-247 Shakespeare: Comedies & Romances

Summer Two (Remote)

Sometime around the late sixteenth century, enterprising cultural producers in early modern London began to develop a new commercial venture called 'playing': a business that offered ordinary people a few hours of dramatic entertainment for the price of one penny. In addition to watching the professional players onstage, spectators also participated in a form of play themselves, in a sense, because theatrical experience provided a unique opportunity to engage imaginatively with otherwise inaccessible people, worlds, and ideas. More than four hundred years later, the drama of the period now ranks among the most esteemed texts in all English literature, and the name 'Shakespeare' has become a byword for literary genius. This course will offer a selection of Shakespeare's delightfuland sometimes surprisingly edgycomedies and late romances. As we read through these works, we will endeavor to understand what, and how, they meant in their original context, thereby developing a historically informed perspective on their influence over our own cultural landscape.

76-260 Intro to Writing Fiction

Summer One (Remote)

This is an introduction to the reading and writing of short fiction. Character development and the creation of scenes will be the principal goals in the writing of short stories during the course of the semester. Revisions of the stories will constitute a major part of the final grade. Reading assignments will illustrate the different elements of fiction reviewed and practiced, and students will analyze and discuss stories from a writer's point of view.

79-115 Introduction to Jewish Studies

Summer One

This introductory-level class will survey the long and varied history of the Jewish peoples, from Biblical antiquity through medieval Europe and the Middle East, to the histories of Jewish people in Eastern Europe, migrations to the New World, the rise of Zionism, the Holocaust, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the contemporary history of Jewish communities around the world.  Across all of these, we will explore topics and themes like religion, collective memory, antisemitism, political violence, genocide, and national identity.  Readings will be a combination of secondary academic literature, along with a smaller selection of relevant primary documents.  Students will be assessed via a mid-term quiz, a final exam, and a participation grade.  This class does not require any prior knowledge of Jewish history.

79-158 Beyond Integration: African American Community Building, Reconstruction to 1960s

Summer One

Our course will consider African American communities and lives beyond what is seen or read in mass media, and we will address the perceptions and preconceived notions of the race that limit African Americans to one version of being in the United States.  Students will think about African American community building as a compliment and alternative to integration, assimilation, and appeasement.  Much previous scholarship has focused either on resistance, such as efforts to integrate and to ensure equal access, thereby limiting ourselves to conversations surrounding Black Wall Streets, and high-achieving African Americans as a goal or outcome of hard work toward assimilation, or scholars have perceived history from below by examining trials, tribulations, and underbellies of Black communities as monoliths that define the entirety of the African American experience and are in need of escape. "Beyond Integration" asks what was daily life in Black communities like through case studies that examine education, home life, business ventures, healthcare, clubs, food, farming, philanthropy, professionalization, and more.  We will examine Black communities as thriving centers of life outside of, sometimes adjacent to, and in spite of white or mainstream society.  Students will discuss the evolution of Black normal schools into the HBCUs of today, as well as overall education in African American communities, migration vs. "cast[ing] down your buckets where you are," African American clubs and Black club women, class in African American communities, religion, and African American co-ops and grocery stores. 

79-150 Medieval Science, Magic, and Wonders of Nature

Summer Two

Why do monsters exist and lurk on the margins of our maps?  What do animals symbolize--are they God's creations, or merely arrangements of the elements?  What is the meaning behind a comet--it is natural, a miracle, or something far more sinister?  Contrary to popular belief, people in the Middle Ages asked themselves questions about the world around them and sought definitive answers.  This course explores the shifting boundaries between science, magic, and religion as defined by thinkers residing in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean between 900 and 1500 C.E.  Their observations--and sometimes, experimentations--laid the foundation for the philosophy of nature, which in turn became science as we know it today.  In particular, we will address the medieval universe and its cosmology; the physical world and the supernatural; the rationale behind transmutations in alchemy and shapeshifting; the invisible and sacred forces in the heavens and from planetary bodies; contemporary attitudes towards medicine and the human body; and the cross-cultural exchange of knowledge within Christian, Islamic, and Jewish circles of scholarship.  As a final project, students will research their own medieval artifact(s) that will be showcased as part of the class's digital "cabinet" of collected curiosities and, ultimately, wonder.

79-155 Introduction to African American Studies

Summer Two

This course introduces students to some of the critical themes, concepts, and contemporary issues surrounding Black Americans in the United States with an underlying interdisciplinary framework. The emphasis of investigation in this course will be comparative--this is, historical, sociological, and literary in scope.  We'll engage with questions of difference and cultural representation as each relates to the construction and deconstruction of essentialized categories of racial, ethnic, cultural, and national identities. Examining the relationship between historical and contemporary policies and representations of Black Americans will be central in our understanding of their lived experiences during the twenty-first century. Overall, we will gain an understanding of the complexity of the African American identity and socio-cultural issues as they relate to economic and political resources/organizing/activism, and sociological engagement with current and emerging issues of race, nationalism, and power.

79-172 Race, Caste, Class, and Difference in the United States and India

Summer Two

This course covers the marginalization of Black Americans to the social exclusion of Indian Dalits throughout the duration of the twentieth century, with emphasis on how race intersects with caste, capitalism, and class.  We will compare the struggles of both Black Americans and low-caste Indians against mass incarceration, police brutality, criminal and racial stereotypes, and their quest for civil rights. In this global history course, we will explore the histories of the South Asian diaspora in the United States, compare their analysis of the racism Black Americans experience, and evaluate how they connect their findings back to the marginalized experiences of low-caste Indians in India.  We will begin with an overview of the History of Racial Formation and White Supremacy and then shift to the 1890s with the Plessy v. Ferguson court case in 1896 which legalized the existence of a "caste society" through racial segregation. Finally, we'll analyze the development of "criminal castes" and mass incarceration in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as the contemporary manifestations of racial caste in the United States as well as caste and gender discrimination in India.

57-411 Musical Theater on Stage and Screen

Summer 2

Defining what musical theater "is" is no easy task. The genre/form/phenomenon as we know it today represents an evolution of embodied practices and interdisciplinary creativity spanning cultures, geographies, traditions, media, and time. Similarly, the history of musical theater—or, more appropriately, the histories of musical theater—should not be reduced to simple narratives or linear chronologies. This course combines elements of lecture and discussion formats to supply information and stimulate the exploration of course topics. Over the course of the semester, we will explore case studies from the repertoire and media, first exploring their musical and dramaturgical components before examining their geneses, contexts, and legacies. We consider works of musical theater as embodied in live performances, (original) cast albums, and other media residua. We will problematize and reexamine Eurocentric (and "Broadway"-centric) notions of canon, aesthetics, cultural distribution, and cultural appropriation. It also introduces significant trends in the academic and popular historiography of musical theater. In addition, we will examine the process of developing musicals from page to stage; the function and labor of performers, administrators, stage directors, stage designers, and technical personnel in making musicals happen; musicals in various media; and concerns of social justice in reviving established works and producing new works. Questions and answers in this course navigate concepts of identity, performance, and artistic agency in musical theater history and practice. Ultimately, students will learn to ask questions about musical theater creators, creations, and consumers based on the student's unique disciplinary strengths. You don't need to be a musical theater buff to take, enjoy, and/or profit from this class.

This course counts as Music Support for Music undergraduate students.