Origin of Earth, continents, and life. Continental movements, changing climates, and evolving life.

An introduction to processes and forces that form the surface and the interior of the Earth. Topics include, changes in climate, the history of life, as well as earth resources and their uses.

Patterns on the Earth's surface arise due to the transport of sediment by water and wind, with energy that is supplied by climate and tectonic deformation of the solid Earth. This course presents a treatment of the processes of erosion and deposition that shape landscapes. Emphasis will be placed on using simple physical principles as a tool for (a) understanding landscape patterns including drainage networks, river channels and deltas, desert dunes, and submarine channels, (b) reconstructing past environmental conditions using the sedimentary record, and (c) the management of rivers and landscapes under present and future climate scenarios. The course will conclude with a critical assessment of landscape evolution on other planets, including Mars.

Directed student research of selected topics in environmental building design. These topics will be further explored in ARCH 708: Bioclimatic Design Studio and will provide the basis for the research documents developed with each student's design project. Course work will include lectures, discussions, weekly readings, and in-class exercises. Each student will be required to make a presentation and submit a research report.

This course explores the place of Latin American cultural production in the environmental humanities. Latin American literature has a long and complicated relationship with the natural world, at times imagining it at the core of national and regional identity and at times figuring it as a dangerous wasteland to be “civilized.” We will focus on texts that grapple with this heritage but attempt to carve out a different approach, texts which contest the logic of development by examining its costs and foregrounding interconnections between human and non-human life. Reading literary and visual texts alongside the work of activists and ecocritical scholars, we will examine the connections between environmentalist arguments and critiques of coloniality, capitalism, and patriarchy. We will ask both what unique advantages literature and art have when it comes to imagining alternatives to systems based on extractivism and domination and what inherent limitations Western art forms face when it comes to representing non-human perspectives or communicating knowledge of the natural world rooted in Amerindian or African Diasporic cultures.

“Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language,” says Raymond Williams in his influential book Keywords. This course explores the many meanings of “nature” as well as the assumptions, anxieties, and aspirations attached to such terms as “environment,” “ecology,” “conservation,” “resource,” “climate,” and “sustainability.” This is not a course in environmental literature per se, but rather an exploration of how language and literature engages with and shapes our relations to and our understandings of the natural world. We will consider both the ways literature--especially the poetry and fiction of the nineteenth century--contributes to present ecology-breaking worldviews, as well as how reading and writing differently is a necessary part of the struggle to refigure our relationship to the natural world.

In this course, we will interrogate the term “remediation” as meaning both environmental restoration and media representation. Students will be introduced to the fields of ecocriticism and ecomedia by examining how a variety of materials—from bestselling books to billboards, documentaries, and websites—have informed the cultural imagination of the environment. Students will also discover how media communications and publications can help to remediate the environment in the face of climate catastrophe. This course can be counted as an elective toward the Environmental Humanities minor and as fulfilling the minor's public engagement component. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Architecture is an inherently exploitive act - we take resources from the earthand produce waste and pollution when we construct and operate buildings. As global citizens, we have an ethical responsibility to minimize these negative impacts. As creative professionals, however, we have a unique ability to go farther than simply being "less bad." We are learning to design in ways that can help heal the damage and regenerate our environment. This course explores these evolving approaches to design - from neo-indigenous to eco-tech to LEED to biomimicry to living buildings. Taught by a practicing architect with many years of experience designing green buildings, the course also features guest lecturers from complementary fields - landscape architects, hydrologists, recycling contractors and materials specialists. Coursework includes in-class discussion, short essays and longer research projects.

This critical-creative seminar explores the rise of New Wave science fiction to explore the interrelations between gender, colonialism, language and ecology. Students will also have an opportunity to write their own ecological speculative fiction.

This course will examine the ecological nature of design at a range of scales, from the most intimate aspects of product design to the largest infrastructures, from the use of water in bathroom to the flow of traffic on the highway. It is a first principle of ecological design that everything is connected, and that activities at one scale can have quite different effects at other scales, so the immediate goal of the course will be to identify useful and characteristic modes of analyzing the systematic, ecological nature of design work, from the concept of the ecological footprint to market share. The course will also draw on the history of and philosophy of technology to understand the particular intensity of contemporary society, which is now charachterized by the powerful concept of the complex, self-regulating system. The system has become both the dominant mode of explanation and the first principle of design and organization. The course will also draw on the history and philosophy of technology to understand the particular intensity of contemporary society, which is now characterized by the powerful concept of the complex, self-regulating system. The system has become both the dominant mode of explanation and the first principle of design and organization.

The study of living organisms in their natural environment, spanning the ecological physiology of individuals, the structure of populations, and interactions among species, including the organization of communities and ecosystem function.

This class examines literary representations of desert spaces in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, from the 19th-21st centuries. Challenging the idea of the desert as a stable or singular biome or ideological signifier, we will trace the ways desert spaces have historically been traversed by questions of national identity, modernity, development, extraction, migration, race, and gender. Finally, we will consider what new theoretical approaches to desert spaces are demanded today and to what extent literature remains a medium uniquely equipped for generating critical encounters with such spaces.

Fuel cells, electrolysis cells, and batteries are all electrochemical devices for the interconversion between chemical and electrical energy. These devices have inherently high efficiencies and are playing increasingly important roles in both large and small scale electrical power generation, transportation (e.g. hybrid and electric vehicles), and energy storage (e.g. production of H2 via electrolysis). This course will cover the basic electrochemistry and materials science that is needed in order to understand the operation of these devices, their principles of operation, and how they are used in modern applications

After introducing electrochemical concepts (redox reactions, electrolytic versus galvanic cells, standard oxidation potentials), this course will cover the broad impact of electrochemical phenomena on materials. Topics that will be discussed include: (1) Materials extraction from their ores to finished products by electrowinning, (2) Chemical refining (Mond process) and electrorefining of materials, (3) Materials degradation by destructive electrochemical corrosion, (4) Three-dimensional nanostructured materials by selective electrochemical corrosion, (5) Enhancing the electrochemical performance of materials via nanostructuring - e.g. lithium-ion battery electrodes; (6) Enhancing the electrochemical performance of materials via surface chemistry - e.g. oxygen evolution electrocatalysts; (7) Light-enhanced electrochemical performance of materials - e.g. solar water splitting photoelectrocatalysts. Students will be engaged in interactive classroom activities.

Principles and mathematical models of electrochemical processes in energy conversion and storage, water desalination, nanofabrication, electroplating, and sensing for engineering and science graduate students and advanced undergraduates, lacking prior background in electrochemistry. The course covers equivalent circuits, electrode kinetics, electrokinetic and transport phenomena, and electrostatics. The course will introduce and use the finite element program COMSOLTM. We will discuss, among other things, applications to stationary and flow batteries, supercapacitors, integrated electric circuit fabrication, electrokinetics, and biosensing. In contrast to CBE 545 Electrochemical Energy Conversion that focuses on solid state electrochemistry, this course emphasizes liquid-based electrochemistry.

The goal of this course is for students to gain an understanding of the principles of electrochemistry along with some practical experience. Potentiometric methods will be discussed in the context of electrochemical equilibrium. Amperometric analytical methods -- chronoamperometry, chronocoulometry, stripping voltammetry, cyclic voltammetry, pulse polarography, AC impedance, and hydrodynamic methods -- will be described from the perspective of mathematical models of mass transport and electrode kinetics. As time permits, special topics and applications, such as electrochemical energy conversion, spectroelectrochemistry, photoelectrochemistry, ultramicroelectrodes, microfluidics, corrosion, electrochemical synthesis, and scanning electrochemical microscopy, will be covered. To complement and reinforce the material learned in class, students will fabricate electrodes, perform cyclic voltammetry and other experiments, and analyze electrochemical data. Equipment will be available in the instructor's research laboratory to do these experiments in small groups on students' own time outside of class. The instructor will provide out-of-class assistance to students who are not yet familiar with the use of electrochemical equipment.

This course provides a broad introduction to the economics of climate change. The relevant theory is covered, but the emphasis throughout is empirical. Topics may include: background in geophysics and econometrics; bi-directional feedback relationships between climate change and economic activity; global warming dynamics as manifeast in temperature and sea ice dynamics; economic strategies, policies, and institutions for climate change mitigation and adaptation (including trading or taxing carbon, hedging climate risk in financial markets, and monetary and supervisory policy).

Basic principles of chemical thermodynamics as applied to macro and nano-sized materials. This course will cover the fundamentals of classical thermodynamics as applied to the calculation and prediction of phase stability, chemical reactivity and synthesis of materials systems. The size-dependent properties of nano-sized systems will be explored through the incorporation of the thermodynamic properties of surfaces. The prediction of the phase stability of two and three component systems will be illustrated through the calculation and interpretation of phase diagrams for metallic, semiconductor, inorganic systems.

The objective is to introduce students to one of the most dominating and compelling areas of human existence and endeavor: energy, with its foundations in technology, from a quantitative sustainability viewpoint with its association to economics and impacts on environment and society. This introduction is intended both for general education and awareness and for preparation for careers related to this field, with emphasis on explaining the technological foundation. The course spans from basic principles to applications. A review of energy consumption, use, and resources; environmental impacts, sustainability and design of sustainable energy systems; introductory aspects of energy economics and carbon trading; methods of energy analysis; forecasting; energy storage; electricity generation and distribution systems (steam and gas turbine based power plans, fuel cells), fossil fuel energy (gas, oil, coal) including nonconventional types (shale gas and oil, oil sands, coalbed and tight-sand gas), nuclear energy wastes: brief introduction to renewable energy use: brief introduction to solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, biomass; energy for buildings, energy for transportation (cars, aircraft, and ships); prospects for future energy systems: fusion power, power generation in space. Students interested in specializing in one or two energy topics can do so by choosing them as their course project assignments. Prerequisite: Any University student interested in energy and its impacts, who is a Junior Senior. Students taking the course EAS 501 will be given assignments commensurate with graduate standing.

Engineers will play an essential role in redesigning systems across scales to meet energy and sustainability goals in mitigating the global climate crisis. This is a foundational course applying chemical engineering principles, in particular mass and energy balances and thermodynamics, to connect microscopic and macroscopic aspects of “energy” from fundamental considerations of heat capacity and electrochemistry to limiting conversion efficiencies of thermal engines and solar cells and planetary energy balances. We will explore technical aspects of device engineering, policy requirements for technology implementation, and societal implications of such implementations. Finally, we will analyze local systems and design and justify possible changes to improve their sustainability.