English

This course provides a fundamental introduction to a wide range of modern biophysics. This is a multidisciplinary scientific area where a number of theoretical and experimental methods from physics are used to understand and examine biological systems. The course begins from the fundamental biological building blocks, including proteins, DNA/RNA, and membranes. It discusses their structure and interactions both on a molecular level and their role in large systems such as the structure of the cell, the movement of organisms and the signaling of nerves. The course describes the fundamental physical mechanisms for interaction and transport that biological organisms use, and introduces modern experimental techniques for obtaining structural and thermodynamical biophysical information at the nanoscale.

This course is the first semester of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, one of the oldest languages in the world. This class focuses on Middle Kingdom hieroglyphs (2055-1650 BC), when many scribes were trained and the writing was notably clear and grammatical. Students begin by learning the ancient Egyptian alphabet and how to write the letters, and go on to learning vocabulary, writing and translation. By the end of this class, students are able to understand, read, and write basic ancient Egyptian sentences; understand basic ancient Egyptian grammar; and read ancient Egyptian historical and biographical texts.

The first part of the course focuses on historical development to illustrate how history matters to understand economic development by examining the forces that kept economies in a long period of slow growth during pre-modern and pre-industrial times, and the mechanisms that enabled some economies to exit stagnation and ultimately embark on a path of sustained economic development. The second part covers fundamental determinants of differences in economic performance. It considers in more detail how and why history matters for economic development, going beyond answers at a proximate level, and studying reasons and mechanisms that explain differences in economic performance at a deeper level. For this, the course relies on the most recent research literature on the impact of historical events on comparative development, and on the economic impact of differences in fundamental characteristics across countries and subnational regions. For example, it examines whether specific dimensions of climate and geography, certain characteristics of culture and institutions, or the coevolution and interdependence between these different types of fundamental determinants, can explain why some economies have been able to build larger stocks of human and physical capital, innovate and adopt new technologies faster, and maintain a trajectory of sustained development more effectively than others; and whether this type of analysis can also illuminate on the reasons behind underdevelopment. The final part of the course explores recent policy debates, including the effectiveness of development policy tools such as foreign aid, the role of industrial policies and active state interventions to promote economic development, and the causes, consequences, and policy demands to address different types of inequality.

This course is an anthropological account of the culture and social organization of the people of the Middle East, with a special focus on the Arab world. Drawing on ethnographic accounts, visual representations and fieldtrips, it looks into how anthropologists have analyzed the transformation of the various structures – economic, political, social, and cultural – that are taking place in the contemporary period. The course analyzes of contemporary debates in anthropological engagements with and in the Middle East and North Africa. It explores the histories of ethnographic research in the Middle East and North Africa, colonialism and post-independence experiences, power and representation, performance and the arts, religious sensibilities, gender and kinship networks.

This course provides an in-depth treatment of selected issues of contemporary international law. It provides an understanding of specialized areas of international law including the use of force and dispute resolution, acquisition of territory, state succession, law of the sea, and international human rights law by focusing on specific issues relevant to the Middle East.

Food is far more than sustenance; it is a lens through which we can understand culture, identity, power, and meaning. This course introduces students to the anthropology of food by examining how what we eat, how we eat, and who we eat with shape and are shaped by broader social, political, and economic forces. Drawing on ethnographic studies and classic anthropological theory, the course explores food as a marker of identity and kinship, as a medium for healing and belief, and as a site of moral debate, political struggle, and cultural memory. Through weekly themes, including food and identity, healing, material environments, belief systems, kinship, politics, knowledge, language, science, and conflict, students engage with a range of case studies, from koshary in Egypt to bread and nationalism, from veganism to GMOs, from honey in healing practices to food wars. Readings pair theoretical texts with ethnographic accounts, encouraging students to think critically about food in both global and local contexts.

This course explores moving image works and related media forms through the lens of migration and diaspora. It will look at the role of aesthetics, affect, gender, race, temporality, and intimacy in the stories that historically marginalized makers tell, and the kinds of narrative and formal experimentation they develop to critically revisit notions of home, memory, and community across different geographies. Readings from film and media scholarship, transnational cultural and ethnic studies, queer and gender studies as well as short creative and personal writings will guide our theoretical framework and help us articulate the various ways in which media are deeply imbricated with both the violent and reparative realities of border-crossing.

This is the second semester in a mainstream calculus sequence. It covers the calculus of inverse trigonometric and hyperbolic functions; applications of the definite integral for finding areas and volumes of revolutions; techniques of integration; improper integrals; sequences and series: Convergence tests, power series, Taylor series with applications; vectors and the three-dimensional space: Dot and cross products, lines and planes.

This course provides an overview of past climate and sea-level changes focused on how these changes are observed in the sedimentary records, and what processes, interactions and feedbacks between the components of the climate system may have led to the signal in the sedimentary archives. The course is composed of theory and case-studies. The theory part comprises an introduction to climate archives and marine and terrestrial system processes. Important sedimentary and geochemical proxies, including isotopes, are explained and students are trained in the evaluation of such data. Examples may deal with past climate changes, long-term carbon cycle perturbations and/or modifications of seawater geochemistry on time scales ranging from thousands to multi-millions of years. In the last weeks of the course, students read key papers and produce a review report or write a report about field/laboratory work/data. The course develops the necessary background for understanding the importance of observations and hypothesis testing. It also develops skills in analysing multiple datasets and in interpretation of which process feedbacks lead to the observations, as well as the ability to evaluate the validity of geological data archives and to model results through comparative studies. A series of lectures and practicals consist in signal analysis (data preparation, Fast fourier transforms or FFT, evolutive FFT, Filter design) of sedimentary climatic signals with the aim of extracting orbital components to better understand the influence of insolation on climate through time.