English

Students explore some of the repertoires that are at the heart of post-war American pop music, including mainstream pop, the blues, hip-hop, funk, country, and rock. Students consider the extent to which American popular music has influenced other pop music cultures, and how a sense of American identity is both fostered and communicated in its music. Students also connect specific kinds of repertoire to major events in American history, such as the Civil Rights Movement. The course is organized according to topics such as the music industry, the blues continuum, identity in country music, urban music, and Afrofuturism. Students learn to identify and describe a range of American popular music genres, and position them in their socio-historical context. 

The course provides a fundamental understanding of the environment in which international business operates and of the business practices required to compete successfully in global markets. This course gives an overview of challenges and opportunities of competing in the global marketplace. It helps students develop the decision-making skills associated with managing different aspects of international business. Furthermore, the course exposes students to the cultural, economic, political environment of international business and internationalist strategies, and the management of international business.

This course explores the history, form, and function of writing systems from around the world: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese pictograms, Ancient Greek and modern Japanese syllabaries, the vowelless alphabets of Hebrew/Arabic, the "fusional" alphabets of Sanskrit/Hindi, the "separational" alphabets of Modern Europe. Students also look at various attempts to create "perfect" writing systems, such as that of Korea and the IPA and its rivals. Through the course, students gain an understanding of the phonological/morphological demands that languages place on their writing systems and how this leads to innovation and development. The course also examines sociological aspects of different systems (particularly in relation to the spread of systems and the role of writing in language preservation/endangerment) and what writing reveals about the organization of the mind/brain.

Foreigners, in particular people from the US or Canada, are often astonished when they hear how fascinated Germans are with Native Americans. So-called “hobbyist” events with Germans “playing” at being and dressing up as North American Indians, shows with Native Americans performing traditional dances or other rituals, but also theatrical festivals devoted to stories around the fictional Mescalero Apache Winnetou and his white (German) blood brother Old Shatterhand draw thousands of visitors, and it is still fair to say that most Germans have some memory of playing Indians when they were children. The creator of Winnetou, Karl May, is more widely read than Goethe or Thomas Mann, although the literary value of his texts is disputed. As puzzling as this may be from the outside: For more than 150 years, America and, in particular, North American Indians have played an important role in narratives about German national identity. Examining these narratives, students discover a complex web of fascination and identification with Native Americans on the one hand, fascination and ambivalence regarding the culture, politics, and economics of the US and white Americans on the other hand. Students study extracts from literary texts depicting Native Americans from the 19th and 20th centuries and analyze films based on Karl May and other authors, produced in the FRG and the GDR (West and East Germany). They discuss the political implications of images of Native Americans in the context of imperial Germany, in National Socialism, and in the GDR, and they review and evaluate concepts such as the “Noble Savage”, “cultural appropriation” and racial/ ethnic stereotyping and exoticism.

This course provides an introduction to developmental psychology, which seeks to understand and explain changes in an individual’s physical, cognitive, and social capacities across the lifespan. The overarching themes are to describe changes in an individual’s observed behaviour over time, and to uncover the processes that underlie these changes. The course begins by introducing the historical and conceptual issues underlying developmental psychology and the research methods used for studying individuals at different ages. It then proceeds to address physical development in the prenatal period, followed by cognitive and social development during infancy. The course then examines change during childhood by introducing major theories of cognitive development and addressing the social contexts of development (parents, peers, and social relationships; morality, altruism, and aggression). The course concludes by addressing the physical, cognitive, and social changes of adulthood and ageing.

This course examines water as a resource. It covers the hydrologic cycle and quantification of the water balance, water use and supplies and the human impact upon water including runoff amount and quality.

The seminar provides a deep dive into economic inequality as relates to political economy more broadly, delving into questions such as “what inequality is and how to measure it?”, “what causes inequality?”, “how can welfare and redistributive policies manage inequality?”, and “why are some countries more equal than others?”. The first purpose of the course is to explain what causes economic inequality and how—and to what extent—it can be reduced. The second goal is to provide students with the theoretical and methodological tools to conduct their own empirical study to address these questions. The seminar begins by delving into conceptualizations and measurements used for economic distributions and income inequality. The second part centers on theories explaining levels of economic inequality, including the work of Pareto, Kuznets, Piketty and Milanovic. The third part focuses on the role of the state and redistribution in managing economic inequality, including theories on welfare-state formation, optimal taxation and the impact of political institutions. Finally, the last part is about public opinion on inequality and redistribution, centering on studies and theories about when voters want redistribution. The interplaying dynamics between economic distributions, political institutions, and public opinion are a running theme of the seminar. Students explore and discuss these dynamics as they are articulated in the literature and also propose and test new theories.

Creativity is an increasingly important skill for contemporary workers, and a key ingredient of organizations' ability to survive and thrive. As creativity is an important source of competitive advantage, organizations are increasingly seeking to foster it; yet, at the same time, organizations and society more broadly often end up stifling creativity in individuals, leading to a loss of confidence, talent, and good ideas. The objectives of this course are (1) to help students discover, develop, and protect your creative ability; and (2) to provide them with a richer understanding on how creativity can be enhanced and managed in a work setting. Students learn about the basic features of creativity and creative processes, both short-term and over longer time periods, and on how to nurture creativity in themselves and others, stimulating factors that enhance creativity and removing the barriers that impede it. The course looks at creativity in many domains, including business, science and technology, the arts, and day-to-day life more broadly. Classes are largely "hands-on", relying on exercises, class discussion, guest speakers, and case studies, as well as on lectures and readings. The course is structured in two parts. In the first part, students focus on themselves and acquire knowledge regarding (1) what creativity is, (2) how to build, feed, and stimulate creativity, and (3) the journey of an idea from inception to implementation. In the second part, students acquire knowledge on (1) how to manage creativity in organizations, (2) how to work effectively in creative teams, and (3) what does it mean to lead effectively for creativity. 

This course explores the underlying principles of several cutting-edge topics in machine learning and deep learning, including adversarial attacks, deep metric learning, generative models, information theory, and reinforcement learning.  

In addition, the course examines the end-to-end construction of modern large language models and practices core concepts by implementing them. Students engage in coding assignments and team projects using GPU-enabled computer servers to test original ideas. 

Topics include concepts and history of deep learning, backpropagation techniques such as stochastic gradient descent, initialization techniques, regularization techniques such as drop out, convolutional neural networks (CNN), CNN architectures, visualization of CNN, recurrent neural networks (RNN), RNN applications, and other applications including reinforced learning. 

To emphasize practical skills to implement deep learning algorithms, programming-related lectures and lab sessions are included. The most important/popular language, Python, will be covered and a Python math library called Numpy is also taught with lab sessions. Advanced deep learning algorithms are implemented in Tensorflow library, which is introduced as well including relevant lab sessions 

Students are introduced to human cognition and behavior, addressing foundational topics in psychological science. These foundational topics include key concepts such as evolution, genetics, neuroscience, human evolutionary biology and anthropology, and specific topics, such as perception, memory, heuristics and biases, decision-making, child development, psychopathology, personality and individual differences, emotion, attraction and sexuality, cross-cultural differences, social relations, stereotypes and prejudice, norms and attitudes, social learning, social influence and persuasion, and group processes. The course offers an integrated perspective on these topics, investigating the evolution and variation in human psychology over time, across cultures, and over the lifespan. Students learn the history of the study of humans and human psychology, offering students the historical context to trends in research.