English

This course provides a survey of the role of plant-animal interactions in the evolution of biodiversity. It covers various subjects from an evolutionary approach and uses examples from recent and ongoing research. Topics include antagonistic and mutualistic types of plant-animal interactions; generalization versus specialization; evolutionary approaches to study plant-animal interaction, including understanding phylogenies; herbivory and grazing from both a plant and animal perspective; pollination ecology, especially plant-insect interactions; attractants and rewards; seed predation and dispersal; plant protection; arms race and co-evolution; physical and chemical plant defenses; plant-plant and other interactions; grazer-algae interactions in the marine environment; and community-level interactions including plants as habitat and food webs. The course consists of lectures and small in class exercises, hands-on activities, visits to the botanic gardens, and literature-based discussions. Training in scientific writing and oral and written communication skills is provided through workshops, journal clubs, an essay and an oral presentation. Students choose a plant-animal interaction and write an individual essay in the form of a scientific article (in review form) using primary literature.

This course examines how artists create meaningful experiences in performance. It covers staging scripts, designing scenes, and devising actions.

This course provides a broad-based introduction to the study of behavior and mental processes. Topics include learning, development, psychotherapy, the brain and states of consciousness, sensation and perception, memory, social behavior, personality, psychological disorders, coping and health, stress, and others. Text: Gazzaniga, Heatherton, and Halpern, PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE. Assessment: midterm (30%), final exam (30%), experiment report (20%), homework (15%), attendance and participation (5%).

This course covers basic finance concepts and their applications including time value of money, risk and return tradeoff, security valuation, and capital budgeting. Other topics include how to manage risks associated with the projects, how capital markets function, how companies and capital markets interact with each other, and social responsibilities of corporations. 

This course introduces concepts used in sociology and anthropology and trains how to use those concepts in analyzing social institutions and processes. Students relate their experiences in society to the discipline of sociology. Topics include: the logic and methods of social investigation; family, work, and organization; power and the state; social inequality (including gender and ethnicity); mass communication and popular culture; values and beliefs; and deviance and social control.

The course introduces the Norwegian education system within its Nordic context. It provides a thorough understanding of all relevant components of the Norwegian education system. In addition, it introduces the notion of "the Nordic model," how it affects Norwegian education, as well as how it relates to the European idea and other educational models. The course covers both formal and informal institutional practices in education, and address questions about the ideas of democracy, inclusion and exclusion, the role of knowledge and expertise, the public and private dimension, lifelong learning, and access.

Where do we pick up after the complete moral, physical, and psychological devastation brought on by World War II? How do we compose poetry in the shadow of the Holocaust, a genocide beyond imagination? How do we write poetry in a language that was used by the Nazis to justify an unjust war and the murder of millions? What forms can suffering and trauma take in literary texts? Young German writers asked themselves these questions starting in 1945 and proposed a number of solutions – or produced a number of attempts – that today are known as "Kahlschlagliteratur" (the literature of clear-cutting) or Zero Hour Literature. This course reviews texts of various genres in translation, considers them in their historical and literary contexts, and identifies common properties and tendencies. The course also questions the validity of the label "Zero Hour," along with its implicit assumption of a complete reset. The focus is on better-known writers (whose texts are available in English), such as Wolfgang Borchert and the Nobel-prize winning Heinrich Böll.