English

This course introduces the history of medicine in Western society from the Ancient Greeks to the present. It examines some of the different ways that doctors have thought about health and illness over the past two and a half thousand years and raises questions about the historical origins of modern scientific medicine. The course introduces the changing role of experts in society, historical shifts in concepts of the body and of disease, and the changing understanding and impact of epidemics from antiquity to the present day.

This course is an intensive introduction to programming in Java that assumes no prior programming experience. It explores all aspects of modern programming by means of lectures and hands-on practical lab sessions. The course starts with the basics of computer science and computer programming. After a short introduction to computer organization, the principles of structured programming in Java are presented. The main topics covered are data types and variables, methods, conditional statements, loops, and recursion. Finally, the course introduces the object-oriented features of Java and their usage for program design. All these concepts have to be understood both from their theoretical perspective and their practical applications.

This course discusses the increasing connections and mobilities of goods (like grains, oil, cars, appliances, parts & components), services (like banking, education, tourism), money and finance, labor, technology, ideas and information. It discusses their trends and patterns and critically examines the role of various factors such as international and regional institutions, media and ICT, infrastructure and distribution networks, state intervention, and private sector involvement. It also assesses the social, economic, political and environmental impacts of increasing interconnectedness and mobilities.

This course is an introduction to Psycholinguistics, an interdisciplinary field of study which aims to understand how humans learn, represent, comprehend, and produce language. It begins by asking what it means to know a language and explore the nature of our linguistic competence. Students examine core properties of mental representations and processes involved in acquiring and understanding language, and how linguistic processes unfold in real time. Finally, students explore issues in perception, production, and acquisition in three core domains: speech sounds, words, and sentences.

This course offers a sociological view of economic, social, and political processes, with a special focus on global social change and development. The course provides the knowledge needed to understand and critically analyze discussions about global social change, focusing especially on the post-war period. The teaching consists of lectures, exercises, group assignments and seminars.  In the first module, explore both classical and modern sociological theories. Examine the economic, social, and political transformations central to classical sociology. Key topics include the rise of nation-states, capitalism, bureaucracies, rationalization, and the increasing division of labor within and between countries. The course also covers foundational scientific theories developed in classical sociology that continue to influence the social sciences today.  In the second module, address current development challenges around the world, using both macro (large scale) and micro (small scale) perspectives. Focus on how societies are structured and how they evolve, considering institutions, structures, and social networks, and their complex interactions. Use sociological theories and concepts to shed light on how inequality is created and sustained. The module ends with an evaluation of various social policy interventions through the lens of the theories we have discussed in the course.

This is a first course in linear algebra. The main objective of this course is to study the solution of systems of linear equations, vectors in Euclidean space, determinants and eigenvalues.

Liberal democracy seems to be the obvious winner of the ideological struggle of the twentieth century. It is therefore hard to understand why the two main alternatives to liberal democracy – Nazism and Communism –exercised such a power over the lives and minds of people of Central Europe throughout the larger part of the twentieth century. This interdisciplinary course examines this conundrum through systematic study of totalitarian practices. Following a basic theoretical outline and criticism of the term “totalitarianism”, the course analyses the ideologies of the “Totalitarian Twins”, Communism and Nazism, which both grew from a perceived crisis of liberal democracy. The main focus of the course is on the methods the two regimes used to rule over their citizens, going beyond the obvious themes of fear and terror and looking at the role of economic policy, propaganda, leader’s cult, and media and art in securing the conformity of the citizens. By studying these methods, the course touches upon the challenges liberal democracy faces in the current political situation. The course also includes the often overlooked issue of environmental destruction especially under communism, and the consequent rise of the environmental consciousness and movements, which contributed significantly to the eventual fall of communism. The course presents a "Prague perspective," examining the experience of the Czechs in the twentieth century as an example of a nation dealing with the two dictatorships. Although the Nazi and Communist dictatorships are over, their residues remain in the collective memory, which influences everyday life. As mentality can only be explained against the historical backdrop, students undertake a journey into the minds of people who lived in these two destructive dictatorships and try to understand them.

This course demonstrates how religious culture is related to contemporary Korean society, focusing on their doctrines, social attitudes, growth, and decline. In addition, the course addresses different sociological perspectives on Korean religious culture and applies them to Korean religious market theoretically and empirically.

The brutal struggle between free will of humanity and historical force has long been a controversial and intriguing subject in the discussions of literature. The point lies not in which side wins eventually, but in exploring what happens in the process of struggle. Viewed from the perspective of literary development, it is quite clear that each different literary movement in postwar Taiwan provides its own unique understanding of the relationship between man and history, between social agency and historical transformation, and ultimately between history and fiction. This course is divided into four parts each dealing with specific historical issues or events. The first deals with how historical figures, such as Song Qingling and Chen Yi, are treaed in fiction. The second part looks at history and politics. The third part discusses how past experiences have been represented from different ideological points of view by different writers. Finally, the course takes a close look at how writers explain the failure (or success) of certain social movements after they have long perished. In short, all the four parts try to explore the complicated interactions among history, human experience, and literary mind.