English

This course explores the role and importance of warfare and the military in the ancient Mediterranean world. It touches on some of the more traditional aspects of military history, while analyzing the wider social, economic, and cultural contexts in which ancient warfare operated. The course covers Classical and Hellenistic Greece, as well as Republican and Imperial Rome, deploying a combination of ancient literary sources, modern scholarship, archaeological evidence, and ancient iconography to help explain the centrality and enduring importance of warfare to our understanding of the ancient world.

Through the practice of Hatha Asana (yoga postures) and Pranayama (breath control), this course aims at increasing flexibility, strength and endurance, finding physical and mental balance, and experiencing an increase of energy, concentration and inner relaxation.

The first half of the course introduces major theories of economic sociology and their relationship to mainstream economics. The course begins with the field of behavioral economics and asks how far its theories take us towards a sociological perspective. This lays the groundwork for examining the idea of embeddedness, which has been economic sociology's main metaphor for socializing our view of markets since the 1980s. The course then looks at the alternative theoretical perspectives which have developed in the decades since, including the idea of "markets as politics" and the notions of "calculation" and "performativity." The second half of the course focuses on the application of these concepts to case studies of neoliberalism, carbon markets, financial models, and regulation. For example, the course asks if economic theory is not just modelling the economy but also playing a large role in shaping it and what this means for a society. Students also look at the sociological mechanisms involved in the uptake of mathematical financial models and their possible role in economic crises.

This course looks at points of intersection between moral philosophy and literature. While details may vary from year to year, it includes at least most of the following topics: Plato's view of art; Sartre's conception of literature; the distinction between moral and aesthetic value; sentimentality; the value of literature for moral philosophy; the question of whether the moral value of a work of literature forms part of its aesthetic value; and the censorship of literary works.

The course introduces students to the variation observed in the languages of the world, to the analytical and theoretical challenges that such variation poses, and to responses that have been given to these challenges. The issues are first introduced from a "bird's eye" view; then actual examples are given and explored in detail in the areas of (morpho)syntax and phonology; and finally the course concludes with a module on the implications of cross-linguistic variation for our understanding of how language is acquired (and vice versa). There are four blocks of teaching: 1. The implications of variation (6 lectures): This block introduces the issue of cross-linguistic variation, shows why it is fundamental to our understanding of language, and presents and explores the responses that have been given by linguists, often from very different points of view. 2. Grammars and syntax (11 lectures): This block presents case-studies of cross-linguistic differences in syntax and explores how the syntactic theory that the students have already learned can account for these differences, and where it has to be extended or adapted. Students will both become familiar with a wider range of linguistics phenomena, and develop their understanding of the theoretical tools for explaining them. 3. Phonology (10 lectures): This block explores universals and variation in the module of phonology, covering phenomena from segmental phonology, tonal phonology, syllable structure, and stress. As in the previous segment, students will both be exposed to some important points of variation, and develop their understanding of the theories that have been developed to account for the topography of this variation. A theme that recurs throughout this and the previous segment is the constant tension in theory building between descriptive coverage and predictive power. 4. Language acquisition (6 lectures): Languages can vary from each other because some aspects at least of linguistic knowledge are not genetically determined; what is not genetically determined has to be learned. This final block sets out how the question of possible limits to variation have, in modern linguistic theory, become intimately intertwined with the question of how language is acquired, and explores how language acquisition has become central to linguistic theory. It will also look at how language development is shaped by the interaction of internal factors (language-specific and domain-general predispositions), external factors (quantity and quality of input), and children's developing processing abilities.

Through lectures, clinics, and directed reading, this course provides an introduction to aspects of cellular and molecular immunology. It emphasizes the working of the immune system, the role of the immune system in immunopathology (including transplant rejection), certain diseases, and vaccination.

This course examines the fundamentals of ecology. It explores ecological theory and methodologies using historical and modern examples from studies of many organisms, including plants, animals, and microbes. Topics include interspecies interactions, species persistence in natural environments, population dynamics, species ranges and the movement of organisms through landscapes, species-area relationships, processes involved in defining communities in space and time, and hypothesis testing in the study of ecology.

This course explores phonetics and phonology, including a grounding in practical phonetic skills and basic phonological concepts. Students learn how all of the sounds of the world's languages are produced, transcribe speech sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), understand basic acoustic and aerodynamic properties of speech, and understand how speech sounds are used and distributed in the world's languages.

This course introduces a set of actionable tools and methods for the redaction of a master thesis. It is more specifically focused on new emerging digital practices that significantly ease the implementation of core tasks. A first series of five sessions are devoted to reference research. They cover the use of general and academic search engines, the creation of structured bibliography with Zotero, the reuse of free-licensed content and the writing of state of the art synthesis. Six sessions focus on the management and analysis of databases and corpora, building on the principles of "tidy data" as implemented in the R language and the Tidyverse extensions. A last focus is given to text mining techniques as a way to map a corpus of scholar references.