English

Students examine how we form opinions about the world, cases of conflict, diplomacy, and the role of non-state actors and major global institutions in creating/sustaining the world around us today. In particular, students assess the different assumptions within particular approaches to IR, their methods and understanding of who and what matters in global politics; how approaches conceptualizes international institutions, and the relationship between agency and international structure. Students investigate issues like whether there is equal sovereignty in the world today, what do we mean by "North-South relations" and the links between theory and practice. Key concepts include anarchy, sovereignty, power, hegemony and empire, the state, and the international system.

This course introduces students to the main narrative features of the novel tradition by concentrating on generic and formal approaches to reading novels. This course looks at novels from the late 18th century onwards and focuses on their generic form. The main objective of the course is to demonstrate the importance of narrative form in critical engagements with novels. Theoretical and historical study of the two dominant narrative forms in the novel tradition - romance and realism - is thus emphasized and students are encouraged to look at their approach to the novel with these theoretical perspectives in mind.

This is an advanced course in corporate finance, with the goal of bringing students to the frontier of knowledge so that they can start doing their own research in this field. 

This course focuses on nine topics in applied corporate finance:

(1)Topics related to accounting irregularities and misreporting;

(2)Topics related to the CEO's early life experience and CEO management styles;

(3)Topics related to the Fetal origins hypothesis; 

(4)Topics related to the issues of climate change risk and opportunities exposures, pollution on investor behavioral bias, and on corporate policies, and Greenwashing versus brownwashing;

(5)Topics related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies;

(6)Topics related to token-based platform finance and B2B financing;

(7)Topics related to innovation & entrepreneurship;

(8) Topics related to intergenerational persistence of occupational choice, and 

(9) Trending topics, including water quality. 

This course examines the History of the Modern World – the events, people, and long-term developments which, since the end of the Middle Ages, have shaped and reshaped human society – with a focus on the growth of international developments and the creation of today’s globalized world. Throughout the semester, we will also be interrogating the continued tensions between local identities and dynamics, state centralization and the rise of nationalism, the spread of Western notions of universalism, and non-Western societies’ adaptation to or rejection of those dynamics. What role did the Christianization of Latin America play in the imperial project? What did it mean for a sparsely-populated settler-colonial society to declare that all men are created equal? How “anti-colonial” were the Marxist movements of the Global South?

This course examines the connections between different cinemas within East Asia and between East Asia and the rest of the world from a genre perspective. Hong Kong and Korean film noir, Chinese swordplay and Japanese samurai films, horror films from Hong Kong and Japan: all are examples of the transnational circulation of genres, involving processes of both localization and globalization. Students will be invited to explore genre theory, trace complex webs of creative influences, and appreciate the sameness and difference that characterize both genre films and our globalizing world. They will also have a chance to apply this new knowledge in practice, by making a short “genre film” for screening at the end of the term.

This course is designed to introduce incoming exchange students to the history of Denmark from the Viking Age to the present day. The course introduces some of the main events and central themes in Danish history. The focus is on political history, but the course also includes important developments in economic, social, and cultural history. The course equips students to engage in discussions of questions such as: what is "Denmark" and what is "Danish" about Danish history? What are the boundaries of Denmark and how have these changed over time? How is Danish history periodized and what have been the key turning points? How should we understand the impact of events and developments such as the Black Death, the Reformation, absolutism, agriculture or the welfare state? The course also considers Danish history in its different transnational (Scandinavian, European, and global) contexts, with reference to themes such as trade, war, colonialism, European integration, and globalization.

This course focuses on why countries democratize, when democracy consolidates or backslides, and what drives these processes. It considers a variety of challenges to democracy at the national and international levels such as corruption, discontent, economic inequality, globalization, legitimacy, authoritarian contestation, technological change, polarisation or populism. The aims of this course are to introduce key concepts and theories in the study of democracy, to foster an understanding of broader processes such as democratisation, democratic consolidation and backsliding around the world, to develop analytical skills necessary to identify and scrutinize the contemporary challenges to democracy.

This course is designed to acquaint students with the concepts and values underlying the rhetorical traditions in China and the West (esp. rhetorical traditions which affect how native speakers of Chinese and English communicate). Students are expected to better understand the differences and similarities which affect the key concepts and values in rhetorical practice across cultures. Materials that will be studied and discussed include the Analects (Chinese and English bilingual version) by Confucius and Aristotle’s On Rhetoric (English translation), and important literature on comparative rhetoric with a focus on Chinese and Western (mainly Greco-Roman) rhetorical traditions.