English

This course develops students' physical skills as actors through the training practices of Beijing Opera. In China, the word for "theater" also means "sport’" revealing how performance has long been viewed as a mixture of drama, dance, circus-style street theatre, acrobatics, and even martial arts. This course provides students with an opportunity to participate in basic training, but the aim is not to turn students into a Beijing Opera performer. Rather, the course explores how students utilize and conserve energy as actors, and how, in a virtually empty space, students can use their bodies to describe complex narratives. Students learn how to complete basic circus "tricks" and how to stage a fight with sticks. 

This course introduces students to a critical understanding of how crime and harm are represented through different media. These may include: TV, film, radio (e.g., documentaries, podcasts, drama, true-crime series), text (e.g., crime fiction, crime biographies, policy documents, music lyrics), visual culture (e.g., art and sculpture, graphics, court sketches, photojournalism, architecture, graffiti, theatre, advertising), news media (e.g., online, broadcast, print), and social media (e.g., trial by social media, citizen journalism, livecasting offending, performance crimes)

This course examines together a group of major and minor 16th and 17th century plays which reflect the contemporary European witchcraft craze. Related phenonema like diabolic possession and ‘high’ magic, as represented in the theatre, are also included when they are relevant to the literary texts. The course challenges students to relate dramatic texts to history while retaining a primary literary focus. 

This course explores Japanese literature written in the wake of World War II, focusing on how writers grappled with the profound disruptions of defeat, occupation, memory, and reconstruction. Spanning from the immediate postwar period to contemporary works, class readings include short stories, novels, memoirs, essays, and manga by authors such as Dazai Osamu, Sakaguchi Ango, Ota Yoko, Enchi Fumiko, Oe Kenzaburo, and Kono Fumiyo. The course also considers broader historical and cultural contexts through critical texts such as John Dower’s Embracing Defeat, and extend the inquiry into diasporic and transnational perspectives by reading works by Min Jin Lee and Kim Tal-su.

The course examines how literature reflects and interrogates key themes of the postwar condition—survival, trauma, gender and power, the legacy of imperialism, and the tension between memory and forgetting. Some knowledge of Japanese literature is preferred but not required.  

In the first half of the course, students are introduced to key concepts and economic models that can be used to understand how different identities shape outcomes, including identity economics, social norms and stereotypes, models of discrimination and stratification economics. The second half of the course looks in more detail at current economic research on a range of topics, including hate crime, labor market discrimination, gender-based violence, diversity, and inclusion.

This course introduces students to the style, history, politics, and controversies of modernism. Students read central modernist texts, alongside a selection of modernist and modern writers, critics, journalists and intellectuals. Students explore how modernism developed in the 1910s and 20s, and examine a range of contexts for its stylistic experiments in narrative and point of view, in urban life, war, sexual emancipation, and psychology.

This course provides a series of lectures on current economic issues, which illustrate how basic economic principles may be applied to real problems. Upon completion of the course students are able to demonstrate knowledge of the core principles of economics; to use the power of abstraction to focus upon the essential features of an economic problem and to provide a framework for the evaluation of the effects of policy or other exogenous events; demonstrate an understanding of appropriate concepts in economics that may be of wider use in a decision-making context; and communicate economic ideas, concepts, and information using means of communication appropriate to the audience and the problem at issue.

This course examines comparative politics through the prism of cities, analyzing how urban spaces both drive and reflect political and socio-economic transformations. Drawing on historical sociology, it reinterprets foundational political processes—such as the monopolization of violence and the construction of national authority—through the perspective of urbanization and state-city relations. The course explores diverse urban political traditions in Europe and around the world, comparing how historical and contemporary urban dynamics reshape political societies. Key topics include denationalization and decentralization, the rise of informality, extended urbanization, shifts in welfare provision and solidarity, the transformation of trust networks, and the political implications of environmental change. Throughout the semester, students read and are (re)introduced to the works of some of the main social scientists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Fernand Braudel, Saskia Sassen, Diane Davis, Charles Tilly, Shmuel Eisenstadt, and Michel Foucault.

This course provides an overview of ethnography of communication, a theoretical and methodological approach to analyzing and understanding a wide range of communicative patterns and language uses as they occur within social and cultural contexts. Students also apply ethnographic insights and methodologies to fieldwork activities and projects in the local community, investigating the range of practices that constitute ethnographic research, aiming for an integrative and holistic understanding through discussion of class members' fieldwork activities.

In this course, students explore a range of contemporary performance practices and develop their own original devised performance material. Students experiment with a range of approaches that might include working with: text-based improvisation, movement-based performance, creative technologies, adaptation, and found or verbatim texts. The course advances students' knowledge of a range of contemporary theatre and performance makers who are producing devised theatre and performance. Through this exploration of a range of approaches to devising, students build a toolkit for making original theatre/performance and identify techniques and approaches that are of particular interest to students as practitioners.