English

Food is far more than sustenance; it is a lens through which we can understand culture, identity, power, and meaning. This course introduces students to the anthropology of food by examining how what we eat, how we eat, and who we eat with shape and are shaped by broader social, political, and economic forces. Drawing on ethnographic studies and classic anthropological theory, the course explores food as a marker of identity and kinship, as a medium for healing and belief, and as a site of moral debate, political struggle, and cultural memory. Through weekly themes, including food and identity, healing, material environments, belief systems, kinship, politics, knowledge, language, science, and conflict, students engage with a range of case studies, from koshary in Egypt to bread and nationalism, from veganism to GMOs, from honey in healing practices to food wars. Readings pair theoretical texts with ethnographic accounts, encouraging students to think critically about food in both global and local contexts.

This course explores moving image works and related media forms through the lens of migration and diaspora. It will look at the role of aesthetics, affect, gender, race, temporality, and intimacy in the stories that historically marginalized makers tell, and the kinds of narrative and formal experimentation they develop to critically revisit notions of home, memory, and community across different geographies. Readings from film and media scholarship, transnational cultural and ethnic studies, queer and gender studies as well as short creative and personal writings will guide our theoretical framework and help us articulate the various ways in which media are deeply imbricated with both the violent and reparative realities of border-crossing.

This is the second semester in a mainstream calculus sequence. It covers the calculus of inverse trigonometric and hyperbolic functions; applications of the definite integral for finding areas and volumes of revolutions; techniques of integration; improper integrals; sequences and series: Convergence tests, power series, Taylor series with applications; vectors and the three-dimensional space: Dot and cross products, lines and planes.

This course provides an overview of past climate and sea-level changes focused on how these changes are observed in the sedimentary records, and what processes, interactions and feedbacks between the components of the climate system may have led to the signal in the sedimentary archives. The course is composed of theory and case-studies. The theory part comprises an introduction to climate archives and marine and terrestrial system processes. Important sedimentary and geochemical proxies, including isotopes, are explained and students are trained in the evaluation of such data. Examples may deal with past climate changes, long-term carbon cycle perturbations and/or modifications of seawater geochemistry on time scales ranging from thousands to multi-millions of years. In the last weeks of the course, students read key papers and produce a review report or write a report about field/laboratory work/data. The course develops the necessary background for understanding the importance of observations and hypothesis testing. It also develops skills in analysing multiple datasets and in interpretation of which process feedbacks lead to the observations, as well as the ability to evaluate the validity of geological data archives and to model results through comparative studies. A series of lectures and practicals consist in signal analysis (data preparation, Fast fourier transforms or FFT, evolutive FFT, Filter design) of sedimentary climatic signals with the aim of extracting orbital components to better understand the influence of insolation on climate through time.

The course tackles philosophical questions about legal systems and criminal justice. The first half of the course typically discusses big picture questions about the purpose of law and what, if anything, the criminal justice system achieves. For example, students might consider the moral obligation to obey the law, the viability of political anarchism, the justification of punishment, dispute-resolution without the state, and the moral status of civil or violent disobedience. The second half of the course usually takes a closer, critical look at how criminal justice works in practice. For example, students might discuss questions like: What is the fairest way to evaluate allegations of sexual criminality? Should we use algorithms to make decisions about parole or punishment severity? Should we defer to juries or instead use professional judges? Does it make sense to treat a corporation as morally responsible? What alternatives are there to prisons?

This course covers the fundamental algorithms for statistical computations and R packages that implement some of these algorithms or are useful for developing novel implementations. It develops the ability to implement, test, debug, benchmark, profile and optimize statistical software; select appropriate numerical algorithms for statistical computations; and evaluate implementations in terms of correctness, robustness, accuracy and memory, and speed efficiency. Topics include: maximum-likelihood and numerical optimization; the EM-algorithm; Stochastic optimization algorithms; simulation algorithms and Monte Carlo methods; nonparametric density estimation; bivariate smoothing; numerical linear algebra in statistics, sparse and structured matrices; practical implementation of statistical computations and algorithms; R/C++ and RStudio statistical software development. 

This course provides an overview of the psychology of love in the Egypt context. It explores psychological theories of love, attraction, attachment, and others. Topics include the relationship life cycle in Egypt, including courtship and marriage. A psychological lens is used to examine conflict and divorce within the Egyptian context, as well as interventions aimed at promoting healthy relationships.

This course develops skills needed to address pressing environmental issues. First, review how to make a thorough analysis of environmental policies: a systematic assessment of what a policy looks like and how it works. Second, learn how to evaluate policies, that is, giving a motivated judgement of how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ a policy is according to certain criteria. Third, learn how the lessons from an analysis and evaluation can be used to design policies, that is, to propose improvements. Read sources that introduce various methods for policy analysis, evaluation, and design. Three writing assignments are required: one for policy analysis, one for evaluation, and one with a major focus on design. The topics of these assignments include the landing obligation in EU fisheries policy, the EU Birds and Habitats Directive (Natura 2000), and flood risk governance in Poland. Sources to be used in the writing assignments include literature, as well as films and video interviews in which practitioners and policy-makers give their views on policies. All sources are made available through Blackboard. Lectures are meant to explain and illustrate the methods to be used in the assignments. Tutorials help you understand the literature and help you in writing the assignments. This course includes an Honors component. Basic knowledge on (environmental) policy and research methods is required.

This course introduces key concepts for understanding the nature policy instruments, how they are selected and combined. Cases used illustrate the utility of the concepts and to engage in critical reflection on their application to actual policy situations. This enables students to explain and make sense of policy instruments and design in different national and sectoral settings. It deepens their knowledge of policy making and develops competencies to design public policies for sustainable transition.  

The course provides students with an introduction to the history of Latin America from the late 19th century to the present day. Its focus is predominantly on Latin Americans and what happened within the region. However, the course also explores Latin Americans’ interaction with the wider world, including their pivotal and expanding relationship with the United States during the 20th century. Major themes covered on the course include identity, citizenship and nationalism; neo-colonialism and anti-imperialism; state-building and concepts of “development”; revolution and resistance; dictatorship and violence; democratization; and the struggle for social justice. In addressing these themes, students are paying particular attention to histories of race, class, and gender with students encouraged to consider how different Latin Americans experienced and influenced the course of history in the region.