English

This course explores Germany’s rich diversity of culinary traditions from an anthropological context. Students gain insights into the cultural, historical, political, and ecological factors leading to the diverse landscape of regional dishes in contemporary German society. By analyzing the complex relationships between food, culture, and society, students analyze how food consumption and production changed historically, including in Germany's turbulent twentieth century, and evaluate Germany’s role in global efforts to develop sustainable and climate-friendly agricultural practices and food production. By exploring Berlin’s food scene and how it reflects the multiethnic traditions of its diverse population, students explore why food is such a powerful symbol of social and cultural identity in today’s contexts of migration and globalization.

This course is a first introduction to algebraic topology, the area of mathematics in which algebra is used to study topological spaces. It defines the fundamental group and singular homology and studies their basic properties and applications. The course introduces foundational competencies in algebraic topology. Important concepts include homotopy, homotopy equivalence, fundamental group, covering space, chain complex, and homology. Prerequisites include knowledge about general topology and abelian groups, as obtained through courses such as Topology and Algebra 2, and Advanced Vector Spaces.
 

Thie course builds upon Physics 1, continuing to introduce basic concepts in Physics to students majoring in natural science or engineering. The course begins with topics in electromagnetics such as Coulomb's Law, electric fields and potentials. Later topics include circuits, magnetic fields, electromagnetic waves. Finally, optics, relativity and basic concepts of modern physics will be introduced.

This course explores the multidimensional definitions and meanings of globalization by examining various interconnections, from traditional cultures to modern ones, cultural diversity to homogenization of culture, from migration and immigration to ethnic diversity, and from population growths to urbanization and climate change. 

Students will examine how globalization impacts the culture, family, aging, international migration, popular culture, population, urbanization, environment, and economic development in societies all around the world, paying special attention to how these issues affect Korean culture and society, and will explore possible solutions to these issues. 

This course builds an advanced understanding of major topics in the field of microbiology, exploring topics such as Microbial Cells, Energy Metabolism of Bacterial Cells, Virulence Determinants of Bacterial Pathogens, Metabolism and Virulence Linked Together, Recent Trends in Microbiome Research, Antibiotics, Bacterial Genetics / Synthetic Biology, Helicobacter pylori infection, and Pathogenesis of Helicobacter pylori.

This course provides basic knowledge of politics and society of the Democratic People`s Republic of Korea (DPRK; North Korea). This course is a mixture of area studies and international relations, particularly focusing on North Korea as a case study. Topics include DPRK political systems, governance, and economy; international sanctions and their impact, nuclear development, human rights, media and information control, and the future of the Korean Peninsula.  Based on basic information of internal dynamics of North Korea, students are expected to search for motivations to study further issues regarding North Korea. By the end of the semester, students find themselves to be better equipped with various approaches to North Korean politics and society. 

This course covers the functions and structures of the various elements that make up a machine, how to select components appropriately, and how components can affect and influence the machine design process. This course includes theoretical lectures on basic design theory, design cases, and various machine elements, as well as design and design practice of KIT for entering design competitions. 

This course examines the rise of novel reading in English as an educative, aesthetic and passionate practice from the 17th century to the present. The course moves chronologically to examine how novels and the world came to be understood as mutually constitutive, how novels create and sustain attachments amongst their readers, how the genre of the novel became available for interrogations of national, gendered, racial, sexual and class identity, of liberty and intellectual emancipation, and of pleasure.

Recent events in global politics have forced the memory of empire into the public domain. Equally, changes in the international system have prompted analysts of various stripes in the public domain to refer to the US, China, Europe or Russia as ‘empire’. These changes have been reflected in political science with American Empire Debate, a turn toward history and critical voices calling for the decolonization of the discipline and a call for a recognition of the importance of empire in shaping global politics. A sub-discipline of comparative empire studies has emerged that overlaps history with IR and calls for ‘epistemic decolonization’ have arisen alongside scholarship which offers colonization as a viable policy option. With the disciplines of the social sciences being largely oriented around the state, this course takes as its focus empire as its referent object and asks: why has political science paid it so little attention? What is an empire and how do we theorize it and study it? What does the introduction of empire as a field of study mean for political science and how we understand the international system? This course takes empire as its object of inquiry and provides students with an interdisciplinary map for the various ways it has been theorized and understood. The aim of the course is to examine and assess in comparative frame the different kinds of analytical tools and methodological problems that might be applied to the study of empire. It will pose the theorization of empire as a problem which will be explored conceptually, methodologically and empirically. Finally, we explore what empire as a political form or category of analysis contributes to our understanding of global politics

This course will introduce students to some of the main authors and concepts associated with structuralism, as well as to its legacy in authors and texts that in France came to be known as neostructuralist and elsewhere are most widely known as “poststructuralist.”  

It is probably safe to suggest that the various thinkers and movements that came to be known collectively under the banner of “structuralism” represent one of the most important and influential moments in 20th century European, and particularly French, thought. Although it may be said to find its beginnings in linguistics, structuralist thinking quickly expanded into a wide variety of fields, from anthropology and psychoanalysis to philosophy, aesthetics and literary theory.  

The course focuses upon works that have had an important direct or indirect influence on the aesthetic tradition while exploring how the terms “structuralist” and “poststructuralist” are both highly problematic and contested; as a result, students will examine the various aspects that might make thinking “structuralist,” as well as examining some of the limits that led many thinkers to attempt to move beyond it.