English

This course explores the theory of automata and formal languages. Topics include: automata theory; finite automata; languages and formal grammars; regular languages; pushdown automata; Turing machine; compilers. Pre-requisites: Programming; Programming Techniques.

This course covers programming language concepts, not as paradigms but as a set of basic building blocks, by using the Scala programming language to implement interpreters for the concepts. 

Students will learn how to learn new languages quickly and how to evaluate various languages and pick the most suitable one for a given task. The course also explores how to know when and how to design language, and how to understand the effects of languages on thought and communication. 

This course focuses intensely on films of the Visegrad region - Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Polish - long known as an artistic and intellectual island within the greater European sphere. Although ravaged by war, foreign occupation, and totalitarian governments for much of the last few centuries, the Visegrad countries have managed to survive and often thrive as centers of culture and artistic experimentation. This course focus on films from four of the largest cultural groups in the Visegrad region with the goal of examining how this region’s history has impacted its culture by looking at the four regions’ responses to identity, war, and domestic social problems. In addition to focusing on film theory, the course also discusses cultural history and media theory, learning approaches to “reading” films not only as movies, but also as multi-faceted cultural artifacts. To this end, readings contain primary source materials on cinema history, historical research, film theory, and literature intended to broaden our understanding of the various cultures, visual and otherwise, which inform cinema creation in this part of Europe.

This course introduces the discipline of international relations and provides students with the intellectual and analytical tools to understand how the world came to be how it is today, and where it might be headed in the decades to come. Topics include mainstream and critical perspectives on international relations, placing Western and Global South perspectives on the discipline into dialog with each other, global inequality, and the conflict in Israel/Palestine. 

This course is designed for students pursuing careers in fixed-income securities trading and modeling, as well as those interested in academic or regulatory research in fixed-income markets and credit risk management. It provides a comprehensive overview of China’s fixed-income markets and policy interest rate system. Students will learn key modeling techniques to price and analyze various fixed-income instruments, including default-free bonds, corporate bonds, and interest-rate derivatives. While the topics are inherently quantitative, the course emphasizes practical applications over purely technical aspects. The goal is to equip students with fundamental knowledge, trading strategies, and hands-on programming skills.

This course outlines the context for the emergence of Irish literature in English and to enable students to explore this literature through the introduction of key concepts and major authors. It focuses on the emergence of Irish literature in English, a literature that had its roots in conquest and colonization, but which proved to be highly dynamic, giving voice to diverse views and developing distinctive forms. The texts included give students an opportunity to explore literary expressions of Anglo-Irish identity, as well as critiques of the colonial process and early examples of hybrid texts that combine Anglo-Irish and Gaelic elements. Authors may include Swift, Edgeworth, Burke, Owenson and Somerville and Ross.

This course focuses on a selection of readings from the Greek Old Testament, Greek New Testament, and other Greek writings of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, along with some elements of advanced grammar and vocabulary. The syllabus changes from session to session but incorporates a range of koine Greek texts. These typically involve a selection from the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek New Testament, the Apostolic Fathers, the Apologists, and other early Christian writers, with a focus on the New Testament Apocryphal Gospels and other non-canonical texts.

This course investigates questions that are both central to political philosophy and of current political importance. They include: What does it take for a society to be just? How can we come to own natural resources? and more. 

This course examines research and theory on memory. The focus is primarily on animal research but the application of this work to the understanding of memory in humans will be made explicit. For example, the implications of this work for our understanding of memory disorders in humans, and the origin and treatment of clinical disorders will be discussed. The laboratory component of the course will provide “hands on” experience in observing various aspects of rodent behavior that are frequently used in studies on the psychobiology of memory and an opportunity for small group discussion/debate on various issues relevant to the material described in the lecture component of the course.

In developed countries, social security expenditures, such as public pension, health care and long-term care, account for a substantial part of the total expenditures of the public sector. The design of the social security system is an important policy issue in Japan, which is facing a rapidly aging population with a declining birthrate, as well as skyrocketing public debt. This course provides an overview of Japan's social security system and the economic theories behind the system.