English

This course introduces students to a variety of philosophical thinking from around the world. It prompts students to explore some key questions and concepts in philosophy across different religious traditions and time periods. The religious traditions to be explored in this course may include, but are not limited to: Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.  

This advanced course on postcolonial literature situates the representative texts of postcolonial literature in broader intellectual and historical contexts, exploring not only the works of literature under this category but also the important issues often associated with postcolonial studies in general by means of comparative, historical, and theoretical approaches.

Along with an introductory survey of the most important art of the period, the course covers various controversies regarding the works' essence. The central aspects and artists of the period are introduced in the first seven weeks. Based on the textbook, lectures, and excursions, students are challenged to create a kind of survey for themselves. The second part of the course gives representative examples of the methods and fields of research that are central to the subject of seventeenth-century Dutch art. An attempt is made to offer a complete survey of the important painters from the seventeenth century, but of course a selection has to be made. There is an emphasis on Rembrandt, not only because he was the most important seventeenth-century Dutch artist, but also because his work has been researched in a number of ways. Additionally, there is an emphasis on painters and art historians from Utrecht, because their work is close at hand in the museums in this city, and because knowledge of Utrecht culture might contribute to a feeling of home. Prerequisites for this course include a course on art history or museum studies.

This course introduces the students to the basics of quantitative finance and targets all students who have an interest in building a foundation in quantitative finance. Topics include term structure of interest rates, fixed income securities, risk aversion, basic utility theory, single-period portfolio optimization, basic option theory. Mathematical rigor will be emphasized. The course requires students to take prerequisites.

Intellectual history of antiquity and the Middle Ages is typically conducted with sparse attention to women authors, and women thinkers whose works are not preserved. This course challenges that approach, by focusing on the achievements and contributions of female thinkers spanning a period from classical antiquity, with figures like Aspasia and Diotima, down to Christine de Pizan at the dawn of the European Renaissance. Some attention is paid to other cultural traditions, especially India and the Islamic world, though the richest materials are to be found in the Greek and Latin textual traditions. Many of the figures covered are, in a broad sense of the term, “philosophers,” but figures more usually described as “mystics,” such as Rabia and Hildegard of Bingen are also included.

The course covers different theories of human communication and utterance comprehension are discussed, including Gricean, neo-Gricean, and relevance-theoretic approaches. The specific topics and data discussed vary from year to year but are taken from the following list: referring expressions and speaker’s reference, conversational implicatures, pragmatic enrichments of explicit content, word meaning modulation, unarticulated constituents, indexical saturation, and non-literal uses of language (metaphor, hyperbole, metonymy, irony).

This course deals with meaning-making in art, its perception, and its cognitive basis. It has a special focus on visual works of art - that is, on how artists construct meaning in vision - but also integrates literary texts. In both domains, it conveys insight into the way in which artists creatively exploit fundamental properties of both visual and textual processing in order to produce given meaning effects. It shows how artists’ formal techniques are attuned to the properties of the visual and cognitive system, notably on the basis of recent findings in neuroaesthetics and the psychology of perception. Furthermore, this course provides a general insight into the reasons why artists’ meaning-making techniques are so efficient. Therefore, it develops the necessary tools for the precise analysis of meaning in visual and textual media, also outside the purely aesthetic domain.

This course examines insights into developing profitable branding strategies that can be implemented by managers. The purpose of this course is to get students to think (and act) like an effective brand manager.

The early modern period saw considerable changes in the shape of warfare and in the nature of armed forces and the state, a process some historians have described as a military revolution. Yet the increasing pressures of war brought about considerable social, economic, and political breakdown, as rulers overburdened both their armed forces and their domestic subjects. This course examines how western European states organized and conducted war between the late 16th and the early 18th century, and consider what effects this had on political stability. The focus is not only on some of the great powers but also upon some minor states who punched above their weight on the international stage.

This course looks at the industrial, technological, and cultural changes in serial television and explore the themes, narratives, and aesthetics of contemporary long-form television. Students are introduced to key conceptual approaches to serial television as an artform and a production practice, examining seriality and long-form storytelling; notions of complexity; discourses of quality, taste, and cultural value; questions of authorship; innovations in visual style and sound design; the rise of streaming services such as Netflix; new viewing practices and habits (such as "binge-viewing"); and issues of gender equality and ethnic diversity on- and off-screen.