English

This course explores social themes in Taiwan’s recent history through the concept of “musicking.” It seeks to discover the communal meanings and effects created through a variety of sonic activities by people living on this island in recent history and contemporary times. Through careful listening and participation, the course aims to gain different perspectives and a more reflexive, embodied, and affective understanding of the social organizations and changes over the last 150 years that shape Taiwanese society today. 

This course does not to fully cover or define “Taiwanese music," but rather endeavors to understand how various themes--including community building, migrations and rights, settler-colonialism, colonial-modernity, politics and economy, ethnic identity, multi-culturalism and indigenous sovereignty, gender and sexualities, space and environments, and social activism--are voiced and enacted through diverse genres of music and dance, by the indigenous, Han, newly immigrated and visiting communities of people living in Taiwan. 

This course is an introduction to market design, a field of economics focusing on designing markets and mechanisms to allocate resources efficiently. The course covers various topics, including auction theory, matching markets, school choice, and kidney exchange. The course also explores the theoretical foundations of market design and examines how market design principles can be applied to real-world problems.    

Course requirements: basic game theory (keywords: (Bayes) Nash equilibrium, dominant strategy) and microeconomics.

Behavioral Ecology takes an evolutionary perspective to address the mechanisms and processes that have shaped the current form and utility of various aspects of animal behavior. The course includes lectures that cover major topics in Behavioral Ecology and introduce relevant research approaches; literature reading that provides a glimpse of cutting-edge research in the field, as well as a group project that allows students to experience the entire process of conducting a behavior study, practicing the theories and approaches learned from the lectures.    

Required Prerequisite: General Biology.  

Suggested Prerequisites: Ecology and Basic Statistics.  

This course covers major topics in deep-sea ecology, including the physical environments and history, sampling techniques, adaptations of deep-sea organisms, community composition and functions, major habitats, and anthropogenic effects. The course also explores Taiwan’s deep-sea environments and living resources.    

Ethnography as both the methodology and the set of methods by which anthropologists gather our data from the field has a long and controversial history emerging during European colonial expansion. Students critically examine the early ethnographic works, particularly in relation to Ireland as well as abroad. Contemporary texts comparatively show core issues and debates in how the "other" is written. As students move through these texts we engage with different ethnographic methods developing the student's own skills in collecting and curating social data.

In this course, students study contemporary issues of diversity and equality advocacy. Students explore the kinds of social movements and collective activism that have driven, shaped, or challenged human rights internationally, taking a bottom-up approach. Case studies are used for in-depth exploration of tensions between equality and diversity and to examine the forms, functions, and outcomes of collective action in relation to the cases considered. 

This course examines how working-class writers have represented themselves as well as how they have been represented by others. It pays due attention to the formal modes employed by working-class writing (realism, expressionism, surrealism, fantasy etc.) across a range of genres - fiction, poetry, drama, and film. The course moves from the 19th century to the present in order to understand how class identities change over time yet it also affirms how the reconstitution of class is not synonymous with its disappearance. The course focuses on key issues such as the relationship between culture and politics, the intellectual or writer as a socially mediated figure, solidarity and individuality, social mobility, gender, voice and vernacular, the politics of representation.

Through the teaching of this course, students can understand and master the process of replication, transcription and translation of genetic information molecules in living organisms, understand and master the characteristics and mechanisms of gene expression regulation, and understand genetic engineering and its application.

This course introduces basic corporate finance principles and applies an analytical framework to examine important financial decisions faced by financial managers. We analyze how well-crafted decisions can generate lasting values impact. Course topics include: net present value and capital budgeting; valuing bonds; valuing stocks; financing investment; company valuation; mergers and acquisitions; Initial public offerings; options and dynamic hedging; and corporate governance. 

This is a two-semester course on the classical interactions of light and matter (electromagnetism), and the relationship between space and time (special relativity). The focus of the course is similarly twofold; there is emphasis on developing skills to solve physical problems, and on the close interplay between mathematical results and physical laws.