English

This course examines Buddhist writing culture from the perspectives of religious art and history of Chinese calligraphy. It will guide students to explore the theories, research methods and practice of Buddhist calligraphy through examining the calligraphy of Dunhuang manuscripts, Buddhist stone sutras, stone stele inscriptions from various ancient archaeological sites. The master calligraphers and Buddhist scribes will be examined. In addition to workshop demonstrations by the teacher, students will acquire the basic techniques, methods and practice of writing with brush. It will enable students learning how to write calligraphy mindfully with tranquility as the quintessence of Buddhist mental cultivation and modalities of writing cultures. They will also appreciate the essence of Buddhist texts, such as the Heart-sūtra and Diamond-sūtra.

This course introduces the broad questions of development economics, such as why some countries are poorer than others and why some people in some countries are poorer than others. It covers a broad range of issues, including education, health, gender, and environment. The course discusses different markets and their imperfections; for example, credit, insurance, labor, and land markets. It also discusses important policy responses to poverty and their effectiveness; for example, micro-credit, social protection, environmental regulation, transportation infrastructure provision. Course prerequisites include microeconomics (covering utility maximization models and market equilibrium) and a course in statistics or econometrics (covering hypothesis testing and regression models).

This course explores key concepts and theories in media, communication, and cultural studies to connect them to matters of cultural politics and power. It focuses on language and how it is used to represent the world we live in. The course covers semiotics, discourse, power/knowledge, speech act theory, performativity, and queer theory. Using these theoretical/methodological perspectives, it critically examines media representations of gender, sexuality, race, and nation.  

This introductory course in computer graphics comprises of three parts. The first part of the course presents a bird's-eye view of the current state-of-the-art in the field. The latter two parts cover rendering, which is one of the core topics in computer graphics, in detail. The second part of the course teaches central concepts in rendering, along with the relevant mathematics. Finally, the third part of the course focusses on applications of the theory taught in the second part.

This course examines generative and iterative studio processes. Weekly topics and activities are designed to encourage connections between materials, processes, and ideas. 

Modern bioscience research increasingly makes use of computational methods to collect, explore, analyze, display, and share data and results. In this course, students learn the foundational skills of coding so that they can write computer programs and analyze data using the Python programming language. Students are taught using examples drawn from bioscience research, and learn how computer techniques are used across a range of cutting edge research methods.

This course introduces students to the field of Human Geography, which is the study of the dynamic relations between people and places. Students gain an understanding of such complex processes as globalization and development, and the regional disparities in prosperity and inequality that result from these. The discussion evolves around the three main themes of economic, political, and social actions, all of which significantly shape the spatial organization of human activities. The course presents a general overview of the discipline, provides the opportunity to develop independent critical thinking skills, and offers insight into practical skills and tools that can be applied to a wide range of research settings. Overall, the course supplies the foundation for further, more topic specific, courses that focus on the spatial analysis of political and socio-economic phenomena at later stages.

This course gives students a broad grounding in the antebellum literature and culture of the United States, from colonial settlement to Civil War. Focusing on the self-conscious acts of speech and declaration which characterized early attempts to bring the new nation into being, the course introduces students to a range of texts designed to be spoken, including jeremiads, lyceum lectures, and orations. Students are encouraged to think about the powers and limitations of these early American voicings, and they draw on a range of literary media - from travelogues and letters to political pamphlets and legal documents - as well as elements of rhetoric and style, to explore literary experiments set on establishing a distinct, "American" voice. The course's wide historical range offers students the opportunity to develop an understanding of the relationship between literary production and the major social and political issues that shaped the early Republic.

In this course, students develop performance skills as set dancers. They learn to execute a set dance performance at the relevant level of competence and in an appropriate style; demonstrate specific set dancing styles; perform sympathetically within the context of a group; and critically understand the act of performance.

This course explores how the Middles Ages has been rejected, reiterated, and reimagined in modernity. Beginning with the Gothic literature of the 18th century, the course tracks medieval revivals and reworkings across period, nation, and medium to explore how the medieval past is refashioned according to contemporary ideologies. What does it mean to describe an element of contemporary culture as "medieval"? Why and how have people turned towards the Middle Ages to understand the present and imagine the future? In addition to popular medieval literature and major critical and political movements, medievalisms in art, architecture, film, photography, music, and video games are potential subjects of study. Key topics include temporality, authenticity, gender, performance, nationalism, fantasy, racism, and cultural memory.