English

This course provides a comprehensive overview of the nature of second language learning and current theoretical explanations for second language learning. It also considers principles of classroom second language instruction in light of current empirical research. The course also examines various positions towards second/ foreign language teaching that have been developed since the 20th century and considers the relationship between second language acquisition theory, research on second language learning, and second language teaching practice.   

This course explores a specific theme of a broad range of topics in Japan Studies representing humanities, social science, natural science, and environmental science perspectives. The course involves substantial out of classroom work, including fieldwork, interviews, and first-hand observation.

This course provides a broad survey of contemporary methods, approaches, and thematic concerns within the expansive and internally differentiated field of Critical Geography, emphasizing its stakes for grappling with a “long twentieth century” (in Giovanni Arrighi’s words) profoundly shaped by the rise and fall of U.S. hegemony. How might questions of space, time, and cartography need to be rethought, not only in the twilight of the historical period Henry Luce famously dubbed “the American Century,” but in light of the so-called Anthropocene, wherein the geological force of humanity threatens to unfold across a timescale that exceeds even human existence? How might a critical geographic imagination illuminate the uneven prospects and perils of this time of uncertainty and transition? In exploring such questions, we will engage Marxist, feminist, Black, Indigenous, postcolonial, posthuman, environmentalist, affective, and abolitionist geographical traditions, drawing on thinkers such as Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Natchee Blu Barnd, Neil Smith, Katherine McKittrick, Anna Tsing, André Mesquita, William Cronon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Lauren Berlant, among others.

This course examines the history of Palestine and the people who lived in it, from the spread of Christianity, through the Islamic period, and until the beginning of Western domination in the 19th century. The story of the land is told from the bottom up, focusing on peasants and the urban non-elites, and to encompass the diversity of the ethnic and religious groups who made Palestine their home.

This course introduces students to key social, economic, and political current issues—such as climate change, economic liberalization, transnational migrations, terrorism, pandemics—and how different stakeholders—municipalities, nation-states, civil societies, as well as regional and international organizations—measure up to these issues and challenges. The course will also emphasize the connection and the articulation of these current affairs and public policies between the global and local levels. The course will thus make room for guest-speakers from local NGOs, news agencies or institutions to present their own take on global matters. While some of the topics addressed in this class have been covered at length by the literature, some will reflect immediate concerns as they arise from current affairs. 

This course develops the understanding, securely based on materials science, of various common failure modes, the reasons for their occurrence and how we seek to avoid failure by design. This course enables students to predict component failures under multiaxial loading conditions due to yielding, fracture, fatigue and creep mechanisms and to identify these failure mechanisms in practice, and to design against them.

In this course, students explore the evolution, contemporary controversies, and ongoing validity of human rights.

Through a range of cases studies around gender, citizenship and migration, torture, the death penalty, development, and corporate abuses of human rights, the course outlines the rise of the human rights regime, analyzes whether we now live in a post-human rights world, and considers the implications for human rights in a post-human era. Students draw on international examples of human rights institutions and violations, including torture in Guantanamo Bay, the death penalty in the US and countries such as Saudi Arabia, and the treatment of migrants and asylum seekers in Europe.

This course examines the fundamentals and principles of dramatic writing for screen, providing an immersive experience in the principles of screenplay writing with particular attention paid to visual language, narrative structure, characterization and dialogue, script critiques and the process of rewriting.

This course offers a unique opportunity to study some of the world’s oldest religions in a comparative perspective. It is an interdisciplinary initiative between the disciplines of the Study of Religions, Egyptology, and Assyriology. The course is theme-oriented and each unit has both a more theoretical part along with an empirical component that focuses on texts and objects from Egypt and Mesopotamia. Themes studied include deities and concepts of the divine, mythologies, temples and sacred space, ritual leaders and other religious agents, rituals and festivals, hymns and prayers, magic, healing rituals and divination, conceptions of death and afterlife. The course also introduces the main textual sources (such as the Gilgamesh Epic, the Babylonian Epic of Creation, the Myth of Isis and Osiris, and the Book of the Dead), excerpts of which are read in English translation. The course provides a general overview of the basic theoretical debates in the history of religions, as well as a basic overview of religious beliefs and practices in ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia (c. 3300 BCE – 300 CE). The empirical material in class come from the religions of the ancient Near East, but the analytical tools used are applicable on historical religions at large.