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Does the law protect or undermine our freedom? Which legal doctrines govern our speech, assembly, property, and personal autonomy?

This course offers the opportunity to explore these questions and more through an introduction to the legal dimensions of freedom. This course is a journey from philosophical foundations - negative and positive liberty, republican theories, and the rule of law - to concrete frameworks in areas such as civil liberties, economic rights, and digital autonomy. The course sharpens legal research and critical analysis skills, helps students engage with case studies and simulations, and produce essays that interrogate how concepts of liberty shape contemporary law.

The course would be especially beneficial for students looking ahead to postgraduate study in Law, or to careers or further study in Law, Politics, or Public Policy.

This course is an introduction to political geography. Topics covered include power and states, nationalism, collective mobilization and social movements, elections, and democratization.

This course is team-taught so that each topic can be led by an expert in the field. The specific topics vary from year to year, but may include such things as film, photography, graphic novel, book culture and digital texts, street art, performance art, painting, social media, animation, monuments & memorialization, and music videos. Each topic introduces students to a specific approach, theory, or methodology that is well-suited to analyzing the particular sites, texts, or images for that topic.

The word ‘empire’ makes one think of the great European naval empires: Portuguese, Dutch, and English. And yet, the third largest empire in history—surpassed only by the Mongol and British Empires—is Russia. Moreover, Russia has sustained its peak territorial extent much longer than any other empire, having been the largest polity on earth for the last 400 years. How should we understand the Russian empire? And how does it help us get a better grasp on recent political events? Much commentary has tried to describe Russian with the classic categories of Western political thought: autocracy, despotism, dictatorship, nationalism, fascism. Others have followed Winston Churchill in declaring Russia to be incomprehensible: ‘a mystery wrapped in an enigma’. This course teaches to think about Russia in a different way, and to recognize it as a complex socio-cultural entity that needs to be understood on its own terms. It shows that the most famous events in Russian history—whether the Revolution of 1917, or the full-scale invasion of Ukraine—can only be properly evaluated within the long-term context of Russian imperial history and identity-formation and teaches students to think of a Russia that faces not only ‘the West’, but also a vast frontier stretching from the Caucasus mountains to the Korean peninsula. The course also places Russian history in comparative perspective, using tools and methods well-known to scholars of International Relations. The course examines whether Russian autocracy is a unique cultural phenomenon, or whether it bears similarities to other political regimes throughout history. Most importantly, it considers the constant interaction between culture and politics. How did shifting conceptions of gender shape the Russian imperial project? How was the Empire’s extraordinary diversity in terms of religious belief, mother tongue, ethnicity or lifestyle studied, interpreted, codified in law, and leveraged for political gains or reinforcing power hierarchies? How has political authority been conceptualized by Russians and their subjects, not just in high politics and formal treatises, but also in art, literature, and other forms of cultural expression? At the end of this course, understand the long-term origins of the Russian Empire, and be able to debate how these origins shape Russian culture and society today.

The course gives students an overview of the current environmental problems both on global and local scales. The emphasis is on analyses and evaluation of the impacts of various types of land-use on the environment. Examples of such analyses are studied and potential planning solutions are searched for. Current planning policies with regard to preserving the environment are studied and evaluated.

In this course students are introduced to the design principles of transport systems, their application to the movement of people and goods, within the wider context of the civil engineering profession. The course covers concepts such as travel demand, value of time and the environmental of transportation, underpinned by mathematical programming and algorithmic techniques. A strong systems design thread is running throughout the course, which includes aspects of network design, optimization, and performance maximization.

This course provides a broad, interdisciplinary overview of the study of what has been interchangeably called nonviolent social movements, nonviolent civil resistance, nonviolent activism, and strategic nonviolence. It explores questions surrounding the ethics of nonviolent activism, when and where it has been used, the conditions under which it is more or less effective, and its consequences for local communities, state polities, and the international system. The course draws from seminal texts, historical accounts, cutting-edge social science research, and guest speakers. Students gain a foundational understanding of both the normative and empirical debates surrounding the practice of nonviolent activism, a familiarity with key cases in which it has been used, and an understanding of how this form of civic engagement is resourced. The course entails substantial discussion in class.

This course examines eight broadly defined topics that delve into significant events and issues in the history of humanity, spanning from the Neolithic era to the present day. It will delve into pivotal historical milestones, including the birth of civilization, religious reform movements, the Industrial Revolution, the Columbian Exchange, the Black Death, the Great Depression, the World Wars, and more. Diverging from typical history courses that primarily focus on historical facts, this course seamlessly melds economics with history and history with economics. 

This course covers the engineering concepts required to build robust and trustworthy systems that make use of machine learning. Students look at all aspects of systems, from data ingestion to user experience, while considering the influence of regulation and wider society. Students spend half of their time in lectures, and half in the lab. Students implement and operate a simplified machine learning based system in a simulated environment inspired by a real-world problem. The course does not cover the design of machine learning models themselves, and students focus on the systems that surround and support them.

This course analyzes the human body not just as a biological entity, but as s a cultural construct and a medium for social interactions.