English

This course introduces students into the riches of the Greek literary tradition. It is for students coming to university without any background knowledge of ancient literature and offers a chronologically laid out, broad survey of periods, genres and best known authors of Greek literature and thought. Although the broad conceptual categories of “socio-cultural context” and generic expectations define the overall intellectual tone of this course, extracts from the texts are woven into lectures to whet the students' appetite to continue with further reading of their own. No previous knowledge of ancient Greek/Latin literature and philosophy is assumed and all texts underpinning the teaching of this course can be studied in English translation.

This course examines contacts between and among diverse peoples in many of the places that came to be known as “the Pacific World”: Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, the South Pacific, the Northwest Coast, and elsewhere, focusing mostly on the late 17th to early 19th centuries but reaching back to the first peopling of these territories. It explores the challenges – theoretical, moral, methodological, and beyond – of cultural encounter and makes connections between these early contacts the present day, thinking critically about the legacies of events that are not really in the past at all. 

This course introduces production management and presents tools and techniques mostly used by Japanese companies to manage and control their production systems. It provides the necessary concepts, tools, and methods to understand production management systems and the logic behind the various planning, scheduling, control, and decision techniques. The course covers essential Japanese production management concepts such as Toyota’s production systems, just-in-time, Kanban, and Kaizen. It also deals with traditional and modern Japanese production systems and those control systems being practiced in Toyota.

This course introduces the different schools of theories that enables one to understand any kind of narrative. Using a selection of prose extracts and poetry, the course teaches methods of reading and analyzing texts in class. By the end of the course, students are expected to reach a general conclusion about possible interpretations of the text, supported by concrete evidence.

This course examines central issues in metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics. It opens with general questions about reality, God, personal identity and free will. The middle section of the unit will consider questions about values, goodness and responsibility. The final part is concerned with the question "what is art", the nature of aesthetic judgment and the role of art in our lives.

This course focuses on the sociology of the State and its relations with society in contemporary Russia. Historical and political sociologists have focused on the state in the form it has taken in the West since the Middle Ages. These essential and fundamental analyses form the starting point for study of the sociological reality of the state in post-Soviet Russia. Using the tools of the historical sociology of politics and comparative politics, the course studies the political transition following the collapse of the USSR, the reform of public action, the trajectories of elites and state agents, and the reform of the state and its authoritarian modernization. Ultimately, the course considers what makes the recent transformations of the Russian state so singular on the one hand and so banal on the other, in the context of the global neoliberal modernization of the state and public action.

This course equips students with a thorough understanding of the causes and consequences of brain damage in humans. It provides knowledge on how the study of individuals with brain damage can lead to a better understanding of human brain function, and it educates students on the core ideas of recovery and neuro-rehabilitation.  
 

This course focuses on the social transformations of food systems. More specifically it focuses on a) how less sustainable systems of food provisioning are deliberately transformed into more sustainable ones and b) how this transformation process and its implications can be understood and assessed from a social sciences perspective.  The course provides a social sciences perspective on the dynamics and diversity of sustainable systems of food provisioning and includes the tools to assess their impact on the environment, society, and health. This is achieved by a combination of lectures, group assignments, and workshops.

What is Judaism? Since Judaism has a history spanning more than three millennia and all five continents, it inevitably means different things to different people. The academic study of Judaism tries to answer the question by focusing on Jewish practice, tradition, and history with a variety of perspectives: The definition of Judaism: is it a religion, culture, or ethnicity? Is it monolithic, essential, and static, or rather diverse, hybrid, and dynamic? What are the texts and practices that define Judaism? What are the central concepts of rabbinic Judaism? How does rabbinic legal text and reasoning work? What are the places and shapes of Jewish worship? How do tradition and modernization make their mark felt in the history of Judaism, from Antiquity to the present day? How does Judaism interact with other religions? Which are the contemporary ways of connecting with the Jewish tradition?

This course examines the use of digital editing for film and video projects. It covers the use of software programs such as Adobe Creative Suite to explain how to edit video files into a project and how moving images can be transformed over time in combination with text, masks, filters, effects and sound. Students will learn how to edit and master in Adobe Premiere Pro through an intensive series of tutorials film/video screenings and practical studio workshops. This will culminate in the production of a studio project.