English

This course explores the evolution of the Great American Songbook, a loosely defined canon of influential American popular songs from the early 20th century. These songs, many originating from Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood, have shaped the foundation of American popular music. Students examine the craft of songwriting, the business of music publishing, and the cultural contexts that influenced the work of composers such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers. Through musical and lyrical analysis, historical inquiry, and engagement with primary sources, students develop a critical understanding of the enduring legacy of these songs and their impact on jazz, musical theatre, and contemporary popular music.

This course provides first-hand knowledge about China and its global impact in two interconnected stages. The first part looks at China itself and asks how it is different and not-so-different from the West by examining China’s recent history, its culture, society and politics, study how China is portrayed in Western media. In the second part, we move to “global China”: how do the “domestic” factors studied in the first part of the course shape China’s decision-making at a global level? This part of the course focuses on its role in Africa, Asia and in the West.

This course undertakes a critical examination of the historical trajectory of Korean education while engaging students in in-depth reflection on its prospective vision and directions for the future. It surveys the philosophical foundations, the colonial education system, and the policies of the U.S. military government, as well as the diverse economic, political, social, and cultural forces that have shaped Korean education from the pre-1900s to the present. Special attention will be given to major sectors of education—including higher education, curriculum, teacher education, and technical education—in order to analyze the ways in which educational development has contributed to the nation’s growth and modernization. Through this inquiry, students will not only gain a comprehensive understanding of the overall evolution of Korean education but also develop a nuanced appreciation of its distinctive characteristics, interpreted through the lens of development and progress. 

Many statistical models try to explain how one variable relates to others. In this course, how to analyze multiple variables simultaneously, multivariate analysis. Both how they depend upon other variables, but also how they depend upon each other. With the tremendous amount of data available nowadays, e.g. in genetics, it is often the case that the number of variables is far greater than the number of observations. This demands special techniques that are learned in this course. Course content includes matrices and multivariate normal distribution, singular value decomposition and its geometric interpretation, principal component analysis including its functional formulation, factor analysis, cluster analysis, prediction theory including prediction with high-dimensional predictors, penalized regression and prediction, sparse matrices, linear discriminant analysis, and large-scale inference.  

This course examines a selection of twentieth-century Spanish films, using cinema as a lens to explore the complex and ever-evolving concept of Spanish national identity. From the veiled satire in the early years of Franco's dictatorship to the vibrant self-expression of the post-Franco era, we will explore how filmmakers have grappled with themes of identity, tradition, regionality, gender, and social change.

This course introduces students to a variety of methods to interpret, analyze, and understand popular music and its impact on society. Each week focuses on a selected genre or thread in modern popular music, from rock and roll to hip-hop to underground and dance music. By examining these genres and threads, students are encouraged to use theoretical frameworks that help reveal the cultural and musical significance of the chosen examples. These frameworks include media theory, gender and performativity, and the critical examination of race and identity. It also focuses more broadly on how popular music propagates itself over time via its relationship to technology, cultural and subcultural movements, and political currents. Although the course does introduce and employ a few musical-analytical concepts, it is an elective course and has no prerequisites.

This course will introduce the principles of kinetic theory and thermodynamics. Students learn to use the zeroth law of thermodynamics to describe scales of temperature; use the first law of thermodynamics to investigate changes in internal energy, involving the exchange of heat and/or work; apply the second law to heat engines and calculations of efficiency; show how the second law leads to the concept of entropy; use thermodynamic potentials for different thermodynamic conditions; and basics of kinetic theory.

This course provides an understanding of the structure and function of macromolecules such as nucleic acids and proteins in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, and introduces key molecular biology techniques, thereby laying a solid foundation for medical research.

This course surveys major marine organisms and the habitats and community structures in which they occur, with emphasis on trophic interactions and the functioning of marine ecosystems. The course examines how environmental conditions, biological adaptations, and ecological processes influence the distribution and organization of marine life. Attention is also given to marine resources and their use by humans, as well as to the design, implementation, and interpretation of marine ecological research.