English

This course studies the fundamental concepts of phonetic and phonological theories. The course begins with a review of classical taxonomic phonology and then moves on to the study of modern phonological theories.  

The course also covers practical phonetics, and students will practice producing speech sounds from languages spoken around the world, using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Examples will be presented mainly from English and Japanese to help students understand the theories, but examples from various other languages will also be used to further explain the theoretical concepts. Students are expected to have a basic knowledge of phonetics and phonology. 

Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that studies computational models for various mental facilities of human intelligence and cognition. Recent AI deals with an extremely wide range of topics including machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, to name a few. This course focuses on fundamental and traditional topics, including problem definition and solving, various search strategies, logic representation and inference, probabilistic models, reinforcement learning, game theory and mechanism design. 

This course introduces students to the life and work of one of the most significant poets in English literature, W. B. Yeats (1865-1939). It also explores Yeats’ influence on modern and contemporary British and Irish poetry. The first half of the course focuses on Yeats’ development as a poet from his early to late years. The second half of the course studies the work of British and Irish poets who have been influenced by Yeats’ writing. These poets include: Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), Seamus Heaney (1939-2014), Derek Mahon (1941- ), Paul Muldoon (1951- ), Peter McDonald (1962- ), and others. 
 
Students will have the opportunity to practice writing their own formal poems and participate in peer review of classmates’ work in several poetry workshops. 

This course takes as its starting point the description of cultural places and moments in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, whose role in both the building and the representations of the global stage has increased and diversified since the late 1990s. It then focuses on contributing to the definition of power in those political entities and understanding their place on the global stage through the lenses of political sociology. 

Throughout the 20th century, the presence of the word "democracy" has become mandatory in political discourses. Politicians from the left and the right claim to speak in the name of democracy. At the same time there is a disagreement about what democracy actually is, and a feeling that democracy is in crisis or at risk. This is expressed in politics, in criticism of the model of liberal and representative democracy, in the demand for a "real" democracy, and in voting for "populist" parties. But the discussion also arises among intellectuals. In light of contemporary debate, this course introduces, develops, and critically debates some of the major theories of democracy in political thought – liberal, deliberative, radical – and the responses they offer to the current crisis of democracy.

This course investigates the ties between resorting to criminal justice and the making of postwar international and domestic orders. The story of post-World War Two war crime trials was long told from a Western standpoint in a context where justice was (also) a way of waging the Cold War by proxy. Moreover, until recent years scholarly attention has predominantly focused on a few highly publicized international trials, especially the Nuremberg and the Jerusalem trials, leaving in the shadows the diversity of legal proceedings that took place before national courts of law and failing to account for what was "a continent-spanning, decades-long, ever-evolving project" (Devin O. Pindas). This course departs from these perspectives in at least two ways: First, the course argues that trials for war crimes offer a fascinating window into several geopolitical, political and social processes. As arenas where a diversity of historical and social battles are being waged, they tell us about the crafting of regime changes, evolving power hierarchies, social norms, as well as the dominant social representations of gender at a given point in time. Second, national and international trials are shown to have been transnational in terms of the circulation of legal qualifications, material evidence, defendants, witnesses, and lawyers, as well as the entanglement between multiple legal proceedings. Three questions lie at the center of our investigations: Firstly, how can one account for the evolving conceptions of the role of justice in the management of postwar settlements and regime changes? Secondly, how can one shed light on the ways in which justice has been served – and has been seen to be served – since the end of World War Two? Thirdly, how have international and domestic trials of war criminals impacted the ways in which large scale violence is told by historians and remembered by victims and outsiders? In order to address these issues, this course provides a vision of justice attentive to the plurality of protagonists – legal as well as non legal professionals – that have contributed to its shaping, both within the judicial arena (prosecutors, judges, defense counsels, witnesses, translators, stenographers, etc.) and beyond it (Holocaust survivors, historians and archivists, journalists, political decision-makers, etc.). The assumption here is that a trial takes shape from the moment when the pretrial investigations are started and ends at the moment when the legal narratives are incorporated into ways of retelling and remembering war crimes. The course builds upon a diversity of oral, print and visual sources, including filmed trials and archival documents. Several scholars who have studied and/or taken part in legal proceedings for war crimes are also invited to share their insights with the students.

The course equips students with a basic knowledge of management which can be used as a foundation for personal development. The course also is an introduction to future courses in management. 

Domesticated animals have been identified in many societies across the world, but rarely have archaeologists considered how livestock management has shaped (and continues to shape) human societies.  In the past, archaeologists have tended to assume that once established livestock can be disregarded as a dynamic factor.  Such studies focus on the narrow confines of the economic significance of livestock produce, often associated with the animal's death.  This course considers the agency of livestock and its importance in transforming human relationships.  Examples and case studies are drawn from archaeology, but also from anthropology, history, and geography

Students learn how the scientific analysis of fossil bones and stone tools, combined with the study of modern and ancient genetic codes, can be used to unlock the hidden history of our species. In this course, students discover the relative strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of data, and the sorts of questions that a scientific approach can (and cannot) answer. Students learn to be able to explain how an understanding of our past can provide unique insights into topical issues such as diet, human health and disease, migration, "race," language and national identity.

This course covers basic notions of information theory. Entropy as measure of uncertainty. Constrained optimization with Lagrange multipliers. Maximum entropy inference with constraints. Partition function, free energy as generating function. Collective behavior in spin systems: from independent voters to the tight-knit model (or Curie-Weiss ferromagnet); phase transitions and spontaneous symmetry breaking.  Distributions of functions of random variables using Kronecker delta.  Laplace's approximation for integrals. Bolzmann distribution and 1d Ising chain: exact calculation for free energy. Variational approximations and trial (factorized) distributions. Time permitting: multi-party voters, stochastic dynamics and Markov Chains, models on social networks, traffic flow and epidemic models.