English

This course is about India from the 15th to the mid-18th centuries. This was a period of sometimes slow or subtle, occasionally cataclysmic, but often palpable transformation, and students examine the ways in which what people believed, where and how they lived, their relationship to the state and its power, and how they expressed themselves was changing. Although the course focuses first and foremost on India, by placing its history in its global context throughout this course, the class scrutinizes the emerging notion of a "global early modernity."

This course provides a critical understanding of the discipline of Forensic Science as it applies to the scientific underpinning of the processes from crime scene to courtroom.

This course provides an introduction to the sub-discipline of urban geography. It explores the distinctive contribution that geographers have made to the analysis of cities and urban life. The course outlines the economic and social origins of urban life, exploring the relationship between population density, size, and diversity that characterise cities. The course systematically outlines how contemporary cities can be interpreted as economic spaces, social spaces, and political entities. It also explores the different ways that urban geographers and others have framed their research into cities and urban environments. Given that cities – for all their attractions and strengths – are frequently defined by their dysfunction and inequality, the course examines how such poor outcomes are generated. It also explores the kinds of policy programmes that might be capable of generating more liveable and equitable cities. The course takes a selfconsciously international perspective, encouraging participants to read widely about the diversity of cities that form the focus of urban geographical thinking today.

This course examines the causes and consequences of this democratic malaise, encouraging students to consider policies and actions to address these ill winds against modern democratic regimes. The course begins with an introduction to normative and theoretical justifications for democratic governance and by providing a historical and comparative analysis of the state of democracy. From there, it considers threats to the democratic consolidation and causes of democratic backsliding. Topics include multiculturism, immigration, ethnic chauvinism, electoral violence and fraud, corruption, and elite capture. The last part of the course considers ways to protect, improve and consolidate democracy.

This course offers a comprehensive exploration of the intersections between gender and religion, examining how religious beliefs, practices, and institutions shape and are shaped by constructions of gender identity, roles, and power dynamics in international and local politics. Moreover, the course critically evaluates the role of gender and religion in shaping law, diplomacy, and conflict resolution strategies. It analyzes the ways in which governments, constitutions and laws, international organizations, and non-state actors incorporate gender and religious considerations into their policies and practices. Some questions therefore regularly returned to are: How have norms for gendered individuals in religious, non-religious, beliefs, and spiritual traditions been negotiated over time? Whose voices matter, when deciding which gendered actions are acceptable (or not)? What happens if we read religious traditions according to the voices of women, queer people, or people who identify with other marginalized gender and sexual identities? This course tackles these questions, showing how gender and sexuality—how they are taught, performed, and regulated—are central to understanding religious communities and international politics.

The course addresses a selected collection of themes that are crucial for the creation and development of a startup, among which one can find group behavior and performance, leadership, motivation, and interpersonal influence, storytelling, gamification and design thinking. Through a series of interactive classes, lectures and exercises, students develop competencies in organizational design, human resources management, leadership, and organizational behavior in the context of an internal or external new venture.

This course is an introduction to linguistic pragmatics, an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics which studies the relationship between language form and language use. It seeks to understand what it is to use language or what we do when we use language (Verschueren 1999). The course is divided into three units: the basic theoretical concepts in pragmatics, such as Grice’s maxims of conversation, conversational implicatures, deixis, and speech acts; key analytical (and contentious) issues such as salience and implicit meaning by analyzing different types of discourse; and the analysis of conversational interaction. Here, students explore such phenomena as turn-taking and preference structure, politeness phenomena, formulaic language, humor, and pragmatic/discourse markers. 

The Greek myths of gods, heroes, and heroines have played a crucial role in the history of Western art, literature, and music. This course examines Greek myths as found in Greek literary sources and provides students with an introduction to the study of Greek mythology in its literary, social, historical, and philosophical context.

This course looks at definition of a curve, arc length, curvature, and torsion of a curve, Frenet-Serret equations. It also looks at definition of a surface patch, first and second fundamental forms, isometries, conformal maps, area, Gaussian curvature, mean curvature, principal curvatures, Gauss map, geodesics, and Theorema Egregium.