English

This seminar provides students with an introduction to the study of contemporary Chinese political economy. The early sessions of the course will place China’s economic development in global historical context before examining the characteristics of the Maoist command economy as well as reformers’ approach to marketization after 1978. Later sessions will focus on current issues relating to the state’s efforts to establish a sustainable, equitable and innovative economy. The final sessions examine China’s role in an increasingly turbulent global economy. Working closely with the instructor, students will write a research paper on a topic related to the contemporary Chinese political economy.

The course familiarizes students with theoretical perspectives that explain the emergence and change of modern welfare states. To this end, the course typically outlines the development of European welfare states, and discusses the emergence of different types of welfare states. The course usually covers core theoretical approaches to understand welfare state politics, which may include economic models of inequality and redistribution, party politics and public opinion, the influence of political institutions, and the role of immigration, race, and gender. The course may also include case studies of specific policy fields or social policy reforms, such as the Universal Credit reforms in the United Kingdom. Students learn a set of theoretical tools that help them understand past, present, and future debates about social policy and the welfare state, and evaluate social policies in a comparative perspective.

The course covers hydrogen as an energy carrier, how to produce it, and how to store it. The role of hydrogen in future energy systems is discussed. Electrochemical conversion in batteries and fuel cells is described and analyzed. All major transport processes, such as momentum, heat, mass, ion and current, and thermal management issues are presented. System integration is described. Properties and characteristics of energy-relevant materials and their role in electrochemical devices are treated. The relevance of energy systems and the transportation sector is discussed. Various engineering problems are presented.

The lecture covers elementary concepts in machine learning and their application on real data with a special focus on methods that are simple to implement. The course alternates lectures and practice sessions. In the practice sessions, students implement and apply machine learning algorithms on real data in Python. Topics include: supervised learning (linear regression techniques, linear classification, kernel based regression), unsupervised learning (principal component analysis, clustering), and model selection.

"Global Writing" are influential texts that are read by people around the world, bridging different cultures and languages. The older term "World Literature" includes some of the writers that the course will cover, but "Global Writing" is a broader concept. This course examines the key role of writers, translators, editors, and readers, looking at many key issues involving language and cultural identity. It also critically examines the selection process for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This course provides a fundamental introduction to Intercultural Communication. Students examine the following key concepts: culture, race, gender, ethnicity, stereotypes, values, expectations, and assumptions. By focusing on applied outcomes of intercultural communication theory, the course enables students to acquire intercultural competences for their professional and personal life. Students learn interpretative strategies in intercultural communication concepts that allow them to become culturally intelligent. They will acquire tools that enable them to avoid attribution errors when communicating across cultures. Students participate in interactive exercises to practice their intercultural competences. A field trip in the local area is also be a part of the course.

This course aims to broaden knowledge in Medieval Japanese history. This is not a course that surveys the whole Medieval period in chronological order, based on a textbook with information that students should memorize. Rather, the course aims to think about the history of Medieval Japan from different perspectives; to think about the reasons of important historical developments, and to understand their context and mechanism. The topics of the course and the readings will change every year according to the focus of the class.

This course provides an overview of general and specific concepts concerning popular perceptions of Viking Age and medieval Nordic history and culture from a multidisciplinary perspective. By reviewing of a wide variety of primary sources, medieval and modern - including sagas, chronicles, myths, folklore, video games, TV, and film - the course provides students with a basic knowledge of both practical aspects and mental attitudes related to the spread of Nordic cultural ideals to a worldwide audience: in particular, the medieval origins of ideas of Nordic culture and how they were transplanted into mainstream popular entertainment. Students explore misconceptions and stereotypes about Viking Age lifestyle and culture, including daily life, food, identity, Romanticism, Nationalism, and ethnic and spatial borders, with particular focus on medieval Iceland and Scandinavia.

This course looks at some of the varieties of independent cinema that have emerged from America since the early 1980s. Films by directors such as John Waters, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Spike Lee, Todd Haynes, Lisa Cholodenko, and Richard Linklater, are examined both within the context of their cinematic precursors and influences, and the wider social and institutional circumstances that helped to create audiences for them.

This course illustrates marketing sustainability models and contributions, describes new relationships that marketing needs to support emerging sustainable business models, and depicts and discusses fundamental variables of the marketing process that allow students to define an operating green marketing strategy. The present scenario shows the advent of a new paradigm at a global level, encompassing customers, markets and companies and based on the concept of “Green Economy.” As a consequence, all managers are faced with new challenges: to fully understand the new paradigm’s rules on the one hand, to infer which might be the new paradigm’s impact in terms of managerial implications and market strategy, on the other hand. The green marketing course’s specific goals are to: single out the most relevant green economy theories and practices, having a deep impact on customer choices and companies’ marketing strategies, such as, for instance, the Cradle-to Cradle approach; develop knowledge as to green products and services’ “go to market,” in particular by identifying which are the key value-drivers generating “green demand;” analyze the green marketing’s key drives for growth and key drives for value; review “Marketing Fundamentals” ( STP, 4Ps, etc.) under the new “green perspective,” in order to make participants able to define a Green STP and a Green 4Ps; single out and analyze the most important, innovative Green Business Models along with their peculiar Marketing-mix; investigate green marketing strategies in selected contexts (B2B,B2C,B2G) and industries (e.g. automotive, retail and e-commerce, building, city planning, food and beverages, "controversial industries"...); and explain how to build up a resilient and successful eco-system, able to deliver a relevant added value to green stakeholders. It is recommended to have attended a course on basic marketing. The knowledge of the pillars of marketing as a discipline is expected.