English

This course presents the historical background, development, and present-day challenges of the Norwegian welfare state. It examines the role of values and norms in shaping the services offered by the welfare state, as well as how the structure of the state in turn shapes societal norms and values. The course follows how political debates concerning the country's welfare programs have shifted in response to accelerated immigration, changing gender roles, and shifting employment patterns. It pays special attention to universal welfare services, work-family balance, and the Introduction Programme (Norway’s integration package), as these are some of the distinctive features of the Norwegian welfare state. Additional modules on education, healthcare, childcare, corrections, and labor market policy demonstrate values and norms in practice, as well as highlight the challenges that increased globalization presents to a state welfare system. The course puts emphasis on classroom discussion and student participation with the aim of enabling students to make a comparative analysis of social structures and institutions in their own and other countries.

The institution and the development of international organizations constitutes a major phenomenon of contemporary international society. This course introduces the law of international organizations including their constituent treaties; the role of states within them; the functioning of their components; and the methods of production and implementation of the law they offer. The course also reflects on the functions of international organizations within contemporary international society to discuss if they are places of governance, regulation of the international community, or simple mechanisms structured by coordination of the interstate relations.

This course explores the psychology behind entrepreneurship and innovation. The topics include the personality of entrepreneurs and exploring whether entrepreneurs are born or made; how entrepreneurs make decisions about risk and manage uncertainty; what drives entrepreneurs and what "returns" they can expect (in terms of income and well-being); what success means to entrepreneurs and what the ingredients are of an ‘entrepreneurial culture’. The course also reflects on how each one of us can act in an entrepreneurial manner and adopt an entrepreneurial leadership style. The course examines the psychological underpinnings of the entrepreneurial process and innovative behaviors within established business. 

This course covers the role of revolutions in shaping history. From the Cold War, to the “new world order” following the end of the Cold War, to the present day, the course considers how and why revolutions happen, what constitutes a revolution, and how revolutions achieve (or fail to achieve) social and political reform.

This philosophy course addresses the historical reality of the German moment of philosophy in two subsequent phases. In the first part, the course follows the emergence and full deployment of German philosophy from its Kantian beginnings to Hegel's grand but fragile synthesis, trying to understand its richness as well as its fragility. In a second part, the course discusses the later renewal of German philosophy in the late nineteenth century and its historical tragedy in the twentieth century. This includes a discussion of the new beginnings of philosophy since the mid-nineteenth century, from Marx, and Nietzsche, via Frege and Mach, to Husserl and Wittgenstein, who have been reacting to the scientific and political revolutions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Martin Heidegger as an established pro-Nazi philosopher and Max Horkheimer as the leading philosopher of the “Frankfurt School” driven into exile are studied as philosophers immersed into the Night of the twentieth century. Finally, post-World War II developments in philosophy (as exemplified by Jürgen Habermas and Ernst Tugendhat) are looked at as pathways out of the self-destructive turn philosophy in Germany had taken in the first decades of the twentieth century, and as passages into an emerging world philosophy. The course is based upon contemporary attempts at rethinking a global philosophical perspective. The focus is on the tension between the Enlightenment heritage of a universalizing human philosophy and a national culture project, as well as on the tension between classicist rationalism and romantic emotionalism in its construction as a series of philosophical projects. From the perspective of a German version of the dialectics of the Enlightenment, the German philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are studied in context, combining the reading of key texts with a reconstruction of their historical contexts and their interaction.

Topics include 1. Structural and Molecular Biology: The structures of biomacromolecules (DNA, RNA and proteins), structure determination (NMR, X-ray crystallography and CryoEM), post translational modification of proteins, synthetic gene design, recombinant protein expression, mutagenesis, unnatural amino-acids, methods of purification and characterization including electrophoretic methods and mass spectrometry. 2. In Silico Methods: Sequence analysis, databases, structure prediction and molecular dynamics. Some of the material in this section are delivered as a workshop to foster the development of in silico skills. 3. Biophysical Techniques: The application of spectroscopic and analytical techniques to measure the physical properties of biomolecular systems, including kinetics, coupled assays, biothermodynamic methods (SPR, ITC), fluorescence, vibrational spectroscopy and imaging techniques. 4. Enzymes and Biosynthesis: This section focuses on enzymes, systems and their applications, beginning with an overview of the structures and functions of the different classes of enzyme. Case studies are used to illustrate the application of techniques covered in earlier sections to the study of complex biological systems and processes. Topics covered include specialized catalytic centers, analysis of biosynthetic gene clusters, protein engineering, directed evolution and highlights of recent natural product biosynthesis.

This course emphasizes hands-on laboratory experience and teaches students research background, relevant theories, and basic laboratory techniques relevant to their field of study. Students formulate a research plan, implement it by conducting experiment-based research, and convey the results in scholarly presentations. Students submit a written research report at the end of the course.

This course is essentially a course in what is known as cultural (or cross-cultural) psychology. Cultural psychology is a subfield of psychology that emerged in the late 20th century as a response to the historic dominance of the Western--primarily, American--perspective in psychology. Of note, Japanese researchers played and continue to play a critical role in this field, as strong Japan-America ("Nichi-Bei") academic cooperation allows for easy comparisons and collaborations. But cultural psychology is much bigger than any two particular countries or cultures. Each and every society, and the societies within those societies, all contain powerful cultures that affect the very fabric of our thoughts, emotions, behaviors. In other words, we will look at the cultural roots of our beautiful and indispensable human diversity--the whole world over.

In addition to the topics mentioned in the basic description of the curriculum (perceptual and cognitive processes, human development, language, gender, social behavior, intercultural relations, and applied cultural psychology), we will examine the nature of culture itself. Throughout the course, we try to keep in mind big questions such as "What really is culture?" and "Why do human beings even have culture in the first place?" For more information on the kind of topics we will cover, please see the course textbook, "Cultural Psychology" by Steven Heine. Note, however, that topics will be organically updated to reflect current cultural issues and student interests.

Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology that regards humans as information processing systems and aims to study its mechanism by the scientific method of measurement and observation. This course instructs on how basic human cognitive activities (e.g. perception, memory, learning, language comprehension, attention, etc.) are examined, from classic research methods to the latest research technology, such as functional magnetic resonance brain imaging.

This course examines the impacts of disease and disaster on individuals and societies in the Middle East from Medieval times to the 20th century. It uses primary and secondary sources to analyze how the Middle East conceptualized disease and crises, and how they dealt with their effects when they struck. This course trains students in the interpretation of Mesopotamian (Babylonian, Assyrian, and Sumerian) literature in translation. It equips them with both questions and methods, and pays detailed attention to the examination of primary sources.