English

This course provides research training for students through the experience of belonging to a specific laboratory at the University of Tokyo. Students carry out an original research project under the guidance of assigned faculty members. Through a full-time commitment, students will be able to improve their research skills by applying the basic principles and knowledge from the literature related to the research questions, and by developing the skills to collect, interpret, and critique data in order to resolve a research question or evaluate a design for a research project. At the conclusion of the program, students submit their final work (paper, presentation, report etc.) as instructed by their lab supervisors

This course examines the “pre-modern period” of Japan from its origins in the Jomon Period through to the end of the 16th century. It focuses on the emergence of the imperial state, court rulership, and the rise of the warrior class. Though dominated by the rulership, religions, and lifestyles of courtiers and warriors, this course also explores the cultural context within which elites, commoners, and those in between lived and prospered. The approach is thus primarily socio-cultural, aiming to enhance the student’ understanding not only of the Japan of the past, but also of the present. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with the most important aspects of the classical Heian age, the dual (or tripartite) polity of Kamakura, the warrior rule of the Muromachi era, and the subsequent era of civil warfare.

This course examines politics revolving around historical issues. What is national history? Why can it be a source of political conflict? What is needed to reconcile historical disputes? These questions are explored through the examination of Asian and European cases. 

This multi-disciplinary course covers three broad topics: the architecture and various state and non-state actors of formal peacebuilding processes; negotiation between states as a key diplomatic function; and the phenomenon of third-party mediation in conflict resolution. These topics are covered from both the theoretical and practical perspectives, so the course literature, lectures, and exercises provide a balance between what the academics state and what actual diplomats, mediators, and non-state actors experience in the field of peacebuilding. The course also involves detailed case studies of contemporary conflicts in the Middle East region in order to explore these various processes in action and provide a degree of area studies specialization, including the conflicts in Lebanon, Palestine-Israel, Libya, Yemen, and Syria.

This course examines modern Korean literature, history, culture, and society of the 20th and early 21st century. 

The course involves an exploration of early historic and medieval Ireland in its European context. Topics include an examination of Roman influences, the archaeology of the Christian church, the exciting developments associated with the Viking Age in Scandinavia and the North Atlantic, the impact of the Norse on Ireland, and the transforming influence of the Anglo-Normans in castle building, town development, and rural villages in the Irish landscape.

The course sits at the interface between bioscience and business, covering the elements of management science that are most relevant to bioscience. Bioscience often has a long, complex route from innovation to implementation. Hence the content includes integration with practice, bioscience firms, medical behaviors, as well as the pillars of intellectual property, regulation and investment choices. How to gain stakeholder support is also included.

This course is designed to deepen students' understanding of the history of economics after the Marginal Revolution. The purpose of these lectures is to encourage participants to look at the development of economics from the viewpoint of history and theory, in order to understand modern economics from a different perspective. This course covers the Marginal Revolution and the historical development of microeconomics. Students are required to have basic knowledge of micro- as well as macroeconomics. Some mathematical reformulations are introduced in the lectures, but they are elementary and can be understood easily. Evaluations will be based on midterm and final papers.

Musical instruments are central to all forms of music. This course introduces the study of instruments, introducing methods and methodologies that can be used to inform ongoing studies across the music curriculum. Through considering instruments from around the world as socially and musically located craft objects that are tools for music making, a decolonized approach is central to the ethos behind this course. The course touches on the history of instruments; the history of studying instruments; how instruments are made, preserved and used; the meanings that instruments gain through association; and the materials available to makers in different contexts. The course is grounded in the University's Musical Instrument Collection.

Socio-cultural anthropology is the study of how people across the globe create, understand, adapt to, and transform their worlds. Located at the juncture between the humanities and social sciences, cultural anthropology merges the study of societies (social structures, institutions and political and economic systems) with the study of culture (belief and value systems, language, ritual and art).

Drawing from their own fieldwork experiences, historical archives, as well as from studies in the sciences and humanities, socio-cultural anthropologists describe, analyze and theorize a wide array of human experiences and relationships. The approach in this course is ethnographic and comparative: it studies peoples and places in depth, comparing places and peoples with one another, in order to gain a better understanding of what is general and what is particular about being human. Beginning with basic concepts in anthropology, ethnography as the core anthropological methodology, and some disciplinary history, the course then turns to a series of topics that anthropologists find important in understanding human beings: kinship and family; domination and subordination in everyday practice; identity and politics; and modernization, capitalism, and globalization.
 

The course explores some of the seminal texts in the discipline to understand how the fundamental questions asked by anthropologists have developed over the last century, and examines how these questions are refashioned in the contemporary world around urgent matters like technological change, global warming, migrants and refugee flows.