English

This interdisciplinary course examines how gender and sexuality were experienced, represented, and contested in Weimar-era Germany (1918-1933). Drawing on a diverse array of primary sources - including theater, visual art, literature, film, and theoretical texts - students explore how marginalized individuals and communities navigated, expressed, and politicized their identities. Key topics include the emergence of sexual science and the conceptualization of the "third sex"; the proliferation of queer spaces, subcultures, and social movements in 1920s Berlin; intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability; artistic and literary depictions of gender fluidity and erotic desire; medicalization, criminalization, and the state's response to gender/sexual nonconformity; the rise of fascism and the violent backlash against LGBTQ+ rights. Through close engagement with primary sources and cutting-edge scholarly work, students gain a nuanced understanding of the complex, often contradictory dynamics that defined gender and sexuality in Weimar Germany. This course equips students with the critical tools to analyze the interplay between cultural production, social movements, and the politics of identity.

This course broadens, and selectively deepens, students' understanding of finance, building on their existing knowledge of financial economics. The course covers a broad range of topics, with both a theoretical and an empirical emphasis. These include topics in investments and performance evaluation and international finance. The first component provides students with a way of thinking about investment decisions by examining the empirical behavior of security prices. Students study the empirical evidence of the CAPM and other asset pricing models, and then analyze different tests of market efficiency focusing on event studies and investment anomalies. They also study the main empirical findings in behavioral finance. They learn how to measure the performance of a portfolio manager and to attribute it to different types of skill. Finally, this section of the course introduces the foundations of international finance and explores issues related to international portfolio management.

This course focuses on applying linguistic theories to real-world contexts, examining the intricate connections between linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena. By analyzing these relationships at individual, societal, and global levels, students will explore how linguistic theories are utilized to understand and address complex issues, gaining insights into their practical relevance and broader impact. Students examine the evolution of language and linguistics, with emphasis on the processes of language development and decline. Students also apply a linguistic perspective to everyday contexts, including education, language policy, K-pop, and culture. 

This special topics data sciences course covers up-to-date research trends in prompt engineering and prompt engineering interactions with large scale language modeling. The course examines how prompt engineering significantly impacts the effectiveness of LLM-based applications and interactions with generative AI. 

Academic researchers, industry vendors, and practitioners have proposed many practical techniques and guidelines for building LLMs or applications on LLMs. In this course, students review concepts and techniques that can be used to guide the model in how to behave in a way that is aligned with users' preferences or perform a specific task. 

Topics include basic concepts of LLMs, Foundation model vs custom model, Fine tuning vs prompt tuning, Methods of prompt engineering, Agentic workflow, Integrating local preparatory knowledge bases, and more. 

This course introduces students to international marketing, focusing on the complexities of operating in diverse and unfamiliar environments. Students build knowledge of the international environment and the unique challenges facing international marketers, including increased scope, risk, and uncertainty. Students learn to identify and manage differences, opportunities, and threats across varied economic, demographic, political/legal, cultural, technical, and competitive environments. Students connect international issues to marketing decision-making at three levels: macro level, where country selection decisions are made; national level, where market entry decisions are considered; market level, where marketing mix decisions are implemented.

This course examines Japanese schooling from sociological and comparative perspectives. The first section focuses on the socializing role of schooling. What kind of values and skills are learned in Japanese schooling? How do they differ from other societies? How do they change from preschool to high school? The second section focuses on the sorting mechanism of schooling. To what extent is Japanese education system an egalitarian system, in terms of social class or gender, when compared with other OECD countries? How do countries differ in their conceptualization or educational equality or mechanism of stratification? The last section addresses some recent educational reforms that have been widely debated in Japan.

This course introduces an overview of the cultural tradition of East Asia by examining classical Chinese narratives translated into English. It explores how these narratives depict the essence of humanity and the world, discussing their influence on modern East Asian culture. Through the course, students identify the cultural characteristics inherent in East Asian civilization and develop a critical understanding of its contemporary discourses. 

Student will be able to: 1. Understand the cultural concepts that underlie the individual, the family, and the state in East Asia 2. Learn the historical development of China, Japan, and Korea and their relationships with each other 3. Practice reading East Asian texts in their own literary tradition and relating them to cultural contexts 

This course explores the main algorithmic design paradigms and teaches students to apply algorithmic techniques to practical and unseen problems. Students quantitatively analyze the performance of algorithms. They also model the mathematical structure of computational tasks and apply the right algorithmic tools on them, and develop their algorithmic thinking and problem solving skills.

This course considers how artists, filmmakers, and photographers have reacted against and dealt with the presence of the audience, focusing on post 1960s art, photography, and art film up to our present days. Video and performances of Bruce Nauman, happenings of Allan Kaprow, participatory art of Marina Abramovic, video work by Rineke Dijkstra, photography of Thomas Struth, and relational aesthetics are examined. Theories and ideas that deal with the presence of (mass) audiences, reception aesthetics, and the educational turn are reviewed. The course consists out of lectures, excursions, guest lectures, student experiments on the reception of art and so on. This course includes excursions. This could possibly involve costs (travel expenses and museum admission). Art history students are advised to purchase a museum year card or an ICOM pass (https://icom.nl/nl/lidmaatschap/individueel-lidmaatschap). The latter pass allows you to visit museums at home and abroad free of charge. Other students should take into account that extra costs are possible. 

This course covers basic concepts in real estate finance, including basic concepts in mortgages, time value of money, income producing property taxes, and real estate investment and accounting issues. In addition, this course covers current issues in real estate finance, such as household debt or sub-prime crisis in the US. At the end of this lecture, the course briefly introduces how to manage micro-level data and calculate some statistical moments. Topics include Mortgage loan foundation: The time value of money, Fixed interest rate mortgage loan, Adjustable and floating rate mortgage loans, Mortgages: Additional concepts, analysis, and applications, Single-family housing: Pricing, Investment, and tax consideration, Underwriting and financing residential properties, Understand a toy mortgage default model (one-sided limited commitment model), Income-producing properties: Leases, rents, and the market for space, Investment analysis and taxation of income properties, Financial leverage and financing alternatives, and Risk analysis. 

Prerequisite: Macroeconomics, financial economics, econometric, and economic mathematics are recommended.