English

This course explores premodern Japanese art and performance, while examining them both in historical context and the common aesthetic principles they have.

The course provides a critical understanding of the medium of film. It covers basic cinematic and literary terms and perspectives for film analysis and analyzes and discusses a variety of English-language films from diverse perspectives.

This course examines the tremendous impact of social media on many walks of life, with a special emphasis on how social media have been transforming the profession of journalist and how the public now consumes news and information. It also offers a look beyond the field of journalism to consider how social media and online communities are profoundly affecting the ways in which young people form their identities and then how those identities develop later in life. Special sessions tackle the influence of social media on the construction of identity, and on the relationship and community building. Many of these issues are discussed in the context of Central and Eastern Europe and the Western experience of social media is compared to the situation in the post-communist world. The course addresses many questions related to social media, including the definition of social media; the role of social media in the formation of community; the role of social media as a uniting or dividing factor; the differences in the consumption of social media in Central and Eastern Europe; the role of social media technologies in constructions of youth, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality; the effect of social media improving on the state of journalism; changes in the role of the journalist with the advance of social media; and others.

This course discusses North American comic books as an ever-transforming form of popular culture from the mid-19th century to the early 21st century. The approach is mostly chronological, from the “invention” of comics in Europe in the 19th century to the rise of graphic novels in the United States since the turn of the 21st century. It also includes examples of the way comics have served as an inspiration for other media – most notably in the contemporary wave of superhero films – and have conversely adapted or imported content origination in other media, from silent movie stars to literary classics. Beyond specific examples, the course offers theoretical approaches to intermediality, with a special focus on adaptation, and address such key notions as genre and cultural hierarchies. The course explains the interactions between technology, market forces, aesthetic choices, intermedial circulation, and social uses in specific comics. It conducts a range of readings including select examples of comics and theoretical texts before each class.

This course provides an introduction to contemporary approaches to the study of the varieties of the English language observed across nations, regions, social groups, and contexts. The two major goals of the course are to illustrate the concepts of sociolinguistics that are essential to studying the expansion and resulting diversity of English and to examine the social, cultural, and linguistic impact of English in countries where English is taught and used as a second or foreign language.

This course offers an introduction to corporate law and to the legal and non-legal governance mechanisms which encourage directors to act in their company's and not in their own interests. The course sets corporate law and governance within its economic and business context, with particular regard to how corporate law and governance mechanisms facilitate or inhibit economic activity. The course adopts an explicitly comparative approach drawing on both UK, US, and continental European law.