English

This course provides a deep understanding of how geoscience can be used to support the overall sustainability of our planet. Topics include earth observations and sustainability; geothermal energy and energy storage; natural and anthropogenic carbon cycles; fluxes and budgets; carbon, capture, utilization and storage; geoengineering, including enhancement of geological processes for climate mitigation; ensuring access to clean water; pollution assessment and remediation.

Food biochemistry is concerned with the principles of biochemistry which underlie the structure and behavior of substance and matter in food. This course provides an overview of Food biochemistry leaving out the complex microbial derivations which usually accompany the one-semester course. The course covers updated information on fundamental topics such as sugars, polysaccharide, lipids, proteins, colors, flavors, preservatives, enzymes, functional foods, and dietary supplements. Each of these areas is directly related to the current effort of commercializing food products and adding new value to them. The successful application of this knowledge is ultimately essential to the development and growth of major aspects of food science, including production, processing, preservation, distribution, safety, and engineering and technology.  

As a result of this course students obtain in-depth knowledge of the major macro-nutrients and micro-nutrients in food. Students also gain deeper insights into consumer perspectives and preferences regarding issues such as genetically modified foods, nano-materials in foods, functional foods and nutraceuticals, and food safety. Assessment: Midterm exam (30%), final exam (30%), presentation (20%), participation (20%). 

Please note: This course is non-calculus-based survey of food biochemistry designed for B.S. degree students with a major in Chemistry, Nutrition, Biology, Biochemistry, Microbiology, pre-professional studies, or students in general. A fair amount of chemical and biochemical background is required to understand food biochemistry. 

This course examines representative works of Japanese cinema. It explores the wonders of cinematic form and how it can communicate fundamental aspects about Japanese culture and society as well as the human condition. The course introduces the basics of film analysis, giving students critical-thinking skills that enable them both to see how Japanese cinema engages with world cinema and to understand how Japan—especially after the post-war—becomes a hub for myriad cultural flows. Each lesson begins by referring to various academic readings and showing movie clips, if necessary, to serve as the basis for in-class discussions.

This course explores how the historical rise of capitalism has been inextricably tied to the production of the very idea of "the economy," and how anthropologists have persistently challenged this separation, showing instead how economic life is entangled with religion, kinship, politics, and affect. Drawing on a broad range of ethnographic and theoretical work, students explore the radical possibilities of alternative social relations offered by communities historically constituted outside capitalist economies or incorporated on their own terms, such as the so-called "original affluent societies." The course critically examines the limits and potentials of contemporary global capitalism. How did the global economy emerge? What are its political, social, and cultural consequences? Why does it produce volatility, inequality, and, at times, accumulation and spectacular abundance? Is globalization unravelling in an era of "de-coupling" and populism, and what new futures might be imagined for capitalism? The course answers these questions through key themes including production, social reproduction, circulation, consumption, and the enduring significance of colonialism, empire, industrialization, neoliberalization, financialization, digital and platform economies

London in the 18th century was the first recognizably "modern" city, the metropolitan center of a global trading empire. For this reason, poets, artists, novelists, playwrights, travel writers, satirists, and essayists were drawn persistently to London as a fascinating and complex subject for literary representation. There were few established precedents for how cities might be imagined through text. Solving the problem of how to represent the diverse, enigmatic, ever-changing city of London is one of the core literary questions that we ask on this course. 

This course interrogates the significance of climate change for International Relations as a discipline and for international relations as a set of global political practices. The course explores the relationship between natural science and international relations, and what this means for making sense of the international politics of the environment. It examines the implications of climate change through several lenses including international theory, international institutions and governance, conflict, negotiations and communications, social movements and protest, inequality and justice, and discourses of crisis. The course seeks to facilitate student independence in exploring the international relations of climate change, as well as transferable writing skills, through the creation of a blog post on one of the security implications of climate change and developing an essay on any single climatic process and its implications for international relations. 

This course covers major issues and historical backgrounds of contemporary East Asian politics, with a particular focus on Northeast Asia.  

Students explore regional politics and the unique development paths and key issues shaping East Asia today. Upon completion of the course, students may be better prepared for careers in East Asia-related fields, including government, diplomacy, defense, the private sector, and academia.  

The course covers a range of topics, including the early 20th-century historical background, postwar decolonization, political transformation and democratization in East Asia, China’s assertive foreign policy and its challenges to the current regional order, the reemergence of nationalism and historical disputes, the US–China rivalry and its regional impact, and territorial disputes in East Asia. 

This course is structured in three parts. First, it introduces the key concepts, structures, and historical backgrounds that underpin contemporary East Asian dynamics. Second, it examines various issues and case studies related to the politics, defense, and diplomacy of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China, as well as their bilateral and multilateral relations. Third, it explores the future of East Asia in terms of regional power dynamics. Students are expected to develop a foundational yet comprehensive understanding of contemporary East Asian power dynamics, the policies of major countries (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China), and their historical contexts.  

Additionally, the course addresses the historical roots of current territorial and diplomatic disputes among major East Asian powers, political transformations in East Asian democracies, and China’s assertive challenge to the existing regional order. Through this course, students develop the ability to form their own perspectives on East Asian regional dynamics and political systems, as well as their implications for both East Asia and global politics. 

This course is an introduction to three main areas of linguistics: (1) language variation and change, (2) multilingualism, bilingualism and second language acquisition/learning, and (3) speech and language processing, from the perspectives of the human and machine. The first area explores how languages vary in different social and geographic contexts and how language can change over time. The second illustrates the difference between individual and social multilingualism and discusses patterns of language learning in monolinguals, bi/multilinguals, and heritage language learners. The third focuses on speech and language processing, by human and machine.

This course introduces some of what anthropologists do with complex social phenomena, what tools they bring, and the significance of their inquiries. The discipline has gone through several historical realignments concerning the relationship between culture, power, colonialism, and representations of difference. Thus, giving a single genealogy of “how we got here” is never going to be complete. Instead, this course is engineered to give a sense of what anthropological methods can do, why they remain relevant in a planetary world, and how the discipline that was once dubbed “the handmaiden of colonialism” can be taken up as a critical practice for confronting our troubled present. If there is one thing that draws many of us to the discipline, it is the conviction that the “big” questions that vex and enliven us take shape in the details of our daily actions, habits, and encounters. Ethnography can be seen as a way of giving an account of how these theaters of operation shape our lives and our world, and as a practice of “learning to learn from that which we cannot understand.”

This course covers historical and thematic aspects of the ‘media technologies and culture’, by raising some significant questions along with three modules: (1) media ontology; (2) media epistemology; and (3) media axiology.  

Module 1 : Media ontology (Lecture 1-3) The first three lectures on the existential forms of the media technologies in history will cover : the days of printing technology and mass media inaugurated by Johannes Gutenberg since the 15th century ; those of the second media age suggested by Mark Poster in the late 20th century ; the recent interpretations of World Wide Web and A4AI(Alliance for Affordable Internet) initiated by Tim Berners-Lee.  

Module 2 : Media epistemology (Lecture 4-6) The following lectures are about how the media technologies could be comprehended and interpreted in conjunction with the societal and cultural transformations : how the new media technologies enact the human digital networks ; enable the digital technology-based knowledge system to solidate the social rules and cultural norms ; and empower the diverse, digitally-networked institutions and groups of the society.  

Module 3: Media axiology (Lecture 7-12) The focus of the next six lectures is upon what should and could be done with the present and future media technologies for sustainable human society and culture.  Discussions on the traditions of dominant political philosophies in the age of media and social communication technologies, which are  liberalism and communitarianism, are followed by specific case studies on the  location of human agency besieged by social and institutional structure, geopolitics of transnational media and communication industries, intersectional convergence of news and data industries, and by the society’s post-truth and post-human transformations.