Denmark

This course is a study of the foreign policy of post-Soviet Russia and its neighbors, and it provides an overview of international relations in this region. It argues that in order to better understand the behavior of post-Soviet states in the international arena, students must examine not only political, but also cultural, historical, and religious phenomena. This course focuses on factors shaping the collective identities of international actors, including the role of Orthodox Christianity, dominant ideologies, geography and perception of space, literature, arts, and creative imagination.

This course covers the following: sequences of random variables, almost sure convergence, Kolmogorov's 0-1 law; the strong law of large numbers; weak convergence of probability measures; characteristic functions; the central limit theorem; triangular arrays and Lindebergs condition; the multivariate central limit theorem; the ergodic theorem.

Using theories and analytical tools from microeconomics and macroeconomics, this course introduces the basic economic concepts relevant for analyzing problems and policies relating to the environment, natural resources, and climate change. Students learn concepts related to the central economic services provided by the environment, the basic theory of optimal management of natural resources, the distinction between weak and strong sustainability, the basic principles for valuation of environmental goods and services, the theory of the environment as a public good, and more. Students apply the standard mathematical method for static optimization subject to constraints to analyze environmental policy problems such as the determination of the optimal level of pollution abatement and the optimal environmental tax rates. This course also covers the application of optimal control theory to solve dynamic optimization problems subject to constraints such as the determination of the optimal extraction of natural resources and the optimal pace of reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Students explain and present central parts of economic theories and models of the environment, natural resources, and climate change, and apply the theoretical and empirical insights from the course in a critical analysis and discussion of important real-world problems of environmental and climate policy.

Behavioral Economics is the scientific study of decision making, and of the related topics of valuation, exchange, and interpersonal interactions. Drawing on methods from psychology, sociology, neurology, and economics, this course illuminates one of the most deeply fundamental activities of human existence: the decision process. Behavioral Economics couples scientific research on psychology with economic theory to better understand what motivates peoples' decision making. The course examines topics such as: how does emotion rather than cognition determine decisions, irrational patterns of how people think about things, how do expectations shape perceptions, group decision making, institutional cooperation, economic and psychological analyses of dishonesty, how trust and cooperation are formed and what the brighter and darker sides of them are, how do incomplete contracts affect employees' work motivation, how people really behave in their everyday life, what the physiology of joint action is, what are the biological, hormonal, and neuronal bases of prosocial behavior, how does pain and arousal affects our decision making, why do we do weird stuff, and how social incentives motivate labor. The course also explores intriguing questions regarding human behavior as: Why do people donate differently in similar cultures? When faced with the same medical condition, why do doctors choose objectively better treatment for their patients than they do for themselves? Why a third option when choosing a product does make a big difference, when actually nothing has changed? Why pain is sometimes good for you? This highly interdisciplinary course is relevant to students with interests in management, behavioral psychology, entrepreneurship, marketing, anthropology, sociology, and even biology. This course also surveys research which incorporates psychological evidence into economics. The seminar has two facets. First, it gives students a broad overview of important results from various behavioral sciences (e.g., behavioral decision research, social and cognitive psychology, consumer research) that clarify how people really make decisions. Second, it provides students with practical advice about applying these findings to their research interests and their life.

This course is primarily about contemporary British novels and the social concerns that they represent and raise in practice. In particular, the course considers the structure of British class society, and how the history of this structure has influenced, been represented in, and been resisted in fiction. Students think closely about the novel and the way it has emerged. Many of the twenty-first century novels covered in this course explicitly struggle to re-write the past, but in doing so they testify in interesting ways to its influence over the future, thus the course considers literature's role in the process of social change. In this light, students have an opportunity to look at some of the most influential British literary theory of the twentieth century (by Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Alan Sinfield) as a defense of literature's role, not just in representing, but in changing the world it describes.

The first part of the course looks at American literature in its international contexts, thinking about the ways that this writing has been defined against, and as part of, the world. Questions covered in the class include: What is the so-called transnational turn in American studies, and how has it changed the way we read American literature? How do the local and the global interact in literary texts? How do texts “move” in the world, either through transnational characters and settings, or the international dissemination and translation of texts? The course spans early nationalist movements in defining a canon of literature in the nineteenth century, the literatures of immigrant groups in the late nineteenth-century, expatriate writers in the early twentieth century, and contemporary transnational writing by authors with roots across cultures. Students also take local and global works into context, considering the reception of American texts in Europe, and Scandinavian-American literary exchanges. The second part of the course considers recent cultural texts that respond to and represent the U.S. South's relationship to contemporary globalization—and relatedly, the region's complex relationship to the nation. The course discusses texts—novels, non-fiction writing, documentary, film, and music—that have focused on the ways in which economic globalization and its demographic corollary, immigration, have challenged and transformed traditional understandings of U.S. southern identity (as a distinctive region within the United States; as characterized by a rooted “sense of place”; as structured around a rigid black-white racial dichotomy, etc.). By reading a range of primary texts produced by native southerners, non-southern Americans, and immigrants, the course maps the changing terrain of the U.S. South as it has been reshaped by an influx (and exodus) of global capital, and by the arrival of immigrants from around the world. Students consider, among other things, how globalization and immigration may or may not have transformed not only regional identity, but also whether it is plausible to situate (as some scholars have) the U.S. South as simultaneously part of the “Global South” and “Global North.” The course locates the selected primary texts in relation to and dialogue with recent critical and theoretical work in U.S. southern studies, especially the “New Southern Studies” (2001-present). Among this secondary reading are excerpts from WHERE THE NEW WORLD IS: LITERATURE ABOUT THE U.S. SOUTH AT GLOBAL SCALES (2018).

This course examines the meaning of globalization and its potential benefits and risks for Africa and Africans. The primary objectives of this course are to debate globalization and its implications for Africa, develop understanding of key concepts and theories related to globalization, and discuss specific cases from Africa related to globalization. Some key elements explored in this course are the role of African actors and institutions in linking or delinking from globalization, the relationship between globalization and natural resources with respect to cost/benefit sharing, and conflicts related to scarcity and abundance. Students also examine globalization as it relates to the role of state, migration both within and outside of Africa, and the impact of climate change. Students gain knowledge about perspectives on and implications of globalization in relation to a range of key actors, processes, relationships, and practices in Africa. Students choose a sub-topic to focus on and select relevant literature to independently and critically analyze the sub-topic in question and place it within the overall context of globalization.

This course enables students to critically evaluate the merits of the particular way welfare provisions and entitlements are organized in Scandinavia. The course assesses to which degree Scandinavian welfare states can still be characterized as women friendly and promoting equality within an environment of European Union and global challenges. Emphasis is on historical and contemporary developments.

The focus of this course is the uses of the French language, both in France and around the world. Also covered is the linguistic variation within French. The theoretical framework used is sociolinguistics (variational linguistics, linguistic attitudes, linguistic policies, etc.) and several concrete examples are used to illustrate the theory in practice. More specifically, the phenomena relevant to the use of the language in France is distinguished where French is the principal language but there is significant variation according to the speakers and the context where French is mixed with other regional languages and languages of immigrants. Also covered are instances where French is used in a formally multilingual setting, such as Belgium and Switzerland, and informally multilingual settings such as the Creole-speaking regions where French is merged with several indigenous languages, as in Reunion Island or Louisiana.