Korea, South

This course is for students with swimming skills. Students also practice starting and turning methods in preparation for competitions. 

This reading-intensive course explores the meaning of the Age of Extremes by examining how violence, the state, and society interacted with one another to create a turbulent 20th century. This course addresses crucial questions by reading canonical texts on violence, civil disobedience, and decolonization, including writings by Thoreau, Arendt, Gandhi, Fanon, and King, among others. 

This course examines how South Korea has been enmeshed in transnational flows of peoples and cultures since the 1980s. It turns an ethnographic lens on global processes to analyze some of their meanings and implications for people's everyday lives and, in particular, explore Korea's specific experience of globalization. Topics include promises and pitfalls of in- and out-migration; national and transnational consumption; intersections of love and profit in marriage migration and in entertainment work; migrant labor; nationalism and transnationalism of Korean sports; politics of race, identity and multiculturalism in Korea itself and toward Koreans internationally; transnational adoption; and “Korean wave.” 

This course provides an examination of the modern theories upon which criminal punishments are based, and how such purposes are met in the criminal justice system. It also examines the major forms and structures of punishment and why we punish individuals, how we do so, and how the punishment process can be viewed in a wider social context. The first part of this course considers the justifications for punishment. The second part briefly reviews the historical development of punishment philosophies and techniques, including the emergence of the modern prison, the joining of medical and legal treatment, and rationales for alternative forms of punishment. The third part examines the work of major writers who have provided a theoretical critique of punishment and the role it plays.

This course offers a comparative study and close reading of the major heroic epics of ancient Greece and Rome: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (Greece), and Virgil’s Aeneid (Rome). Topics include the warrior ethic, the distinction between kleos (glory) and time (honor), heroic friendship, of nostos (homecoming), fate and the gods, oral vs. written poetry, the social function of epic, myth and epic, and the changing nature of heroism. It also explores more closely the themes of retribution and justice, as they are very starkly presented in Aeschylus's Agamemnon, and of human and divine concepts of justice in Sophocles's Antigone.

This course provides an introduction to key concepts in global environmental policy and politics and their relation to globalization. It addresses the theoretical concepts surrounding environmental problems and globalization and examines their application to pertinent environmental issues, such as air pollution, natural resource depletion, and climate change.

This course provides some insight into most of the major themes and issues on China and the Korean Peninsula. Topics include Nationalism and Political Cultures in China, The Korean War, China-DPRK Relations, ROK-China Relations: From Normalization to 2020, Korea between Ally and Partner: Trump, Xi, and Moon, US-China Rivalry and Sino-Korean Relations, THAAD and a New Normal in Relations between Seoul and Beijing, Implications of and Responses to the "Rise of China", and The Future of “The Rise of China” and the Korean Peninsula.

This course provides a global perspective on the development of dress and fashion in Korea. It offers a look at Korean culture through the medium of Hanbok, one of the cultural symbols of Korea and an important medium and channel for understanding Korea. The course also covers how practices of dress/fashion embodied critical thoughts and ideas, such as the performance of identity in gender, race, and class. It acknowledges ‘dress/fashion’ as a powerful tool in shaping our future society with values such as individualism, inclusivity, diversity, and sustainability through industry and museum practices.
 

This course examines Korean development and capitalism from the political economy perspective, exploring how Korean capitalism emerged, what pathway it has taken, and how it will continue to evolve. This course covers various topics in the international and domestic political economy such as economic growth, culture and network, international investment and trade, democratization, globalization, the currency crisis in 1997 and the economic crash of 2008, institutional change and economic reform, restoring democracy in 2016-2017, global pandemic, social justice, and fairness. The main focus is on the roles and interests of governments, businesses, civil society, and foreign investors.

This course covers basic concepts of information theory, and discusses how these concepts are used in machine learning and data science. The first part of the course introduces various information-theoretic quantities including Entropy, Mutual Information, KL-divergence, and provides two main components of information theory: source coding and channel coding. The second part covers how information theory is used in machine learning and data science. Topics include various applications including recommendation systems, supervised learning, generative models, neural network compression, and distributed machine learning.