University of British Columbia

This course examines city and representation in Asia. Our period focus is the uneven context of modernization. The course will roughly cover developments beginning in the 1850s through the 1970s (and today). Topics discussed will include geography, landscape, and the inscription and uses of historical memory (The Past City); modernism and the rise of urban culture in the twentieth century (The Modernist City); urban forms in the age of imperialism (The Colonial City); and developmentalism and its critique in the post-war/post-independence periods (The City of the Future). it concludes with an exploration of diasporic formations, including in Vancouver—The Diasporic City.

This course examines the history of imperial and colonial archaeology in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and the ways in which archaeological extraction often went hand-in-hand with the European and North American imperial or colonial ventures. It covers the artefacts that arrived in museums as a result of these ventures and what that says about our current “encyclopedic” style of museum that purports to share knowledge of the world yet is also a testament to western intervention in Indigenous societies at home and in other parts of the world. 

This course examines physical principles involved in biological systems at the microscopic and molecular scales. It covers diffusion, low Reynolds number dynamics, the physicist's view of biomolecular structure, models of molecular motors and membranes.

This course examines the vast world of visualizing the city and ways of representing the built environment, including how to both interpret and use visualizations to read the city.

This course examines ancient and historic societies in the North American Arctic and Greenland, with emphasis on Pre-Dorset and Dorset (Paleo-Inuit), ancestral Inuit (Thule), and historic Inuit peoples. It covers the region’s culture history, how diverse societies emerged in challenging environments, and the analytical challenges specific to northern archaeological research. It also considers emerging research directions in Arctic studies, including advancements in community-based participatory research, archaeological engagement with Inuit ways of knowing, ancient DNA and isotope analyses, climate change research, and the management of at-risk sites.

This course examines power series methods for ordinary differential equations. Introduction to partial differential equations: boundary value problems for the heat, wave, and potential equations; separation of variables, Fourier series, and other orthogonal series.

This course examines the rapid transformation of cities by information technology and socio-economic innovation; growth in citizen-generated data and the internet of things; and emerging theory, methods, and frameworks for understanding Smart Cities.