University of British Columbia

This course offers a comparative study of advanced programming language features. It explores methods of syntactic and semantic description of programming languages. Topics include: statement types; data types; variable binding; parameter passing mechanisms.

This course offers an introduction to Canadian cinema as a historical and thematic object in terms of how it is perceived in both the local and international imaginary. The course explores topics including the Canadian tradition of realist filmmaking and its historical development, as well as alternative filmmaking modes that have emerged thanks to changing notions of national identity and art. This is a research-intensive course, which requires students to engage with cinema and national identity in ways that foster important research skills, including familiarity with scholarly journals, primary research, and participation in local film culture.

This course explores the history of Britain from the end of WWII to the present. Topics include: from warfare to welfare state; youth culture and consumer society; race, ethnicity, and the ends of empire; sexuality in the 1950s and 1960s; the women's liberation movement; the Thatcher years-- Neo-liberalism and the end of the "nanny state", dissent and resistance; Ireland 1968-1998; race and racism in the 1970s and 1980s; New Labour; Brexit.

This course examines the intertwined histories of the United States and Vietnam within the twentieth century global contexts of colonialism, anti-colonial resistance and revolution, and world war and global cold war. It places these developments within the domestic social and political contexts of Vietnam and the US and explores how revolution, warfare, and their aftermath shaped politics, culture, and historical memory in both countries. Topics include: Vietnamese politics and society under French colonialism; the political and diplomatic dimensions of the French and American wars in Vietnam; the war on the ground from both American and Vietnamese perspectives; the long-term legacies of the American war for both the US and Vietnam.

This course explores the evolution, practice, and future of urban planning and development with emphasis on institutional arrangements, housing, transportation, urban design, and development control.

This course examines the cultures of control that target the commerce and consumption of illegal drugs. Students consider the evolution of these policies and explore their impact in a variety of historical moments and social worlds. The course reviews how the criminalization of drugs has created an alternative market around which distinctive lifestyles and cultural practices have emerged with several specific case studies focused on the Americas. Those lifestyles and practices are commonly called narco-culture and have in recent years been the source of inspiration for a varied aesthetic genre in music, literature, and popular television (among them narco corridos, narco novelas, narand~ co graffiti). While surveying and interpreting a selection of these aesthetic productions, this course discusses the social history of a variety of substances constructed as drugs including cocaine, Ayahuasca, valium, and fentanyl. To illustrate the wide-ranging impacts of criminalization, the course tracks the historical transformation of these commodities from legal to illegal and sometimes back again.

This course offers a study of computer graphics. Topics include: human vision and color; geometric transformations; algorithms for 2-D and 3-D graphics; hardware and system architectures; shading and alighting; animation.