University of Auckland

What makes a great city? This course explores urbanism in both historical and contemporary cities to determine the essence of urbanity and the way that citizens (and visitors) experience city life. The dynamics and character of cities are considered in terms of their built environment, environmental systems, population, social diversity, and planning policies and practices.

This course builds students' core knowledge of the Pacific, introducing key debates and interdisciplinary methods in Pacific Studies. The course covers critical concerns in the Pacific Islands' region, including those of its peoples, transnationalism and globalization, government and economy, health, wellbeing, and climate.

This course explores a variety of philosophical questions relating to the environment and our use of it, such as: Do we have obligations to future generations concerning preservation of the environment? What are our moral and epistemic responsibilities regarding climate change and other environmental issues? Does nature have intrinsic value? Is it better to live in a natural world or a virtual world?

"On or about December 1910", according to Virginia Woolf, "human character changed". Like Ezra Pound with his famous dictum "Make it new!", Woolf spoke for a generation of artists and writers who were subverting traditional forms, re-imagining genre boundaries and foregrounding the conditions of art-making and writing. Henceforth, a poem might find itself in a sculpture court, a cabaret or a little magazine. A ballet might turn into a riot. A flow of language acts could look like prose on a page or a typographical vortex whirling off into space. This course takes transformation as its theme and a selection of influential Modernist works from the first half of the twentieth century as its focus. We explore poetry and manifestos, novels and paintings that map out some of the possibilities for avant-garde art and literature, asking how art and culture responded to a period of dizzying change. Along the way we’ll investigate the role of cities in the development of modernist art, the effects of colonization and decolonization, changes in gender roles, the influence of new sciences like psychology and the results of technological development for culture.

This course provides an exploration of the diversity, physiology and functions of microorganisms (prokaryotes, eukaryotes, viruses) as individuals and as communities. The fundamental roles of microorganisms in ecosystems, health and disease are considered alongside methods for their isolation and study. Microbial applications in biotechnology, food production, agriculture and industry are also discussed. The course includes lab.

This course is on the rigorous treatment of functions (defined on subsets of the real numbers) and sequences. The course offers a broad introduction to the theory of Real Analysis in one variable. Topics: real numbers, sequences and series, limits, continuous functions, differentiation, the Riemann integral, sequences of functions and infinite series.

This course is an introduction to the study of European culture, with focus on various ideas of Europe and Europe’s global influence. The course explores linguistic and ethnic identities, religious and intellectual traditions, the scientific and industrial revolutions, urbanization and mass entertainment, and sociopolitical developments.

This course is intended for students who have enjoyed basic combinatorics and discrete mathematics. It expands on the concepts seen in those classes. Topics: introduction to graph colorings, planarity, etc.; theorems in the area: the Five-Color Theorem, Euler's Formula, Hall's Marriage Theorem. The syllabus also includes incidence structures such as designs, projective planes. To show applicability of combinatorics to real-life problems prefix codes and universal compression codes are considered with applications to computer science, and simple games which have applications to economics and political science. This course uses a Team Based Learning approach. At the beginning of the course, students are assigned to teams of approximately five students in each team. After a preliminary topic devoted to revision of the basics, the course is divided into five main topics. Each topic has the same structure: preliminary reading, available in advance, followed by a readiness assurance test (RAT). This is a multi-choice quiz based on the reading, and it has an individual and a team components. Near the end of each topic, there is a team task, where students are set a problem to solve as a group during class.

This course explores advances in environmental science, technology, and policy, using case studies of global environmental issues and proposed solutions. Students apply environmental science to assess how science is used to inform environmental intervention and policy and understand environmental responses.