University of Copenhagen

This course offers a unique opportunity to study some of the world’s oldest religions in a comparative perspective. It is an interdisciplinary initiative between the disciplines of the Study of Religions, Egyptology, and Assyriology. The course is theme-oriented and each unit has both a more theoretical part along with an empirical component that focuses on texts and objects from Egypt and Mesopotamia. Themes studied include deities and concepts of the divine, mythologies, temples and sacred space, ritual leaders and other religious agents, rituals and festivals, hymns and prayers, magic, healing rituals and divination, conceptions of death and afterlife. The course also introduces the main textual sources (such as the Gilgamesh Epic, the Babylonian Epic of Creation, the Myth of Isis and Osiris, and the Book of the Dead), excerpts of which are read in English translation. The course provides a general overview of the basic theoretical debates in the history of religions, as well as a basic overview of religious beliefs and practices in ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia (c. 3300 BCE – 300 CE). The empirical material in class come from the religions of the ancient Near East, but the analytical tools used are applicable on historical religions at large.

This course introduces theories, methods, and procedures that can be used to assess and manage the psychosocial work environment in work organizations. It covers theoretical and methodological approaches to the understanding of different types of job demands and job resources, and their differential impact on health, well-being, and organizational behavior. The course also discusses theoretical and practical approaches to occupational health assessment and intervention; and workplace bullying: concept, measurement, antecedents, and consequences, and intervention levels. Through group activities and case analyses, it introduces the challenges of translating theory into practice. The course is graded on a pass/no pass basis only.

This course studies topological spaces and continuous maps. Main topics include: topological spaces; subspace, order, product, metric and quotient topologies; continuous functions; connectedness and compactness; countability and separation axioms. Secondary topics include: retractions and fixed points; Tychonoff Theorem; compactifications; and vistas of algebraic topology. 

The focus of the course is on the relations between terrestrial ecosystems and global climate systems. Seen in a historical and present perspective as well as on a temporal and spatial scale, the interactions between climate and ecosystem are put in perspective of the ongoing and future climate change. Further, the course explains how models and data bases are used to develop future climate scenarios and reconstruction of previous climate conditions, as well as the anthropogenic role in the present changes in climate.

This course examines the primacy of aesthetics in comprehending and responding to environmental crises by considering the role of the arts in addressing environmental disasters;  whether the aesthetic appreciation of nature should be grounded in scientific understanding; and the aesthetic dimensions of climate change, wastelands, wetlands, and wilderness. Attending the connection between historical conditions and philosophical notions, the course explores the emergence of environmental aesthetics within the European philosophical tradition of the mid-eighteenth century, concurrent with the first industrial revolution and rise of capitalism. It reviews classical and contemporary texts (from Immanuel Kant and Alexander Baumgarten to Peter Sloterdijk, Sianne Ngai, and Yuriko Saito), and introduces key categories: the beautiful, sublime and picturesque; landscape, scenery, environment; atmosphere, climate; Nature, the Anthropocene–and its critical alternatives. Deploying these concepts, the course analyzes contemporary works of art and literature grounded in awareness of ecological conditions quite different from older traditions (e.g. of landscape painting and nature poetry), examining the work of artists such as Olafur Eliasson and his former students, and science fiction writers from Mary Shelley to Kim Stanley Robinson. Finally, this course derives an important lesson from the history of aesthetics and its engagement with the environs: the aesthetic pertains as much to the background as to foreground of attention; to ambient conditions of everyday life as to works of art and unique sites. Thus, the course moves in the direction of a revaluation of our modes of life, with particular attention to our homely environmental aesthetics: the banal, quotidian, routine, and habitual aspects of our lives, homes, and streets. This is the arena in which the impact of environmental crises–and efforts to remediate them–is felt most acutely: in our patterns of consumption of energy and materials, how we dress, do chores, feed ourselves, transport, and communicate. Through these intimate investigations, the course considers how contemporary ideas of the environment call for a rethinking of aesthetics, as well as aesthetic approaches to environmental remediation. 

This course covers how to design and implement tropical forest restoration programs that are adapted to local biophysical and social situations. It focuses on the initial restoration phase and discusses how to make wise choices of methods, species, and propagation techniques in relation to given restoration objectives and with participation of rural people in the implementation. Topics include biological aspects of tropical forest landscape restoration; seed supply, genetic aspects, and climate change; tree seed procurement and propagation; and implementation, monitoring, and management of tropical forest landscape restoration.

This course introduces advanced economic concepts relevant for analyzing problems and policies relating to the environment, natural resources, and climate change using theories and analytical tools from microeconomics and macroeconomics. Additionally, the course introduces optimal control theory, which is applied to various problems within environmental and resource economics.

This series of creative workshops explores environment, climate crisis, and more-than-human/human interdependence by composing multimodal texts in response to recent Copenhagen University and international research. A background in natural sciences is not required but the course necessitates a curiosity and willingness to experiment creatively with the environmental knowledge gained thanks to independent study, classroom exchanges, field trips, and guests (scientists, activists, and artists). These creative collaborations rethink such concepts as "nature," "sustainability," and "care" by reading, listening to, and watching a variety of academic, literary, and artistic texts. The course combine science, emotion, and creative expression not only to describe environmental loss, grief, and vulnerability but also to celebrate the Earth and diversity. It encourages appreciation of the complexity of ecological processes and interactions through an individual project that investigates an environmental subject and experiments with diverse forms of communicating it to varied audiences. The course produces research-based, hybrid, multimodal works-in-progress (which may develop beyond the course) which become forms of green thinking, slow art, activism and stewardship.

This course discusses the psychological foundations of human behavior and their economic implications. It presents the empirical regularities that have inspired the development of behavioral economics, analyzes the key theoretical models that have been brought forward, and discusses a number of applications where insights from behavioral economics have contributed to a better understanding of individual behavior and market outcomes. Topics include fairness and social preferences; reference-dependent preferences and loss aversion; present-biased preferences and limited self control; limited cognitive resources and attention; and behavioral economics, market interactions, and economic policy. Course prerequisites include a thorough knowledge of microeconomic theory (especially game theory and contract theory), microeconometrics, and econometrics.

This course considers some of the most important debates and trends in feminist theory over the last five decades. It considers the intersections of academic and popular, intellectual, and activist dimensions of feminist literary theory. In particular, it focuses on French Feminism and its influence in the United States, the rise of the Wages for Housework Movement in Italy, and in the relations of race and gender theory forged in the United States. The last weeks of the course explore some of the new debates in Queer and Trans theory and investigates how they build on the feminist history previously explored. In each case, the course foregrounds this specialty as ENGEROM scholars able to think in detail about how feminist ideas have travelled back and forth between Europe and the United States, both through literal and cultural translation. The course explores whether feminism is truly a transatlantic phenomenon; what happens to some of these key texts as they move from one language to another; the debates about individual differences and rights; and the impact of race, specific to US, French, Italian, and German contexts; and where the archives of feminism are held in these different national settings.