National University of Singapore

This seminar explores China's place within the larger maritime world, beginning with the voyages of Ming dynasty eunuch Zheng He and culminating in the South China Sea dispute. The course focuses partly on states and societies that claimed China’s coastal regions and the oceanic spaces surrounding it, and partly on the networks, institutions, and economies linking China to a wider maritime sphere. Readings will be drawn from both primary sources and scholarship on topics such as the Zheng organization on Taiwan, steamships, overseas migration, fishing, smuggling, and reform and opening in the late 20th century.

This course explores the common ground between the discipline of history and art history by considering images as historical evidence, exploring both Western and Asian art from 5th century BC to the 20th century. Students acquire the conceptual tools to understand the meaning of images and read visual narratives as historical texts. Topics include art and democracy; art and empire; art and world religions; art and the modern world; art and absolutism; art and Imperialism; art and industrialization; art and dictatorship; and art and consumer society. 

This course examines the celebrated Chinese novel Journey to the West - the story about the dispossessed, marginalized, and demonized, Journey to the West exemplifies a sort of plurilingual, multicultural cosmopolitanism that is deeply resonate with the world today. Drawing on recent movements in literary studies—ecocriticism, gender and sexuality, food studies, animal-human interspecies interaction, the bureaucratic turn—students explore in the text English translation and study its global reception and why the novel continues to be popular.

This course introduces students to the world of poetry, which includes both composition: inspiration, methods, forms and reception: reviewing poetry, statements of poetics, writing for poetry outlets, and public readings. Students examine shifting conventions, evaluation, and how poets write about poetry. Coursework involves a combination of written assignments, peer workshops, and public readings.

This course introduces the modelling and analysis of time series data. A computer package is used to analyze real data sets. Topics include stationary time series, ARIMA models, estimation and forecasting with ARIMA models. The statistical software R is used to implement these methods on real-world data sets. The course requires students to take prerequisites.

Through a close reading and analysis of several representative Platonic dialogues, this course introduces the philosophy of Plato and Socrates and prepares students for Aristotle’s philosophy and Greek Thinkers. The course also include materials on earlier Philosophy forming the background to Socrates and Plato.

This course explores cultural, economic, political, intellectual and religious movements in continental Europe from an urban perspective. Students examine patterns and ideas which have shaped the European cultural and historical inheritance that remain relevant today. Course topics include the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Church, the Monarchies, and Europe in the 1700s. 

This course is a history of the personal and institution library, focusing on Renaissance Europe, a pivotal period of enormous cultural, religious, and technological changes. Students examine some masterworks—Petrarch, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Cervantes, Marlowe, and the visual arts. Additional topics include other sites of knowledge such as the cabinet of curiosities, museums, anatomy galleries and gardens and the questions of how knowledge is created and destroyed? How did people cope with information overload in the past? The course requires students to take prerequisites.

This course provides a conceptual-level introduction to the field of machine learning and its most important techniques. Students examine how machine learning (ML) is the dominant component of modern research in artificial intelligence and that although ML is largely associated with computer science and software engineering, many of its foundational techniques have historical roots in the natural and social sciences and are commonly used in those fields.

This fundamental course examines signals and systems. Topics include the relationship between signals and systems, time and frequency domain representations, Fourier and Laplace transforms, spectrum of a signal, frequency response of systems (Bode diagrams), sampling theorem, linear time invariant systems, convolution, transfer functions, stability of feedback systems, modulation and filters. The course requires students to take a prerequisite.