National University of Singapore

This course introduces the art of Thai painting and drawing through an analysis of both scholarly texts and hands‐on sessions. The course provides visual journey through all the major periods of Thai classical art. Emphasis is also be placed on regional and folk styles of painting as well as with new forms of traditional art. The course focuses primarily on the Rama 3 style of Thai painting as developed in nineteenth century Bangkok and which has become the most common form of Thai classical art seen in the country today. Students enrolled in the class will be taught not only how to appreciate traditional Thai painting but also how to draw, create compositions, and critique art works.

Geography increasingly relies on empirical data to understand social and environmental phenomena. This course builds a foundation for applied data analysis, emphasizing the fundamental data science tasks of wrangling, visualization, and analysis. Each of these tasks requires an understanding of quantitative approaches to generate and evaluate hypotheses. The course also covers essential concepts in statistics including expectation, hypothesis testing, and regression. By the end of the course, students will have a strong foundation to analyze multivariate data and communicate findings using open-source programming tools.

This course analyzes Singapore's outlook towards the world with particular reference to countries in the West and Asia. It examines the following key issues affecting Singapore's foreign policy problems of a small state, factors influencing the worldview, the key foreign policy principles and precepts, the operationalization of relations towards different countries; and the key differences in outlook towards the world in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. 

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is the process of identifying, predicting, evaluating and mitigating the biophysical, social, and other relevant effects of development proposals prior to major decisions being taken and commitments made. The objective of EIA is to ensure that decision-makers consider environmental impacts before deciding whether to proceed with new projects. This course introduces the concept of EIA, its historical evolution, and the terminologies that are used worldwide. Topics include the organizational aspects of EIA, the EIA framework and the procedural methods to conduct an EIA, with special emphasis on water and water related issues. 

This course offers students a chance to play and perform music from different cultures. The focus of the course will change from semester to semester allowing students a chance to participate in different traditional music each term.

This course explores different aspects and contexts of Chinese communication. The various contexts of Chinese communication include advertising, business, the press, social communication, regional usages, pop culture, translations, meaning of Chinese names, codeswitching and the use of Chinese dialects. 

This course provides an appreciation of the use of drugs in relation to the cultural and social environment of societies past and present. How drugs are employed today, watershed "drug" discoveries and their impact on society (for example contraceptives, antibiotics, vaccines, psychopharmacological agents), the issue of drug use in sports, "social" drugs and the "pill for every ill" syndrome will be discussed. Particular attention is paid to “controversial” drug-related societal issues within each topic. For example, the role of pharmaceutical industry will be examined to determine if the tendency to “bash” big Pharma is justified or if decriminalization of drug use will be a more effective means of curtailing drug abuse.

Few things are more dramatic than the collapse of a political system, whether through violent conflict or peaceful negotiations. Explaining why regimes break down and why new ones emerge are among the most important questions in political science. This course looks at the conditions under which regimes unravel, focusing on the breakdown of democratic institutions, the rise of populism, and conversely, transitions away from various types of authoritarian regime, using case studies from Southeast Asia. 

Due to advances in imaging, genetics, and sequencing over the past 30 years, there has been an explosion in the amount of quantitative biological data. This course introduces mathematical and physical concepts and methods necessary for understanding and analyzing quantitative biological data. It uses systems from across biology, from photosynthesis to human sleep cycles, to demonstrate the power and applicability of these approaches.

This course introduces the making of modern Southeast Asia from the late colonial era through the Cold War through fiction and film. Fiction and films provide a means to access political history in an engaging way and for what they reveal about how outsiders as well as Southeast Asians themselves came to view the region. The course covers Southeast Asia integration into the global capitalist economy, national awakenings, colonial anxieties in the 1930s, World War II and the Japanese occupation, the Cold War and neocolonialism, the Vietnam War, and the promise of modernity.