National University of Singapore

This course covers the historical evolution and characteristics of ancient Chinese fiction. It covers different genres of the fictional narrative tradition, zhiguai, zhiren, Tang chuanqi short tale, huaben colloquial short story and full-length xiaoshuo. Some knowledge of Chinese language is required.

This course looks at how colors, materials, and finishing (CMF) is applied in the design industry, in particular to consumer products. Students learn how to rationalize the best choice of colors and materials to engage the user. They will be able to objectify how the colors, materials and finishing that strongly link to the context of the design.

This course provides theory and hands-on experience for developing thematic maps. Thematic maps are effective means for delivering spatial information. Depending on the way thematic maps are created, they could have huge impact on the way physical or human environments are perceived and managed. The course focuses on human perception and visualization of map elements, data processing, symbolic encoding and decoding, and how these factors affect the design of thematic maps. Common types of thematic maps are introduced. The course also provides working knowledge of commercial software commonly used for creating maps (e.g., ESRI's ArcGIS).

This course provides both methodological and theoretical guidance for doing critical ethnography in Southeast Asia. The course systematically teaches the fundamentals of practicing ethnography in Southeast Asia and considers philosophical-theoretical, disciplinary and ethical issues underpinning each stage of the ethnographic process. Different forms of ethnographic texts on Southeast Asia (including films) are introduced to teach how to critically evaluate ethnographies. The course includes an ethnographic research project. There will be a compulsory field trip (Sep 22-26) to Pattani, Thailand, during the mid-semester break.

Sex, sexuality, and sexual orientations are cultural forms rather than purely "natural" states. This course examines the variety of social dimensions that shape human sexuality. A range of theoretical perspectives and cross-cultural comparisons are drawn in order to unravel the complexities of sexualities and to see how sexualities are shaped by historical norms, social scripts, political structures, global forces, and commodification. Students read historical materials and anthropological research and become familiar with political economy and social constructionist paradigms.

This course builds on the skills developed in intermediate Vietnamese. Students progress from reading selections from passages to a more sustained and systematic encounter with the nature of language used in novels, newspapers, the Internet, and other forms of popular publications, official public discourse, academic writings, and business Vietnamese. Students learn to comprehend texts from background and subject matter knowledge and from increasing control of language. They also learn to handle conversations involving complication, in the form of connected discourse, and to make choices of diction, as well as manipulate grammatical features reflecting formal and informal registers.

This course covers statistical analysis and modelling methods that are commonly used in the finance industry. Major topics include statistical properties of returns, regression analysis with applications to single and multi-factor pricing models, multivariate analysis with applications in Markowitz's portfolio management, modelling and estimation of volatilities, calculation of value-at-risk, nonparametric methods with applications to option pricing and interest rate markets.

This course provides a solid grounding in key themes relating to the study of Tamil culture and society. It emphasizes historical and social variation in the exploration of Tamil world(s). The course explores a variety of texts and visual media relating to articulations of ‘Tamilness' across time and space in order to arrive at a nuanced understanding of how Tamil culture and society are represented, shaped, and reproduced by scholarly articles, Tamil popular cinema, and literature. They can look forward to gaining critical perspectives on processes of identity formation, social hierarchies and institutions, politics, war, and everyday life, all of which will be taught with reference to Tamil contexts, but which equally lend themselves to better appreciating culture and the contestations that it engenders in the world as we know it today.

This course focuses on the emergence of that famous eighteenth-century form: the novel. The course provides a firm grasp on what Henry James called that “large loose baggy monster” by tracing its development from the early fiction of the late seventeenth century to the relatively refined novels of Jane Austen. We will also read the novel through a variety historical and theoretical lenses ranging from the rise of literacy and the middle class to the confinement and empowerment of women in a newly configured domestic sphere to the eighteenth-century appetite for news and facts. Finally, close attention is paid to the novel's experiments with form and its characteristic features in order to understand how the novel enabled a new concept of the modern individual.

This course is an overview of the biosynthesis and catabolism of carbohydrates, proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids in the context of human health and disease. Emphasis is on the integration and regulation of metabolic pathways in different tissues and organs. It covers principles of bioenergetics and mitochondrial energy metabolism, free radicals, mitochondrial DNA damage in aging, and neurodegenerative diseases.