Norway

This course examines aspects of the cultural history of magic with a focus on the period of the witch-hunts in early modern Europe. The course explores how conceptions of magic, witchcraft, and trolldom changed over time; how they were put to use in philosophical reflections, demonological manuals, legislative texts, and oral traditions; and how these ideas became social realities. From the 1500s, combating witchcraft with legislation and judicial prosecution became an important concern for authorities all over Europe. Witchcraft trials consequently became a nexus between law, theology, and the culture of the common people. In this course, students address the cultural and social basis of this development, and review a selection of Norwegian witchcraft trials. The course also introduces later redefinitions of magic expressed in modern occultism and Neopaganism.

This course is an intermediate to advanced level molecular biology course, which focuses on structure and maintenance of genomes, as well as gene expression. The course discusses topics including major methods used in molecular biology; principles of genome organization and dynamics; how genetic information is stored and expressed; and the main mechanisms of gene regulation. The course requires students to have met specific prerequisites in order to enroll in the course.

The course offers an introduction to programming-based problem solving for social scientists. The course introduces a number of problems and solutions in social science data processing with applications in R. The course begins with a number of general programming topics, followed by efficient processing of different data structures and how data can be combined using SQL and Tidyverse. Secondly, the course looks at special challenges related to space and time. The spatial dimension introduces GIS techniques. Towards the end, the course sees how machine text analysis can be used to automate data collection and to look at how we can effectively visualize different types of data. The course provides a good basis for independent work with social science information. The course requires students to have completed a course in research methods and statistics as a prerequisite.

This course covers central topics in the global economic history since 1500. The topics are chosen from the comparative history of the development of nations. The course emphasizes the dynamic process of historical change. The method is in part applied economics with a critical attitude towards timeless explanations of the wealth of nations. The list of questions includes: Why and how has the world become increasingly unequal? Why did some countries industrialize before others? What was the role of income distribution, endowments and political institutions for economic progress? What role did high wages play to induce change? Why was it Europeans who conquered the world? How was the Americas incorporated into the global economy? Why has Africa remained the poorest region in the world? This course addresses these and other similar questions using simple tools and by contrasting them to contemporary and modern economic theories for understanding the role of economic incentives, inequality, and institutions for economic and social development. This course requires students to have completed courses in microeconomics, macroeconomics, and mathematics as prerequisites.