Utrecht University – University College Utrecht

This course has as its subject Paul Kennedy’s stimulating thesis on the rise and fall of the great powers and the extensive criticism which arose. The focus is on the history of the great powers, their strengths and weaknesses, since 1500: the Habsburg Empire, the France of Louis XIV and of Napoleon, the British Empire, the German bid for mastery in the 20th century, the fate of Japan, the rise and demise of the Soviet Union, and the fall and subsequent rise of China in the 19th and 20th centuries. Special attention is paid to the United States, which played a crucial role in the history of the 20th century and was after 1991 the only remaining superpower. Since the publication of Kennedy’s study the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the rise of China and the seeming decline of the United States have given the debate a sense of immediacy. In addition, the conflicts among the great powers, such as the Napoleonic wars, the world wars, and the Cold War, have fundamentally changed the course of history. The rivalry among great powers often also functioned as a powerful dynamo that spurred development and modernization.

The first half of this course covers literary prose fiction and the second half covers non-fiction, drama, and poetry. Neither fiction aimed at children/young adults nor genre fiction feature in this course. This course stresses process writing, rewriting and editing as essential to the craft. Students read aloud their prose, poetry, and drama in writers' workshops. This course is predicated on acts of practice-led research. Therefore students are required to write critical introductions, citing relevant theory, to accompany all assignments including the portfolio.

Students learn elementary yet important mathematical concepts and techniques that have a wide range of applications in natural and social sciences. The focus is on calculus skills required for further study in life sciences, earth sciences, and economics, amongst others. Topics include basic and discrete mathematics, matrices, graphs and derivatives, functions of multiple variables, and optimization and basic integration, with applications to probability distributions.
 

Innovative drug research has a drug discovery and a drug development phase. In the drug discovery phase, medicinal chemists make molecules and pharmacologists test these molecules. This course challenges students to think of a medical need, to find a target, to come up with a lead, and optimize this lead towards a drug candidate. While performing this structure-based drug design project, students learn about medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, organic chemistry, biochemistry, and some computational chemistry. Concepts of organic chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology, and medicinal chemistry that form the foundation of structure-based drug design are taught in a just-in-time fashion.

Course goals

After completing this course students are able to:

• identify the major protagonists and a number of key works
• distinguish some of the practical problems artists had to confront
• approach, describe and assess a work of art in its appropriate historical context
• judge material conditions and essential aesthetic qualities of paintings
• identify main trends in art historical research
• conduct a small-scale research using secondary sources
• gain an initial understanding of the institutional context of collections

If art, as Gombrich suggests, be taken to mean such activities as building temples and houses, making pictures and sculptures, or weaving patterns, then we come to realize that there is no people in the entire world without art. Nor has there been a period in history which did not yield fascinating creations of artistic virtuosity and imagination. Human expression in a visual form can be traced back to its strange beginnings in caves and on rock faces, and it is safe to say that it has not lost a bit of its appeal since. Starting from the oldest images that have come down to us decorating the ceilings of Altamira and Lascaux, from then on to delve into the documented history of art covering the period from the ancient world till the 1960s, this course will introduce the students to the fascinating world of visual arts and its most important monuments in the domains of architecture, sculpture and painting, as rendered in Gombrich’s Story of Art.