Utrecht University

In the period from roughly the late fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, developments took place that would form the basis of the world as we know it today. States took on recognizable forms, merchants looked for new markets within and outside Europe, and the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment resulted in new insights and world views. The Atlantic Revolutions and the Industrial Revolutions from the end of the 18th century would permanently change the world politically and economically. The (Early)modern History course focuses on three, often closely related, thematic areas: political, socio-economic, and cultural and religious developments. The course answers the following questions: how did the French Revolution change the political landscape of Europe? What was the role of Europeans in globalization? How did the Reformation and state formation become entwined?

This course extends the discussion of molecules and cells presented earlier to the biology of a wide range of organisms and to the processes and mechanisms that affect their functions and activities. The course covers evolution, starting with key evolutionary concepts and the "Tree of Life".  In lectures and work groups, the differences and similarities between organisms and their genes and proteins and how these can be studied from an evolutionary perspective are covered.  The importance and diversity of microorganisms and the biological processes in which they function, e.g., nutrient cycling is explored. This section includes a hands-on microbiology laboratory session. The course then focuses on the higher eukaryotes, especially plants and animals. Here, the multicellularity, growth, development, and physiology of these organisms is discussed. In individual assignments, students explore the parallels and differences among important biological processes, such as development, chemical signals that direct growth and physiology, reproduction, immunity, electrical signaling, and neural regulation. Throughout the course, students work on a group project describing research on a biological process in a selected model organism, culminating in a plenary poster session during the course's final week.

This course offers an introduction to cultural criticism by looking at how critical thinkers have made connections between culture and society and analyzing a selection of novels and other texts in which key concepts of criticism are explored imaginatively. Through theoretical reflections, the course answers the question: what is the relationship between literature and other forms of art and the culture and society from which they originate? Each week of the course is organized around a key idea or concept in cultural criticism. Assumed previous knowledge includes an elementary knowledge of literature, literary history, and literary theory.

This course offers a comprehensive overview of Europe in the world since 1848. Important topics that are covered are state formation and citizenship, colonialism and the resistance against it in the second half of the 19th century, and the rise of large ideologies (democracy, fascism) around the two world wars. This course discusses how this period was characterized by both war and genocide and important initiatives in the field of international cooperation, in Europe and beyond. Students learn to understand the global Cold War and how it is intertwined with the decolonization process. They study the rise of neoliberalism, the consumer society, and the welfare state in the second half of the 20th century. The more recent period covers globalization, terror, and climate change. This course deals with many topical issues and helps students to think about current events in their historical context.

On a global scale, wealth, health, and life opportunities are unfairly distributed. Several philosophers have emphasized that this unfairness gives the affluent a moral duty to help the worst-off, others have tried to formulate basic principles for a fair society. Whereas political philosophers of the past mainly focused on these issues through the lens of the nation state, contemporary thinkers argue that globalization processes force us to approach themes like sustainability, justice and equality on an international level, for example by constructing international institutions or by rethinking ideas about national sovereignty. This course discusses a wide range of analyses of these issues by visiting core political theories of past and present and coupling these with debates on specific (applied) questions. The focus is on values as diverse as liberty, equality, (international) justice, sovereignty, sustainability and more, and critically discuss issues arising from phenomena like migration, climate change and poverty.

This course provides an overview of key approaches in film studies, exploring film as an art form, an economic product, a social practice, and an object of theoretical reflection. Through lectures and mandatory film screenings, students are introduced to central concepts for studying topics such as the film industry, film form, film genres, and stardom. In seminars, students analyze films and supplementary materials (e.g., film magazines, advertisements, reviews) while developing their film analysis skills individually and collaboratively.

This course teaches the complexities of socio-technical transitions, including the systemic nature of these long-term change processes, and their unfolding across geographical scales (local/regional, national, supra-national/global). Students develop a conceptual understanding of transitions in a multi-scalar context, as well as apply transitions frameworks to the empirical context of their domain of interest (i.e. energy, transport, food, or life sciences). Via guest lectures, students learn about the transition challenges different organizations (including government, industry, consultancy, NGOs and industry associations) are facing and how they make sense of their transitioning systems environment. The course is split into two parts: In the first part, students learn the basics theory and core concepts related socio-technical transitions. Several transition frameworks and concepts, like the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP), Strategic Niche Management (SNM), and transition pathways are taught and are applied to their own societal transitions study. Furthermore, students learn about public policy instruments and the underlying policy rationale for intervening in societal transitions. In the second part of the course, based on the general conceptualizations, students learn how to embed transition dynamics in a specific geographical context. Develop an understanding about the diversity of actor-specific resources, networks, and institutional conditions across space, and explore the regional aspects of a transition in relation to national and global system structures. Throughout the course, students apply the theoretical knowledge to their own empirical case study and develop transition- and region-specific policy interventions to help support their focal societal transition.

What puts former criminals on the right track? How can we prevent heart disease? Can Twitter predict election outcomes? What does a violent brain look like? How many social classes does 21st century society have? Are hospitals spending too much on health care, or too little? Data analysis is the art and science of tackling questions like these by looking at data. Just as cartographers make maps to see what a country looks like, data analysts explore the hidden structures of data by creating informative pictures and summarizing relationships among variables. And just as doctors diagnose sick patients and advise healthy ones on how to stay healthy, data analysts predict important events and variables so we can act on this knowledge. Methods from statistics, machine learning, and data mining play an important part in this process, as well as visualizations that allow the analyst and other humans to better understand what we can conclude from the available facts. During this course, students actively learn how to apply the main statistical methods in data analysis and how to use machine learning algorithms and visualizing techniques. The course goes beyond linear and logistic regression and thus continue where “Fundamental techniques in data science with R” ended. The course has a strongly practical, hands-on focus: rather than focusing on the mathematics and background of the discussed techniques, student gain hands on experience in using them on real data during the course and interpreting the results. Entry requirements include at least followed an introductory statistics course of 7.5 EC, and familiarity with correlation and regression, comparing means and cross tabulations of categorical variables. It's also expected to have hands on experience in carrying out these analyses, with, for example, SPSS, Stata, R or SAS.

This is a survey of a century of Anglophone literature from the mid 19th to the mid-20th century. Since this period covers a challenging range of texts and authors from various backgrounds and nationalities, a central focus is on writers who, until a few decades ago, were hardly considered to be part of the canon: female or queer-identifying authors, writers of color, outsiders, exiles. In the case of the well-established authors, the focus is on texts that frame the impact of industrialization and mechanization; that represent landscapes of war, imagined or real; that explore technologies of time, that problematize gender and sexuality; and on less explored themes, such as the occult and the surreal. The course considers the distinctive characteristics of a range of literary genres; identify the historical and cultural movements specific to each period; and read the themes and formal elements of poetry, prose and essays against the social and political backgrounds that compose the ‘Brave New Worlds’ of the era.

The course is divided in two parts. The first part of the course starts with a historical introduction to the building of the cosmological model. It is followed by the introduction of key concepts in Einstein’s theory of relativity, which then allows for the introduction of the Friedman-Lemaitre- Robertson-Walker cosmological model for an expanding universe. Several observational probes of cosmology are introduced, such as the cosmic microwave background, supernovae and the large-scale structure. From these, the presence and nature of dark energy and dark matter are examined. The course concludes the first part with a description of the earliest moments of the Universe and the building of a complete timeline for its history. The second part of the course focuses on extragalactic astrophysics. The goal is to overcome the assumption of galaxies as single points and understand the origin of their diversity. This diversity presents some structure, which is quantified in so-called “scaling relations” for different galaxy types. How they connect to the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies are discussed. Finally, the course looks into the stellar population composition of galaxies and some of the key evolutionary processes and understand how they lead to observed colors and estimates of galactic distances. Assumed previous knowledge includes NS-106B, NS-108B, NS-112B, NS-120B, NS-121B, NS-220B, and Python or other programming language knowledge (e.g. NS-109B). NS- 251B and NS-268B are recommended.