Utrecht University

This course provides a survey of the conflict between literary creativity and control by society, in a wide historical, European context. A series of case studies on controversial texts and authors are discussed in connection with the regulations imposed to suppress or regulate the distribution of these works. Official secular and religious censorship, the development of copyright, and protests against “inflammatory”, “blasphemic”, or “amoral” texts are studied through authors like Erasmus, Montaigne, Vondel, Spinoza, Stuart Mill, Nabokov, and Rushdie who used literary strategies to avoid censorship and repression, such as the use of metaphor, humor, satire, or hiding their name.

This course is intended for students who have not taken any other courses in academic writing as this course provides the basic knowledge and skills required to produce written academic work in your field of study. Students learn to use the most important grammatical structures of English appropriately and expand their vocabulary and register required in formal academic writing in your subject. Some attention is paid to the mechanics of academic writing in English (structure, punctuation, referencing).

This course examines the http protocol and its add ons. It covers relevant technologies and programming languages such as (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript and framework; the development of the world wide web from a historical context; and technical aspects of the world wide web.

This course offers an overview of different theories related to economics and justice to analyze issues such as the trade-off between equity and efficiency. The course discusses questions including: How do these theories operationalize equity? How do they deal with the trade-off between equity and efficiency? And how can they be incorporated in economic models? The course focuses in particular on Dworkin’s theory of equality of resources and Roemer’s theory of equality of opportunity. Dworkin’s theory makes use of devices such as auctions and hypothetical insurance markets that economists are very familiar with. Roemer has shown that his theory can be formulated in terms that can be tested empirically in different domains (e.g. income, education, health care). The course consists of lectures and working groups.