Utrecht University

People communicate, for the most part, through language. Language (speaking, listening, reading, and writing) is so ordinary and commonplace that one often forgets that it is actually a highly complex and miraculous capacity, with its own specific laws and peculiarities. Understanding the properties of the language system is very important for understanding and clarifying the process of communication. This course covers the following topics: how psychologists and linguists view the structure and functioning of the human mind and the place of language competence in it; how a language is acquired and the difference between language acquisition by children and acquisition by adults; the processes that take place in our heads when we perceive and interpret the written or spoken language; impairments in the ability to use language and how are they related to defects (congenital or acquired) in the brains; how and where language knowledge and language processing is represented in the brain, and how we can make its investigation measurable and visible; the genetic basis of language; and how participants in a conversation understand each other's intentions.

In this hands-on course, students work in interdisciplinary teams to uncover the rich history of Utrecht and share findings with the public. Combining historical, architectural, and societal data, students develop and design an innovative application for the city of Utrecht. In the process, students cooperate across disciplinary borders, take charge of their own learning process, and experimentally assess the added value of new media and ICT. The course accumulates in presentations and interactive demos of the teams’ final prototypes.

This course introduces the digital tools and methods used for research in the Humanities.  The theoretical part of the course focuses on basic concepts that are essential for working with large quantities of humanities data, including corpora and databases, searching techniques, information retrieval, and statistical language models. In the practical part of the course, students learn how to do basic text analysis using the programming language Python.
 

This course examines the major developments in the field of Postcolonial Theory. The course starts with Said's observation that colonialism affected both the colonizing countries as well as the colonized peoples. As such, Postcolonial Theory provides a variety of methodological tools for analyzing literature and culture that are of special relevance in the age of globalization. Students focus on the development of a postcolonial consciousness, the implication of literature and other cultural forms in the colonizing process, and as forms of resistance. Students become familiar with all major issues in the field of Postcolonial Studies and acquire a number of theoretical perspectives that apply to the interpretation of literature and other forms of culture.