History

This course examines the history of the American continent from the arrival of Europeans to today.

The course gives a broad overview of the archaeology, history, and art history of the material culture and of the written sources from the eighth to the twelfth centuries. The course covers different aspects of the political, social, cultural, and religious developments, as well as changes within Scandinavia. This includes such aspects as the transition from paganism to Christianity, Viking Age burials, gender and social segregation, trade and plundering, rural and urban landscapes, and economic development.

This course introduces the history of concepts of gender and sexuality, and covers topics such as heterosexuality, homosexuality, sex education, women’s emancipation, masculinity, prostitution, pornography, sexual nationalism, and transgenderism. It uses a diverse range of teaching methods including group work, movie screenings, and lectures. The course focuses on Denmark, but also studies how Denmark relates and compares to the rest of the world. The course does not require previous knowledge of theories of gender and sexuality and provides the opportunity to share knowledge of students' respective home countries in an academic setting.

This class introduces students to the system by which powerful countries in the world have related to each other over the past 400 years. This course provides an understanding of how major world powers have managed their relationships and competing interests while crafting a stable system that allows them to pursue their own goals.  Aspects of cooperation and competition as they manifest in military, economic, and cultural means are investigated to see how these fields have shaped the global order and how economics, technology, and culture have influenced the interaction.

Islam has become the subject of public debates and discourses in the Western World as well as a core research topic within various disciplines in the social sciences. This course takes a closer look at Muslims and Islam in Europe and tries to analyze and discuss the present condition of Muslims living in Europe from a socio-anthropological perspective. In order to do so, Islam is first introduced from a general perspective; students also visit a representative mosque in Berlin. The first sessions of the course provide an overview of theories of cultural difference and secularism. Having this theoretical lens in mind, the following sessions look at various public discourses regarding Islam and Muslims in Europe. Here issues such as Muslim-state relations, gender, policies, and religious practices of Muslims in Europe are examined and accompanied by a critical analysis of certain public controversies concerning Islam.

This course takes a closer look at some of the historical developments that have shaped North American literature and culture, and have been shaped by them in turn. The course also addresses the question of how an understanding of history is informed by one's standpoint as well as social hierarchies more generally. Some of the topics the course discusses include the ongoing significance of settler colonialism; slavery and its afterlives; the American Revolution; the constitution of the United States; abolitionism; feminism; U.S. imperialism; the Civil Rights Movement, Indigenous rights movements; the Black Lives Matter movement; and the historical roots of the Trump presidency. The course foregrounds an understanding of ongoing historiographical debates and methods of interpreting primary sources.

This course introduces the history of medicine in Western society from the Ancient Greeks to the present. It examines some of the different ways that doctors have thought about health and illness over the past two and a half thousand years and raises questions about the historical origins of modern scientific medicine. The course introduces the changing role of experts in society, historical shifts in concepts of the body and of disease, and the changing understanding and impact of epidemics from antiquity to the present day.

The brutal struggle between free will of humanity and historical force has long been a controversial and intriguing subject in the discussions of literature. The point lies not in which side wins eventually, but in exploring what happens in the process of struggle. Viewed from the perspective of literary development, it is quite clear that each different literary movement in postwar Taiwan provides its own unique understanding of the relationship between man and history, between social agency and historical transformation, and ultimately between history and fiction. This course is divided into four parts each dealing with specific historical issues or events. The first deals with how historical figures, such as Song Qingling and Chen Yi, are treaed in fiction. The second part looks at history and politics. The third part discusses how past experiences have been represented from different ideological points of view by different writers. Finally, the course takes a close look at how writers explain the failure (or success) of certain social movements after they have long perished. In short, all the four parts try to explore the complicated interactions among history, human experience, and literary mind.