Course Catalogue

What makes life worth living? Which people are the happiest? Can money buy happiness and wellbeing? How can we maximize our wellbeing? This innovative course is designed to answer these questions and more by examining the fundamentals of happiness and wellbeing. You will also have an opportunity to develop a range of evidence-based practical skills […]

This course cross-lists with Vietnam Studies. It will allow students to replace Vietnam in the context of Southeast Asia, explore its relationship with its neighbors and new perspectives of its modern historical development. It will help Vietnam Studies students understand regional differences in culture, cultural values, social attitudes, and approaches to history and politics.This course […]

The title of the course suggests two important themes that will orient our discussions and readings: First, how does literature reflect and represent the super/natural world? Second, how do those representations differ across cultures and geographies? What does that tell us about human relationships to the world around us, as well as how heterogenous those […]

This course will brief the key processes of hydrology and meteorology, two intertwined Earth-science disciplines that focus on the terrestrial water cycle. The students will first be introduced to the fundamental sciences governing the climate and hydrological systems, represented by a wide range of variables such as precipitation, wind, air pressure, evaporation, (sub)surface water, and […]

With its expanding economy and ever-deeper international integration China is playing an increasingly significant role in the world affairs. Under such circumstances it is nearly impossible to foresee further international developments without understanding how China approaches the world and what shapes its behavior. How can we make sense of how China makes its foreign policy […]

This video and film production course will introduce students to the basic elements of recording and combining image and sound using various kinds of digital equipment. We will also explore important technical and theoretical concepts associated with the moving image, such as editing, dialectic, representation, and protest. We will cover basic narrative structure and script […]

This course covers East Asian History from 1600 to the present with a focus is on the tumultuous 19th and 20th centuries, when China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam underwent rapid social and political transformations in response to unprecedented internal and external pressures. Our goal is to develop a deep understanding of key historical ˜moments, such […]

How do we describe the trajectory of a space shuttle? How is the human body affected by scuba diving to different depths for different lengths of time? The mathematics required to describe most real life systems involves functions of more than one variable. The concepts of the derivative and integral from a first course in […]

This course is designed to help students learn to make systematic observations, derive scientific questions, form hypotheses, carry out research, analyze data, interpret results, and report findings. This course draws from foundational research skills first introduced in Quantitative Reasoning and Scientific Inquiry, and aims to further develop student competence in various research approaches (e.g., basic, […]

The Independent Research Seminar is an optional summer follow-up course to the spring course Fulbright History Lab. It gives students the opportunity to carry out the history research projects they designed in the spring. The Independent Research Seminar provides a well-structured, but self-implemented research experience for first- and second- year students interested in pursuing History […]

Is climate change real? If so, to what extent? What are the factors causing it? And what are we willing to give up to stop it? This introductory course offers students a first touch in economics as an economist, not a student. Rather than consider hypothetical situations related to climate change, we will actually compute […]

From the Second World War to Vietnams withdrawal from Cambodia in 1989, a series of multifaceted and interconnected conflicts gripped the Indochina peninsula. During this timespan, the wars in Vietnam evolved from anti-colonial struggle to superpower confrontation and were central to the decades-long global encounter known as the Cold War. As the struggle for Vietnam […]