Syllabus

Noir fiction is one of the most popular forms of literary modernism. This online course examines five American hard-boiled novelists who published during the rise of the noir novel from 1930-1952: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Patricia Highsmith, and Jim Thompson. Why has this been such a consistently popular genre? How did the crime novel respond to issues of class, capitalism, race, gender, and sexuality? How do these novels instance complex interrelationships between narrative and film?

Course Description Often times political theory can seem abstract to our everyday lives. This course will work to bridge that abstraction as we will apply theory to the ways in which it can be seen in our lives, in our community, and in our society. We will look at these intersections and find the personal and political ramifications. Some of these insights can shift the ways in which we see contemporary society, especially during a time of great political turmoil and during a presidential election.

The readings and class discussions will introduce you to a selection of literary works from different cultures since 1650.  Many of the works will exemplify the concept of “World Literature” insofar as they represent encounters between people of different nations.  Through your readings, you will observe ways in which authors use literary and rhetorical techniques to construct images of themselves and others.

Political, social, intellectual, and cultural history of Europe from 1400-1789. Focuses on the Reformation.  It explores the cultural and social history of Europe contextualizing The Protestant Reformation and the Catholic response within the social and intellectual cultural developments of the period. There are no pre-requisites for History 330 and no prior knowledge of the Reformation is expected.

Course Description: A continuation of the Classical Mind, the Modern Mind is an introduction to modern philosophy focusing on texts from selected early modern and modern thinkers. The class builds upon the history, thought concepts, and themes developed in the Classical Mind and traces the development of Western philosophical thought from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. In particular, this course deals with philosophers that consider the nature of thinking and reasoning, the idea of metaphysics and the foundations of human knowledge, the idea of a universal moral law, the nature of political society and the concept of right, and the idea and value of historical thinking. This course utilizes canonical philosophic texts situated in the history of philosophy to establish the structure and methodology of philosophical thinking. As the second course of the introductory sequence of philosophy classes, this class culminates not only in the identification of philosophic issues, concepts, and questions, but also the practical examination and analysis of fundamental human questions as preparation for students' continuing engagement with their liberal arts education. — Prerequisite for PHIL 202: successful completion of PHIL 201.

Africa, the 'Dark Continent' of the Euro-American imagination, was long portrayed as a land without history. In this course we debunk the myths, exploring African civilization and culture in the centuries before European colonialism. We will examine how ecology and religion, slavery and the slave trades, and Africa's place in Atlantic and Indian Ocean networks shaped ancient Egypt, medieval Mali, the Swahili Coast, the Central African Rain Forest, and the world.

This course has two primary objectives. First, students will develop a broad understanding of the evolution of various African societies before colonial conquest in the nineteenth century. Second, students will learn how scholars use a variety of methods-archeology, linguistics, oral traditions, and documents-to reconstruct Africa's past. Students who engage thoroughly with course materials will come away with a basic understanding of Africa's deep history, as well as a set of analytic tools that will help them to think about historical change more broadly. This is a reading intensive introductory course. It will appeal to students with an interest in Africa, art history, religious studies, politics, archeology, historical methods, and anthropology.

It is often said that there are three teachings (三教) that have defined Chinese society through the ages. Yet at first glance, these teachings seem very different, almost irreconcilable. In this course, we will examine each of these on both an intellectual and personal level. You will meet wild Daoists who will propose that the Way, the secret of the universe and the key to living a good life, can be summarized as “go with the flow.” You will be admonished by stern Confucians that this is not true at all, that order can only be found by paying careful attention to history, to the rituals and customs of our ancestors. Bald Buddhist monks will then tell you that the only way to live is to leave everything behind. Whatever you choose to believe or think, these meetings will give you a firm knowledge of some of the most important sources of Chinese culture, a living heritage that affects the world around you, at DKU and in modern China. So don’t be mistaken: this course is not just about reading books. It is intended to challenge your vision of yourself and the world.

Description: This course explores the history of architecture and urbanism from a global perspective. Beginning with the first ritual centers and settlements to roughly 1700 AD, students will learn to analyze buildings and their surroundings through different methods of interpreting history. They will come to understand that architecture is the result of complex interrelationships and interactions dealing with contextual issues. These include shifting and ever changing design priorities dealing with aesthetic, cultural, symbolic, religious, social, economic, political, technological, behavioral, and ecological issues. This is the first of two courses in the History of Architecture sequence.

Course Description: Introductory course providing students with an understanding of the fundamental principles and language of architecture. The course will teach students design principles that inform classical architecture which are found in the order, proportion, archetypal geometry, and patterns found in nature and the cosmos. This sets a solid foundation for learning and applying architecture’s vocabulary and syntax to compose poetic and meaningful buildings.

The Daoist classic Zhuangzi teaches not a single doctrine, but a method to approach all doctrines and situations by shifting perspectives and adapting our courses of action. This foundational work of Chinese philosophy, full of witty and irreverent humor, language games, extravagant characters, parables, and argumentative essays, will not leave you unchanged!
The limits of knowledge, the efficacy of action, death and happiness, change and transformations, friendship and humor, perspectivism and skepticism, playfulness and freedom, emptiness and the dao. The Zhuangzi is about living, thinking, knowing, acting, feeling, loving, changing, and dying well in a messy world.
This class follows the format of a graduate seminar. We read the text prior to class in an active, critical, and reflective manner (i.e. taking notes, asking questions, identifying themes and arguments, searching relevant concepts, acknowledging the literary form and style, finding secondary sources for further explanation, coming up with our own readings and interpretations, etc.). In class, we read line by line together and discuss until we are ready to move on to the next chapter. Readings will be provided in English, and no prior knowledge of Chinese is required.

This course exposes students to the world of coffee and how the drug has changed and influenced human societies over time. In the classroom, we will explore coffee’s Ethiopian roots, prominence in Middle Eastern societies, rise through the European coffeehouse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, employment of slave labor systems, and the resurrection of coffee culture in the late twentieth century.  Trade, slavery, global markets, political intrigue, and socio-economic ethics, among other topics, will be discussed in accordance with the course readings and films. At least one class period will be devoted to a coffee-related field trip in Salt Lake City.

Course description and objectives:
This course is designed to introduce students to the international and area studies curriculum. The goal is to illuminate the profoundly international and regional character of the world we live in, and to cover a number of contemporary issues and challenges with global implications. Most of these topics can be studied in greater depth in upper division thematic courses at UCLA. And many of them will reappear in upper division area studies focused courses as well.

This class is divided into two parts. The first section covers political and economic issues central to international studies such as democratization and economic development. The second half of the course focuses on social and cultural issues with a global significance such as transnational migration and climate change.

Though not a survey, this course introduces students to children's literature in the West for the past two centuries, moving chronologically from the Grimm's fairy tales to contemporary Young Adult (YA) literature. We will explore how fairy tales, folklore, and other children's stories reflect cultural values and influence the construction of identity. These stories have endured in cultures throughout the world, with many being retold again and again. Each time, these stories transform to challenge or reinforce the cultural values—and fears—of our time. YA literature is often classified as children's literature (to much debate!). In this course, we will explore how YA literature builds on children's stories as well as how YA revolutionizes storytelling for young people. We will apply literary theory to the study of race, gender, and sexuality in both children's and YA literature. We will also investigate the relationship between storytelling and colonization.

This is the syllabus for a Gospel of Mark course taught at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary during the Fall 2019 semester. The course itself was subdivided between four sections: Greek Exegesis Online, Greek Exegesis Residential, English Exegesis Online, and English Exegesis Residential.

Students in the class were predominately MDiv Students and many were taking the class not only to fulfill an exegesis course requirement but also in preparation for the exegesis portion of ordination exams for the PCUSA.

What makes a world? Popular discourses celebrate globalization as a contemporary phenomenon characterized by increased connectivity, access, and diversity. Yet, the proliferation of borders—geographical, legal, and symbolic—radically trouble these idealistic accounts of inclusivity and progress. This course grapples with global literatures to explore the dark underside of globalization, minding the unevenness and violences of its histories and structures. Particularly, we will work through a set of literary and theoretical texts to investigate the role of literature and literary criticism in reproducing, complicating, and transforming the very conditions of the “global.”

Following the routes and historical legacies of colonialism and postcoloniality that structure the modern world, our participation in larger academic conversations will be guided by the following inquiries: How do literary and cultural productions not only reflect, but also produce and uphold the very contours of globalization? How do the proliferation of borders, histories of colonialism, and structures of violence trouble celebratory visions of an increasingly interconnected world? How can we perform readings that attend to a literary text’s relationship to power dynamics and the world?

This research aimed to evaluate English courses and syllabus in Bina Nusantara University, particularly in the accounting department, whether it was appropriate in the workplace. This study was conducted by interviewing 54 Bina Nusantara university graduates from Accounting department of 2013-2014 and three from big four public accountant firms in Jakarta. The result of the interview was analyzed qualitatively. The purpose of the interview was to get more detailed information about the benefit of English courses that they had at Bina Nusantara University. Besides that, the researchers had also interviewed with some public accounting firms in Jakarta to find out the level of English skills required and the standard scoring system used as a reference in their companies. With structured data collection, it can be concluded that the students need to practice English to improve the communication skills of speaking and writing to get good reports in English. Bina Nusantara University has ...

Drugs are, and have always been, an important component of all human societies, though their role and function is far from fixed. In this class we look at the multiple and profound roles of drugs in human life. One of the aims of the course is to broaden our ways of thinking (or open up our doors of perception) about drugs beyond the simplistic idea that drugs are substances that make feel better or stuff to which we should “just say no.” Drugs are much more than either a cure or an bad habit. To see how this is the case, we will read a heavy dose of philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, theologians, historians, and more. Our investigation into the nature of drugs and society from multiple perspectives will have us spanning different periods of history, including the present. We will also look at the place of drugs in our own “culture” and “cultures” very different from our own.