Taught Courses

 

This course offers an in-depth examination of American politics and government. The first half of the course deals with the origins, evolution, and maturation of the American federal republic, focusing on the development of the United States Constitution, the two party system, and mass politics. The goal is to acquaint students with the structure, functions, processes, and traditions of local, state, and national government, and with the complexities of American political culture. The second half of the course explores the theory and practice of democracy in the contemporary United States, placing American politics and government in comparative perspective.

This course aims to investigate the role played by media in American life, especially in the 20th century. It analyzes the role played by the media during the period of World War I and II, and the Cold War and the post-Cold War era. This course studies the ways that the media affect public opinion in America and to exert pressure on American administrations. It also sheds light on the attitudes of American media toward such hot topics as communism, Islam, the Arab world, and America's war on terror.

This intensive reading and writing course provides a comprehensive introduction to the study of American fiction, poetry and drama. Focusing on representative works of literature and literary criticism, the course examines the evolution of the American literary scene from its colonial origins to the experimental forms and deconstructionist critiques of the 1990s. The first half of the course considers the works of early writers such as Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, Poe, Melville, Twain, Dickinson, Stowe, Whitman, and Howells. The second half focuses on 20th century writers such as Dreiser, Eliot, Fitzgerlad, Wharton, Lewis, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, Stevens, Pound, Wilson, Brooks, Albee, Williams, Wright, Hughes, Ellison, Miller, Bellow, Hellman, Updike, Barth, Morrison, Walker, Pynchon, Styron, Oates, and Vonnegut. This course also shed light on American philosophy as a reflection of a unique American culture distinct from the European experience due to its tackling of several issues that weren't present in the European world, in doing such, the course covers the works of such American philosophers as Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Dewy, William James and Jane Adams.

This interdisciplinary course examines the evolution of American society over four centuries, focusing on broad patterns of change and continuity in American social structures and social norms. Important areas of inquiry include: demography, family life, women's history and gender relationships, age relationships and gerontology, social and economic class, social mobility, migration, regional variations, community studies, and the social implications of urbanization and industrializ.

This course would allow students to develop an advance understanding to different social and scientific theoretical perspectives that offer analyses and interpretation to conflict as a social phenomenon through focusing on its definition, concept, sources and stages. Moreover, this course would also enable students to develop necessary research and analytical skills.

This course examines the historical development and present character and condition of the American economy. The course places the American economic system in historical and comparative perspective by analyzing the institutional structures, inner workings, and ideological relations of American economic life. Areas of focus include: the origins and early development of regional economies, the emergence and maturation of a national market economy, the ideological and cultural underpinnings of American capitalism, the evolution of commercial agriculture, the development of financial and banking institutions, industrialization and the triumph of corporate culture, patterns of competition and monopoly, cycles of boom and bust, mass production and consumption, organized labor and labor-management relations, international trade and protectionism, public relations and advertising, Taylorism and the gospel of efficiency, unemployment and the problem of economic inequality, migrant and immigrant labor,, speculative behavior and the stock market, de-industrialization and social implications of abundance and economic growth.

This course introduces the theories of “Foreign Policy and its Analyzation” to empower students through acquainting them with the international foreign policy. This course deals with the foreign policy makers, foreign policy tools.

This course is especially designed to allow students to explore, develop and gain an in-depth understanding of different techniques of conflict management and resolution such as mediation, arbitration, good office, conciliation and preventative diplomacy. Moreover, this course would also enable students to develop necessary research and analytical skills.