This site houses a large number of very brief audio files in which native speakers say brief, useful, every day phrases in a number of conjugations. Phrases include things like "How much is this?" "How are you?" or simply reciting useful vocabulary and also cover numbers and time. Each phrase is spoken in 8 or 9 dialects from the regions of North Africa, the Levant, and the Persian Gulf. Every phrase is accompanied by a transcript.

This course will conduct a comparative study of the grand strategies of the great powers (Britain, France, Germany and Russia) competing for mastery of Europe from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Grand strategy is the collection of political and military means and ends with which a state attempts to achieve security. We will examine strategic developments in the years preceding World Wars I and II, and how those developments played themselves out in these wars. The following questions will guide the inquiry: What is grand strategy and what are its critical aspects? What recurring factors have exerted the greatest influence on the strategies of the states selected for study? How may the quality of a grand strategy be judged? What consequences seem to follow from grand strategies of different types? A second theme of the course is methodological. We will pay close attention to how comparative historical case studies are conducted.

Introduction to Media Studies is designed for students who have grown up in a rapidly changing global multimedia environment and want to become more literate and critical consumers and producers of media. Through an interdisciplinary comparative and historical lens, the course defines “media” broadly as including oral, print, performance, photographic, broadcast, cinematic, and digital cultural forms and practices. The course looks at the nature of mediated communication, the functions of media, the history of transformations in media and the institutions that help define media’s place in society. This year’s course will focus on issues of network culture and media convergence, addressing such subjects as Intellectual Property, peer2peer authoring, blogging, and game modification.

JUNG ??? the Java Universal Network/Graph Framework--is a software library that provides a common and extensive language for the modeling, analysis, and visualization of data that can be represented as a graph or network.

This course studies the interaction between law, courts, and social movements in shaping domestic and global public policy. Examines how groups mobilize to use law to affect change and why they succeed and fail. The class uses case studies to explore the interplay between law, social movements, and public policy in current areas such as gender, race, labor, trade, environment, and human rights. Finally, it introduces the theories of public policy, social movements, law and society, and transnational studies.

This course seeks to provide students with a general understanding of the form of collective action known as the social movement. Our task will be guided by the close examination of several twentieth century social movements in the United States. We will read about the U.S. civil rights, the unemployed workers’, welfare rights, pro-choice / pro-life and gay rights movements. We will compare and contrast certain of these movements with their counterparts in other countries. For all, we will identify the reasons for their successes and failures.

This course fulfills the first half of the Comparative Media Studies workshop sequence requirement for entering graduate students. The workshop sequence provides an opportunity for a creative, hands-on project development experience and emphasizes intellectual growth as well as the acquisition of technical skills. The course is designed to provide practical, hands-on experience to complement students’ theoretical studies.