The International Liberal Arts Honors Certificate is 16 credits in total.
Upcoming Courses (Fall 2026)
Thriving, Not Just Surviving: Flourishing in a Distracted World
Tuesday 1:10-3:00
Annie Tsai
What does it truly mean to live well today? In an age of distraction, uncertainty, and constant pressure, how can individuals cultivate a life of depth, resilience, and meaning? This interdisciplinary course explores the science and psychology of human flourishing across cultures and contexts. Integrating ancient wisdom with modern research, students examine relationships, suffering, attention, digital life, meaningful work, awe, creativity, and physical well-being. Designed as a discussion-centered, reverse classroom experience, the course invites students not only to understand flourishing intellectually, but to critically reflect on how they themselves might thrive in a complex world.
Tuesday 1:10-3:00
Annie Tsai
What does it truly mean to live well today? In an age of distraction, uncertainty, and constant pressure, how can individuals cultivate a life of depth, resilience, and meaning? This interdisciplinary course explores the science and psychology of human flourishing across cultures and contexts. Integrating ancient wisdom with modern research, students examine relationships, suffering, attention, digital life, meaningful work, awe, creativity, and physical well-being. Designed as a discussion-centered, reverse classroom experience, the course invites students not only to understand flourishing intellectually, but to critically reflect on how they themselves might thrive in a complex world.
Becoming the Monster: Queering Gender, Desire, and Sexuality
Tuesday 10:20-12:10
Ying-Hsiu Lu
This course explores how cinematic monsters reimagine gender and sexuality. Through films such as Psycho, Alien, The Shape of Water, and The Substance, students examine reproduction, hybridity, and bodily autonomy. Monstrosity emerges as a site of desire and resistance, challenging binaries and rethinking the limits of the human.
Tuesday 10:20-12:10
Ying-Hsiu Lu
This course explores how cinematic monsters reimagine gender and sexuality. Through films such as Psycho, Alien, The Shape of Water, and The Substance, students examine reproduction, hybridity, and bodily autonomy. Monstrosity emerges as a site of desire and resistance, challenging binaries and rethinking the limits of the human.
Is the World Fair? Understanding International Rules and Institutions
Friday 3:20-5:10
Han Wei Chung
This course explores the theme of the international community and international rules, examining the foundations and development of the modern international order. Students will study the origins of internationalism and trace the evolution of the concept of sovereignty, particularly in the context of secularization and the emergence of the modern state system. The course aims to provide a solid understanding of the structure and function of contemporary international institutions, as well as the legal frameworks that regulate their actions.
Friday 3:20-5:10
Han Wei Chung
This course explores the theme of the international community and international rules, examining the foundations and development of the modern international order. Students will study the origins of internationalism and trace the evolution of the concept of sovereignty, particularly in the context of secularization and the emergence of the modern state system. The course aims to provide a solid understanding of the structure and function of contemporary international institutions, as well as the legal frameworks that regulate their actions.
Cosmopolitanism and Global Justice
Friday 1:10-3:00
Shu-An Tsai & Michael Hemmingsen
This course explores major debates about cosmopolitanism and global justice. Students examine the ethical challenges raised by globalization, including tensions between cosmopolitan ideals and patriotic obligations, the foundations and implementation of human rights, global poverty and inequality, environmental justice, international peace, and global governance.
Friday 1:10-3:00
Shu-An Tsai & Michael Hemmingsen
This course explores major debates about cosmopolitanism and global justice. Students examine the ethical challenges raised by globalization, including tensions between cosmopolitan ideals and patriotic obligations, the foundations and implementation of human rights, global poverty and inequality, environmental justice, international peace, and global governance.
Previous & Current Courses
Same Right, Different Rules? – Understanding Modern Civil Rights
This course provides a comparative perspective on civil rights in different countries, cultures and international contexts. Starting with the philosophical explanation of natural rights, human rights and constitutional rights, we consider the tension between is and ought and reflect the dilemma between moral duty on paper and decision-making in reality. We are especially interested in thinking through basic rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and protection of property against the background of contemporary threats to these rights such as digital surveillance, climate change, disinformation, and the rise of populism.
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AI and Me: Master or Servant
How are chatbots like ChatGPT changing you now? What choice, if any, do you have in these changes? What do you need to understand better to maximize the control you can have? Should AI companies be allowed to use our creative work to make profits without our permission? How will evolving AI become different and make us different? What new sorts of decisions will we face and what could be the consequences? In this course we probe such questions together.
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Understanding International Relations
This course provides an introduction to the major theoretical approaches that scholars use to understand and explain international relations. Students learn how different frameworks shape our understanding of global politics and develop skills in applying these perspectives to analyze contemporary world events.
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Sustainable Agriculture and Human Well-being
This course explores the relationship between agricultural practices and their effects on human health, society, and the environment. Students will study eco-friendly farming techniques that maintain soil health, conserve water, and reduce chemical inputs, with a focus on how sustainable agriculture supports food security, economic resilience, and public health. Through discussions, case studies, and greenhouse sessions, students will gain both theoretical and practical insight into building agricultural systems that promote long-term ecological balance and human well-being. The course also examines agriculture’s role in global sustainability, equitable food distribution, and the impact of policy and personal practice.
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Making Sense: On How Meaning Works
What moves us to laugh at a joke or brings us to tears at a movie? How is it possible that sounds or marks can convey full thoughts from one mind to another? What enables infants to grow from perceiving their physical environment to experiencing a meaningful world? What is the difference between how a sentence can convey meaning and how a painting can? In this course, we put the human capacity to “make sense” under a microscope and explore important ideas developed to explain it. We trace the impact of some of these ideas, eventually showing how one old idea about meaning was recently rediscovered and applied to computers. The result was Generative AIs like ChatGPT. What was this old idea? Does it show that machines can mean? We will think through questions like these together.
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Ethical Theory in Global Perspective
What makes an action right? What kind of person should we try to be? And how can we decide between different answers to these questions? This course explores major traditions in ethical theory from around the world, including Confucian, Mohist, Buddhist, Cārvāka, Akan, and European schools of thought. We’ll look at different ways these traditions think about ethics – whether they focus on consequences, duties, character, or something else entirely – and consider what each approach takes to be the point of living an ethical life. Rather than working from just one cultural or philosophical framework, we’ll compare ideas across traditions and ask what happens when they come into conflict. The course doesn’t assume any background in philosophy, but it does ask you to think hard and engage seriously with unfamiliar ideas.
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Gender, Body, and Power
What does it mean to be a man or a woman? How are sex and sexuality employed as conceptual tools to construct the ideas of “foreignness” and “monstrosity”? This course explores sexuality, bodies, and gender across medicine, literature, and creative arts. Four topics are introduced: 1) Same-Sex Desire in Pre-modern China; 2) Cross-Dressing and Gender Performativity; 3) Nonbinary Bodies and the Monstrous Races; 4) Gender and Virtual Bodies in Creative Imagination. These topics call into question the links between anatomical sex, gender, and cultural forces that sought to regulate sexuality and gender by de-naturalizing the common understanding of sexual binary categories and hetero-normativity as universal across time and space. Questions about non-binary bodies also constitute a racial discourse that emphasizes spatial and bodily boundaries between humanity and monstrosity.
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Critical Reading & Writing on Complex Issues
This course is designed to develop students’ skills at reading and writing (in English) as critical life-long tools for deepening their understanding of unfamiliar topics and issues and their capacity to convey that emerging understanding to a specific readership. To this end, rather than teaching these as decontextualized skills, the course provides a workshop context where a theme involving complex issues serves as the unit of focus. Students uncover and explore the relevant issues through a recurring cycle of reading, discussion, and writing.
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Advertising and Consumer Society
In this course, we critically explore how advertising shapes and reflects society. More than a tool for selling products, advertising is a cultural force that influences economic, social, and political change. We will examine its methods and messages, focusing on its role in consumer society, media economics, and the commodification of everyday life. Topics include advertising’s construction of commodities, promotion of consumer identities, and tensions between creativity and commerce. By addressing questions about its influence on desires, values, and capitalism, this course equips students with analytical tools to evaluate advertising’s impact on culture and society.
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Rethinking Innovation and Discovery
This course examines these two notions that are central to human progress. We do this for the constructive purpose of fostering well-grounded participation in innovation and discovery, whether on the modest scale of one’s own everyday living or at the ambitious scale of societal or global impact. The course takes a case-based approach, where actual instances of innovation and discovery are examined in depth and probed for clues to deeper principles that can guide students’ own efforts to gain novel insights and apply them to new problems.
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The Problem of Evil
The existence of evil and suffering in the world has long been a perplexing and troubling issue. Why does evil exist? Why are there natural disasters, war, and suffering? In this course, we will try to make sense of the existence of evils such as these. What is evil in the first place? Is evil compatible with the idea of a morally ordered universe or a higher purpose to human existence? Is evil the inevitable result of human free will? Might it be necessary for us to develop important character traits such as compassion and kindness? Or is there simply no good justification for the existence of evil at all?
More +Other Courses
- Honors Capstone Proposal Writing
- Honors Capstone Research I
- Honors Capstone Research II
- Honors Capstone Research III