The Low Countries have made a rich contribution to art history with well-known artists and movements. The lectures of this thematic course on Dutch painting offer an overview of the visual arts from the 15th century to the present covering the characteristics of important moments in art history placing it in the context of Netherlandish culture and history. It covers Flemish Primitives (such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden), important 16th-century painters (e.g. Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel), and famous painters from the so-called ‘Dutch Golden Age’, esp. Rembrandt, Hals, Jacob van Ruisdael and Vermeer with an emphasis on developments in style, function and meaning of their paintings. Furthermore, the course discusses the many faces of modernism in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries focusing on Vincent van Gogh and Piet Mondrian.

When you choose to study in the Netherlands, this course will definitely be an enrichment of your Dutch experience. This series of lectures will give you a broad overview of Dutch history and contemporary society. Topics (among others): Dutch cities, history, geography, government and politics, economy, the people, the language, and art. To stimulate students to see more of the Netherlands than just Leiden and Amsterdam, an individual fieldtrip to a Dutch town is part of the course. This assignment will be done in groups of four students and concluded with a vlog (10-15 minutes). You will share your video with the other students of the course on the digital platform Pitch2Peer and review the vlogs of others. This way you have the chance to discover a large part of the country in just a few weeks.

This course aims to give students a concise knowledge of the modern histories of South and Southeast Asia from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and to make them familiar with current debates on key issues with relation to those histories. These include for South and Southeast Asia: the character and institutions of the colonial state, the colonial economy, colonial instruments of knowledge, the late-colonial economic structure, the emergence of nationalism, decolonization, including the partition of the British Raj.political change, economic development, national security, human rights and response to globalization as rsutls of their respective choices of national survival, political development and economic prosperity.”

Natural computing is a quickly developing field dealing with models and computational paradigms inspired by nature and attempts to understand the world around us in terms of information processing. Natural computing today includes paradigms such as modelling information processing through artificial neural networks, modelling emergent behaviour resulting from the interaction of a large collection of agents in particle swarms (representing e.g., birds, insects) or spatial arrangements of cells (cellular automata), or modelling efficient search and optimization procedures such as ant colonies (finding shortest paths in a network of possibilities), simulated annealing processes (finding the optimal energy state of a crystal), and evolutionary processes (adapting a population to find the best mix of genetic material under changing environmental conditions). The course introduces the foundations of a variety of such computational paradigms, and discusses algorithmic implementations on computers as well as the analogies between these implementations and the natural model. In addition, we also present some practical application examples of such computational paradigms, such as pattern recognition, engineering optimization, simulations of fire breakouts, to name a few.

This course builds on the fundamental knowledge provided in the course Inleiding Internationaal Publiekrecht (BA 1). In that course the emphasis was on becoming familiar with the basic characteristics of the international legal order and the law relating to international obligations and dispute settlement. In this course we will discuss certain specific fields of public international law, such as human rights law, the law on the use of force, international humanitarian law, international criminal law, international economic law, international environmental law, and law of the sea.

Law, governance, and Africa; all three are general concepts that hide a world of diversity. In this course we explore the complex relationships and interactions between law, governance and society in Africa, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. What influence does colonial domination have at law systems that are in place in present Africa? And what does a decolonial approach to African studies entail? How do different legal systems (traditional, religious, international, state) interact? How is access to land regulated according to the law? And how do people get access to land in practice? How do state courts deal with spiritual accusations about witchcraft if no material evidence is available? Why do people resort to justice “with their own hands” under certain circumstances? Which mechanisms do societies use to restore order and bring reconciliation to war-torn communities? Who rules in failing states? In this course we look at legal phenomena in their social context in today’s Africa, while taking into account historical pathways that have led to the current situation. We take a broad definition of law and governance that includes both formal and informal rules, practices, and authorities. We explore interactions between these different sources of ordering in society, how they function in practice, and the impact they have on everyday life in an Africa context. This will enable students not only to get a better understanding of law and governance in its context, but also about functioning of African societies, and ways in which people organise their lives. discussions.

Countries nowadays are part of the global economy. Before products reach their final destinations, they have traveled the world as businesses increasingly cut up production processes over many countries; also massive flows of finance are crisscrossing the world. These developments challenge the possibilities with which countries and international economic organisations can exercise an independent economic policy. In this course, we will discuss the different roots and the benefits of international trade as well as their costs; further, we will discuss the benefits and costs of a free flow of finance, in particular we will include risks of financial crises. At the end of this course students will have an understanding of the basic principles of trade and finance and of the motivation of business to engage in international activities. Students will be able to present economic arguments on these international economic issues.