FALL 2025 Travel Course Offerings
| Course | Topic and Destination | Leader |
|---|---|---|
| AHT 218T | Harbor Cities (Hamburg) | Gee |
| Oceans, seas and rivers have long provided resources favorable to the growth of urban settlements. Cities built on water shores use natural fluxes as passageways for bodies, goods and ideas from a privileged position. Their harbors became gateways to both wealth and the unknown. This course will focus on the modes of representations of the harbor city in the 20th century, placing particular emphasis on the role of imagination in its past, present and future construction. In the 19th and 20th centuries, radical and rapid changes in maritime technology and the geographies of the world economy prompted dramatic transformations in the functionalities and the identities of harbor cities across the globe. The proud jewels of the ‘economie-monde’ in the Mediterranean as well as many of the industrial bastions of the 19th century empires fell into decline, while emerging economies prompted fast-paced development of their sea-linked cities to accommodate emerging trade. Throughout this process, the relation of harbor cities to their self-perceived identity significantly evolved. A sole focus on a city’s desires and assets has become unviable. For the once remote outside world has found multiple paths of its own making to gain access to the city’s shores. The course will consider the array of visions drawn by artists, poets, architects, urban planners, politicians, entrepreneurs, and everyday inhabitants in informing the modeling of harbor cities in the context of rapid and drastic physical and mental changes. The course includes a travel component to Hamburg, Germany. | ||
| BIO 217T | Extreme Ecosystems (Iceland) | Della Croce |
| This course explores the various ways in which plants, animals, and microorganisms are able to survive extreme habitat conditions with respect to temperature, salinity, light, water availability, physical disturbances and so forth. Throughout the semester, students will look at a variety of extreme ecosystems of the Earth ranging from the Sahara Desert to Icelandic hot springs and from tidal mudflats in northern Europe to the depth of the Mariana trench. For each ecosystem, students will first identify the challenges that organisms living there must be able to face, and then, through the lenses of evolution, will investigate how organisms cope with these challenges. Tentatively, the travel component of this course will take place in Iceland, where students will be able to see and study first-hand ecosystems with extreme conditions with respect temperature, light, alkalinity (hot springs), and physical disturbance (tidal shores and volcanos). NOTE - This Academic Travel course carries a supplemental fee: CHF 950 (for students invoiced in CHF) or USD 1,145 (for students invoiced in USD). | ||
| BUS 237T | Operations and Supply Chain Management | Balushkina |
| This course introduces students to the field of operations and supply chain management. It aims to explain how to effectively organize the process of creating goods and services and introduce students to the major concepts, models, and methods in the field. The course explains how to apply quantitative and qualitative methods to solve a wide range of problems in managing operations, such as forecasting, sales planning, or outsourcing. The travel component of this course will include visits to Bologna and Umbria region in Italy. A specific focus will be given to understanding manufacturing companies in the automotive and food industries. | ||
| BUS 243T | Personal Finance (Germany) | Suleiman |
| This course introduces students to the basic concepts and tools needed to make wise and informed personal financial decisions. The content of this course is presented from a practical point of view and with an emphasis on the consumer as the financial decision-maker. The primary objective of this course is to help students apply finance practices to their own life. For example, students will learn how to plan and manage personal finances, how to obtain credit to purchase a home or a car, and how to invest personal financial resources in stocks, bonds, and real estate. Students will also learn how to interpret financial and economic news that have an impact on personal finances. The travel component of this course will include visits to several cities in Germany such as Frankfurt and Berlin. During those visits, students will be introduced to financial institutions that are relevant for personal finance such as the ECB, the Frankfurt stock exchange, commercial banks, and wealth management and real estate firms. | ||
| CLCS 105T | Paris Protagonist: Lost in Translation | Ferrari |
| This Academic Travel and creative writing course creates the occasion for an intensive hybrid scholarly/creative encounter with a mythical urban landscape which figuratively lives and breathes, as a protagonist, through French literature and film. The travel component that underscores this course will also mark the culmination of this Parisian encounter, ushering students from the realm of theory to practice with daily (on-location/site-driven) writing prompts and workshop-style events designed to address the following key questions: What forms does this protagonist assume as s/he endures through time? What voices emerge from the space of her debris? What gets lost in translation and how can the dialogue between art and cultural theory aide us in finding our way through this impasse of loss? How can the deepening of a student’s cultural awareness help the City of Light avoid being subsumed by her own, distinctive, and almost irresistible, charme fatal? Three thematic modules will frame this exploration and create a groundwork on which to base the student’s intellectual discovery and experimentation as writers/travelers: the poetry of Charles Baudelaire highlights the unique experience of Parisian space; the contribution of Surrealism which both defines and defies the peculiarities of Parisian time; the French New Wave (contrasted to foreign cinematic renderings of Paris), with a focus on the twin concepts of translation-transfiguration, allegories of Light and “Othering.” Students enrolling in this course may expect dual-language editions of French literary sources and French films with English subtitles (when possible). | ||
| CLCS 238T | The Postcolonial City: Berlin & Hamburg | Roy |
| Colonialism has left its traces not only very obviously on the former colonies themselves but also on the face of the cities of the colonisers. Host of the “Congo Conference” that carved up the continent in 1885, Germany was late into the “scramble for Africa.” However, it has long been implicated in colonialism through trade, scientific exploration, and Hamburg’s position as a “hinterland” of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Seeking to explore colonial echoes in less obvious places, namely in contemporary Berlin and Hamburg, the course asks how we can remember colonialism in the modern world, become conscious of its traces, and encourage critical thinking about the connections between colonialism, migration and globalization. As an Academic Travel, this course will include an on-site component where the class will team up with postcolonial focus groups in Berlin and Hamburg, going onto the street and into the museum to retrace the cities’ colonial connections, and to experience and engage with the colonial past through performance-based activities. | ||
| COM 230T | Comm, Fashion, Taste (Florence, Milan) | Sugiyama |
| The sense of taste, whether it refers to the metaphorical sense of taste (aesthetic discrimination) or the literal sense of taste (gustatory taste), is a fundamental part of human experiences. This Academic Travel course examines various ways that communication processes shape our sense of taste in the contemporary society. It will explore topics such as the taste for food, clothing and accessories, music, and other cultural activities applying key theories and concepts of communication, fashion, and taste. Ultimately, the course seeks to develop an understanding of how interpersonal, intercultural, and mediated communication in our everyday life plays a critical role in the formation of individual taste as well as collective taste. In order to achieve this objective, field observations and site visits will be planned during the Academic Travel period. | ||
| HIS 215T | Central Europe: An Urban History | Pyka |
| This Academic Travel course seeks to explore urban development and urban planning of Central European cities from Antiquity to the Present. The course investigates the specific development of cities in Central Europe, both north and south of the Alps, with an emphasis on the legacies of Roman antiquity, the Christian (and Jewish) legacy of the Middle Ages, the role of princely residences, and of bourgeois middle classes. An important part plays also the various political movements of the 20th century, including the architectural fantasies of National Socialism, and the attempts post-World War II to deal with this legacy in a democratic society. The course asks in which way the interplay of tradition and modernity over time has structured not only the physical shapes of cities, but even the mindsets of the population. The travel component of this course features day trips to the Roman foundation of Como (Italy) and the oldest still standing structure in Switzerland in Riva San Vitale (Ticino), and a major excursion to the three most important cities in Bavaria: Nuremberg, Regensburg, and Munich (Germany). | ||
| HIS 241T | Modern Türkiye: Dreams of Modernity | Mottale |
| Turkey-Türkiye has become once more a major player on the international scene, while seemingly changing constantly. What are the origins and future perspectives of the modern Turkish Republic, and how are Turks see themselves? In order to answer these questions, the course starts from the heyday of the old Ottoman Empire, subsequently analyzing its crisis and decline, and the birth of the modern post-Ottoman states after World War I, with the Republic of Turkey-Türkiye as one of the main heir states of the Empire. The course focuses on the transformations that led to contemporary Türkiye from the Young Turks and the time of Atatürk to the current President Erdogan. ‘Dreams of Modernity’ provides an understanding of Turkish nation-building process, highlighting the continuous political and social transformations of one of the major international actors in the Middle-Eastern and North-African area (MENA). | ||
| POL 216T | Global Challenges (Vienna) | Bucher |
| To better understand (some of) the major challenges humanity faces today, this course introduces students to the underlying structures and the key actors that shape global relations. As such, this travel course will provide an opportunity to engage with the main building-blocks of the contemporary international order and to inquire into the interactions among states, international organizations and non-governmental actors. Some of the key topics covered in class and on travel include: interstate war, deterrence and contemporary shifts in the nuclear order; the challenges underlying the political need to address energy security, fight climate change, and enable development; and the relationship between human rights, intervention, and state sovereignty. | ||
| PSY 208T | Psychology En Route (Tuscany) | Ongis |
| This course blends psychology principles with the timeless allure of Medieval and Renaissance cities. It integrates cognitive, social, and psychodynamic psychology to offer a systematic exploration of cognition and an intricate analysis of social dynamics in these historical urban centers. Throughout the course, students will actively engage in a structured series of activities, discussions, experiments, and meticulously planned research projects, effectively bridging psychology theories with the authentic reality of cities renowned for their profound intellectual legacy. | ||
| SJS 377T | Sustainable Education in Madagascar | Galli |
| This course explores the challenges faced by the population of rural Madagascar – one of the poorest countries in the world – including limited schooling and poor learning outcomes, scarce and low-income employment opportunities, lack of basic infrastructure, high fertility, bad nutrition, poor health conditions and adverse environmental impacts. In particular, the Madagascar educational system and the reasons behind its very low quality are examined. During the travel, students are hosted by local schools and must adapt to lodging and transport conditions that, albeit still a luxury for most of the local population, are relatively closer to the lifestyle of the local population. This gives students the possibility to obtain first-hand experience of how different it is to live in low-income countries. Students have numerous opportunities to meet and bond with local students, teachers, school directors, tourist guides, and micro-entrepreneurs, allowing them to learn how rich Madagascar is in terms of cultural, natural, and human resources and to hear directly from the local youth what their needs, wishes and aspirations are. This academic travel in a remote non-touristic part of North Madagascar is organized by the Swiss NGO Boky Mamiko. Students are expected to participate in some pre-travel volunteering work and to represent the NGO in Madagascar in a professional and responsible manner. NOTE - This Academic Travel course carries a supplemental fee: CHF 1,400 (for students invoiced in CHF) or USD 1,685 (for students invoiced in USD). | ||
| SOC 100T | Introduction to Sociology (Venice) | Schwak |
| What is "society"? What does its structure look like and how does it work? How does it change? Why does it change? How do are individuals and society intertwined? This course provides students with the tools to answer these questions. Modern societies have experienced dramatic social changes with the emergence of individualism, new class structures, the development of urban life or changing relationships between individuals and their natural environments. Sociology provides an understanding of these changes by studying human interactions and forms of social organization. In this course, students will be introduced to major sociological thinkers, concepts and approaches. This Academic Travel course will take students to Venice and its region. This will allow students to apply their knowledge of sociology in one’s of world’s most visited cities, and to address very urgent sociological questions related to overtourism and social change in age of global mobility. Recommended prerequisite: POL 100. | ||
| STA 275T | Studies in Ceramics (Italy) | Zdanski |
| This introductory ceramics course combines art history and studio work with an intensive travel period in northern and central Italy. Students will be given the opportunity to understand the complete process of producing objects in clay and terracotta, from the first planning/designing phases, through the basic modeling techniques, to the more complicated processes of firing and glazing. Studio sessions both on and off campus will incorporate lectures on artists and art movements, as well as visits to local venues, major museums and other sites of importance with regard to the use of clay and terracotta in the fine arts. The on-campus lectures aim to provide students with an understanding of the importance of northern and central Italy for the history of ceramics from the age of the Etruscans to the present day. All students will have the opportunity to do in-depth, intensive work in clay modeling, hand-built ceramics and glazing techniques. The first part of the course will focus on the functional aspects of the terracotta object, while the second will introduce terracotta as sculpture. | ||
| VCA 120T | Documentary Photography on Location | Fassl |
| This course will investigate the particularities of both documentary and street photography through readings and studio projects. It will shed light on the history of photography; how the visual world communicates, studying the interaction of photography with other visual media; and will pay specific attention to the semiotic potential and challenges of photography. Students will engage in a project that relates to the location of the travel component of the class, documenting a subject of their choice. The Academic Travel destination will be Munich with additional day excursions to Bavaria and Austria. | ||
No one-credit courses are scheduled for FALL 2025.