Fall 2015

PS 375 is a two-credit course designed for first-time Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs).  The course seeks to introduce students to practical teaching methods and to foster discussion about effective pedagogy. It also focuses on professional development, in particular on developing skills that are closely related to effective teaching such as presentation skills. The course features student presentations on selected pedagogical topics, panels on key issues related to teaching and to professional development, and discussion of weekly assignments in relation to challenges encountered by GSIs in the course of their teaching.

Although Asia has clearly been the world’s outstanding developmental success story since World War II, as reflected for example in the steady increase of emerging Asian in world trade (increasing from 21% in 1990 to 34% by 2006),  the study of Asian politics has been hitherto dominated by area studies and to a lesser extent international relations; the comparative analysis of Asian polities has been rare and relatively unsystematic.  There are good reasons for this, including the bewildering diversity and exoticism of this vast continent, but as Asia rises economically it also becomes more economically and politically integrated, creating a basis to understand its patterned similarities and differences.  Still, this is an introductory course in a field that is only emerging.  The purpose of the course is to immerse advanced undergraduate students in the available analytical literature on contemporary Asia for the purpose of encouraging further comparative teaching and research.  

Subfield:  Comparative Politics

Note: This description is from Fall 2014.

Political Science 143A, the first of a two-semester upper division sequence on modern Northeast Asia, is primarily concerned with the People's Republic of China but also includes segments on China's relations with its immediate neighbors, as well as a look at the components of "Greater China," Hong Kong and Taiwan. Lecture topics will include the Chinese revolution and the old regime, Chinese political culture and the attempt at "cultural revolution," the political and economic dynamics of reform and opening to the outside world, Chinese foreign policy, the Tiananmen incident, and other such topics.

Subfield: Comparitive Politics

Please note that this course description is from Fall 2013

IMPORTANT! Due to the content overlap, if you have taken PS 143C with Professor Lorentzen, or are enrolled in it for the fall, you will not be able to take this course for the Poli Sci major. Also, if you take this course for the major in the fall, you will not be able to take PS 143C in the future.

This one-unit course will feature a guest speaker each week discussing an issue currently in the news. The class is open to all students, and there are no prerequisites. The class is offered Pass/Not Pass, based on a final examination. May be repeated for credit.

This course does not count as an upper division Political Science requirement.

This course investigates the ‘Civil Law’ or the jus civile, the legal order first established by classical Roman jurists and codified in uniform textual form by the Emperor Justinian known collectively as the ‘Body of Civil Law’ [Corpus Juris Civilis].  Hailed variously as ‘the written embodiment of reason’ and ‘the true philosophy,’ Civil Law was foundational to Western jurisprudence and political thought, and its influence was particularly important among early modern theorists of rights and the sovereign state.

The course has three main aims.  The first part of the course will investigate the major substantive areas of Classical Roman law, such as family law, the law of property, the law of obligations, and public law.  The second part of the course will treat the Reception of Roman law in medieval and early modern Europe and focus especially on the role of Roman law in the formation of the European jus commune and the rise of a judicial and administrative legal culture central to the modern nation-state.  The third part of the course studies the ideological orientation of the Civil Law tradition in political thought and examines the use of Roman law as a major source of political theory in major texts of political thought such as Bodin’s Six Books on the State, Hobbes’ Leviathan, and Kant’s Doctrine of Right.

The goal of this course is to introduce advanced political science graduate students to current debates in the filed of international security and to prepare theses students for conduction dissertation research in their own areas of interest within this field.  This course is designed for advanced political science graduate students preparing to commence their dissertation research.  Its orientation is theoretical rather than empirical and it is both reading and research. 

Please note that this course description is from Fall 2013.

This course will provide graduate students the critical technical skills necessary to conduct research in computational social science and digital humanities, introducing them to the basic computer literacy, programming skills, and application knowledge that students need to be successful in further methods work.

The course is divided into three main sections: skills, applications, and community engagement. The “skills” portion will introduce students to basic computer literacy, terminologies, and programming languages -
i.e. Unix Shall, R, Python, and Git. The second part of the course provides students the opportunity to use the skills they learned in part 1 towards practical applications such as automated text analysis, geospatial analysis, network analysis, data collection via APIs, crowdsourcing and online experiments, and data visualization. The third section on community engagement will introduce topics such as ethics and privacy, best practices of reproducible research, scholarly communication and collaboration, and how to further one’s research using UC Berkeley campus resources.

The goal of this yearlong course is to provide a forum in which students propose, develop, and complete a research project that produces a journal-length paper of publishable quality. This paper will typically serve as students' second-year M.A. essay, and the course is intended as a complement to that requirement. This course is primarily oriented towards second-year Ph.D. students in any subfield (students in other years may participate with the professors’ consent). The course meets regularly during parts of the fall semester and irregularly during the spring semester. In the first few weeks of the course, we discuss the process of moving from research topic to research question; and we survey published articles by recent Ph.D. students/assistant professors, focusing on the structure and nature of the writing and presentation as well the quality of the argument and evidence. We then move to students’ research proposals for the rest of the fall semester. During the spring semester, students meet individually with the course instructors and their advisors, develop and revise drafts of their papers, and present their work at a department “APSA-style” conference. In order to complete the course and receive credit, students must complete the requirements for both semesters.

This seminar is designed to acquaint students with current research approaches in various subfields of American Politics. Particular attention will be given to debates over theory, methodology, and substance. The seminar is not designed to provide a complete survey of the field. Students planning to be examined in American Politics are expected to master recommended readings on their own and should review additional readings included in versions of this seminar offered in the past years.