Summer Semester 2026 - Courses
Foundation Course: Indian Civilizations
Course Code: FC-0201-1
Faculty: Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Professor, Ashoka University
Course Description: The course will reflect on early philosophical and political thought in India, examining Asokan Edicts, Sangam age thinking in India’s Tamil tracts, the non-religious imaginations of Sarmad and the Sufis. It will also examine Yatric India with the India of Visitors through the ages, studying the journeys of ancient travelers such as Fahein to the current Dalai Lama. It will study the history of imprisonment in India from early times, including that of a serving emperor jailed- Shah Jehan, through colonial times to our own times when penology has changed from its emphasis on punishment to reform. The Course would reflect on the testamentary role of the Constitution of India in the way we are evolving or not evolving as a people, a nation and a civilisation.
Pre Requisites: None
Cross listing: None
Grading Policy: Students will be required to write one assignment paper due at the end of the term, for which students will be given an adequate number of prompts from the subjects discussed in class.
Foundation Course: Literature and the World
Course Code: FC-0701-1
Faculty: Abir Bazaz, Assistant Professor, Ashoka University
Course Description:What is literature? And what does it teach us about who we are, the world we live in, and where we are going? Does literature help us make better sense of the lives of others or the necessary strife involved in the human condition? Does literature put us more genuinely in touch with ourselves and one another? What is the relation between literature and
politics? Or literature and religion? In this course, we will search for answers to some of these questions by reading modern literature from all over the world. We will be studying literary texts by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, V.S. Naipaul, Tayeb Salih, Toni Morrison, Jorge Luis Borges, Samantha Schweblin, Clarice Lispector and Flannery O’Connor among others.
Pre-requisites: None
Cross listing: None
Grading Policy: Regular attendance, classroom posts, midterm paper or exam and final exam or paper.
Foundation Course: Quantitative Reasoning and Mathematical Thinking
Course Code: FC-0306-1
Faculty: Aalok Thakkar, Assistant Professor, Ashoka University
Course Description:“Wonder not then, what God for you informs,
If your objects may be steps to ascend to God.”
— John Milton
There is a particular kind of grief that belongs to those who reach for the infinite and find, at the last moment, that their arms are too short. The mystic knows it. The poet knows it. And, as this course will argue, so does the mathematician.
Once exiled from the Heaven of the Infinite, we have found ourselves in a world that feels chaotic, broken, and opaque. Since that imagined abandonment, human beings have attempted to reconstruct a stairway to the skies: through art, music, poetry, science, and even mathematics. However, we are not made for mathematics. We are creatures of bone and breath and endings, furnished with ten fingers, a little din in our throats, and a brief corridor of years between birth and disappearance. And yet, from within this corridor, we have had the audacity to attempt a description of the infinite.
In the first module of this course, we will trace how different civilisations have constructed systems for counting, comparing, and compressing the world into symbol and language. What we discover, when we look closely, is that every such attempt bears the fingerprints of its makers. What presents itself as the neutral grammar of reality turns out, on closer inspection, to be a series of choices made by particular people in particular moments: what symbols to use, how many to use, what operations to permit, when to divide by zero, and what to use as a yardstick for proof.
We will then turn to what may be the most ambitious intellectual project in human history: the attempt to build a formal language capable of capturing all of mathematics, a tower of symbols tall enough to touch the sky. This is the Babelian dream, and like Babel, it ends in a ruin. A language powerful enough to describe arithmetic is powerful enough to describe, most fatally, itself. It can encode well-formed sentences like “this statement cannot be proved,” which are neither provable nor refutable. With merciless rigour, Kurt Gödel showed that this is not a flaw of a particular construction but an inescapable feature of logic. In the second module of the course, we will sketch the proof of this incompleteness and show that any symbolic language powerful enough to do arithmetic will contain truths it cannot prove. We will see that mathematics is not merely incomplete in the way any unfinished project is incomplete, but rather broken from the inside and beyond repair.
And yet, somehow, most mathematicians wake up every morning and go to work. This is because mathematics works, with an extravagance that borders on the offensive. Structures conjured in abstraction turn out to describe the world with almost indecent precision. The same incomplete, historically contingent mathematics turns out to be unreasonably effective in physics, economics, and the social sciences. In the final module of this course, we will sit with utility as a consolation for incompleteness.
By the end of this course, you will have witnessed the grief of the subject. You will also have witnessed something else: human beings, when confronted with a proof of their own limitations, chose to keep rolling the boulder anyway. This is, in the end, what mathematics is. Not a stairway to the infinite; not a view from above. It is the stubborn, fingerprinted, perpetually incomplete work of creatures like us who refused to stop counting.
Pre-requisites: None
Cross listing: None
Grading Policy: 1. Assignments (40%): The course includes four problem sets designed to supplement lectures and develop practical application skills. 2. Examination (20%): One 2-hour, closed-book in-class exam. 3. Class Participation & Attendance (15%): Regular attendance and active engagement in discussions and activities. Participation quality matters more than quantity – thoughtful questions and contributions are valued. 4. Final Paper (25%): A collaborative final paper. Includes proposal submission, draft review, and final revision.
Foundation Course: Mind & Behaviour
Course Code: FC-0503-1
Faculty: Tatyana Aleksandrovna Kostochka, Assistant Professor, Ashoka University
Course Description: Day to day, all of us are trying to make our way in the world, to live our best life: we socialize, we make difficult choices, we learn, we create. But what is a good life? Is it a pleasant life? A long life? A moral life? Are there multiple ways to have a good life? How we answer these questions partially depends on what we are. So, in this course, we will start out by looking at the nature of our mind and our relationship to it. Having gotten this foundation, we will dive into the nature of wellbeing and what it means to have a good life. In the process, we will not only consider what it is for something to be good for you but also how it relates to what is morally good. Finally, we will move on to explore the various things that people do: how we make decisions, look for the truth, and create art.
Pre-requisites: None.
Cross-listing: None
Grading Policy: In-class assignments: 100%. This will include: quizzes (~30%) In-class writing: (~70%)
History: War: History, Politics, Society
Course code: HIS-2505/ SOA-2234/ POL-2107 / IR-2067
Faculty: Pratyay Nath, Associate Professor, Ashoka University
Course Description: How has war shaped gender identities and political ideologies in our societies? In what ways do race, class, and religion figure in the experience of war? How have computer games, movies, and comics made war an object of popular consumption? How have war, animals, and ecology shaped each other? These are some of the questions that the present course addresses. It offers a global history of the inter-relationship between war, politics, and society. In the first week, we will look at war and politics, with respect to ideology, propaganda, and protest. In the second week, we will study war and gender, in terms of masculinity, femininity, sexuality, and violence. In the third week we will analyse war and identity, with respect to labour, class, religion, and race. In the fourth week, we will examine war and the environment, in terms of animals and ecology. In the fifth week, we will study war and entertainment with respect to computer games, movies, literature, and comics. In the final week, we will look at the politics of dissemination of information about war in posters, museums, and media. Drawing examples from across time and space, the present course unravels this rich history through a close reading of the latest scholarly literature on the subject. Alongside this, students will get hands-on experience of analysing modern cultural artifacts of war (like movies, graphic novels, posters, and games). By the end of the course, students will have an understanding of the social, cultural, and political lives of war in the past and present times.
Pre-requisites: None.
Cross-listing: Political Science, Sociology, and International Relations
Grading Policy: Class Participation (25%) Mid-Term Presentation (35%) Term Paper (40%)
International Relations: The Rise of Populism in International Politics
Course code: IR-2013/ POL-2038
Faculty: Ananya Sharma, Assistant Professor, Ashoka University
Course Description: Populism is one of the main political buzzwords of the 21st century. The rise of populist forces in recent years has generated new challenges in many long-established democracies, such as the US, UK, Germany, Italy, Greece, and France, as well as destabilizing states worldwide, such as in Venezuela, Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, the Philippines, Thailand, and India. What explains the rise of these forces? What are the consequences? And what can be done to mitigate the risks? The course aims at bringing together the conceptual analysis of populism with comparative case studies in different regions of the world. Given the highly contested nature of populism, we will look in depth to different theories of populism, including institutional, ideological, discursive and socio-cultural understandings of populism. The course will also explore the conditions of emergence of populism and the relations between populism and key political concepts, such as democracy, security, gender, international organizations and political communication. The course covers: (i) The conceptual foundations of populism, tracing its definitional debates and mapping the typologies of populism including ideational, socio-cultural, performative approaches. (ii) Competing explanations focused on ‘demand-side’ cultural value change, economic grievances, and patterns of immigration, and also ‘supply-side’ electoral rules and party competition.(iii) The broader implications of populism for civic political culture, democratic norms and policy agenda; and alternative strategic responses.
Pre-requisites: None
Cross-listing: Political Science
Grading Policy: Attendance and Class Participation (10%) ii. Reality Check: Behind the Headlines (25%) iii. Exploriments Around the Globe: E-Zine (25%) and iv. Final end term essay (40%)
Media Studies: How to read a film
Course code: MS-2410
Faculty: Aakshi Magazine, Visiting Faculty, Ashoka University
Course Description: This is a film-analysis based course which introduces students to film studies. We will be watching films from across film industries, time periods and genres in order to understand some key concepts of film studies. Our focus will be on developing a relationship to film form and the moving image. We will also devote some time to paying attention to writing about film. Some of the films we will be watching for the course include In the mood for love, 400 Blows, Charulata, Jeanne Dielman, Where is my friend’s home, Man with a movie camera, Bicycle Thieves, among others. Students are encouraged to be open to watching films that may be different from what they usually watch or like.
Pre-requisites: None
Cross-listing: Creative Writing
Grading Policy: Grades will be distributed over class participation, weekly essays, mid-term and final submission
Entrepreneurship: Business Applications of Data Science
Course code: ENT-2045
Faculty: Tushar Jaruhar, Visiting Faculty, Ashoka University
Course Description: This course is designed to equip entrepreneurs with essential skills and knowledge in AI and technology, enabling them to leverage these tools to drive innovation and growth in their businesses. Through a combination of theoretical learning and hands-on practical exercises, participants will gain proficiency in key technologies such as Excel, KNIME, Tableau, GPT, AI driven Videos and no-code app development platforms. Participants will begin by mastering Excel, learning how to manipulate and analyze data effectively using advanced functions and formulas. They will then delve into KNIME, a powerful data analytics platform, to explore data preprocessing, analysis, and visualization techniques. With Tableau, participants will learn to create dynamic and interactive data visualizations to gain actionable insights from their data. The course will provide participants with the skills to track and analyze website traffic, measure campaign effectiveness, and make data-driven decisions for their digital marketing strategies. Participants will explore the capabilities for natural language processing and image generation, unlocking opportunities for creative content creation and automation. Additionally, participants will learn about no-code app development platforms, empowering them to build and deploy applications without writing a single line of code. By the end of the course, participants will have the knowledge and skills to harness the power of AI and technology to drive innovation, streamline operations, and create value in their entrepreneurial ventures.
Pre-requisites: None.
Cross-listing: None
Grading Policy: Relative.
Entrepreneurship: Artificial Intelligence and Technology for Entrepreneurs
Course code: ENT-2041
Faculty: Tushar Jaruhar, Visiting Faculty, Ashoka University
Course Description: This course is designed to equip entrepreneurs with essential skills and knowledge in AI and technology, enabling them to leverage these tools to drive innovation and growth in their businesses. Through a combination of theoretical learning and hands-on practical exercises, participants will gain proficiency in key technologies such as Excel, KNIME, Tableau, GPT, AI driven Videos and no-code app development platforms. Participants will begin by mastering Excel, learning how to manipulate and analyze data effectively using advanced functions and formulas. They will then delve into KNIME, a powerful data analytics platform, to explore data preprocessing, analysis, and visualization techniques. With Tableau, participants will learn to create dynamic and interactive data visualizations to gain actionable insights from their data. The course will provide participants with the skills to track and analyze website traffic, measure campaign effectiveness, and make data-driven decisions for their digital marketing strategies. Participants will explore the capabilities for natural language processing and image generation, unlocking opportunities for creative content creation and automation. Additionally, participants will learn about no-code app development platforms, empowering them to build and deploy applications without writing a single line of code. By the end of the course, participants will have the knowledge and skills to harness the power of AI and technology to drive innovation, streamline operations, and create value in their entrepreneurial ventures.
Pre-requisites: None.
Cross-listing: None
Grading Policy: Relative.
Psychology: Psychology of Health and Illness
Course code: PSY-3083
Faculty: Annie Baxi, Visiting Faculty, Ashoka University
Course Description: Course Objectives The paper is a blend of Critical and Cultural Health Psychology and intends to detail the various theoretical perspectives on health and illness and strategies that promote healing and wellbeing. Health is defined as ‘a way of being’ which is not limited by the absence of malfunction or disease but an experience that is grounded in one’s body and is shaped largely by individual and collective attributions around it. The designed course attempts to address questions like how do we identify and operationalise markers of a healthy living in a context? What are the various ways in which illness(es) can be experienced? What is the symbiotic relationship of the individual reality and social processes in understanding health and illness? Learning outcomes After completing the course, the student will be able to: Analyse and critically evaluate existing theories on health and illness Understand individual ‘symptoms’ as interactive and constituted by macro systems. Enhance skills associated with health and illness research. Apply concepts in designing health-related interventions for communities.
Pre-requisites: Introduction to Psychology (PSY-1001)
Cross-listing: None
Grading Policy: Grade Cut Offs
85 and above = A
75-84= A-
70-74= B+
65-69= B
60-64= B-
55- 59= C+
50-55= C
Below 50 = D/F
Psychology: Cognitive Neuroscience
Course Code: 3021
Faculty: Supriya Ray, Associate Professor, Ashoka University
Course Description: Cognitive neuroscience bridges the gap between biological structures and the magic of thought. By mapping neural circuits to cognitive processes like memory, emotion, perception, action and consciousness, you’ll discover how a three-pound organ inside the skull creates your entire reality. Your brain receives information of your environment in complete darkness. It has never seen light, heard a sound or touched an object – it simply interprets electrical pulses generated by your sensory organs. Everything you feel and do is contingent on a high-fidelity illusion constructed by billions of tiny cells called neurons. Join me to decode the biological blueprints of the self and master the science behind how we think, feel, perceive, and act.
Pre-requisites: None
Cross-listing: None
Grading Policy: Mid-sem exam (20%), Two quizzes (15% each), Final Exam (50%)
Political Science: Quantitative Research Methods
Course code: POL-1007
Faculty: Aashna Khanna, Visiting Faculty, Ashoka University
Course Description: This course focuses on developing the analytical skills required to engage with academic research in the social sciences. It provides a foundational overview of working with quantitative data and the tools required to analyse it, including basic statistical concepts and computational analysis using statistical software. The course covers topics such as causal inference, research design, exploratory and descriptive analysis and linear regression. No prior knowledge of mathematics or programming skills is required.
Pre-requisites: None
Cross-listing: None
Grading Policy:Problem sets (40%), midterm exam (25%), final exam (25%) and remaining 10% for participation.
Economics: Introduction to Data Analytics and Machine Learning
Course code: ECO-3401
Faculty: Parush Arora, Assistant Professor, Ashoka University
Course Description: The course discusses why data analysis is a required skill among social scientists. The course not only focus on theory but aims to teach students how to analyze data and
apply techniques. The core topics will include prediction, supervised-unsupervised learning, bias-variance trade-off, cross-validation, regularization, how linear regression is used from the perspective of prediction Vs causation etc. The course will also introduce some of the machine learning techniques like lasso, k-nearest neighbours, decision tree etc. The course aims to teach students to analyze data on RStudio andR.
Pre-requisites: Statistics for Economics (ECO-1400) and Econometrics (ECO-2400)
Cross-listing: None
Grading Policy: Student grades have 4 components: midterm exam (20% weightage), Final exam (30% weightage), Assignments (20% weightage) and final presentations (30% weightage). The syllabus for the midterm exam will be announced in class and on AMS/Moodle/Google Classroom. Final exam will be cumulative.
China Studies: Introduction to Mandarin Intensive
Course code: CHI-1101 and CHI-1102
Faculty: Shao Jhe Chin, Ashoka University
Course Description: Introduction to Mandarin is a beginner’s language course, specifically designed for students with no exposure to Modern Standard Chinese (Putonghua 普通話). The course will introduce students to the Chinese language and culture and focus on basic speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills. This includes an introduction to phonetics, basic vocabulary, and expressions of daily use. The course will prepare the students to attain a certain level of understanding and proficiency in Chinese language through interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational modes. It will integrate Chinese culture into language learning through both written and audio-visual means to familiarize students with the culture and language. At the end of the class, students will be able to read and comprehend Chinese texts on various topics moderately without the aid of pinyin and tone marks. They will be able to give presentations in Chinese on a prepared topic and write short paragraphs and compositions on a limited range of topics and situations. This course consists of a total of 90 hours, including two semesters of Mandarin language classes and cultural lessons. By the end of the program, students are expected to reach the TOCFL Novice 2 level (equivalent to HSK 2).
Pre-requisites: None
Cross-listing: None
Grading Policy: Attendance(15%),Homework assignments (20%) Multiple Quizzes(20%) Oral Presentations (25%),Cultural Activities(10%) TOCFL mock test (10%).
Note: Students are required to register for both CHI-1101 and CHI-1102 simultaneously in Summer 2026.
