English

This course introduces the essential tools and frameworks of sustainable finance and impact investing. It explores how ESG principles shape investment decisions, how to evaluate the trade-offs between financial returns and social impact, and how sustainable finance drives capital allocation and firm behavior. Drawing on cutting-edge research from LSE's Department of Finance, students navigate the complexities of responsible investing and understand where investors and industry need to focus to support the transition to a more sustainable economy.

Focusing on two key areas, the course equips students to analyze how sustainable finance and impact investing create value while also developing the skills to lead organizational change toward more sustainable practices.

This course examines the study of the ‘blue’ spaces of our planet—oceans, rivers, reefs, and inland bodies of water—through case studies in the arts and literature. Using the vantage point in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, “The Great Connector”, it considers environments and peoples whose lives are explicitly connected with and determined by the ocean. It considers kinship, sovereignty, and belonging through aesthetic, historical, religious, political, social, and material manifestations. Situated around issues of ocean acidification, pollution, and sea-level rise, it critically reflects on ways the humanities can improve our knowledge of cultures, histories, publics and practices of the blue planet.

Art and cultural heritage is not only a tool to express the creative value of an artist, of a community, of a movement, it is also inundated and steered by a complex set of legal rules and institutions. Art Law has been quipped as a quixotic way of navigating through concepts from contracts, property, and taxation to deeper, ethical issues such as moral rights, the levity of ethnic repatriation, and memorialization. This course surveys an expanse of topics to serve as an introduction into both art and cultural property law. It traverses the intersectionality of art, culture, and international law in topics as varied from Nazi looted art, generative AI, capitalism in the art market, institutional actors such as auction houses and museums, culture in times of war, and modes of dispute resolution. This course simulates a moot court, on a fictional looted art case. Prior knowledge and artistic inclination is not required for this course (but passion is preferred).

This course addresses the ethics and politics of the social sciences, and the role of the social sciences in ethics and political philosophy. Students address questions such as: Are the social sciences inferior to the natural sciences? Should citizens, scientists, or the market decide what gets researched? Are some topics ethically, or politically, out of bounds for scientific research? How should science guide policy and what would evidence-based policy look like? Is cost-benefit analysis the best way to choose a policy? Does everything have a price? Should our ethics be informed by the findings of social science? And what should the relationship between political philosophy and political science be like? The course has two overall aims: first, to encourage critical reflection on the social sciences and, second, to explore the relationship of ethics and political philosophy to the social sciences.

This course is about the problem of crime. It introduces some of the central issues, themes, and concepts involved in thinking critically about crime. Students are concerned with exploring how perspectives drawn from across the social sciences can inform our understanding of this significant contemporary social issue. 

The course offers students a strong foundation in the theoretical side of computer science. The course explores the skills involved in dealing with abstract systems and constructing proofs, through both teaching and exercises. Students learn to construct rigorous arguments about properties of the Lambda Calculus, construct reduction sequences according to particular reduction orders, and understand the relationship between the Lambda Calculus and other notions of computability.

The course focuses on formal descriptions (models) of computational behavior. Students learn about the operational semantics (formal description) of a simple 'WHILE' programming language; the operational semantics of other styles of real-world languages, such as Java and Haskell; and equivalent definitions of algorithm, initiated in the 1930s and providing the foundations for programming languages and computation.

This course offers an overview of international politics since 1914, providing a factual grounding and surveying the main historiographical debates. Lectures and classes examine the origins, course, and aftermath of the First World War; the Great Depression, appeasement,  the origins of the Second World War in East Asia and Europe; the course and aftermath of the Second World War and the global origins of the Cold War: and aspects of the Cold War world, including decolonization, European integration, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the ‘American war’ in Vietnam, and peaks and troughs of tension between the superpowers. The course also addresses the history of international organizations and of peace movements. It closes with the end of the Cold War and the origins of the Persian Gulf/Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003.

Through the study of the trial transcripts and related documents of the investigation, as well as all kinds of resources on the events of 1691-93, this course examines the Puritans’ worldview and the socio-political background that shaped their reactions to the events leading up to the trials, introduces the dynamics of this very unique succession of events from beginning to end, and assesses the historiography of the Salem witch trials. It covers the ways religious, diplomatic, political, cultural, social and economic factors combined in such a unique way to create the crisis precipitating the Salem witch trials. They offer a detailed survey of religion, spirituality, superstition, magic, the supernatural, public rituals, as understood by 17th century New Englanders and which explain this extraordinary “witchcraft craze” they indulged in. Once the context is laid out, the course moves to a detailed examination of the witch trials at Salem themselves. The economic and demographic patterns apparent during 1692 and 1693 are examined, as well as the relationships between witchcraft accusations, gender, and inheritance practices. The relationship between these witchcraft trials and the traumas faced by New Englanders at the hands of the Natives during King Philip’s and King William’s wars are also alluded to.

In 1937, anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet Charles Madge and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings began a "scientific experiment" recruiting members of the public, to "systematically" observe the lives of ordinary Britons. The Mass Observation project ran from 1937-1966 and was reanimated in 1981 continuing to today. This course uses the Mass Observation archive – held at the University of Sussex and substantially digitized by Adam Matthew – and its unique collection of diaries, study directives, and social surveys to explore class, gender, emotions, and experience across the second half of the twentieth century to the present. It also offers students first-hand insight into the sources and methods available (life writing, surveys and "directives," social investigations, oral histories) for interrogating constructions of gender, class, sexuality, race and ethnicity, age, ableism, and faith commitments over the last eighty years.  

Virgil’s AENEID has been described as a "classic" of western literature for many reasons, and this course is devoted to identifying those reasons and assessing their validity. This course looks closely at the epic itself: its story, which bridges myth and history; its literary form, which depends upon an exceptionally wide range of influences; and its various social, political, philosophical and religious viewpoints. Students also study the ways in which later artists, critics, and scholars have read the Aeneid.