English

This course provides an overview of the goals institutional actors are pursuing when they design and reform an electoral system. Conceptual dimensions and criteria for categorizing and comparing electoral systems are discussed. Specific national cases are studied to assess the impact of electoral laws on party systems, legislator behavior, and interbranch relations. After completing a long series of case studies, a comparative perspective is adopted to discuss recent scholarly research in this field. Electoral systems are made up of rules that govern a variety of issues related to how elections work, including rules about how candidates get access to the ballot; the extent to which voters can disturb the ballot presented to them; to what level votes will be pooled before seats are awarded; whether voters can select individual candidates or just party banners; how seats are allocated within a district; whether certain thresholds must be met etc. Therefore, electoral rules incentivize certain behaviors and are strategy oriented. Finally, both aspects of intraparty and interparty politics are explored.

The course broadens, and selectively deepens, students' understanding of finance, building on their existing knowledge of financial economics. The course covers a broad range of topics, with both a theoretical and an empirical emphasis. These include topics in corporate finance, investments and performance evaluation, and international finance. The course consists of two interchangeable ten-week components, one on investments and international finance, and the other on corporate finance.

Recent years have seen a debate about the waning of war, though for millions of people around the world, wars and violence are part of their everyday lives - with implications far beyond the war-torn states’ borders. This course introduces students to major trends in warfare (types of wars, the actors engaged in wars, targets in wars, funding of warfare, technology of warfare), theories explaining these trends, the relationship between warfare and state-building, and ethical questions concerning how wars are fought. The course first looks at major concepts and theories, and then moves on to examine contemporary debates and issue areas such as international law, international institutions such as the UN Security Council and NATO, civil wars and peacekeeping, climate-conflict nexus, weapons of mass destruction, cyber warfare, new technology, future weapons, and killer robots.  

Students study works by post Spanish Civil War writers. The novels chosen are written in radically different styles, ranging from social realism and naturalism to post-modernity or extreme experimentalism, and treat an array of themes, the conflict between the individual and society, the struggle against social norms and sexual morality, the deployment of fiction as a means of shaping both personal and national identity, and the alienating effects of modern society. Via these novels a variety of issues are considered, such as the changing role of the novel over the 20th century, the way novelists create an individual "voice" in dialogue with their predecessors, the function of the reader in the interpretative process, and the socio-political environment and sexual politics of reading and writing fiction.

In this course, students cover contemporary safety and environmental concerns as they impinge on the practicing engineer, the legal and regulatory background to engineering activity, to ensure safe operation of hazardous processes, and the procedures to be followed in seeking a license from the environmental protection agencies for the operation of processes involving prescribed substances. Generation, propagation, and the fate of pollutants discharged to the air, to water, and to the ground are discussed along with means of mitigating emissions by elimination, substitution, and pre-discharge treatment are considered. Methods of identifying process hazards are introduced leading to risk assessment and consequence analysis using hand calculation methods are presented to allow risk assessment and its application to the process industries to be appreciated.

This course explores the dynamic discourse at the intersection of contemporary art and digital technologies, equipping students with a practical and contextual knowledge of how these technologies are reimaging the landscape of contemporary art practice. The course explores what it is to have "an art without objects" and the impact this is having, in turn, on the international art market and the curatorial field. Topics include artificial intelligence, augmented theory, virtual reality, NFT's, digital conservatism, and the history of digital art.

Cuba, the "Pearl of the Antilles" had long been the heartpiece of imperial aspirations. One of the last Spanish colonies after the revolutions in South and Central America, it played a defining role in Spanish imperial identity. Meanwhile in the US, intellectuals had argued all throughout the 19th century that the island was a natural extension to the Nation, and should be conquered as a logical conclusion to the Monroe Doctrine. When after the war of 1898 the island came into American hands, Spain fell into a deep crisis of identity. The United States though took its first steps into the arena of colonial world politics, in turn becoming an empire. All the while, the Cuban’s desire for independence became a mere footnote in the aftermath. The colonial and imperial struggles had another dimension to them: Gender. A common propaganda theme in the US depicted the Spaniards as raping Cuba. While Theodore Roosevelt and his "Rough Riders" came to define the ideal American masculinity after the war, Spaniards questioned if they were still manly enough to belong to the club of civilized European nations. This seminar will follow three objectives: First, understanding the importance of Cuba to Spain and the United States before the war of 1898, as well as the events leading up to the war. Second, comparing the ascent of the American Empire with the decline of the Spanish Empire. Third, introducing the analytical category of gender as a tool to understanding geopolitical conflicts in the age of colonialism.

This course focuses on derivatives, with a particular emphasis on equity derivatives (standard call and put options, exotic options), futures and forward contracts, and interest rate derivatives (swaps, caps and floors, swaptions). It systematically addresses three basic questions: how do these products work, i.e. what are their payoffs? How can they be used, for hedging purposes or as part of trading strategies? And above all: how are they priced? The course emphasises a small number of powerful ideas: absence of arbitrage, replication, and risk-neutral pricing. These are typically introduced in the context of discrete-time models, but the course also covers some well-known continuous-time models, starting with a comprehensive treatment of the Black-Scholes model. The level of mathematics is appropriate for third-year students with a solid quantitative background.

This course presents the study of intermediate piano repertoire and application of harmony at the keyboard. Students learn various important keyboard skills and techniques that enhance their understanding of and experience in making music. Such skills include harmonization, transposition, figured bass, improvisation, piano techniques, score reading, musical interpretation, solo and ensemble playing.

The course provides a comprehensive introduction to the modern theory of finance. It describes the functioning of the main asset markets, the most important theories explaining the formulation of prices of financial assets, and the role of financial markets in the optimal allocation of risk bearing. Students develop an understanding of the economics and characteristics of the main financial assets.