English

Every war story, according to Leo Tolstoy, begins with the disclaimer that war cannot be understood by those who have not witnessed it for themselves – yet the story is always told anyway. Since the earliest works of art and literature, war has been a persistent topic and a prevailing theme, but it has also presented a challenge for artists and writers: while culture cannot resist representing war, war often seems to resist being represented. This course asks why war has seemed to hold such a challenge for representation in art and writing, and how artists and writers have attempted to overcome this resistance to image-making and storytelling. Our primary focus is on literary works that offer rich and evocative writings of modern warfare, but students begin by paying brief attention to earlier works of literature, as well as some visual pieces, that set the scene for our cultural understanding of warfare today.

This course examines the rise of humanitarianism as a dominant way in which both powerful and weak actors conceptualize and respond to a range of social problems and processes, such as political conflict, emancipation, poverty, and migration. This is core terrain for anthropology, because the figure of the human lies at the center of humanitarian discourses and forms of action.  In this course we historicize humanitarianism and ethnographically investigate the possibilities and limits of humanitarian frameworks and action as ways of confronting the challenges that face our world.

This course provides an advanced, comparative insight into citizenship debates with a specific focus on the intersection between citizenship, migration, and belonging. The course primarily concentrates on Europe and Northern America but systematically introduces comparative elements with other regions of the world (Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East) to provide a wider, global perspective on the politics of citizenship. The course delves into the transformations of citizenship regimes through the review and discussion of key scientific contributions in the field of citizenship studies, which has developed at the nexus of different disciplines over the past thirty years (political science, sociology, history, law). Beyond discussing citizenship and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion it entails, this course is also an opportunity to address more general concerns in social science research, such as how to assess change, how to ensure comparability across contexts, and how to address the gap between policy on paper and policy in practice.

This is an advanced course considering the economic forces that govern the geographic distribution of economic activity and its implications for economic outcomes and public policy issues. The course is divided into two parts. The first part develops a simple theory of cities as the result of the interaction between agglomeration and congestion forces. It studies in detail the agglomeration forces that attract firms, consumers, and workers to cities, as well as the congestion forces that limit the size of cities and how to overcome them through transportation networks and housing markets. The second part of the course extends the basic model to study a system of many locations, the dynamics of city growth and decline, and to conclude, the role of cities and geography for climate change.

This course examines gendered and sexual attitudes and behaviors in Scotland during the period c.1800-1918. Traditionally perceived as an era of change from a time of repression to a more liberated modernity, recent historiography points to diversity, ambiguity, and continuity as well as change.

This intensive three-week course explores, experiments, and discovers students' creative writing abilities and tastes and embraces creative writing as an ongoing process, an entrepreneurial "fail better" and "succeed together" via constructive feedback experience. Fortune helps those who dare, and sharing one’s own writing can be, albeit a means to self-expression and experimentation, scary, vulnerable, and quite uncertain. In this course, however, students can grow together in a practice-based environment exploring boundaries, challenging stereotypes and developing skills in a fun, intense, and stimulating way. Get inspired by poetry, prose, drama. Get a peek into the publishing world and the life of a writer. Experiment, play, and create with writing styles, language, and online media. More importantly, do what all writers have to do in the end of the day, write! Not a course for the faint of heart, but definitely one for those who want to be more creative, perceptive, develop a writer’s toolbox, and see London with literary-colored glasses. 

This course analyzes the rights linked to European citizenship as well as for those residing in the EU territory. It explores case law developed by the Court of Justice of the European Union, as well as the tools available for civil society to participate in the policies and decision-making processes in the EU. It focuses on the means of communication that EU citizens and residents have before the institutions of the European Union for expressing their opinion, practical needs and concerns.

This course provides an introduction to the field of cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology is defined as the study of all processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used (Neisser, 1967). The course aims to scientifically explore and gain insight into human cognitive mechanisms and processes. The information processing of the mind as a cognitive system is modeled and explained based on experimental data. 

Information is a fundamental concept in the world around us that can be investigated from several perspectives. The mathematical theory of information provides a framework for a formal description and interpretation of information. In many ways, this mathematical framework (its applications and the interpretations it provides) is based on concepts from probability theory and statistics. This course provides students with an introduction to the field of information theory. Students will learn to apply and interpret a wide range of concepts from statistics and probability theory to develop, model, and understand the concept of information, as well as related ideas, in a structured and organized way. Many of the tools of statistics and probability theory students encounter in the course should be familiar to them from introductory or intermediate statistics courses, while other concepts might be new.

This course presents a conceptual and practical introduction to object-oriented programming and software engineering practices, exemplified by Java. As well as providing a grounding in the use of Java, the course will cover general principles of programming in imperative and object-oriented frameworks. Students learn to develop programs that support experimentation, simulation, and exploration in other parts of the Informatics curriculum (e.g. the capacity to implement, test, and observe a particular algorithm).