Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford

This course introduces climate change law and policy. It examines climate change as a disruptive legal phenomenon, exploring how it is framed and how legal systems have responded to it. It provides a foundation in climate law and policy across international, EU, and selected national legal orders. It covers also climate litigation, including the growing importance of judicial adjudication and the role of courts in climate governance. Building on this foundation, the course then examines specific climate measures in greater depth, including carbon markets, greenhouse gas removal technologies, and critical raw material mining. Finally, it addresses greenwashing and the risks it poses to the credibility and effectiveness of climate action.
 

This course explores the universe at the smallest distances and highest energies where quantum mechanics and special relativity collide. Through lectures from world-experts and hands on seminars, students will join the particle physicists from the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS experiment in analyzing real proton collisions from the world’s largest machine - uncovering the secrets of the building blocks of the universe. The course uses coding notebooks to teach Python data analysis techniques used by professional particle physicists, progressing from the very basics, to rediscovering the Higgs boson, and culminating to an original analysis of real data. Along the way students develop computer coding, big data analysis and machine learning skills that will carry over to the real world.

The course begins with an introduction to the basics of programming in Python, in particular understanding object-oriented programming and its importance to deep learning. The course quickly proceeds to an introduction to artificial intelligence, examining the fundamentals of supervised machine learning, including linear regression, logistic regression, neural networks, and gradient descent. In the second week, students explore image processing, investigating transformations, convolutional filters, and edge detection, before an introduction to convolutional neural networks and some prominent CNN architectures such as VGG and ResNet. In the final part of the course, students look at the core concepts of natural language processing, including sequence modeling, autoregressive models, and recurrent neural networks.

Does the law protect or undermine our freedom? Which legal doctrines govern our speech, assembly, property, and personal autonomy?

This course offers the opportunity to explore these questions and more through an introduction to the legal dimensions of freedom. This course is a journey from philosophical foundations - negative and positive liberty, republican theories, and the rule of law - to concrete frameworks in areas such as civil liberties, economic rights, and digital autonomy. The course sharpens legal research and critical analysis skills, helps students engage with case studies and simulations, and produce essays that interrogate how concepts of liberty shape contemporary law.

The course would be especially beneficial for students looking ahead to postgraduate study in Law, or to careers or further study in Law, Politics, or Public Policy.

This course focuses on the novels of Jane Austen, four published in her lifetime (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma), two published posthumously (Persuasion, Northanger Abbey), and one unfinished fragment (Sanditon). It examines key themes in Austen’s novels, such as the roles of family and femininity, of class, manners, status and authority, and teaches about Austen’s pioneering and distinctive narrative techniques, including her use of free indirect discourse, epistolary narration, and natural dialogue. This course provides a thorough introduction to the life, works, and influence of Jane Austen, and is perfect for students seeking to develop their knowledge of this popular author and their skills of literary analysis.

The course offers a rigorous, varied, and exciting introduction to the scholarly field of book history, engaging the University of Oxford’s world-famous manuscript and archival collections. Students will take part in hands-on bookcraft workshops and learn from academics undertaking cutting-edge book-historical research. Each week of the program focuses on a particular period of book history, starting with a focus on the medieval period (500-1500), proceeding to the early modern period (1500-1800), and concluding with the modern and contemporary period (1800-present day), while also reflecting on conceptual, textual, and material connections between them.

The course traces a history of the fantasy genre's formation and crystallization, from its medieval beginnings to the present. It looks at the story-telling and world-building literary devices used by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote his medieval bestseller about King Arthur in Oxford Castle, and the authors of Renaissance Romance fantasies. It also explores Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, a forerunner of science fiction, and 18th-century Gothic fantasies which paved the way for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The course follows Oxford's own Lewis Carroll, Scottish fantasy author George Macdonald, and the pre-Raphaelite William Morris through to Tolkien and Lewis and beyond. It also considers recent critical approaches to the fantasy genre as well as discusses whether these pre-21st century texts lend themselves with ease to the modern media of cinema, TV serialization, or computer games, and which adjustments have been made or are still to be made to make them relevant to our own times.

This course explores how group identities are formed, how individuals understand themselves in relation to others, and how both connection and division emerge within and between social and political groups. Drawing on key theories, cutting-edge research, and global case studies, students examine the psychological mechanisms that shape social relations including how people connect, cooperate, and sometimes come into conflict.

From group belonging and everyday social interactions to the psychological roots of intergroup bias, and polarization, the course traces how social minds are shaped by identity, group life and the broader social and political context. It then moves into real-world applications, exploring how ideas from social psychology can help us to better understand division and conflict as well as foster connection and promote social change. This course also considers the role of social media and how it can both drive conflict and foster connection.

This course is a comprehensive tour through the writing life and theatrical legacy of William Shakespeare. Taking its cue from the First Folio (1623), the book that preserved many of Shakespeare’s plays for posterity, the course spends one week on each of the main genres in which the author wrote and introduces students to key questions raised by plays such as The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Richard III, Hamlet, and Othello, among others. It overviews the major plays of Shakespeare’s career and the critical questions that shape how we read them today, while giving students the chance to engage with the material conditions of Shakespeare’s world. The course includes trips to the playwright’s birthplace and grave in Stratford-upon-Avon, classroom sessions in the Bodleian Library in which students can view Shakespeare’s original early printed books, and the opportunity to see a performance of a Shakespeare play.

This course teaches about the role of attention as a fundamental cognitive process and how it relates to short and long-term memory. It examines the phenomenon of learning, looking at learning theories and neuroimaging evidence to discover how learning occurs in the brain; and investigates the role of cognition in language, sleep, and consciousness. Throughout the course students learn about the methods involved in studying Psychology and how to think critically about empirical research. Introduction to Cognitive Psychology offers a solid foundation for future study in Psychology and provides an opportunity to hear about cutting-edge research taking place at the University of Oxford.