University of Cambridge, Pembroke College

This course offers a comprehensive understanding of how pathogens emerge, evolve and spread as well as an insight into the cutting-edge tools applied in their study and measures for their control. The course moves from pathogen-related genetic factors that enable pathogens to adapt to new hosts or acquire antibiotic resistance that make them so difficult to treat, through to ecological and host factors such as intensive agriculture, and climate change that bring us in to contact with new diseases.

This course approaches forensic psychology as a field shaped by evidence, interpretation, method, and power. Students explore how police, courts, therapists, and predictive technologies translate lived experiences of harm into technical categories; risk, pathology, disorder, and how these translations influence decisions about victims and offenders. Students also critically analyze why victims sometimes remain attached to their perpetrators, drawing on emerging frameworks such as weaponized attachment.

This course focuses on the interdisciplinary studies fields of public and global health, especially the contribution made to them by social sciences like political economy and medical sociology. The course addresses how our health is shaped by factors such as class, gender, race, profit-seeking behavior, climate change, and technology; it also questions what constitutes "medicine" and what role it plays in society, and how health policy shapes and is shaped by these considerations.

A research project that assigns students to expert professors in their proposed research topic. The course takes the student's research capabilities to a more professional level. This can be most closely compared to what is called a supervised research project in American universities.

The Economics of Information is a critical field that explores how information affects economic decisions, market outcomes, and organizational structures. In this course, students investigate concepts such as information asymmetry, signaling, screening, moral hazard, and adverse selection in order to understand how information and communication may lead to unfavorable outcomes in interactions between agents. Students explore the impact of these phenomena on markets, contracts, auctions, and policy-making, and show how to design institutions that could help to alleviate issues related to asymmetric information.

The course focuses on the ways in which gender, power, and sexuality shape and are shaped by our lived experiences, social interactions, institutional structures, and cultural norms. Students engage with diverse theoretical frameworks to critically analyze a wide array of relevant topics, including reproduction, sex work, and intimate relationships, among others. Through contemporary case studies, the course explores how gender and sexuality intersect with power, race, class, ethnicity, age and ability, and how it operates within wider institutional, political, and socio-cultural frameworks.

How do states cooperate with each other? How do they engage in conflict? Do these strategies of engagement change over time? These are some of the most important questions in the field of International Relations (IR) and they lie at the center of this course. Researchers and practitioners have asked those questions throughout human history – the increasingly competitive landscape of international security in the last decade makes such questions all the more potent. Starting with the onset of World War I and ending in the near future, this course explores the nature of conflict and cooperation over approximately the past 100 years. It introduces students to the different actors, processes, and technologies that shape these dynamics. This involves themes and topics such as why and when states start wars, how they may be prevented, how powerful states build international orders and for what reasons, whether international institutions are autonomous from states or subservient to them, the consequences of the rise of populism on interstate politics, and the nature of the current conflict between Russia and the West.

The idea of "Britain" has been shifting and contentious throughout the history of the British Isles. A "United Kingdom" only since 1707, Great Britain moved from a minor island nation to an imperial power over the course of the Early Modern Period and contemporary political issues such as Brexit show that its position on the global stage is no more secure or straightforward today. This course looks at art in Britain from the Middle Ages to the present day, exploring how art and artists have responded to and, to some degree, have shaped these social and political developments. Throughout the lectures and seminars, students are invited to question what we can understand to be "British art" and how conceptions of it may have changed.