University of East Anglia

This course introduces the core issues of modern social and political thought by means of in-depth study of key texts by leading thinkers of the 19th and 20th century. The course emphasizes classical social theory and liberal political theory as well as more recent departures from those traditions. Special attention is paid to the three fundamental values that inspired the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity/solidarity. Students read and discuss major works of social theory by Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu, and of political theory by J. S. Mill, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Iris Marion Young.

In this course, students study contemporary research and theoretical debates in the related fields of social neuroscience and affective neuroscience. Students explore the methodological and conceptual underpinnings of social and affective neuroscience, the state of research in a variety of topics, and why key debates in these topics are important for the discipline more broadly.

This course introduces sociolinguistics and looks at the approaches to analysing language in relations to many different social variables such as class, gender, or social distance. Students explore sociolinguistic frameworks, methods, and concepts, and learn how to communicate linguistic ideas, principles, and theories by written, oral, and visual means. Topics include dialectology, code-switching, genderlects, language policy, multilingualism, and interpersonal dynamics. By looking at the different methods and types of evidence used by sociolinguists, students are exposed to the different ways of working in this subject.

In this course students explore key texts and writers in the development of crime fiction and examine critical and theoretical responses to such texts. This course allows students to respond both creatively and critically to the concerns of, and thinking about, this diverse genre.

America post World War II is marked by great optimism and conversely an extreme sense of foreboding over the absurd conditions of life. Picking up the threads of the transatlantic discussions between continental philosophy and American fiction making, this course explores the connection between American society, literature and experimentation in the decades immediately following World War II. Authors studied may include, Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Ishmael Reed, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Hunter S Thompson, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Robert Coover for example.

This introductory course is designed to invite students into philosophical inquiry by engaging in a conversation – in the first instance - with some key figures from the history of philosophy, with an emphasis on ancient, medieval, and renaissance texts. Students examine the work of Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, Montaigne, Emerson, and Mill. Discussion is complimented by a series of mainstream Hollywood films from the 1930s to the present. The central theme of the conversation is friendship; more specifically, a certain understanding of friendship which is devoted to the moral or spiritual education of one friend by another: one which has, as its heart, the teaching of being true to oneself.

This course surveys psychological approaches to language, featuring discussions of experimental methods in psycholinguistic research and theoretical approaches to both language comprehension and production. More specifically, students study the main theories of language comprehension and production, and how psycholinguistic research develops and tests theoretical questions concerning the nature of underlying representations and the mechanisms associated with language processing. Emphasis is on a full understanding of the mapping between theoretical research questions, and the experimental methodologies and techniques used to advance our understanding of how language is processed in the adult human brain.

This course develops students' understanding of both typical and atypical development through a detailed introduction to theory and empirical research related to neurodevelopmental disorders. It highlights how genetic, environmental, biological, and cognitive factors interact to shape development and behavior over time. Students are encouraged to evaluate classical and contemporary perspectives on the subject and invited to consider practical issues related to the identification of, and provision for, children demonstrating an atypical developmental trajectory.

This course explores basic concepts and examples of Group theory. Topics include cosets, Lagrange's theorem, normal subgroups and quotient groups, first isomorphism theorem, quotient spaces in linear algebra, rings, elementary properties and examples of commutative rings, ideals, quotient rings, polynomial rings and construction of finite fields, unique factorization in rings, and applications in linear algebra.

This course aims to equip you with a knowledge of writing from across the nineteenth century, in a variety of modes (fiction, poetry, science, journalism, cultural criticism, nonsense). We will examine authors such as George Eliot, Tennyson, Dickens, Darwin, Arnold, Charlotte Bronte, and the Brownings. You will thus develop an awareness of how different kinds of writing in the period draw on, influence, and contest with each other. Likewise, you will acquire a sense for the cultural, political and socioeconomic contexts of nineteenth-century writing, and some of the material contexts in which that writing took place (serial publication, popular readership, periodical writing, public controversy).