University of St Andrews

Contemporary global problems such as pollution, biodiversity loss, and population growth are critical issues for the planet's future and demonstrate the interdependence of social and environmental systems. This course unpacks the complexity of these challenges by analyzing different manifestations of "a world in crisis" as questions of geography - shaped by geographic processes operating at a range of scales (from the global to the local). The course thus explores how Geography works as a "world discipline" that is equipped to examine global problems from a range of human, environmental and physical geography perspectives. 

Incentives economics (also known as economics of information and contract theory) studies interactions between economic agents in the presence of information asymmetries, such as sellers being better informed than buyers about product quality, or workers knowing better than employers the cost of exerting effort in a given task. Incentives economics is part of the core toolkit of modern graduate-level micro- and macroeconomics. This course introduces basic models featuring risk-sharing, private information and moral hazard, and covers a selection of applications among the following: workers compensation, corporate finance, equal pay communes, pricing, insurance, and higher education.

This course  leads students through the scientific quest for the origin of life on Earth and the prospect for finding life on other planets, both in our solar system and on habitable worlds elsewhere in the Galaxy. The course covers diverse topics in biology, geology, astronomy and chemistry, which together comprise the field of astrobiology. The course studies the origins and evolution of planets and life on Earth, and uses this as a framework for how to search for life in our Solar System and beyond, including exploring how science interfaces with society. Due to the wide range of science topics covered, the course is applicable to any Science faculty student. A key component of the course is to examine the scientific method, how scientific theories are developed and refuted, and discuss the burden of proof for extraordinary claims.

The course introduces some of the most interesting and innovative work in contemporary fiction, and gives students the knowledge and the tools to read it, judge it, and write about it with pleasure and with critical insight. Students are asked to think rigorously about the idea of the "contemporary," and how that term might relate to other literary and cultural categories. Spanning the last twenty years or so, the set texts don't attempt any sort of representative cross-section of fiction of the period; rather than seeking such a survey, students concentrate on how certain writers have used fictional form to think about what is old and what is new: what is current, or anachronistic, or ahead of its time. (To think, that is, about the structure of contemporaneity itself.)

This course explores human memory and attention. Topics include theories of attention, short- and long-term memory, and processes involved in memory encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. The course emphasizes the development of the skill of critical evaluation of evidence and theory. Lectures are accompanied by practical classes, in which students gain experience in experimental methods used in cognitive research, and seminars in which research papers are critically evaluated.

This course examines the relationship between art and political struggle in the 20th and 21st centuries, exploring how practitioners around the globe have contributed to socio-cultural change and forged new ways of seeing. It addresses how artists, architects, photographers, and designers have responded to the increasingly industrialized and fast-paced nature of modern and contemporary experience, and how this has led to a constant re-evaluation of what might be expected of art. Each week is devoted to a specific theme, including modernism, the metropolis, materiality, protest, dissent, and globalization.

Castles remain the most impressive physical reminders of Scotland's medieval past. The great royal fortresses of Edinburgh and Stirling provide symbols of Scotland's past nationhood; the ruined walls and towers of baronial castles demonstrate the power and pretensions of the great lords of the middle ages. As military strongholds, centers of government and lordship, and residences of royal and aristocratic households, these castles give access to the main themes of medieval Scottish politics and society. This course studies the castle in its context: the changing needs of military and domestic architecture in response to the needs of war and peace; the siting of castles and their use in wider structures of authority from Lothian and the marches to the Hebrides; and their role in warfare, as places of refuge and as bases for garrisons. Architectural and archaeological evidence is combined with descriptions of the Scottish castle in chronicles and record sources to obtain a full understanding of the buildings and their functions.