University of St Andrews

This course surveys the history of Europe and the Mediterranean world from the 12th to the 15th centuries. The course takes thematic cross-sections which enable students to understand not just the crucial events that shaped the period (such as the Crusades, the fall of Constantinople, the Black Death, the threat of Mongol invasions and popular rebellions), but also the mentalities of the people who experienced them. The thematic structure of tutorials allows comparison within each theme, covering not just Europe but also the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. Possible themes may include political structures, popular devotion, religious dissent, transmission of intellectual thought, violence and warfare, marriage, childhood, the persecution of minorities, assimilation and co-existence, and travel and exploration.

Narratives about antiquity have reverberated through history. The stories the Greeks and Romans told about themselves and their past shaped the complex societies in which they lived. Today, narratives about the origins and fall of classical societies continue to be used to make claims about where modern societies came from, how they should be run, and how far we have come from our origins. This course examines influential narratives from the ancient world and their reinterpretations in later periods, from the 19th century to the present day. Possible topics include the origins of Greece and Rome and their entanglement in ancient and modern ideas of nationhood, culture and race, and the fall of the Roman empire and the lessons that have been drawn from it. This course shows that narratives of antiquity have always been embedded in contemporary culture, society, and politics, and that they continue to shape the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

This course provides a survey of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Europe and beyond from c. 1280 to c.1580. It follows a roughly chronological course, from Giotto at the beginning of the 14th century, to Dürer, Michelangelo, and Titian in the 16th century. Attention is paid to the issues relating to the wider artistic situation of the Late Medieval and Renaissance periods, including those of patronage, iconography, materials, technique and types of commission. Although the primary focus of the course is on Western Europe, lectures also address how European art formed alongside non-Western traditions, including the important role played by global trade.

This course examines the psychology of dementia focusing on the cognitive and psychosocial impact on individuals with a diagnosis and those who care for them. Students examine patterns of both lost and retained cognitive skills in people with dementia. Students focus on how retained skills can be maximized, and how the caregiving experience can be improved for both people living with dementia and their caregivers. 

Waste and recycling seem like every-day, if important, issues with which we are all familiar. But do we actually know what waste is? This course introduces students to the anthropological study of waste, an area that straddles politics, economy, and the environment. Early anthropological studies focused on issues such as the symbolic pollution beliefs associated with persons and substances within a coherent cultural framework. A more recent and clearly defined "anthropology of waste" has taken discards and the regimes of production, labor, and value that generates them, as its central areas of study. This course introduces key theoretical understandings of waste alongside compelling ethnographic accounts of waste work that involves both dignity and discrimination, citizenship, and segregation. 

Researchers often overlook the environmental impact of cutting edge research; however, there is growing awareness that environmental sustainability needs to be embedded into all aspects of scientific research, and that all scientific communities need to take action to preserve our planet. This interdisciplinary course meets this challenge head on. Students review scientific benefits of state-of-the-art research methods in psychology and neuroscience, while also discussing methods for assessing and mitigating the environmental impact of these activities. Students evaluate research methods such as lab work with animals and people, scientific imaging, field work, and AI and data sciences. In the context of these methodologies, students discuss the practical and ethical dimensions revolving around emerging sustainability assessment and mitigation methods both inside and outside the University.

The course develops an understanding of visual perception and its functions. Focus is on the integration of findings from physiology, neuropsychology, anatomy, and experimental psychology. Topic areas include theories of human vision and their application to understanding our ability to perceive distinct visual properties, for example the shape, size, location, and identity of objects. 

The Late Republic (first century BCE) was a time of change and conflict in the city of Rome and the wider Roman Empire. In political terms the history of that century is dominated by the series of civil wars which led to the political dominance and assassination of Julius Caesar. The literature and art of that period in many cases reflect those tensions and problems. It was also a time of rapid development of Roman art and literature as it sought to form its own new identity through the traditions it had inherited from Greek culture. From the seething passions of Catullus' poetry, through Lucretius' philosophical poetic treatise ON THE NATURE OF THINGS, to the stylish rhetoric of Cicero, the course sets the main literary texts of that period against the broader backdrop of Roman art, culture, and social life. All texts will be studied in translation.

This course analyses how institutions shape economics policies in modern democracies. The course covers the tools and looks at some of the frontier research in the field. Topics include collective choice and voting, political accountability, redistribution, media, immigration, and populism.

Early Greece was the age of beautiful poetry and cutting-edge philosophy. The course explores the diversity of early Greek thought at the crossroads of poetry and philosophy, from the 8th to the 5th century BCE starting with Hesiod's struggle to re-order the world of gods and humans: Hesiod's work stands side by side with Homer's poems as foundational works of ancient Greek epic. We then consider the exciting literary and intellectual experiments of lyric poets and philosopher poets, who saw poetry as a way of writing philosophy, exploring love and attacking enemies. Authors to be studied include Sappho, Theognis, Solon, Xenophanes, and Empedocles. All texts are studied in translation.