University of Edinburgh

This course is an introduction to race and colonial studies. Why do ideas about race feature in social relations today? What structures of knowledge do ideas about racial difference rely upon? How do historical projects of race-making come to be refashioned in contemporary social life? This course engages with such questions by examining the provenance of race and its defining role in the formation of colonial modernity. It provides an overview of key theoretical approaches and methodological debates in the study of race, racism, and colonial formations across various disciplines and intersecting sites of modern power.

This is a course in abstract algebra, although connections with other fields are stressed as often as possible. It covers some of the jewels in the crown of undergraduate mathematics, drawing together groups, rings, and fields to solve problems that resisted the efforts of mathematicians for many centuries. The powerful central ideas of this course are now crucial to many modern problems in algebra, differential equations, geometry, number theory, and topology. 

The study of children and childhood has long been of interest in the fields of archaeology, history, and classics, highlighting the importance of this particular age group in understanding past societies. It is a matter of fact that children have always been present throughout pre-history to the modern-day, but their voices and lived experiences have not always been directly accessible, often presented through an archaeological record generated, and interpreted, by adults. The concept of childhood too is a social construct, subject to the needs of a population within a particular geographic or temporal context, and economic, political, cultural and environmental influence.

Our contemporary world continues to be shaped by many different kinds of empire: from the nation states that assert political and military control over mineral resources in foreign lands to the global corporations that control public access to medicines, food, and telecommunications; from attempts to unify new territories and populations by force to attempts to expand global markets under the banner of freedom and liberation. This course asks, how are we to understand Empires today. How might we approach Empires as cultural projects of power and control? How might we approach Empires from the perspective of those without them? What does it mean to consider contemporary Empires in the light of colonialism? And how might the study of past Empires help us to reflect on the limits to globalizing ambition?
 

This course provides a broad introduction to Marine Archaeology and illustrates through a series of case studies how crucial the sea was in terms of human development. The social, economic, and cultural progress of humanity has always been closely connected to the water and the sea. From the spread of human groups in early prehistory to the importance of container shipping and maritime commerce to modern economies today, sea travel has remained central to the development and maintenance of human societies. 

This is a course in the rigorous treatment of Fourier series and related topics, including Fourier series, Fourier coefficients, trigonometric polynomials and orthogonality; properties of Fourier coefficients; Bessel's inequality, Parseval's identity and the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma; various notions of convergence of Fourier series, including pointwise, uniform and mean square convergence. Summability methods, convolution and Young's inequality; Fourier Analysis in broader contexts; for example, Fourier integrals, Fourier expansions in groups, Schwartz spaces and tempered distributions.

This course introduces the basic mathematical tools of Quantum Mechanics with a special emphasis on the connection between physical phenomena and mathematical modelling. The Hilbert space of physical states is reviewed as a particular case of a linear vector space. General properties of representation theory are discussed for the case of finite groups and are applied to quantum mechanical systems. Representations of the continuous groups U(1), SO(3), and SU(2) are presented and discussed in relation with invariance under translations and rotations. The general theory of angular momentum is introduced and applied to cases of physical interest. Quantum mechanical results are compared to their classical counterparts for a number of physical systems.

This course introduces students to essential notions in algebraic topology, such as compact surfaces, homotopies, fundamental groups, and covering spaces.

This course focuses on the material culture of the Roman world from the early history of Rome through to the early Christian period (c. 8th century BC - 4th century AD). The lectures examine different strands of the art and archaeology of this period, exploring what these reveal about contemporary society and culture, urban and rural life, religious practices, death and burial, visual display, domestic life, the negotiation of status and power, warfare, and interactions between groups within and beyond the Roman empire. Emphasis is placed on considering the potential and limitations of the archaeological record and its role in elucidating patterns of change and heterogeneity across time and space, from the city of Rome to the most distant reaches of Roman influence.

This course explores literary engagements with the French Revolution together with responses to the Haitian Revolution, while Sir Walter Scott's inauguration of the historical novel frames our discussion of later responses to the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. The course considers the multiple forms of discursive and ideological connection between literature and history, and students think about what literary forms are capable of registering the shock of historical novelty: the historical novel looms large in that respect, but students also explore the transformation of the bildungsroman, the differing poetics of various mid-Victorian writers, fin-de-siècle utopian imaginaries and early examples of the Empire "writing back." The seminars discuss various non-literary "para-texts," including writings by anti-colonial rebels such as Toussaint L'Ouverture, Firoz Shah and Paul Bogle, in order to explore the broader intertextual, international and political constellations that inform the literature of revolution and rebellion during the long 19th century.