University of Edinburgh

This course discusses a range of contemporary security challenges providing a set of key concepts that help you develop an in-depth understanding of the post-Cold war geopolitical and strategic environment. It seeks to provide students with the analytical tools for analyzing and assessing respective policy responses, and for developing critical perspectives that go beyond the mere explanation of political practice. In doing so, the course draws on a range of International Relations theories, illustrating ways in which various approaches can serve as a framework for analyzing global and regional security. The course places particular emphasis on the dichotomy between problem-solving and critical approaches to the study of global security and this is also reflected in the way it is assessed: the policy brief challenges students' problem-solving skills whereas the essay and the tutorial discussions give students room for critical reflection.

The course covers topics including language, gender, and sexuality; language, politics, and ideology; language and social identity (age, gender, class, region); language contact; and multilingualism. Students gain an overview of foundational and contemporary theoretical and methodological developments in the field.

This course introduces students to an expanded canon of premodern art. Students consider traditional European material spanning from the Late Antique through the Renaissance and Baroque periods, whilst also looking in depth at simultaneous artistic developments in places such as East and South Asia, Africa, the Indigenous Americas and the Islamic world. Art historical touchstones by famous artists like Michelangelo, van Eyck, and Dürer are examined alongside works by artists of earlier and non-Western cultures whose names less well known or lost to us. The aim, in all cases, is to understand the diverse ways that artistic practices intersected with issues of, for example, identity, gender, sexuality, nationality, and religion. 

This course examines the linguistic products of contact between English and other languages, in contexts of colonization and/or globalization. These different "Englishes" can include English creoles, substrate-influenced or "L" Englishes, or dense code-mixing with English. Sometimes these Englishes co-occur, and in addition there are L1 varieties of English which are retained in educational and or formal settings. Students explore the structure of these Englishes; the circumstances that have led to their formation, ideologies of the new varieties and attitudes towards them.

This course provides an overview of societal, cultural, and literary developments in the North Atlantic island of Iceland, from its settlement in the late 9th Century through the end of its Commonwealth Period in the later part of the 13th Century. The main focus of the course is the rich literary heritage of medieval Iceland. Students engage with a representative selection of texts, covering a range of genres and topics. By undertaking guided readings and analysis against a background of pertinent historical, and cultural developments, the course reviews the value of these texts as literary artefacts and historical source materials.

This course invites students to rethink their preconceptions about studying the complex modern topic of religion by introducing them to key approaches and debates in Religious Studies, including historical, sociological, and anthropological approaches. It uses these to examine through a comparative and theoretically informed perspective empirical examples and case studies of how religion/s are articulated by diverse people in multiple settings. The course gives prominence to people's everyday ideas and practices about religion, while also indicating the broader disciplinary shape of the Study of Religion/s.

What are the roots of our concern for the environment? What did environmental activism look like in the 1960s, the 1930s or even the 1870s? This course offers a survey of where environmentalism has come from and where it is going. This course provides students with a deeper appreciation for the history of environmentalism. We learn about links between the development of the sciences of the environment and environmentalism as a social movement. The geographical focus in this course is on Europe and North America. However, students also locate and interrogate how environmental concern and policy has developed in various parts of the globe. Students note the experiences and contributions of different identity groups. In doing so, they consider the impact of and reactions to European imperialism and postcolonial globalization. They also examine and critique the role of the United Nations and other international organizations in environmental affairs.

As a discipline, history is a matter of selecting and shaping historical data. Theory is a meditation upon the discipline and its data. The course is a study of historians, theorists, and their texts. After an introduction considering the Period as the object of historical definition and as the tool of the historian, the course introduces theorists and theories of architecture from Vitruvius to Deconstruction. They are arranged chronologically so that the force of historical determinism and purposiveness of historical reflection may be gauged. The course concludes with a discussion of the proposition that cultural time moves in cycles.

How did the cities in the Mediterranean world develop from the 4th to the 8th century? How did the arrival of Christianity and Islam influence the built environments, and how did the urban populations engage with the monuments of the pasts? This course uses texts and material culture (art, architecture and objects) to examine how people lived in, thought about and interacted with the urban space. Students begin with a critical examination of the models that scholars have used to explore the process of urban change. The course adopts a thematic approach by addressing the organization of physical space, examining the fabric of the late antique city, and exploring social and religious practices in the urban environment. Towards the end of the course, students return to the present to explore how archaeological practices and heritage management influences the view of the late antique city.

This course provides students with the tools needed to understand how domestic violence and abuse was and is now understood in public debate and what the key theoretical underpinnings are to understand domestic violence from a social science lens. The course explores how legislation within different jurisdictions has evolved to reflect new research evidence and changes in public debate, and it critically reflects on what the social policy response to domestic violence is and has been in different settings. The course focuses primarily on the UK context with potential for exploring other countries as case studies.