University of Edinburgh

Over the course of the 19th century, North Americans in the United States and its territories experienced overwhelming social, political, technological, and economic change. At the same time, they faced significant health challenges from epidemic disease to unfamiliar environmental ills, to feuding physicians. This course addresses such changes in context and introduces students to the debates surrounding the American public's health.

This course introduces students to the key ideas of sociology by examining the relationship between individuals and societies. The course explores how social processes shape individual lives, and how changes that occur around us influence our sense of self. It draws on C. Wright Mills' idea of the sociological imagination. Mills makes three claims: that individuals live within society, that they live a biography or a personal history, and that this takes place within a distinct historical sequence. It is the sociological imagination that provides a means of mapping and understanding the relationships among these three elements, and allows us as individuals to relate our personal lives to the often impersonal social world around us. 

This course examines the anonymous song-poetry which stands in contrast to the 'court' tradition of panegyric and learned poetry of the 17th century. Neglected by most of the early collectors, it has been regarded by some critics as containing some of the most powerful Gaelic poetry extant. The course considers (1) questions of definition, range and subject matter, authorship and transmission; (2) the evidence of the orain luaidh, which raise all these questions in acute form; (3) the relationship between these 'sub-literary' compositions and the rest of the Gaelic tradition; and (4) the assessment of these songs from a literary point of view. The lecture in the first hour will be delivered in English. The tutorial in the second hour is available in either Gaelic or English, dependent on individual degree programs.

The notion of risk is central to areas such as economics, finance, medicine, and law as well as branches of philosophy such as ethics and epistemology. It is also a prominent part of ordinary everyday decision making. Risk is standardly understood in a probabilistic way, on which the risk of a given outcome is connected with the probability that the outcome will occur. In some recent philosophical literature, however, the dominance of this probabilistic approach has been challenged, and certain non-probabilistic conceptions of risk have been proposed. This literature serves the starting point for this course, but students go on to consider a much broader range of literature, drawing upon sources in psychology, risk management and legal theory. Specific topics to be covered vary from year to year but may include the ethics of risk imposition, risk-taking in extreme sport, the legal distinction between attacks and endangerments, and whether there is such a thing as a "de minimis risk" - a risk that is so small that it can be rationally ignored.

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.