University of Edinburgh

The course consists of the following lecture courses under the theme of characterization of molecules, matter, and reactions: molecular symmetry and electronic structure; nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy; structure and bonding. Available to visiting students only. 

This team-taught course on gender and culture offers a series of different forms of analysis through which one can "read" gender. It is particularly suited to students who wish to develop their critical and analytical skills by learning more about specific gender-related issues and developing gender-specific approaches to engaging with a variety of cultural works across disciplines, genres and literary periods. All texts will be in English or in English translation.

The course looks at how plants work and how this knowledge is being used in crop improvement and biotechnology. The course is also about developing students' skills, from designing and analyzing experiments to finding, evaluating, and presenting information.
The course particularly explores aspects of plants that make them unique. It is centered on the processes underlying growth, development, and how plants interact with their environment and with the pathogens and symbionts that they share it with.
Students learn how plants use their genetic information and how this knowledge can be harnessed via the latest synthetic biology, gene editing, and high-throughput sequencing technologies available to improve crops and tackle climate change.

This course introduces the Earth System as a basis for characterizing and understanding natural hazards, their causes and consequences. The major types of natural hazard are described, analyzed, and assessed in terms of their underlying causes as well as their socio-economic and environmental impacts. This course capitalizes on natural synergies between subsurface, surface, and human dimensions of the Earth System. Hazards for consideration include earthquakes and tsunamis, volcanic hazards (local, regional and global scale), meteorological hazards (hurricanes, tornadoes, dust storms, El-Nino, flooding and coastal erosion), topographic hazards such as collapse of unstable slopes, and hazards arising from climate change. The evidence for past natural catastrophes and hazards, recorded in natural archives, are described along with remote sensing methods for documenting current hazards and hazard risk. The principles and application of risk assessment and analysis are considered with respect to case studies. The course concludes with an overview of human settlement, planning, and policy in relation to natural hazards in the light of their socio-economic impacts. The course comprises lectures supplemented by a series of laboratory classes, together with a directed program of reading. 

The course encourages students to find new ways to create, structure, and orchestrate/produce their music, to express themselves musically and engagingly, and to develop and challenge their own understanding of music through the creation of new work.

This course examines the city in history as represented in fiction in the particular case of Edinburgh, from the historical fiction of Scott, Hogg, and Stevenson to the genre fiction of the last two decades. It examines the construction of the city in these texts as a site of legal, religious, economic, and cultural discourse. The extent to which civic identity both contributes to and competes with national identity is a central theme, as is the internal division of the city along lines of religion, gender, and, especially, class. In addition to the skills training common to all English Literature students (essay-writing, independent reading, group discussion, oral presentation, small-group autonomous learning) this course develops the student's understanding of: (i) the ways in which urban space is constructed in the various discourses of the novel as a genre; (ii) the relation of civic identities to national identities as the novel brings them into relation; (iii) a broad understanding of the history of the novel in Scotland in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The course introduces students to a range of contemporary critical theories and debates on the body and identity. Students explore the body as a site on which social constructions of difference are inscribed, as well as how these constructions can be challenged and resisted. Bodies are regulated and self-regulated, marginalized, oppressed, erased, owned, visualized, textualized, and designed. The body is not isolated; rather, it extends and connects with other bodies, practices, human and non-human entities, and technologies. The course also examines the ways in which digital developments are reshaping our understanding of our bodies and question what it means to be human.

This course is an introduction to finance. It starts by introducing the value of money, interest rates, and financial contracts, in particular, what are fair prices for contracts and why no one uses fair prices in real life. Then, there is a review of probability theory followed by an introduction to financial markets in discrete time. In discrete time, students learn how the ideas of fair pricing apply to price contracts commonly found in stock exchanges. The next block focuses on continuous time finance and contains an introduction to the basic ideas of Stochastic calculus.

This course describe the structures of biological macromolecules, particularly proteins, in relation to their functions in catalysis, ligand binding, membrane transport, and ability to form and function as complexes, and to illustrate the types of experimental techniques used to study macromolecular structure and function. It develops personal skills appropriate to a third-year biological science student, including competence in a range of laboratory techniques; the ability to analyze scientific papers; familiarity with the use of libraries and databases; the ability to present the results of experimental work concisely and accurately, both numerically and in writing, and to write about biochemical and molecular biological topics in a clear and well-organized manner.

The course covers the archaeology and prehistory of Scotland from the very earliest human settlement in the 10th millennium BC until the end of the Iron Age and the Roman Occupation in the first millennium AD. Practical aspects of the course introduce students to the study and interpretation of archaeological artefacts, sites, and remains using Scottish material relevant to the course.