University of Edinburgh

This course explores the intersection of politics and culture in early medieval Europe through the strange fate of the Carolingian kingdom of Lotharingia. The slow-motion collapse of this kingdom, linked to an extraordinary marriage scandal, is uniquely well-documented, through secret treaties, letters both confidential and public, the minutes of staged show trials, records of tense summit meetings, learned legal advice, and rich and often spiteful contemporary narratives. Drawing on these sources, students explore key themes in early medieval European history, including the contested meaning of empire, dynastic rulership, the evolution of queenship, the use of the written word, legal pluralism, the impact of the Vikings, and the changing role of the papacy.

This course provides the theory and practice of knowledge graph construction, reasoning, and question answering technologies. The students analyze case studies to construct knowledge graphs and apply reasoning services on them. The course covers the following topics: knowledge graph foundation and standards; RDF (Resource Description Framework); OWL (Web Ontology Language); SPARQL (Query Language for RDF and OWL); knowledge graph construction, embeddings, and completion
knowledge graph reasoning and querying; tableaux algorithm; tractable schema reasoning in EL; tractable query answering in DL-Lite; and semantic parsing.

This course provides an introduction to written and spoken Modern Standard Arabic for students with no previous knowledge of the language. On completion of this course, the student is able to read and write the Arabic script; has a basic knowledge of grammar and a variety of everyday vocabulary of Modern Standard Arabic; has knowledge of Arabic pronunciation; and is able to conduct simple conversations on a limited range of topics.

In this course, students develop a wide and deep understanding of contemporary Africa, drawing on the multi-disciplinary approach of African Studies. Students learn about the historical roots of modern phenomenon on the continent and situate these within a wider global context. They develop expertise about particular countries and regions as well as on particular themes, depending on the focus of the course for the year. The substantive content of the course changes each year depending on topical issues and is taught by experts on the issue itself or on particular approaches/methods from amongst permanent and postdoctoral staff. 

The course provide students with a comprehensive view of the global Christian movement in time and space. Considers the period from its Middle Eastern and European origins in theological and sociological/political terms to the Inquisition (50.CE to 1500). It looks at the origins and growth of Christianity in the Mediterranean world and beyond, from the first generation of Christians to the fall of Constantinople (50CE to 1453CE). The course covers Christianity's role in and interaction with the various cultures of the Roman and Byzantine Empires, the early and medieval Islamic states, and the emergent civilizations of medieval Europe, looking at persecution, education, mission, monasticism, piety, orthodoxy, and heresy and other major themes. 

South Asia today is not only geo-politically significant but has risen to global prominence as an important locale for burgeoning economic growth and development, cultural production and nation building. This course provides a theoretical framework and empirical illustrations to make this complex region both accessible and better understood. The teaching is multi-disciplinary, providing a unique mix of sociological and anthropological approaches to the region.

This course equips students to understand causes, effects, framings of, and responses to climate change and related phenomena around the world, from a critical social science perspective. Building on anthropology's long-standing engagement with social transformation and human-environment relations, and more recent environmental turns across social sciences and humanities, students explore how recent identifications of climate crisis and debates around the Anthropocene are situated in longer histories of environmental change and social injustice, as well as their contemporary manifestations and politics. The course is grounded in empirical, ethnographic work that explores what environmental and social changes mean and entail for people, communities, organizations, and nations around the world - across Europe, North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Its approach to questions of climate and environment emerges from sustained attention to the afterlives of empire and ongoing colonial relations between Global North and South. Through a genuine engagement with decolonial and indigenous scholarship, as well as critical studies emerging from the Global South, the course offers students a unique opportunity to engage with a diverse range of analyses and discussions pertaining to the environment and climate change. 

The concept of trauma has gained increasing traction in the past decade, in the recognition that the impact it can have on individuals can be lifechanging. The Scottish Government for example now seeks to have all its policies based on a "trauma informed" mindset. Underpinning this is the understanding that adverse childhood experiences play an important role in the life chances of individuals. Academic research in this area is often inter-disciplinary, and feeds into government and 3rd sector policy. This course seeks to explore these new developments and introduces students to the different ways that trauma is experienced by both individuals and society.

Dynamic programming is a neat way of solving sequential decision optimization problems. Integer Programming provides a general method of solving problems with logical constraints. Game theory is concerned with mathematical modelling of behavior in competitive strategic situations in which the success of strategic choices of one individual (person, company, server, ...) depends on the choices of others. By the end of this course, students have gained: ability to formulate and solve a sequential decision optimization problem; ability to formulate and solve optimization problems with logical constraints; ability to find optimal and equilibrium strategies for zero- and nonzero-sum 2x2 matrix games; and mastery of the theory underlying the solution methods.

This course examines fundamental and advanced topics in social psychology. Students look at the topics of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination and how these manifest in the world today. They also cover how these can be challenged and reduced. After covering these topics, students examine in depth a range of specialist areas of social psychological research such as dehumanization, objectification, and the ways in which people think about animals.