University of Edinburgh

This course introduces students to the field of environmental economics. They discuss and analyze how markets, without policy intervention, fail to capture environmental externalities. They then discuss the possible regulatory measures and policy instruments available to correct such market failures yielding what might be the socially optimal level of pollution. The course introduces various environmental valuation techniques that help identifying the costs and benefits of controlling environmental externalities. 

This course provides students with an introduction to the anthropological study of the USA, incorporating perspectives on a variety of topics and regions, and referring to research carried out at a range of historical moments. It provides a grounding in key debates. It shows how ethnographic work carried out in the US has influenced the discipline of anthropology. The course takes a (self)-critical look at what area-based foci of study do. Those teaching the course draw from rich ethnographies and from their own fieldwork experiences in the US.

This course introduces students to political data analysis using domestic and international data. The course covers core substantive topics in politics and international relations, typically exploring one major research question from Politics and one major research question from IR. It explores how to access relevant data and assesses the appropriateness of data. It provides key skills in quantitative data analysis, including descriptive statistics, cross-tab/contingency tables, measures of association, correlation, and regression. 

The course explores key works from the Irish Literary Renaissance, otherwise known as the Irish Cultural Revival, or the Celtic Revival: an extraordinary period of literary endeavor during a time of intense cultural and political transformation. The texts on the course are key works of Irish literature, of literary modernism, and would also come to be hugely influential on post-colonial writing through the rest of the 20th century. Students explore how the texts shaped and contested ideas of identity and history; how Ireland's push for freedom from English rule coincided with the context of modernity; and students close-read our primary texts, discussing how they challenge conventional notions of style, form and genre, asking how their formal innovations related to historical and political change.

The course introduces the study of global crime and justice, a developing field of inquiry which examines the impact of global changes on issues that pertain to crime and punishment. The purpose of the course is to both study criminal phenomena and the available responses to them on the global level as well as to explore the ways in which these issues supplement but also challenge our conventional thinking about crime and punishment. In that sense, the course covers key problems that pertain to global crime and justice and also provides the students with the necessary skills to critically assess the challenges posed by supranational phenomena and the adequacy of responses that we currently have.

This course covers both the theory and application of a number of techniques in analytical chemistry, as well as instruction in the general principles of sampling and analysis and in the statistical presentation and testing of data. Topics include different strategies for sampling; quality assurance procedures in support of an analytical measurement; calibration curves and statistical procedures to extract quantitative information from a measurement; basic parametric and non-parametric significance tests on data; different chromatographic techniques for an analysis involving separation; the principles of different types of ion sources; analytical methods which employ mass spectrometry to identify and quantify the abundance of molecular species; modern techniques for determination of isotopic elemental composition, including isotope ratio quantification and accelerator mass spectrometry, and their application to understanding environmental processes; and the principles of biosensor design from simple molecular recognition to transduction of binding events and be able to apply these in the context of detecting a variety of classes of target molecule.

This course examines the place of Europe - its countries, and the institutions they have created in the global order from the end of the Second World War to the present day. Students study how Europe has articulated its interests on the international stage, how the EU has evolved as an actor in foreign and security policy, what characterizes the European perspective on key issues and on international politics more generally, and how the EU relates to other regions and powers, including the United States, China, and Russia. The course proceeds chronologically, beginning with the origins of the Cold War and European integration in the 1940s and 1950s, and proceeding to analyze Europe 'between the superpowers' as the Cold War unfolded, its place in the American-dominated 'unipolar moment', and where the continent stands now as the 'rise of the rest' leads to the emergence of a more diffuse international order. The course concludes with a strategic foresight exercise in which students depict divergent scenarios for Europe in the world over the coming decade.

This course offers a wide-ranging survey of European history from the late 18th century to the present. It provides a basic grounding in - and a self-contained survey of - Modern European History, and it demonstrates how European society has evolved as a result of the interplay of major economic, social, political, and cultural developments of the period c.1780 to the present. A course with such a wide chronological and geographical span has to be rigorously selective, and in consequence the lecturers confine their attentions to those general developments that had a far-reaching influence on a major part of the European population.
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This course introduces students to key ideas and practices in architectural heritage and conservation, and to a range of practical and digital skills. The course is structured as a mixture of lectures, interactive/practical sessions, and tutorials. The lectures introduce the history, key ideas and philosophies which shape current heritage practice. In parallel, tutorials introduce some of the key policies, processes and practical skills used by architectural historians and heritage professionals.


 

This course presents a conceptual and practical introduction to object-oriented programming and software engineering practices, exemplified by Java. As well as providing a grounding in the use of Java, the course will cover general principles of programming in imperative and object-oriented frameworks. Students learn to develop programs that support experimentation, simulation, and exploration in other parts of the Informatics curriculum (e.g. the capacity to implement, test, and observe a particular algorithm).