University of Edinburgh

This course provides an introduction to the analysis of music composed in the Western extended common practice. It concentrates on Western tonal music from the 17th to the 20th centuries, but more broadly extends modal and post-tonal repertoires from c. 1350 to the present, and ranges from instrumental and vocal genres to music theatre and music for screen. It involves the study of musical scores alongside aural evidence obtained from listening. Students must be able to read music and a good grasp of basic theory (harmonic functions, cadences, etc.).

In this course, students cover topics in human and machine inductive inference. In the first half of the course, students are exposed to the problem of induction and how the problem manifests in a range of domains such as object recognition, categorization, and learning. The focus of the course then turns to analogy and relational reasoning, areas were humans make generalizations across situations and domains with much more success and flexibility than non-human animals and conventional machine learning approaches. Students cover research in analogical reasoning as well as the development of analogical thinking and the representations that support analogy and generalization. The second half of the course focuses on computational theories of how humans and artificial (i.e., machine) systems perform induction and generalization. Students cover broadly the main approaches to representing knowledge and modelling human cognition (symbolic and connectionist models). They then cover how these approaches have been leveraged to explain human induction and learning with focus on traditional production system models, Bayesian models, neural network models, and symbolic-connectionist models.

In this course students explore a variety of representations of modern urban United States, focusing specifically on New York and Los Angeles. Students are looking at a number of different genres of writing - fiction, poetry, travel narrative, and screenplay to consider the ways in which the city has been depicted in American literary culture. The relationship between aesthetics and urban geography is also examined through reading a number of key theorists alongside the primary texts. The course encourages both close critical engagement and conceptual thinking about the ways in which city spaces function as part of modern culture.

This is a challenging interdisciplinary first-year course, based on a series of high-profile, evening lectures given by prominent members of staff from the three Colleges. The course engages students in thinking about the global challenges that confront society, and makes them aware of the role of academic research and scholarship in meeting these challenges. Students are expected to address key global issues across discipline boundaries, and develop an understanding of the relevance and impact of their own subject in the broader context. Students in the course attend the public lectures, research the topics in depth, participate in facilitated group discussions on each topic, work in small groups to produce a collaborative project on a chosen topic, and produce an individual research report on an aspect which may be closer to their own subject area. Our Changing World is a pass/fail grade-only course.

This course introduces students to a varied range of 14th- and 15th-century English and Scottish literary texts: allegory, romance, dream vision, meditation, lyric, and drama. Through these texts students explore the medieval imaginative models of the physical and metaphysical world, considering issues such as society, the body, gender, God, love, and death. Visual images and other kinds of writing and commentary are considered alongside the literary texts, to develop an understanding of the imaginative world which the literature both emerged from and helped to shape.

This course provides an overview of notable historical dates, events, trends, and individuals in China, Korea, and Japan from approximately the 3rd century BCE until the early 17th century.

This course explores some of the main trends of French and Francophone life writing since the beginning of the 21st century, and evaluates in what ways these trends (and the authorial strategies associated with them) offer new perspectives on the traditional concerns of the literary genre of autobiography, reflecting the increasing gender and ethnic diversity apparent amongst contemporary authors of French and Francophone literature. Questions of personal identity are at the center of this course, with a particular focus on (ethnically) hybrid identities. The course centers on the role of images in contemporary French and Francophone life-writing in order to interrogate the tendency in such works to use images in diverse ways to explore the complexities of identity. Visiting students should have the equivalent of at least two years of study at University level of French.

While this course is based around primary Victorian comic texts, it allows students to understand and apply key concepts in the wider study of comedy: these include forms such as irony, satire, farce, comedy of manners, parody, and black comedy; and theoretical concepts in comedy, such as superiority, incongruity, and relief theories. Students also have the opportunity to study the work of key comedy theorists such as Freud, Bakhtin, and Bergson.
 

The seminar gives an introduction into the different ideas around sex and gender in the Hebrew Bible. It discusses matters such as the creation of man and woman, the connection of sexuality and male struggles for power and honor, laws about sexuality in the Pentateuch, and the use of the marriage metaphor for the relationship between Yhwh and Israel.

This course introduces students to a variety of theoretical models, tools, and techniques which explore psychological well-being and their applicability in personal and professional development, and in the business world. These models are used as the basis for developing self-awareness, personal and professional strength and growth, and evaluating how these can be fostered in others, in order to achieve a positive impact on personal, professional, and organizational performance, through adaptability and change.