University of Edinburgh

The course is a survey course concerned with the histories, languages, literatures, and cultures of the Celtic-speaking peoples from the Iron Age until the end of the Middle Ages. Its principal objective is to guide students to a fully contextualized understanding of the languages, nations, and material and artistic cultures that came to be considered 'Celtic'. Topics include Greek and Roman authors' description of 'Celts' (i.e., in central Europe, Gaul, and Britain) alongside those peoples' visible artefacts and literature; the speakers of Celtic languages (e.g., Welsh and Gaelic) in medieval Britain and Ireland and their emerging intellectual culture; and the ways in which Celtic-speaking peoples understood themselves or were understood by others, and how they related to each other.

The course provides an introduction to the main problems in epistemology and metaphysics. Topics vary by year, and may include defining knowledge, skepticism, testimony, disagreement, modality, universals and particulars, causation, free will, and social/feminist metaphysics and epistemology.

This interdisciplinary course offers a first understanding of the society, politics, culture, and economics of South Asia and provides a critical assessment of its growing significance in world politics and the global economy. It introduces students to the history, social, cultural, and political dynamics of the region. Key questions addressed include (a) What is the lasting legacy of Partition on the political and economic integration of the region? (b) How have the main South Asian states tackled poverty, inequality, and economic development? (c) Why is there so much gender inequality in South Asia and what have various states done to address it? (d) What are the main social cleavages (based on ethnicity, tribe, caste, religion) in South Asia, how have the states of South Asia sought to accommodate these differences and why have they developed different pathways in this regard? (d) To what extent has the liberalization of the South Asian economies affected their development and what have been the costs and benefits of globalization? What role has India played, as the largest South Asian country in world trade and climate change negotiations? (e) To what extent does the India-Pakistan rivalry affect the regional integration of South Asia, politically and economically? (f) Is India a rising power?

Faraway and everyday landscape typologies shape human inhabitations, as well as cosmogonies, cosmologies, myths, and folklore of different cultures. These spaces are sometimes the place of conquests, other times the place of retreat; sometimes regarded with fear, other times with fascination. The same landscape typologies can be the archetypical images of inhabitation, and the archetypical images of abandonment. This course unfolds some of the meanings of landscape through the lenses of abandonment and inhabitation, shedding light over the pertinence of some concepts in particular historical periods and the cause of their oblivion in others, for example, concepts of nature and environment; wilderness and sublime; or landscape urbanism, social urbanism, or informal urbanism.