University of Edinburgh

This course surveys formative trends in Christian history throughout the world from the 16th century to the present day giving a comprehensive view of the global Christian movement in time and space. It covers mission and ministry in Africa, Latin America, Asia and North America, as well as following changes in Europe and movements of religious transformation, cultural encounter and missionary expansion. The course applies historical approaches and the study of original texts to the understanding of formative trends in Christian history throughout the world from the 16th century to the present day. In European history attention is paid to the 16th-century Reformations (with particular reference to Scotland), the impact on the churches of the Enlightenment and industrialization, and their response in the 20th century to totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. On the global stage, the course covers the expansion of European Christendom to Latin America, Asia and Africa, the role of Christianity in shaping American history, and the more recent growth of distinctive varieties of non-western Christianity. In tutorials these themes are illustrated by study of original texts. 

This second-semester course introduces students to the history of literature in Scotland in English and Scots, covering two periods of its self-conscious revival: the Modernist "Scottish Renaissance" between the world wars of the 20th century, and the contemporary period, defined as beginning with the first Devolution Referendum and the election of Margaret Thatcher as British prime minister in 1979. It focusses on how questions of literary form relate to the social, political, and intellectual context in which the text was written and read; that is, on how the text's formal achievement responds to changes in Scottish society and the wider world. 

The course introduces students to selected aspects of medieval Gaelic and Welsh literature in English translation. It will cover important and characteristic genres of these literatures, and provide historical and social backgrounds against which primary texts may be interpreted.

The course examines the current happenings and events that profoundly shape our lives for better or worse, exploring through different data sets and data approaches the ways in which the world is being reframed and reimagined. Students learn how different academic disciplines approach complex challenges and wicked problems, and how different theories, data and methods from these disciplines are used to understand the current, while mapping a path for the future. The course reflects on the causes and drivers of these challenges - the sparks that lead to global fires that change world outlooks and shake world orders.