University of Sussex

The course explores how drama, theatre, and performance reflect and effect social change. Students think about the relationship of the individual and the community in relation to wider social or institutional structures. The course brings together historical perspectives about drama, theatre, and performance and urgent issues in the present. Key skills students gain include working with theatre texts, historical understanding, and critical analysis about social and cultural change.

Students consider a range of Shakespeare's plays (comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, and romances) from different stages of his career, analyzing the playwright's stagecraft, his use of language and his reworking of traditional forms for the commercial stage. While students explore some recent adaptations for stage and screen, the course also focuses on the plays as produced in their original historical and cultural contexts. The course familiarizes students with Renaissance drama's negotiation of contested social and political issues at the turn of the 17th century. Students investigate the social processes of the theatre – notably the playhouses used by Shakespeare's company (the Theatre, the Globe and Blackfriars) – and focus on the interplay of Shakespearean texts and their performance in the production of meaning.

This course explores the representation of women and the construction of female sexuality and feeling in a wide range of 18th-century writing. The course addresses fictional and non-fictional writing by both women and men in novels, medical works, advice books for women, and erotic literature. The course explores contemporary debates about the place of women in society, (including personal conduct), and the place of sexuality (both socially-sanctioned and otherwise). A central concern is attitudes to female feeling, from sexual passion to sensibility, and the ways in which feeling of various kinds enables conformity to, or critical interrogation of, a larger social and cultural order. Attention also is paid to the relationship between bodies and passion, the social disciplining of feeling, and the relationship between emotion and gender. Literary works are supplemented with a range of additional sources that enable students to contextualize the novels and poems and link them into contemporary debates and attitudes.

In this course, students learn about vectors spaces, subspaces, bases, inner products, linear transformations, rank/nullity, matrices of linear maps, change of basis, eigenvalues/eigenvectors, Jordan normal form, diagonalization, and special classes of linear transformations and their matrices.

This course introduces students to international marketing, focusing on the complexities of operating in diverse and unfamiliar environments. Students build knowledge of the international environment and the unique challenges facing international marketers, including increased scope, risk, and uncertainty. Students learn to identify and manage differences, opportunities, and threats across varied economic, demographic, political/legal, cultural, technical, and competitive environments. Students connect international issues to marketing decision-making at three levels: macro level, where country selection decisions are made; national level, where market entry decisions are considered; market level, where marketing mix decisions are implemented.

Students explore some of the repertoires that are at the heart of post-war American pop music, including mainstream pop, the blues, hip-hop, funk, country, and rock. Students consider the extent to which American popular music has influenced other pop music cultures, and how a sense of American identity is both fostered and communicated in its music. Students also connect specific kinds of repertoire to major events in American history, such as the Civil Rights Movement. The course is organized according to topics such as the music industry, the blues continuum, identity in country music, urban music, and Afrofuturism. Students learn to identify and describe a range of American popular music genres, and position them in their socio-historical context. 

This course introduces students to Cognitive Psychology, the scientific study of how the mind works. Students become familiar with the field of Cognitive Psychology and its research approaches, and appreciate its relevance to everyday functioning. A variety of relevant topics are discussed, such as perception, attention, memory, language and decision-making, both in terms of the prevalent theoretical models, as well as empirical evidence.

This course discusses and analyzes the major challenges and current initiatives in the creation of finance industries appropriate to and effective in developing countries. The course focuses on the private financial sector and issues relating to access to finance. After a general overview, the course examines the forms of finance available for larger firms in developing countries, mainly the banking sector and the stock market. Subsequently, the course covers the evidence on the effects of financial development on economic growth and the role of institutional factors, such as corporate governance, in financial development. The course then examines the access to finance for smaller firms and households and the implications of a lack of access. Finally, the course touches upon private international sources of finance, namely private capital flows, FDI, and remittances to developing countries.

Decolonizing education is critical for social justice in the Global North and South. This raises important questions about the relationships between knowledge, power, and society in the past and present. This course addresses these issues. It engages with the politics and history of education in both UK and international contexts. It critiques how the curriculum has privileged particular knowledges and identities in ways that are racialized, gendered, and classed. Throughout the course, students relate these issues to students’ own experiences of education and what decolonizing education means for them.

George Orwell once wrote that "many people who would consider themselves extremely sophisticated and “advanced” are actually carrying through life an imaginative background which they acquired in childhood." This course examines the political lessons children’s books encode about what childhood is, and about which children matter and why. Students read children’s texts from a range of genres and forms – including fantasy, school stories, picture books, and domestic fiction – written between the late 18th century and the present day. Key focuses include agency, gender, race, class, and the environment.