University of Sussex

This course covers Maxwell equations, optical field-matter interaction, principles of lasers and rate equations, optical resonators, plane waves, ray-tracing, and Gaussian beams.

In this course, students gain a molecular understanding of human health and disease, and how the mode of action of drugs is crucial for the development of new drugs wit: improved potency and reduced side effects. The course also underpins the development of personalized medicine. This is about giving the right treatment to the right people at the right time. It’s also a move away from the "one size fits all" approach to the treatment of patients with a particular condition.

The origins of this rich and complicated genre lie in the Middle Ages, when romance was the most popular form of secular literature and the particular narrative form in which women characters developed agency and subjectivity. Medieval romance has a profound influence on later literature, and, as students explore, on the novel, making it one of the most important genres to English literary history. Despite this, romance is a peculiarly discredited genre – a bit of an embarrassment to write, and to be seen reading. The course asks why the discrediting of romance in later periods is bound up with its association with women readers, and, indeed, with women writers. This course introduces students to the history of romance, to feminist scholarship on it, as well as to a history of women as readers and writers, and the ways in which male writers thought about and adapted a genre that was assumed to be feminine.

This course mainly focuses on romantic relationships. The course reviews historical and classic approaches to studying intimate relationships as well as new research to better understand real-world relationship functioning. General topics include attachment, attraction, social cognition, commitment, love, sexuality, conflict, and maintaining high-quality relationships, as well as breaking up and being single. The course explores questions such as: Why are relationships so important to us? What informs our choice of friends and romantic partners? What predicts satisfaction and stability in relationships? How can we become better romantic partners? And what predicts wellbeing in singlehood?

The course provides students with a survey of foundational topics in metaphysics. Topics include ontology (categories of being), the persistence and identity of material objects, the nature of properties, substances, events and absences, accounts of causation, time, personal identity, and free will. An emphasis is placed on critical examination of arguments for and against competing metaphysical views. 

In this course, students examine a range of family forms: family functioning, family relationships, and child development. They explore individual, dyadic, family, and cultural-level factors that influence the development and functioning of family relationships. The course covers the main theoretical approaches to the study of the family but emphasizes recent empirical research. A focus on diverse family forms runs throughout the course, such as LGBTQ+ families, and families formed through third-party assisted reproduction.