University of London, Queen Mary

This course explores semantics - the study of meaning in natural language. The course uses English as the language of study, considering how the material covered might (or might not) apply to other languages. This course looks at the different aspects of meaning that contribute to the process of understanding sentences that underlies all communication.

The course considers the fundamental forces underpinning contemporary British politics. It explores the power structures that support everyday practices, including ethnic, gender, and class inequalities. The course considers how different forces - from the conventional constitution through the electoral system - legitimize those power structures. It discusses how British politics work and the people who benefit.

This is a comprehensive class covering the fundamental areas of mechatronics and robotics technology and its application to a range of areas including industry, medicine, society and extreme environments. The aims of this module are to introduce robotics as an integral part of modern automation, to provide an introductory insight into the engineering design and application of mobile robots and robot manipulators, to provide an understanding of navigation, motion and path planning of robotic systems, to explain the actuator and sensor principles and roles in robotics, to introduce various aspects of robot modelling and actuation and to introduce problems encountered in robot programming and their remedies.

This course reviews the classical understanding of space, time, and motion: the fundamental physical principles that underpin modern physics. It provides an overview of classical mechanics, looking at kinematics, dynamics, rotational motion; dynamics of a rigid body, the gyroscope, gravity, and planetary orbits. The course explores oscillatory phenomena and wave motion, which occur throughout nature in fields from biology to quantum mechanics. Topics include the 1D wave equation; free, damped, forced, and coupled oscillations; resonance and driven simple harmonic motion; calculations of normal modes for coupled oscillators; waves in linear media including gases and solids; dispersion, phase, and group velocity; interference, beats, and standing waves; simple diffraction phenomena; and the Doppler effect in sound and light.

How to perform Shakespeare has been one of the most enduring and ideologically fraught struggles in modern British theater production. This course provides a practical laboratory in which students explore modes of performance that illuminate the theatrical work in performance, while preserving its historical strangeness. Students practice performing text from Shakespeare's plays, drawing on the contemporary understanding of the conditions of English Renaissance production and experimental performance techniques of the 20th and 21st centuries. Students learn techniques of performing rhetorical gesture, improvisation, flirting and showing off, talking to the audience, audio feeds, part-scripts, textual muddles, obscenity, and cross-dressing. The emphasis of the course is on finding viable and intellectually rigorous modes of performance that challenge the dominant naturalistic modes that operate in most British theater production.

This course explores how the post-colonial Middle East has evolved and examines key issues dominating politics in the region.

This course explores the field of queer studies using a range of material in different media that represents a diversity of LGBTIQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer/questioning) experience since 1900. Writers and artists over the last century have produced work that has unsettled sex and gender binaries and challenged normative gendered constructions of the body, the family, community, race, and the nation. Students consider how such work has queered the past and explored alternative futures, laying claim to new possibilities for cultural production, politics, and embodied subjectivity.

This course covers all aspects of reproductive and developmental biology, from molecular and cellular mechanisms to physiology, ecology, and evolution. Topics include molecular gametogenesis, fertilization, embryo development, placentation, pregnancy, parturition, lactation, reproductive and parental strategies, reproductive suppression, courtship and sexual selection, and the evolution of reproductive-isolating mechanisms. The class compares and contrasts reproductive and developmental mechanisms across a range of vertebrate and invertebrate species.