University of London, Royal Holloway

This course engages with theater texts, and relations between text, performance and the social world. From the naturalist stage of the late 19th century to contemporary verbatim performance, theater practitioners have frequently sought to represent social reality in order to critique it. This course explores the methods and implications of theater’s "reality-effects" and considers why it is that so many theater companies and practitioners in the 21st century have turned to documentary, tribunal, verbatim, and other forms of reality-based performance-making. The courses explores a contrasting range of plays and performance texts from around the world, and builds a strong awareness of the politics, possibilities and limitations of "staging the real."

This is an advanced level course in the sociological analysis of contemporary society which helps students understand major social and economic changes in the contemporary world through key sociological debates concerning, amongst others: the changing nature of the organization of production and changing nature of class. Students also examine the transformation of cultural forms in contemporary society.

This course provide an overall account of some of the main theoretical and empirical issues in key areas within cognitive psychology. It covers a wide range of topics, including selective attention, problem solving, reasoning, judgement, blindsight, unilateral neglect, social attention, word recognition, and cognitive psychology of sleep.

This course covers energy loss processes, particle detectors, accelerators, spin-off applications. Strange particles, quantum numbers, the simple quark model. Heavy quarks. Leptons and lepton number. Electroweak unification, W and Z bosons, the Higgs mechanism, QCD. Extended topics selected from: deep inelastic scattering, supersymmetry, beyond the Standard Model, dark matter, Neutrino oscillations, and applications to industry and medicine.

This course examines contemporary politics and government. It deals with the nature of politics and its study, and how the study of politics differs from doing politics. Students examine the long spread of democracy (and some of its recent reversals) and the nature of representation, and they look at left and right in contemporary politics, and the challenges posed by populist parties. The course also deals with institutions which are found across different democracies. The course has both conceptual and empirical elements. The empirical elements of the course focus on consolidated democracies (countries which have been democracies for thirty years or more), and more particularly on English speaking democracies.