United Kingdom - England

Are you looking to develop the skills to solve real-world challenges in finance, risk management, and insurance? These fields often deal with unpredictable phenomena—like investment decisions, insurance claim patterns, or pricing derivatives—which require robust stochastic models and advanced machine learning techniques. To tackle these challenges effectively, it’s essential to use robust statistical techniques and calibration methodologies to ensure models are reliable. This course equips students with the tools to apply modern statistical and machine learning methods to these complex problems. Students start by exploring Monte Carlo methods, simulating stochastic processes, and applying Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in risk management. They then connect Generalized Linear Models to deep neural networks, discovering their practical applications in the insurance industry. The course also addresses the challenges of calibrating models to ensure their accuracy and reliability. Combining rigorous theory with hands-on coding exercises in Python, students gain experience implementing real-world case studies while strengthening their core data science skills.

The course equips students with the critical tools required to analyze the variety of British colonial representations of India in the 19th and 20th centuries. Students gain the necessary historical knowledge that enables them to contextualize a range of novels and shorter fiction, as well as key historical documents and works of historiography.

This course focuses on expression in the solo keyboard music of C.P.E. Bach, Haydn and Mozart. J.S. Bach and Beethoven will appear as "book ends" to help establish a broader music-historical perspective. The central aim is to develop a refined, historically informed understanding of the musical materials used in keyboard music, encompassing the theory of musical topics, the rhetorical concept of musical form, stylistic registers (from tragic to comic), and notions of character and representation. The course is notes based, but not concerned with structural analysis for its own sake. Instead, the materials and expressive intentions of solo keyboard music are related to period aesthetic ideals, instrument design, music publishing, the rise of the professional solo fortepianist, and­—in the home—the bourgeois ideal of female musical accomplishment. An over-arching theme is the special place of solo keyboard music within the culture of sensibility: in many ways a more productive rubric than that of Viennese Classical Style.

This course introduces students to the avant-garde literary and artistic movement called surrealism that developed across Europe in the early part of the 20th century. Beginning with an examination of the first theories of surrealism which were written in France, the course looks at the movement’s influence across European media before ending with a discussion of the movement’s continuing international development. This course compares surrealism across national boundaries and literary and artistic disciplines. The emphasis of the course is on the interrelation of different media employed by surrealist practitioners, including but not limited to prose, poetry, periodicals, film, painting, and photography. 

The course delivers the concepts and models underlying the modern analysis and pricing of financial derivatives. The philosophy of the course is to first provide the firm foundations for understanding derivatives in general. The required technical tools are explained carefully, allowing students to learn the language and to be able to converse with derivatives professionals. Once the tools are in place, those same tools can then be applied to any derivative. Special emphasis is put on those derivatives that shape the modern world. Students should feel comfortable with calculus, probability, and statistics at the intermediate undergraduate level before taking this course.

This course provides an introduction to the basic mathematical aspects and associated data analysis of statistical design and survey sampling, and also to data ethics as a set of principles to guide the design of appropriate data use in academia and the public sector. 

This course introduces students to key religious texts that have been foundational in shaping religious traditions. This course is intended for students who may or may not have some prior knowledge of the religious texts in question, but who have no prior knowledge of the critical methodologies used in academic study.

This course explores the relationships between science, war, and the prevention of war. It places military and security technologies within social, political, and historical contexts. The course emphasizes 20th and 21st centuries and weapons usually designated as "unconventional" or "weapons of mass destruction." In addition to thinking about how science, technology, and warfare have shaped each other, the course considers the changing role of the scientist in relation to the state. It also considers broader themes, such as arms control, disarmament, ethics, and popular culture in relation to war.

Since the Middle Ages, Germany has been part of wider transnational networks of commerce, religion, diplomacy, scholarship, exploration, tourism, and migration that have involved encounters with other peoples, languages, and customs. This course explores ways in which German literature and culture, at different points in its long history, has engaged with these networks and has imagined the resulting encounters with nations, cultures, and languages beyond its boundaries, both in Europe and further afield. Always bearing in mind that these encounters take place as much in the imagination as in reality, students study a range of texts and other forms that represent journeys, whether real or imagined, and the course considers what light can be shed on these by critical theories that explore ideas of otherness, boundaries, and identities.

This course examines Anglo-American relations from 1939-1991 and analyses the nature of the special relationship from historical and political perspectives. Set within the rich historiography of this subject, the course considers how US and UK governments responded to major events in world history from 1939 to 1991. Throughout, particular reference are made to Anglo-American relations in the political, diplomatic, economic, defense, and intelligence arenas and to the importance of personalities in strengthening and weakening the alliance. Students reflect on UK and US social, cultural, and political values in the context of international relations, and develop an understanding of ethical and political issues arising from modes of representation.