United Kingdom - England

Psychology Now! introduces students to a variety of contemporary topics in psychology and a variety of ways in which psychological knowledge is applied to understand and solve everyday problems. The course covers topics related to well-being, mental health, the psychology of work and rest, hypnosis, gender differences, educational psychology, and how the presence of others affects our behavior.

This course provides an introduction to selected themes in the anthropology of the region in the Southwest Pacific Ocean known as Melanesia. It gives students a grounding in the contemporary anthropology of the region, primarily through a close reading of three book-length ethnographies. The three ethnographies, which are all new since 2013, are Christopher Wright's THE ECHO OF THINGS, an account of what photography means to people in the western Solomon Islands; Alice Street's BIOMEDICINE IN AN UNSTABLE PLACE, an analysis of how persons and diseases are made visible or invisible in a hospital on the north coast of Papua New Guinea; and Maggie Wilson’s A TRUE CHILD OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA (edited by Rosita Henry), the part-memoir/part-"ethnographic biography" of a woman who lived between "two worlds," that of her mother, a New Guinea Highlander, and that of her father, an Australian colonist. These ethnographies not only provide students with focused accounts of three very different contexts in Melanesia, they also address histories, dynamics, and concerns familiar to people living throughout the region. Engagement with these three books is enhanced and supplemented by other readings (including works by Pacific Islanders), ethnographic films, and a visit to the British Museum.

This course offers an introduction to the full sweep of English literature from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. It allows students to sample works from different periods while also showing how these works are connected together, over and across time, by continuing narrative, generic and thematic concerns. Teaching will be by seminar, setting literary works written in English including modern translations of Old English. The course introduces students to a wide variety of reading matter – epics, mock-epics, long poems, novels, and it encourages students, through intense weekly seminars, to further develop their reading skills, and to broaden their critical vocabulary. The richness and variety of English literature is unparalleled – it is a wonderful subject to study. But it is also a challenging one, and this course is designed to give students a taste of that challenge.

A research project that assigns students to expert professors in their proposed research topic. The course takes the student's research capabilities to a more professional level. This can be most closely compared to what is called a supervised research project in American universities.

This course takes both a short and a long-term view of the economy and helps students to understand how modern macroeconomics have attempted to explain economic growth as well as fluctuations. The course also looks at the design and effectiveness of macro policies to boost growth and stabilize fluctuations. Topics include measurement of the macroeconomy; long-run macroeconomic model and determinants of long-run growth; short-run macroeconomic model and its building blocks; and monetary and fiscal policies and their effectiveness.

This course examines normative and conceptual theories of politics from a global, transhistorical perspective. Students go beyond current theories of “decolonization” to consider how conversations about political life can be and have been transformed on the basis of distinctive concerns that emerge from specific times and places, marked by different levels of affluence, historical connections (or the lack thereof), textual or oral heritages, as well as the experience of imperialism. The course brings these diverse sources into a meaningful discussion about the political questions that they pose, both on their own and in comparison with others. 
 

The course covers various aspects of biosynthesis and bioenergetics.  The course provides students with important information relevant to understanding the living cell as a chemical reactor, focusing on the chemistry of biosynthesis and bioenergetics underpinning this. The chemistry of key metabolic functions including energy-generating processes such as glycolysis, the citric acid cycle, respiration, photosynthesis as well as aspects regarding control of metabolic flux in the cell are looked at in detail. The course includes a detailed look at information flow and molecular machinery of the cell.

Neoplatonism is the last great ancient Greek philosophical tradition, founded in the 3rd century by Plotinus, who is arguably the most important ancient Greek thinker after Plato and Aristotle. Neoplatonism had a tremendous historical influence on subsequent philosophy, in both the European and Islamic worlds. Above all, however, the Neoplatonists are distinctive for their own philosophical interest and value, developing fascinating positions on issues such as the structure of reality, the soul and its happiness, the nature of evil, and the meaning of freedom. The Neoplatonic tradition also devoted considerable attention to the interpretation and harmonization of Plato and Aristotle. Anyone interested in the work of these two thinkers is likely to find Neoplatonism of interest too.

This course considers the re-emergence of social class as a primary category of a sociological understanding and analysis and assess its significance for interpreting contemporary inequalities and recent political developments. Set against the backdrop of post-war social and cultural change in Britain, it begins by tracing the declining salience of class in sociological theory and political discourse before considering the recent development and impact of a more culturally sensitive model of class analysis associated, in particular, with the work Pierre Bourdieu. It then moves on to examine how the key mechanisms of class formation are conceptualized and operationalized by researchers, paying particular attention to debates about social mobility, education, and meritocracy. A third section considers the relationship between lifestyle and classed cultures, the politics of classification, and issues of intersectionality between class, gender, and ethnicity. Finally, the course looks at the particular role of elites in defining class-based spatial inequalities and political alignments in "Brexit Britain."

This course is broadly equivalent to A1 Basic User, Breakthrough Level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.