United Kingdom - England

From Wordsworth’s ‘gleams of half-extinguished thought’ to Freud’s excavation of the human psyche, writers and thinkers throughout the 19th century were preoccupied by the workings of memory and time. This course investigates connections between literature, the arts, philosophy and science, revealing the centrality of memory and memorialization to the 19th-century imagination. Students examine how developments in science and technology impacted upon the perception and representation of time, while also exploring how modernity was constructed through an active engagement with the past. Topics to be discussed include: time and modernity; technology and the standardization of time; history and historicism; afterlives and hauntings; evolution and extinction; architecture and material memory; nostalgia and trauma; imperial and colonial time.

In this course basic principles of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neurochemistry are discussed to develop an understanding of how these biological factors underlie human brain function. Topics include biological basis of emotion, motivation, stress, sleep, autistic, ADHD, and substance abuse disorders. Students become familiar with multidisciplinary methods of investigation through use of behavioral, computational, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging tools.

This course examines ideas of culture, ideology, and hegemony, discourse, media aesthetics, and digital convergence. Class discussions investigate the history of communications techniques, the implication of media in the workings of power in modern societies, the politics of media aesthetics, the role of audiences in shaping media, and the impact of digital technologies. Specific examples are introduced to clarify the main ideas, including the printing press, 19th-century visual entertainments, early and avant garde films, fan-fiction, and computer games.