United Kingdom - England

The course provides students with an understanding of the key issues in the historical, philosophical, ethical, and sociological approaches to the study of war and the military. It develops students’ understanding of the relationship between armed forces and the societies they protect, and it engages with war as a moral problem and the tools that philosophers have created to limit its brutality and guide belligerents. It explores why, in spite of these tools, wars can descend into barbarity, crime, and genocide, making a special case study of the Holocaust in the Second World War. It looks at dynamics of protest against war and then goes on to interrogate the intellectual, economic, and financial factors that drive outcomes and shape war as a social dynamic. The term concludes with explorations of what war teaches us about human nature and the social contract, humans’ relationship with their environment and national identity.

This course suggests that the lyrics of Taylor Swift can and should be read as literature. In doing so, the course pays close attention to formal elements such as rhyme and word choice. The course also analyzes her songs with the help of key texts in critical theory and discuss the political, national, and historical contexts of her work. Queen Mary's London setting encourages students to pay particular attention to the way in which the UK, and London in particular, figures in Swift's lyrics. 

This is an introduction to the fundamental importance of law in everyday commerce in the common law world. The course deals with the common law approach to law, its creation, dynamic development, and practical application to business, focusing on two of the most important areas regulating business obligations: contract law and negligence. It also deals with risk evaluation and the capacity to influence, develop, and change the law itself. 

This course provides a broad overview of psychiatric practice in Britain from the beginning of state-regulated asylums through to the advent of current policies of pharmaceutical treatment and community care. Using a mixture of secondary sources and primary texts, students examine how the diagnosis and treatment of madness has been shaped through the rich interaction of social, scientific, political, economic, and cultural factors. Students evaluate approaches to the concept of "madness" from historical, psychiatric, psychoanalytical, sociological, and legal perspectives, and demonstrate how techniques from each disciplinary approach can be applied to a study of identity and human behavior.

In this course students develop writing skills through a series of focused writing exercises that are critiqued in class. Students are introduced to some of the major theories of story design, and are taught how to develop their work draft by draft. Weekly classes cover (among other issues) the classic three act structure, beginnings and endings, the importance of genre, universal themes and their audience relevance, and dialogue. 

This course enhances students’ knowledge of emotion science and their capacity to evaluate empirical data and current emotion theories, show how findings from a range of methodologies contribute to our understanding of emotion and strategies for enhancing emotional wellbeing, and enables students to discuss and evaluate contemporary research in written and oral formats, both independently and in groups. 

For businesses operating in the UK or the EU, three factors are important: environmental, social, and governance, commonly referred to as ESG. This course addresses the benefits and risks of technologic progress as possible solution for greener friendly solutions for infrastructure. The course discusses the use of social entrepreneurship, and the implementation of technology solutions as part of different generation of new smart infrastructures in the context of UN agenda for sustainability.

In this course students explore central theoretical issues in modern social anthropology and in the history of the discipline; key figures and their contributions to the history of anthropology; important ethnographic case studies; connections between ethnographic materials and theoretical positions; cross-cultural similarities and differences in a number of social and cultural domains; and the relevance of social anthropology for 21st century citizens.

This course provides an understanding of the structure, organization, and function of cellular membranes. Particular emphasis is placed on membrane composition and organization, and involvement of membranes and membrane proteins in ion and solute transport, signal transduction, and vesicular transport. Diseases that arise from defects in these processes are used to exemplify the importance of this topic to life science.

In this course, students study the contested dynamics of police-work and policing, classic and contemporary research on policing, and nature of contemporary debates on policing and the police.