United Kingdom - England

This is a largely practical course, which develops experimental skills. A selection of practicals and follow-up sessions designed for students taking Pharmacology PHAR0004 provide reinforcement of the material in that course. Students learn to conduct simple experiments on in vitro preparations and present their findings in a written account, use animals in medical research from the standpoint of animal welfare and ethics; set-up tissue preparations and use transducers and computers to measure tension or length changes in smooth muscle preparations; understand the experimental conditions required to maintain tissues in vitro and of the requirements to achieve stimulation of nerves using pulse generators; perform dilutions of stock drug solutions and calculate appropriate volumes to add to organ baths to achieve the desired final concentrations; follow experimental protocols accurately to generate reproducible results; and quantify results and present them clearly in graphical form.

This course focuses on the afterlife of a selection of controversial tragedies, which shocked their original audiences in Elizabethan and Jacobean London as much as they continue to challenge and entertain us today, both on the contemporary stage and on screen. The course focuses equally on the original context within which these tragedies were first written and performed, and on the history of their reception, with special emphasis on cinematic adaptations spanning over the late 20th and the early 21st centuries. 

This course provides and understanding of group theory and some of its applications. In this course, students work with cyclic groups, permutation groups, dihedral groups, equivalence classes, cosets, Lagrange's theorem, and direct product groups; are introduced to quotient groups, construct the groups of low order, learn about the conjugation map, and construct conjugacy classes; meet the classical matrix groups, which are examples of continuous (or Lie) groups; work with group homomorphisms, isomorphisms, automorphisms, normal subgroups, kernels of homomorphisms, and prove and make extensive use of the group homomorphism theorem (also known as the first isomorphism theorem); learn about the semi-direct product and semi-direct product groups; construct and investigate the Euclidean group; investigate the geometric structure of some of the classical matrix groups, in particular SU(2)and SO(3); work with group actions on sets, stabilisers and orbits; and prove the Sylow theorems.

This course explores how different kinds of outposts became key sites for directing and negotiating the different forms of US empire, from the early days of colonization to the recent past. Each week students explore a different kind of outpost, often focusing on one particular beachhead of American power. Likewise, they analyze the outsized influence of Americans abroad and assess how the creation and maintenance of different kinds of outposts helped form the structure and sinews of the US empire. This course combines different strands of transnational history, particularly the histories of empire, capitalism, and ecology. 

This course is for students with either no or very little previous knowledge of the French language. It provides students with a sound knowledge of essential French grammar and vocabulary and develops the four key language skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. It presents and covers all the basic elements of the French language, including its pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. The course is well balanced between the presentation of the main grammatical concepts by the tutor in seminars and by activity-based, mixed-skills classes which incorporate oral expression and comprehension as well as reading comprehension and written expression. Translation is also used from time to time as a way to practice grammar in context and to expand one's lexis. 

This course provides an introduction to sets and functions: defining sets, subsets, intersections and unions; injections, surjections, bijections.; compositions and inverses of functions; an introduction to mathematical logic and proof: logical operations, implication, equivalence, quantifiers, converse and contrapositive; proof by induction and contradiction, examples of proofs. These ideas are then applied in the context of the real numbers to make rigorous arguments with sequences and series and develop the notions of convergence and limits. 

This course introduces students to a rich variety of often unfamiliar sonic expressions, musics, and contextualized musical case studies that highlight (or question the limits of) music’s relationship with particular physical (or natural) environments. It also introduces students to, and encourage critical engagement with, music specific and interdisciplinary literature relating to the environment, place, landscape, acoustic ecology, and indigeneity.

The course introduces seminal examples, key texts of game theory and relevant critical theory. Students consider the creative aspects of writing for games including: narrative and storyboards, world building, shooting/scripts, characters and avatars, players, virtuality and corporeality, queer feminist game play, play addiction, and algorithms and chance.

The course gives students a first look into one of the most fundamental functions of any organization, its operations and its relationship with strategy. The operations function of a business, whether manufacturing or services, has the responsibility of making whatever it is the organization sells (product or service). Students study this core function extensively and see the vital role it plays in strategy as well as analyze some of the important decisions that must be made by operations managers when it comes to design, planning, and control and improvement of the organization’s industrial engineering system.

This course teaches students certain key literary texts and the philosophical topics they explore. It also allows students to explore certain key conceptual issues concerning the relations between philosophy and literature. Topics include: what is the distinctive contribution that literature and philosophy each make towards an understanding of religion and morality in the broadest senses of these terms? Are there topics which can best be understood from a philosophical, rather than literary, point of view, or vice versa? What kinds of critical concepts does one need in exploring philosophical, alternatively, literary texts? Can one even speak of texts as "literary" and "philosophical" in such a broad-brush way? And, most importantly, what are the respective contributions of philosophy and literature to a humane education? There is no requirement to read foreign language texts in the original languages, but students are encouraged to do so if possible.