United Kingdom - England

This course provides a synthetic study of the history, politics, and political economy of modern Ukraine. Students study history up to independence in 1991, the formation of post-Soviet Ukraine in the 1990s and 2000s, and the attempts to reform it via the Orange Revolution and Maidan Revolution/Revolution of Dignity in 2013-14. Students look at the reasons for the election of a comedian Volodymyr Zelensky as President in 2019. Particular attention is paid to the theme of national identity, and to the complex historical interrelationship between Ukraine and Russia. Students also explore Russia’s motives for invasion in 2014 and 2022 and Ukraine’s will to resist.

Students learn to identify and remove simple trends and seasonalities from time series data; describe the properties of stationary time series and their autocorrelations; define various time series probability models (ARMA, ARIMA, GARCH); construct time series probability models from data and verify model fit; define the spectral density function and understand it as a distribution of energy in the frequency domain; compute the periodogram and smoothed versions; and analyze multivariate time series.

This course explores the related topics of war and security. It is divided into three parts. The first part looks specifically at the idea of war, particularly how the idea of war has been conceptualized within the field of strategic studies and the tactics of war. The second section considers how these traditional notions of war and security have been questioned; specifically, it looks in depth at two key issues that have challenged traditional perceptions of war and security. These are the rise of non-state threats (i.e. terrorism) and the concept of human security. The third section looks at a range of contemporary issues in security studies, such as nuclear proliferation, genocide, and cybersecurity. 

This course covers basic evolutionary biology as applied in biological anthropology, covering evolutionary theory, socio-biology, and primate behavior. The course combines weekly lectures with tutorials, where students discuss key readings linked to issues presented in the lectures, gain scientific comprehension skills, and learn how to communicate scientific findings in biological anthropology to the public. Major topics covered include a summary of the history of the theory of evolution, genetics and heredity, sexual selection, nature and nurture, and human biological diversity; and an outline of the taxonomy, anatomy, ecology and behavior of primates, as well as primate conservation.

This course offers students the opportunity to consider the nuances of American politics. Working across broad themes of democracy, inclusion, exclusion and power, the course provides a detailed examination of American politics.

The course focuses on the ways in which gender, power, and sexuality shape and are shaped by our lived experiences, social interactions, institutional structures, and cultural norms. Students engage with diverse theoretical frameworks to critically analyze a wide array of relevant topics, including reproduction, sex work, and intimate relationships, among others. Through contemporary case studies, the course explores how gender and sexuality intersect with power, race, class, ethnicity, age and ability, and how it operates within wider institutional, political, and socio-cultural frameworks.

This course explores the theory and practice of modern British politics. It familiarizes students with the ways in which British democracy has evolved, how it operates today and some of the challenges that confront it. Students gain knowledge of the of the political system and learn about how and why the system operates in the way it does, as well as the quality of contemporary democratic governance. 

Explore the social, political, economic, and cultural elements that explain global health disparities. The course introduces the concepts of globalization and global health, illustrate the global burden of disease, and by doing so, deepen understanding of the inequities and inequalities between and within countries and why we think they exist. The main global health stakeholders and ´global health´ governance and explore diverse science paradigms that have dominated the way we analyze and comprehend the process of being healthy and ill, as well as how we approach global health issues. Review concepts such as determinants of health vs determination of health (a Latin-American theoretical construct), decolonialism and equitable discourses in global health. The course is delivered by global health experts at BSMS and our independent consultant Maria Cristina Quevedo-Gomez.

This course provides students with an overview of innovative and experimental writing by women in the twentieth century – and beyond. The texts studied allow for a consideration of various kinds of formal, linguistic, generic, thematic and material experiment, and for discussions of diverse literary categories, practices and movements, such as modernism, postmodernism, multimodality, cut-up, lipogrammatic writing and the nouveau roman. Accompanying critical material facilitates a discussion of the various avant-gardes of the 20th century (such as Dada, Surrealism, and the Oulipo group), and their contextual and cultural significance.  

This course provides an introduction to the comparative politics of the US and the UK.  Attention is given to similarities as well as differences, and the course uses comparative analysis to throw light on the political systems in both countries.  Occasional reference is made to other countries. The course is structured around four themes: ideologies and foundations, institutions, political actors, and policy.