United Kingdom - England

Why was love such a burning topic in pre-modern France? How did poetry and prose fashion attitudes towards women, men, love, and sex? What were pre-modern constructions of gender and were there any alternatives to traditional models? During this course, students answer these questions by consulting a wide range of pre-modern texts, including courtly romance, lyric poetry, short stories, and longer narrative. They examine the portrayal of love and the conventions that govern its representations in literature. Topics include the body, virtues and vices, marriage, sexuality, seduction, chastity and violence. Students compare how men and women treat these themes, and look at how women write in genres traditionally dominated by men. Knowledge of French is not required. English translations of the works studied can be read.

In this course, students study animal physiology, emphasizing how to compare and contrast the physiological processes across different animal groups that govern their day-to-day function. Students gain an appreciation of how response strategies are used to cope with different external environments and how physiological plasticity is key to maintaining and adjusting physiological processes in terrestrial and aquatic animals.

How do states cooperate with each other? How do they engage in conflict? Do these strategies of engagement change over time? These are some of the most important questions in the field of International Relations (IR) and they lie at the center of this course. Researchers and practitioners have asked those questions throughout human history – the increasingly competitive landscape of international security in the last decade makes such questions all the more potent. Starting with the onset of World War I and ending in the near future, this course explores the nature of conflict and cooperation over approximately the past 100 years. It introduces students to the different actors, processes, and technologies that shape these dynamics. This involves themes and topics such as why and when states start wars, how they may be prevented, how powerful states build international orders and for what reasons, whether international institutions are autonomous from states or subservient to them, the consequences of the rise of populism on interstate politics, and the nature of the current conflict between Russia and the West.

This course explores the role of seapower and empires in the development of modern warfare, strategy, and international relations. Students examine the role of sea power in imperialism and the relationship between East and West, the role of technological innovation in the ability of sea power to affect war and politics both at the global and regional levels, the role of maritime geography as a structural impediment and enabler in the projection of power, and the conceptual complexities involved in the terms empire and imperialism as tools for understanding the strategic challenges that face the world today.

Developmental biology deals with the various steps necessary for the correct and complete formation of the body of a living organism. In this course, students are introduced to the mechanisms used to produce different cell and tissue types and ensure these cells develop in the correct position and identity. Students learn, using examples such as the eye and limbs, that similar developmental mechanisms are employed by diverse organisms. The role that developmental biology plays in medicine in stem cell therapy, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine are also considered.

The human voice is a highly flexible tool for communication with others. The course familiarizes students with the main concepts underpinning the psychological processing of the human voice, and to introduce them to research on the perception and expression of speech, emotions, and identity. The content covered ranges from basic articulatory and acoustic properties of verbal and nonverbal vocal behavior (e.g. speech, laughter), to social and cognitive aspects of voice processing (e.g. identity recognition, evaluation of personality traits), and the neural underpinnings of human voice processing.

This course provides an introduction to strategic people management, with a focus on people management innovations and the major changes affecting contemporary people management. While this includes coverage of the basic people management functions and how people management contributes to value creation and organizational performance, the course’s strategic perspective means that people management is analyzed in light of several major changes and innovations, including diversity management; employee involvement; employability, soft skills, and labor market trends; employee wellbeing; global value chains, downsizing, and other forms of organizational restructuring; and the internationalization of people management, also through multi-national corporations. Furthermore, promoting a strategic perspective, the course also discusses contextual factors influencing people management decision-making. 

This course teaches symmetries and group theory, and their applications to physical problems – from basic discrete groups, representation theory, and Lie groups and algebras.  This course also includes formal mathematical concepts.

Students learn about group theory and formal mathematics, giving them a firm framework for further study.

The 20th century completely reconfigured global politics. These reconfigurations also transformed Britain’s international standing. This course examines the often-overlapping shifts behind this transformation – imperial decline, economic crises, world wars, Cold War, European integration. Using a foreign policy lens, it examines how successful Britain was in navigating global challenges; how it adapted its strategies and alliances as a result; and how the foreign policymaking process altogether evolved, from being mainly the domain of ambassadors to increasingly being shaped by individual prime ministers. In answering these questions, the course has three main aims. First, to offer students an overview of the international history of modern Britain; second, to establish a firm basis for further studies in foreign policy and/or British politics; third, to provide the conceptual tools necessary for understanding current political discourses.