United Kingdom - England

This course introduces students to a wide range of spaces and places where music is encountered and used throughout cultures and societies across the globe. It engages with changing ideas and concepts about the role of music in society, in different cultural contexts.

The ability to communicate scientific information well is important if one is to disseminate scientific ideas clearly and accurately. Scientific communication involves more than just writing. It also involves the ability to read, analyze, understand, and critique scientific subject matter in a knowing way, at an appropriate depth and breadth, and with an appropriate style for an intended audience. Within this broad context, this course guides students through writing a scientific research paper, as applied to the physical sciences, for an audience of their peers. Students write about one real physical phenomenon such as one of Hooke’s law, Torricelli’s law, projectile motion, the behavior of a pendulum, or some other suitable phenomenon. Such investigation is supported by simulations and/or practical experiments.

This course explores the thrilling and cataclysmic changes of the 17th century through the prism of poetry. As England came to grips with a fundamental change in the national religion; saw civil war pitting neighbor against neighbor and family against family; witnessed a steep rise in women authors and the emergence of modern science, the country’s values were challenged, overturned and re-formed. The course explore how poets responded to these intense changes. The course explores a wide range of writers, from John Milton and Aphra Behn to Aemilia Lanyer and Robert Hooke. Students analyze the brilliant wit, rich imagery, and evocative forms of the period’s poems and ask what they tell us about the historical conditions of their production, and vice versa. Does political poetry have a particular style? Can poetry propel revolution as well as respond to it? Students investigate the models that poets called upon to write about these unprecedented events. 

This course provides an in-depth critical introduction to a range of important 20th/21st-century concepts, musical works, institutions and people and explores both their impact on musical culture and their relationship to wider political, social, and artistic issues during the 20th and/or 21st centuries.

This introductory course provides a comprehensive introduction to digital research for students from a range of backgrounds. Through a variety of interactive sessions students develop an understanding of the key principles of Open Science and Scholarship, the importance of reproducibility and methods for managing research projects. The course serves as a platform for students to undertake digitally enabled research projects.

This course helps students develop the relevant knowledge and understanding of fixed income instruments and interest rate models. The course provides an overview of the major institutions, organizations, and investors, and it covers both the theoretical background of fixed income markets and its practical implementation. Gaining hands-on experience using real-world examples, students develop the critical thinking and analytical skills to engage in fixed income markets globally.

This course analyzes developments in Russian literature after Stalinism, covering major literary texts and events in Russian cultural history from 1953 to the present, with a brief look at the period immediately preceding the post-Stalin era. Each week is devoted to a particular text or author, but certain themes recur throughout the course, including: emigration and exile; the boundaries between published and unpublished literature; experimentations in literary form; the effects of ideological and political change on literary production; and writers’ involvement in (or withdrawal from) politics.

This course examines post-war French politics and society through the study of objects. It explores issues such as race, class, gender, and sexuality in the context of modernization and urbanization, colonization and globalization, social movements and revolt. The course assesses the rebuilding of France in the aftermath of collaboration and occupation, looking at the expansion of the French state, the emergence of new social groups and categories, and the way in which conflicts emerge over social, political, and cultural questions. It charts these processes by focusing on the study of objects, drawing on a range of perspectives developed by historians, sociologists, and critical theorists.

This course introduces students to the social dimensions of climate and climate change. The course takes a critical analysis of the dominant international process to mitigate climate change emissions, comprising of the IPCC, UNFCCC process and the Paris Accord. We will explore the different ways in which climate knowledge is constructed and how climate is represented and articulated in society. Existing discourses of climate change are placed in an historical perspective, and alternative aims for climate change mitigation explored. The course begins with a history of the discovery of climate change and an outline of the global governance regime for climate mitigation, as manifested through the Paris Agreement, UNFCCC process, and the IPCC reports. We will then critically analyse this process, by discussing the assumptions that underpin it, the unintended consequences of action to fight climate change, and alternative measures and outcomes that are not covered within the UNFCCC process.

The course explores food as the essential link between nature and culture, examining how food classification, production, cooking, and eating shape cultural identity, social organization, family and gender systems, and religious practices. By studying practices of commensality, students uncover how food reveals ideas about similarity, difference, politics, religion, and social hierarchies. Students also explore contemporary issues such as how food consumption ties to identity, the obesity epidemic, and the environmental challenges of sustainable food production.