United Kingdom - England

In this course, students examine the origins of the idea of human rights, how it became institutionalized in law and international politics, and how its history and prospects have become so fiercely contested today. Students reflect on the history of abolitionism, human rights, and humanitarianism in a global setting, and analyze the impact of modern international and multi-cultural perspectives on the evolution of human rights history.

The course explores beliefs in witches, demons, and magic, and phenomena such as angels, ghosts, dreams, and miracles using case studies from a range of European countries across the period 1450 - 1750. It investigate the interplay between popular and elite ideas about witchcraft and magic and how these changed over the course of the period. Topics include: witchcraft, sabbats, the diabolic pact, and black magic; witch trials, torture, and execution; demonic possession and exorcism; angels, ghosts, and fairies; and monsters and miracles. Students discuss a range of textual and visual primary sources including woodcuts, witchcraft trials, popular pamphlets, and official treatises (all in translation). 

This course introduces students to advanced numerical methods for the solution and optimization of both linear and nonlinear systems, so that they are able to apply them in real chemical engineering problems. Students learn about optimization theory and how to formulate optimization models for linear and nonlinear problems, select an appropriate solution method, and compute a numerical solution. The numerical software tool for this course is GAMS.

The course examines the inter-relationships between the development of the international economy and the growth of national economies until the late 19th century. The course introduces students not only to a wide variety of topics and issues, but also to the wide variety of approaches used by historians. The course includes analyses of the original leading nation, Britain, and its replacement, the United States, as well as the catch-up of areas such as continental Europe, and the failure to catch-up of earlier well-placed areas such as Latin America. 

This course examines a selection of epic poems from ancient Greece and Rome - all studied in translation - to trace the development of the genre from the oral tradition of Homer through the literary composition of later Greek and Latin poets. Authors and texts studied in this course may include Homer, Hesiod, Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius. Themes studied may include genre, gender, myth, the gods, destiny, mortality, narrative technique, oral, and literary culture, or paradigms of heroism. Students also reflect on the cultural and political contexts of these works, including differences between Greek and Roman epics.

This course includes topics such as user-centric design, user study design, data analysis, and verbal and non-verbal robot behavior. Additionally, the course explores several human-robot interaction applications such as healthcare, education, and in-home robots.

Employing the theory of Bourdieu throughout the course, students examine the interrelatedness of economy, governance, and society in influencing the choice of where we live. Students focus on the role of culture in nuancing class-based explanations of the relationship between people and place. We consider how housing choices can confer social advantage or disadvantage on individual households. Students discuss the significance for policy makers of placing the social at the center of our understanding of housing choices. We use a series of place-based typologies and phenomenon to relate theory to practice. Examples might include but are not limited to suburbanization, rural second homes, and gentrification.

This course examines the nature of the operating environment for international business today.  Students review the scale, scope, and trends in international business activity and evaluate the various methods that firms can use to assess, enter, and develop non-domestic markets. Students consider the relevance of factors such as culture, psychic distance, host and home country perspectives, and "green" issues on the organization and management of international business. Emphasis is placed on the business environment in key regions of the world, notably the European Union, North America, East and SE Asia and the transition economies of East and Central Europe. Finally, students examine the impact of the evolving world economy, regional integration and globalization on today's international firm.

This course introduces students to the inter-disciplinary field of peace and conflict studies, and the range of practices that have developed to make peace in different parts of the world. These include international peacekeeping, mediation, peacebuilding, conflict transformation, and peace formation, among others. In particular, the unit sets such practices in the context of the key political science and international relations’ dynamics of power, international and state design, rights, resistance, and socio-political agency. It does so in the context of inter-disciplinary, multi-methodological, approaches, as well as a wide range of empirical case studies. The course outlines insights from a range of disciplines (social psychology, economy, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and geography) and places them in the context of insights from different conflict-affected regions around the world where various methods associated with peace processes have been applied.