United Kingdom - England

This course traces the premodern histories of contemporary constructions of race and gender, exploring the figuration of these concepts in (mainly) non-dramatic texts from Old English to the 17th-century. Students read works including Old English texts scrutinizing the practices of slavery, early modern women’s conduct books, the diplomatic correspondence between Elizabeth I and the Ottoman “Sultana” Safiye, travel writings by Leo Africanus and Al-Hasan al-Wazzan, and Zadie Smith’s reimagining of Chaucer, THE WIFE OF WILLESDEN. Students draw upon important recent scholarship in Premodern Critical Race Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, Gender Studies, Trans Studies and Queer Temporalities to trace how premodern texts helped to construct, perpetuate, challenge, critique, or explore ideas of race and gender, and how this has shaped our field and our world today. 

This course starts with a historical overview of computer simulations in science and engineering and an introduction to the challenges and opportunities in connecting simulations, theory, and experiments. Students address the core concepts essential to understand and interpret computer simulations in science and engineering, including the fundamentals of statistical physics, interaction potentials, Monte Carlo simulations, equation-based simulations, and the concept of coarse-grained simulations and enhanced sampling techniques. 

This course explores the making of a modern metropolis: London in the 20th century. Using the city as a classroom, students take a social and cultural approach to London’s history. The course attends to differences in the urban space, thinking about the dividing line of the Thames that separates the city North and South, or the East/West divide. They consider the multiplicity of lives lived in London, as shaped by structures including gender, class, race, and age. Students study some of the major events of this period including suffrage campaigns, two world wars, mass migration, and decolonization. They also think about how the public history of the city has been constructed through museums, walking tours, podcasts, documentaries, fiction, and film.

This course surveys research methods for science and technology studies and across the social sciences that contribute to the generation of new data. Students study a diverse range of methods and learn to understand the strengths and weaknesses of particular methods for investigating particular questions. Students are introduced to the theory and practice of qualitative and quantitative methods. Topics include research ethics, research design, face-to-face interviews and focus groups, surveys, content and discourse analysis, and ethnography. 

The course introduces theoretical perspectives on the "public sphere" by drawing on political and philosophical arguments, and illustrating them in the context of the competition/complementarity of political and religious discourses and movements in the age of mass communication. The course also focuses on how religious and political authority is communicated through both conventional and new global media. Topics include the study of religion in the public sphere, power, media, and religion, media representations of religion, media and religious political conflict, and others.

The course combines theoretical and empirical content in the analysis of digital campaigning. Digital campaigning is hereby understood as comprising all forms of social and political campaigning that make intense use of digital media. Theoretically it covers a number of concepts and theories that are relevant to the understanding of this issue, including social movement theory, and digital politics theory. Furthermore, it covers a number of important concepts such as the digitization of political activity, the notion of hybrid media system, the consequences of interactivity, crowd-sourcing, networking, and participatory culture for social and political campaigning. Empirically, it will draw on a number of digital campaigns, from social movements, to charity and civil society campaigns. Its geographic scope mostly focuses on the Western context, but with some attempts to explore similar developments in other word areas including India, China, and South America. 

The course introduces key ideas and processes in the area of Entrepreneurship using an applied approach. The course focuses on the generation of business ideas followed by development, articulation, and formulation of a business plan. Relevant areas such as business model development, the external environment, resource management and financial planning are integrated in an entrepreneurial context. Theoretical and empirical foundations of entrepreneurship are explored at the start of term; the remainder of the course is dedicated to students designing their own entrepreneurial venture and experiencing the entrepreneurial process in action.

This course offers a dynamic exploration of the current and emerging regulatory frameworks guiding Digital Finance or FinTech. It closely examines how laws and regulations across key markets, including the UK, EU, and US, are adapting, striving for a balance between fostering innovation and mitigating risks.

Students learn fundamental theories and methods of database systems: what they are, how they are developed, and how they function to achieve their purposes. The course exemplifies these constructs with contemporary database technologies and students learn how these technologies are exploited to build effective information systems of different scale.

Family firms are the dominant organizational form worldwide, yet a distinctive field of study due to the potential tensions and synergies between family and business systems. This course explores these tensions and synergies, which are manifested in the resources, governance, succession planning, and most important the entrepreneurial orientation and transgenerational value creation potential of family businesses. While research has found consensus on some general trends and characteristics of family firms, there are some surprising outcomes that challenge existing theories.