United Kingdom - England

This course provides an introduction to epistemology and metaphysics. Topics to be discussed include the nature of knowledge, scepticism, the existence of God, whether theism is rational, why the universe exists, free will, personal identity, and the metaphysics of race.

This course focuses on the intersection of climate crisis, energy demand, buildings and the wellbeing of people. Students are introduced to key concepts and Open Access data and tools for modelling and analyzing building energy demand and occupant wellbeing at a large scale. Students learn to synthesize knowledge across disciplines to develop and evaluate strategies and comprehensive plans for sustainable urban living.

Few chapters in all of history are as dramatic—both tragic and spectacular--as modern Jewish history. The apparent success of Jewish emancipation was challenged by popular and religious non-Jewish opposition, and efforts among Jews to control or turn back such changes. No matter what, Judaism and Jews did not stand still. Antisemitism gained traction as reactionary utopia, along with the persistence of traditional prejudice and discrimination. Against this background there arose a variety of Jewish ideologies, including: Modern Orthodoxy, Reform Judaism, Zionism, Territorialism, Variants of socialism, "Ultra" orthodoxies, and National extremism. 

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Jewish life changed radically, and European Jewry came close to being totally wiped out in the Holocaust. Since the late eighteenth century, Jews had sought new ways to think about and live in the modern world. Numerous individuals of Jewish origin took the lead in attempting to understand the changes wrought by modernity—including: Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, Bertha Pappenheimer, Emma Goldman, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and Philip Roth. 

Experimental writing is often counterposed to writing that emphasizes voice, experience, and identity. Exploring the relationships between literary form and subjectivity, between abstract systemic forces and our concrete lived experiences of the world, the course considers how contemporary writers have turned to experimental techniques to channel modes of solidarity, joy and refusal, and to make legible forms of gendered and racial violence. In this way, literary experimentalisms have also provided crucial tools for anti-racist and feminist critique. But what makes a literary text experimental? What does experimental writing have to say about class? And what does it mean to ‘queer’ a text? Asking these and other questions, the course will considers what the literary critic Anthony Reed calls "literature’s means of expanding the domain of the intelligible and thinkable."

This course is about India from the 15th to the mid-18th centuries. This was a period of sometimes slow or subtle, occasionally cataclysmic, but often palpable transformation, and students examine the ways in which what people believed, where and how they lived, their relationship to the state and its power, and how they expressed themselves was changing. Although the course focuses first and foremost on India, by placing its history in its global context throughout this course, the class scrutinizes the emerging notion of a "global early modernity."

This course provides a critical understanding of the discipline of Forensic Science as it applies to the scientific underpinning of the processes from crime scene to courtroom.

This course provides an introduction to the sub-discipline of urban geography. It explores the distinctive contribution that geographers have made to the analysis of cities and urban life. The course outlines the economic and social origins of urban life, exploring the relationship between population density, size, and diversity that characterise cities. The course systematically outlines how contemporary cities can be interpreted as economic spaces, social spaces, and political entities. It also explores the different ways that urban geographers and others have framed their research into cities and urban environments. Given that cities – for all their attractions and strengths – are frequently defined by their dysfunction and inequality, the course examines how such poor outcomes are generated. It also explores the kinds of policy programmes that might be capable of generating more liveable and equitable cities. The course takes a selfconsciously international perspective, encouraging participants to read widely about the diversity of cities that form the focus of urban geographical thinking today.

This course examines the causes and consequences of this democratic malaise, encouraging students to consider policies and actions to address these ill winds against modern democratic regimes. The course begins with an introduction to normative and theoretical justifications for democratic governance and by providing a historical and comparative analysis of the state of democracy. From there, it considers threats to the democratic consolidation and causes of democratic backsliding. Topics include multiculturism, immigration, ethnic chauvinism, electoral violence and fraud, corruption, and elite capture. The last part of the course considers ways to protect, improve and consolidate democracy.

This course is an introduction to linguistic pragmatics, an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics which studies the relationship between language form and language use. It seeks to understand what it is to use language or what we do when we use language (Verschueren 1999). The course is divided into three units: the basic theoretical concepts in pragmatics, such as Grice’s maxims of conversation, conversational implicatures, deixis, and speech acts; key analytical (and contentious) issues such as salience and implicit meaning by analyzing different types of discourse; and the analysis of conversational interaction. Here, students explore such phenomena as turn-taking and preference structure, politeness phenomena, formulaic language, humor, and pragmatic/discourse markers.