United Kingdom - England

This course investigates central questions of recent ethical theory. Topics include the nature of the good, the badness of death, utilitarian accounts of right and wrong action, virtue (esp. justice and benevolence), equality, partiality and impartiality, responsibility and moral luck.

This course provides students with insight into the origins of modern celebrity within the literary and theatrical marketplaces of the long 18th century. The course also provides a grounding in the burgeoning field of celebrity studies and encourages reflection on continuities between the 18th century’s public spheres and our own. It traces the rise of different kinds of celebrity within 18th-century Britain’s literary and theatrical marketplaces. Students examine the fame of authors, performers, criminals, politicians, and numerous, notorious others. 

This course begins with exploring how digital technologies have proliferated every aspect of our daily lives, around work, travel, leisure, consumption, production, and reproduction, in ways that are simultaneously virtual and material. This focuses on how digital technologies, infrastructures, devices, logics, and methods are blurring the divides across analog and digital spaces. It then looks at how digital technologies can simultaneously break down and reinforce inequalities along class, race, gender, sexuality through new "digital divides." Finally, it examines the implications this has for producing new forms of digital citizenships and claims to social and spatial justice.

This course introduces students to the history, development, and institutions of the American political system. It provides a deeper understanding of contemporary US politics by exploring the historical origins of American political and economic development. The course examines the operation of the main branches of the US government (Congress, Presidency, Supreme Court), and the nature of political ideology and the rise of modern political parties. It also analyzes the development of the federal government, bureaucracy and regulation, and explains the importance of voting and elections in shaping the scope and breadth of public policy in the US today. 

This course takes students on the path to understanding of how religious ideas, movements, and institutions shape and are shaped by individuals, groups, and societies. Students engage with ideas and theories of classical thinkers, such as Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, and with innovative and often provocative views and concepts of contemporary sociologists. Among the questions for discussion are whether religion serves as "social cement" or causes conflict; why and how it can reinforce the existing social order or encourage change; and how we can explain why people stay in conventional faiths or choose new, even exotic, religions – or maybe they are brainwashed into them? Students discuss methods and approaches that sociologists use to study religion – and why their methodology often leads them to discoveries that challenge common assumptions about certain religious beliefs, practices, and groups.

This is an introduction to quantum computer science, intended primarily for computer scientists, physicists, electrical engineers, and mathematicians. It introduces a large number of ideas with an emphasis on building familiarity with the main concepts, and some general knowledge of terminology and methods. Mathematical methods are employed in a practical way, on a "need-to-know" basis. 

This course examines through three case studies how we should develop legal responses to the challenge of AI. Today AI is used by the police, other law enforcement agencies, and even by private citizens to build smart surveillance networks through the use of live facial recognition cameras and so-called “hot spot” policing. This has the potential to impact our privacy and personal data and risks bias and error in design and deployment. The use of AI in law enforcement is the first case study. The second, the deployment of AI in medical practice and treatment, raises questions of autonomy, consent, confidentiality, and liability. The third case study looks at how public authorities deploy AI in ways which impact all, including digital transformation of public administrative systems, the use of AI in the legal profession and the courts, and the deployment of AI at borders and to manage immigration. 

This course introduces a range of issues surrounding the dynamics of disputes and the advanced models of negotiation and mediation designed to aid in their resolution. The focus of the course, which draws on insights from a range of disciplines including law, anthropology, psychology, and economics, is on looking at contemporary dispute resolution theories across a range of settings. An important feature of the course is the way in which it examines the interface between theory and practice. Academic staff is joined by leading practitioners in exposing students to the everyday dynamics of negotiation and mediation.

This course offers a thematic approach to selected literary, cultural, and socio-political processes from across the Spanish and Portuguese speaking-worlds we call Global Iberias. Encompassing Spain and Portugal, Latin America, and Lusophone Africa and Asia, lectures and seminars explore questions of power and creativity, and introduce students to the key concepts for the discussion of social movements, urban regeneration, colonialism and postcolonialism, and literary and cultural movements and ideas, from Modernism and Futurism to Magical Realism. Overall, the course provides students with core conceptual, interpretative, methodological, and presentation skills for the study of the cultures and societies of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds.

In the last few decades, the number of film festivals in the world has boomed. Even more recently, film studies researchers have begun to pay attention to this phenomenon, and the sub-field of film festival studies has grown rapidly. This course combines practice and theory. Students form small groups and curate their own evenings in a week-long campus film festival to be held in the final week of the semester. Students also read a wide range of research in film festival studies.