United Kingdom - England

This course explores key topics in understanding British electoral behavior, election campaigning, and political communications, in particular the changing role and influence of public opinion on politics and vice versa. Topics covered include the nature and measurement of public opinion; theories of electoral behavior, and an introduction to the use of quantitative methods in political science; the nature, operation and impact on politics of the British electoral system; influence of the media on public opinion and politicians' attempts to communicate with the public through the media; the tension between "image" and "substance" in modern democratic decision making; and the democratic implications of modern trends including falling turnouts, lower engagement with politics and the parties' adoption of a political marketing philosophy. Each of these issues is set in context by examining their contribution to explaining the significance and/or outcome of various key elections in Britain since the 1930s.

This course explores how labor economics informs the discussion of many social issues such as the causes of unemployment; how technological change is shifting the distribution of jobs and wages; the impact of immigration on wages and employment; the impact of social security on the incentive to work; and the causes of gender and racial wage and employment gaps.

The course will provide students with an understanding of the basic human anatomy and physiology. Students learn the coupling of structure with function through a series of lectures, tutorials, and practicals.

This course introduces students to world history through material culture. The main objects and configurations of material culture, from the body as commodity to cowries as money, are analyzed in this course. Food, drinks, drugs, fabrics, dress, houses, furniture, interior decoration, urban planning, and gardens structure a diversified program. The circulation of objects around the world, in some cases under different materials and forms, opens the way to consider cultural exchange between different civilizations, meaning forms of transfer, contamination, adaptation, and refusal.

This course  examines the theories and evidence underpinning social inequalities in health (defined as the unfair and avoidable differences in health status). It considers structural/material and psychosocial theories, and hypotheses about social drift, self-selection, and genetics. Attention is given to the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health. Sources of data and measurement of scale of inequalities between and within groups are addressed. The course considers the distribution of wealth, income , resources, and power at global, national, and local levels. Redistributive mechanisms work through either government or market control, and the economic implications for inequalities are compared and analyzed. Policy interventions and their different approaches are explored including universal and targeted or selective approaches to reducing inequalities by reducing the inequitable distribution of power, money, and resources.

Modern bioscience research increasingly makes use of computational methods to collect, explore, analyze, display, and share data and results. In this course, students learn the foundational skills of coding so that they can write computer programs and analyze data using the Python programming language. Students are taught using examples drawn from bioscience research, and learn how computer techniques are used across a range of cutting edge research methods.

This course explores how the Middles Ages has been rejected, reiterated, and reimagined in modernity. Beginning with the Gothic literature of the 18th century, the course tracks medieval revivals and reworkings across period, nation, and medium to explore how the medieval past is refashioned according to contemporary ideologies. What does it mean to describe an element of contemporary culture as "medieval"? Why and how have people turned towards the Middle Ages to understand the present and imagine the future? In addition to popular medieval literature and major critical and political movements, medievalisms in art, architecture, film, photography, music, and video games are potential subjects of study. Key topics include temporality, authenticity, gender, performance, nationalism, fantasy, racism, and cultural memory. 

This course explores one or more key issues in Value Theory through the close reading of two or more central works by key historical thinkers in the area and by the critical analysis of the ideas and arguments these works present. The course also introduces students to some of the key secondary literature on the relevant texts and consider how the ideas presented in these texts relate to each other and to issues in the modern philosophical debate.

This course addresses the literature of the 17th century, tightly defined as the period running from the accession of Charles I in 1625 through the Civil War (1642-9) and the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II (1660) to the end of the so-called "early-modern" era in 1700. 

Drawing on a combination of philosophical, sociological, political, and legal scholarship, and taking a comparative and transnational approach, this course examines the role of law in the protection of individual liberty through the provision of civil and political rights. The course critically examines the nature and historical emergence of key civil and political rights, such as the rights to life, to liberty and security, to freedom from torture, to family life, and to hold an opinion, and the requirement for states to legislate against incitement to discrimination and torture. It explores how ideas about civil and political rights have been taken up and transformed at different historical moments and in a variety of geographical contexts. These issues are considered within a broader political framework which assumes that democracy is a necessary context for the fulfilment of civil and political rights. Case studies from recent international events are used to illuminate some of the key issues addressed in the course.