United Kingdom - England

What is Judaism? Since Judaism has a history spanning more than three millennia and all five continents, it inevitably means different things to different people. The academic study of Judaism tries to answer the question by focusing on Jewish practice, tradition, and history with a variety of perspectives: The definition of Judaism: is it a religion, culture, or ethnicity? Is it monolithic, essential, and static, or rather diverse, hybrid, and dynamic? What are the texts and practices that define Judaism? What are the central concepts of rabbinic Judaism? How does rabbinic legal text and reasoning work? What are the places and shapes of Jewish worship? How do tradition and modernization make their mark felt in the history of Judaism, from Antiquity to the present day? How does Judaism interact with other religions? Which are the contemporary ways of connecting with the Jewish tradition?

The course gives students an introduction to some key legal areas relevant to business law. It teaches important aspects of business law, looking at business relationships, agency, and the business organization. 

This course introduces students to the material and visual culture of the ancient world from the second millennium BC to late antiquity. Semester 1 focuses on the Greek world. Students will study the built environment - from the great urban monuments to everyday domestic units (including temples, "homes" for the gods). Students explore the art and iconography of the ancient world alongside the material residues of daily life and ritual. Students are introduced to the different perspectives and methods of both archaeologists and art historians in interpreting material remains and visual images. The course combines close study of individual pieces of evidence with an evaluation of how they illuminate the societies, cultures, institutions, and economies of classical antiquity. The course draws heavily from the extraordinary collections in London, particularly the British Museum.

The musical emerged at the end of the 19th century to become one of the most popular and commercially successful theatre forms in the world. This course looks at the long history of the musical, its many varieties (from musical comedy to the integrated musical, from the concept musical to the rock musical, from SHOWBOAT to HAMILTON); considering its pleasures and its politics, its representations of gender, race and sexuality, the relationship between the stage and film musical. The course looks at the artistic achievements of the music theater form and the peculiarities of its cultural form, the role of narrative, the relation between song and story, etc. The course will examine whether musicals are appropriate vehicle for serious content, whether its apparent frivolity might be of significance and value, and the political significance of kitsch, camp, escapism, and excess in the musical’s formation. 

This course shows students that nature and politics are totally intertwined. This is the case in two ways. First, the natural world has been shaped and governed by human action for thousands of years. Second, humans themselves are part of nature, always being shaped, changed, limited, and enabled by the non-human (or more-than human?) world. Since all human action and the intimate entanglements between the human and non-human world are suffused with power relations, they are, by definition, deeply involved in politics. This course delves deeper into the implications of thinking about nature through a political lens. Students are introduced to ideas about the ways the natural world relates to nationalism, colonialism, power, violence, belonging, spirituality, ethics, care, time, food, and embodiment. 

 

This course covers various theoretical traditions of scholarship within the sociology of education, and explores questions about the role of education in society. It explores institutional based processes, such as institutional power dynamics, teacher labelling, the curriculum and "hidden curriculum," and the construct of ability. In doing so, the course explores the processes through which educational and social inequality are generated and how alternative forms of education might address inequality.

This course provides a rich introduction to modern British history, from 1801 to the present day. If students have not previously studied the period, it gives them the foundation for specialist courses in subsequent years. If students have some prior knowledge, it challenges them with new interpretations from the cutting edge of historical research. The course introduces students to new critical approaches to the subject and draws extensively on primary sources such as film, pop music, and visual imagery. It has a strong global dimension, showing how crises in India, Asia, and Africa shaped the "British World." 

This course focuses on the basics of infrastructure as a complex system, giving priority to the interdependencies across infrastructure, and how these links result in macro infrastructure properties, such as resilience, security, and adaptability. Challenges for infrastructure including climate change are elaborated in the context of infrastructure as a system of systems. Exciting opportunities from digitalization, decentralization, democratization, decarbonization, etc. are exposed, highlighting the connectedness of nature, society, and engineered systems. It is essential for future engineering leaders to appreciate how their sectoral systems create stakeholder value and deliver critical services in the context of infrastructure as a whole, and how these values and services change over time. The course also provides an overview of transdisciplinary approaches and methods for the analysis and visualization of infrastructure, equipping students with the skills to communicate challenges, opportunities, and recommendations to improve outcomes from infrastructure throughout its lifecycle.

This course interrogates development geography as a discipline, discourse, and practice. Framed as "global development" in contemporary discourse, it traces its origins to colonialism and engages with debates in both mainstream and radical development thinking. Drawing on examples from different regions of the world, it focuses on global challenges related to migration, employment, gender, environment, digital technologies, and development finance to reflect on the changing geographies and politics of development.

This practice-based course develops students’ sense of nonfiction-writing as a creative act, and introduces some of the practical skills and techniques essential to a variety of forms including: memoir and the personal essay; biography; nature-writing; reportage and cultural criticism. Through studying a wide range of non-fictional texts, students explore the ways in which writers engaged in supposedly factual writing nonetheless take creative risks and make the same kinds of narrative decisions as fiction-writers.