United Kingdom - England

This course introduces students to and explores the purpose, nature, and operation of the financial accounting function within businesses, particularly limited liability companies in the UK. It reveals, illustrates and explores how the financial accounting systems operate when tasked with measuring and recording the financial value of the transactions, events, and activities of a business. In so doing, it examines the nature and scope of financial accounting and the underlying conceptual framework of accounting conventions and standards. It further looks at the ratio analysis and associated interpretation of published financial statements from the perspectives of a range of differing users of financial accounting information. Accordingly, the course seeks to equip students with the knowledge, understanding, and skills to enable them to identify and record the financial value of business transactions, events and activities, and to generate financial information through the construction of balance sheets, income statements (profit statements) and cash flow statements, and through the use of financial ratios.

In this course, students learn to develop and present a business plan for a commercial or social enterprise within the creative economy. The course equips students with the tools and entrepreneurial skill to rigorously plan, resource, and deliver their own proposal or product launch, as well as articulate and communicate its relevance in a rapidly changing landscape. Students gain a range of sought-after hard and soft skills, across five key areas: market analysis, product or service design, branding, assessing resources, and an in-depth financial forecasting. Regular group and project-based activities help to foster an inclusive and entrepreneurial learning environment. Lectures, seminars, and panels led by specialists and leaders drawn from the commercial art, finance, and startup sectors also help students to generate entrepreneurial sparks to resolve some of the issues facing the contemporary art world. This course culminates in a “shark tank” event, where students present a unique idea to a panel of experts, offering opportunities for networking, advice, and potential investment.

This course presents financial statement analysis from the point of view of the primary users of financial statements: company managers, creditors, and investors. The course provides students with tools to enable them to analyze financial statements and draw inferences about the performance and the value of a firm. The course is structured in two broad parts. Financial analysis forms the first part, focusing on past and present performance evaluation to generate expectations about future performance (prospective analysis), credit rating and distress prediction. The second part, security valuation, focuses on market- and accounting-based models to derive the value of a firm. All analyses are conducted within the context of a firm’s industry and strategy. This is an applied and practical course. 

In this course, students gain an in-depth understanding of what makes consumers buy some products and not others, how various psychological characteristics influence our consumer behaviors, how companies can best try to meet consumers' wants and needs, among other topics. Building on a general understanding of marketing, this course develops a useful, conceptual understanding of psychological theories relevant to the study of consumer behavior.

This course provides an overview of natural hazards such as floods, severe storms, droughts, multi-hazard interrelationships, the perception of natural hazards, and the complex relationship that exists between natural hazards and society. Lectures on specific hazards are addressing the basic theory for the creation and/or existence of each hazards, along with an understanding of some of the primary and secondary effectives (both negative and positive) of each hazard, including case study examples. 

One of the primary functions literature serves is as a vehicle for memory. From the portrayal of national histories, to the embodiment of collective myths, to the expression of individual identities, literature has both lent authority to and constructed contentious arguments for our image of our past. The literature of central and eastern Europe is particularly rich in explorations of history and memory. While in earlier times literature was called upon to lend social and historical legitimacy to communities without nation-states, more recent literature of the region has played a major role in attempts to come to terms with the catastrophes of the 20th century.

Memory is a property of the living brain and operationally it is defined at the behavioral level. For the mechanistic analysis of memory it is important to distinguish between processes, such as memory consolidation and memory retrieval. In mammals, there are independent memory systems that involve distinct brain regions. Neuronal networks establish memories in the brain and distinct molecular and cellular processes within individual neurons are fundamental for memory. In this course, students study state-of-the-art knowledge of memory mechanisms at the molecular, cellular, network, anatomical and behavioral level. Students learn which experimental approaches are being applied to investigate these memory mechanism and they learn to critically reflect on these investigations. The course also covers how diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, affect memory mechanisms, and how memory abilities may be improved with pharmacological treatments.

The course provides an introduction to the science of the natural environment and gives an overview of the processes that shape the evolution of our environment. Topics include (1) global cycles that operate in the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and cryosphere, and the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, water, and energy; (2) natural hazards and their impacts on human society and how these are monitored, assessed, and mitigated; and (3) natural resources exploitation focused on water, minerals, and fossil fuels, and the environmental issues associated with their extraction and use.

The course provides students with a grasp of the main conceptual approaches, schools, methods, and sub-disciplines in Politics. All the course contents are framed and taught with reference to contemporary European politics and political systems. The course gives students the toolkit and ability to problematize and reflect critically on common-sense assumptions and understandings of political institutions and processes.