United Kingdom - England

The course introduces students to the history, changing fortunes, monuments, and artistic output of Constantinople, successor to Rome and the largest city of the medieval world. This is achieved through the examination of the city’s fabric, of individual monuments with their decoration, and of primary texts which shed light on important questions, with particular emphasis on the transformation of the city from Late Antiquity through the so-called dark ages and into the medieval period (4th - 15th century).

A research project that assigns students to expert professors in their proposed research topic. The course takes students' research capabilities to a more professional level. This can be most closely compared to what is called a supervised research project in the USA.

This course examines the rise of risk-based policy-making and risk regulation for scientific, technological, and environmental developments. Students explore definitions of risk and the terminology for risk governance, (changing) perceptions and attitudes to risk in public and private organizations, as well as established and new approaches to managing and regulating risk. These issues are explored through a number of deep dive case studies and sessions from several fields: healthcare and pharmaceutical (including Covid-19), the environment and climate change, digital technologies and cyber-physical systems, and food safety. Particular attention is paid to addressing uncertainty and ambiguity, and what good governance of uncertain risks entails via models such as "planned adaptive risk regulation." 

This course deepens students' understanding of the writer’s craft and enhance the development of techniques they acquired in Prose Fiction. The first ninety minutes of every workshop is devoted to the critique of student work-in-progress (either a short story or a novel excerpt). Discussions are guided by the lecturer, who offer feedback tailored to the craft-related issues evident in each submission. This may include topic such as characterization, plot, structure, dialogue, voice, point of view, narrative time, conflict, and prose style. The last half-hour of each workshop promotes the close reading and evaluation of established authors’ work, exemplifying matters of technique and the various stylistic approaches to the form. 

The course introduces the basic concepts from a wide spectrum of topics in finance including financial statement analysis, time value of money, capital budgeting, bond valuation, stock valuation, stock returns and market efficiency, portfolio diversification, CAPM, cost of capital, corporate governance, and behavioural finance. In addition, it also introduces empirical research evidences that synthesise the aforementioned topics. 

This course examines, from a philosophical perspective, the ways in which recent developments in genetics and neuroscience challenge our conceptions of what we are — and what we could become.

This course gives an overview of the key arguments in the sociology of religion, including the social, cultural, and political significance of religion to the individual, social groups, and society at a national and global level. The course begins by covering the classical sociological theorists on religion (Durkheim, Weber & Marx) and examines the key debates around secularization and post-secularization. It then considers the social and cultural significance of new religious movements and the rise of spirituality and New Age movements in the West. Finally students consider the growth of fundamentalism around the world and how religion is becoming globalized.

The course provides an introduction into monetary and financial history from the 18th century to the present day. It examines the main developments in international monetary architecture and the global financial system since the Glorious Revolution. The course introduces students to major concepts of money and finance (financial development, financial integration, monetary policy, banking crises etc.) and to provide a long run perspective to the current policy debate.

This course examines the functioning of democracies in a context of high economic interdependence. To do so, the course is structure into two parts. In the first part, students learn how to define and measure globalization; how institutions emerge and change and how political institutions have contributed to the development of globalization. In the second part of the course, the focus is on analyzing the relationship between democracy and globalization. In this part of the course, the main topics cover the relationship between globalization and political accountability; the surge of technocracy and the tension with the democratic ideal of self government, and the socio-economic consequences of globalization. These topics provide the basis to understand more complex problems like Brexit, the collapse of establishment parties or the rise of populism. 

This course is to help students better understand why people make certain financial choices in a way that systematically contradicts theoretical expectations. More specifically, this course is particularly interested in exploring examples of where conventional theory in finance does not hold and markets appearing to be acting "irrationally." Consequently, this course guides students through the development of the field of behavioral finance from the early ground-breaking work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the 1970s-1980s, to the extensive field that it is today, where the course covers a range of topics relating to seemingly irrational financial behavior, including spending, investing, trading, retirement planning, wellbeing, and public policy.