United Kingdom - England

This course focuses on examining the contributions that social, cultural, political and economic factors have made towards environmental problems by applying insights from scholarship from across the social sciences. Working with case studies of contemporary environmental issues, students consider how and why these issues have emerged, and reflect on the risks, challenges, and opportunities associated with past, present, and future responses. Students pay attention to the roles and responsibilities of a range of stakeholders and institutions (including citizens, consumers, activists and social movements, state policy makers, international organizations, and corporations), and to the ethical and political tensions involved in enacting practical solutions to environmental issues.

This course explores the challenges we face and identifies collaborative processes for nature-based solutions in urban planning, design, implementation, adaptation, and care. Through a range of creative processes, with reference to exemplar projects and contributions from industry experts and academics, students learn the principles and application of an urban green infrastructure approach for resilience, health and wellbeing, and social and environmental justice.

The course broadens, and selectively deepens, students' understanding of finance, building on their existing knowledge of financial economics. The course covers a broad range of topics, with both a theoretical and an empirical emphasis. These include topics in corporate finance, investments and performance evaluation, and international finance. The course consists of two interchangeable ten-week components, one on investments and international finance, and the other on corporate finance.

Recent years have seen a debate about the waning of war, though for millions of people around the world, wars and violence are part of their everyday lives - with implications far beyond the war-torn states’ borders. This course introduces students to major trends in warfare (types of wars, the actors engaged in wars, targets in wars, funding of warfare, technology of warfare), theories explaining these trends, the relationship between warfare and state-building, and ethical questions concerning how wars are fought. The course first looks at major concepts and theories, and then moves on to examine contemporary debates and issue areas such as international law, international institutions such as the UN Security Council and NATO, civil wars and peacekeeping, climate-conflict nexus, weapons of mass destruction, cyber warfare, new technology, future weapons, and killer robots.  

This course explores the dynamic discourse at the intersection of contemporary art and digital technologies, equipping students with a practical and contextual knowledge of how these technologies are reimaging the landscape of contemporary art practice. The course explores what it is to have "an art without objects" and the impact this is having, in turn, on the international art market and the curatorial field. Topics include artificial intelligence, augmented theory, virtual reality, NFT's, digital conservatism, and the history of digital art.

This course focuses on derivatives, with a particular emphasis on equity derivatives (standard call and put options, exotic options), futures and forward contracts, and interest rate derivatives (swaps, caps and floors, swaptions). It systematically addresses three basic questions: how do these products work, i.e. what are their payoffs? How can they be used, for hedging purposes or as part of trading strategies? And above all: how are they priced? The course emphasises a small number of powerful ideas: absence of arbitrage, replication, and risk-neutral pricing. These are typically introduced in the context of discrete-time models, but the course also covers some well-known continuous-time models, starting with a comprehensive treatment of the Black-Scholes model. The level of mathematics is appropriate for third-year students with a solid quantitative background.

The course provides a comprehensive introduction to the modern theory of finance. It describes the functioning of the main asset markets, the most important theories explaining the formulation of prices of financial assets, and the role of financial markets in the optimal allocation of risk bearing. Students develop an understanding of the economics and characteristics of the main financial assets. 

This is an interdisciplinary course tackling questions of interest to political science, geography, environment, engineering, and anthropology. Infrastructure spans time and space, fills our daily lives but is said to be mostly invisible, especially when it works well. The course starts with a look at theories of infrastructure and its relation to power before turning to in-depth case study-driven work on roads, shipping and logistics, water and sanitation, failed infrastructures, and even the notion of "evil" infrastructure. Each of the thematic units develops skills and knowledge related to project management, public procurement and tendering, infrastructural financing in the developing world, decarbonization, debates on surveillance, as well as the geopolitical aspect of infrastructure seen in policies such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Weekly workshop-seminar sessions and tutorials engage students in identifying and exploring the specific genre of Creative Non Fiction, with the goal of using such literary works as foundations for an examination of advanced principles in producing successful communicative writing (with an emphasis on the “creative” element). The course is based around an exploration of sub-genres of the form, with class discussion time given to considering the personal essay and memoir; literary journalism (“new journalism”); observational/descriptive essays and travel writing, for example. A reading list of creative non-fiction texts is used as the basis for lectures and example technique texts and as the springboard for in-depth critical analyses. During workshop seminars, students engage in peer assessment, providing oral and written critiques of classmates’ creative nonfiction writing (submitted on a rotating weekly basis). 

This course examines cutting edge research into some of the hottest topics and most rapidly advancing areas in biology. Focusing on functional genomics and epigenetics in the context on development, cellular differentiation, disease, non-model organisms and gene-environment interactions. Emphasis on molecular mechanisms and state-of-the-art genomic technologies are underpinned by an understanding of the importance of computational biology in delineating genome function.