People are emotional beings, but we often find it difficult to think and talk about feelings.

On this module, we bring emotions into the spotlight, as we use interdisciplinary approaches to explore understandings of emotion as a cultural, social, psychological, and political experience.

We consider what emotion means to individuals, communities, and societies, and examine how emotions feel, and, in turn, how we feel about emotions.

The Mediterranean is a space of dangers and wonders, riches and ruins. On this module, we use travel writing to explore the interdisciplinary interconnections of the Mediterranean as a key factor in the development of political systems, global exchange, major world religions, and social movements from pre-history to the modern day.

We’ll chart our own intellectual journeys across the islands, ports, histories, and experiences of the Mediterranean.

On this module, we seek to understand why and how revolutions have achieved such enduring success through the stage musical and what we can learn about revolution and representation. Looking beyond slick staging and catchy melodies, we consider both how subversive and conservative stage musical representations of revolution are.

Also available to Year 2 students.

Physical, spiritual, allegorical, and psychological journeys through the underworld present a wide variety of problems: how does a trip through hell and back change the person undertaking the journey? What forces shape the imaginary design of such underworlds and their often terrible punishments? What narratives about the self and society are intertwined in such underworlds? How do underworld narratives manifest in recovery narratives, our conceptions of organised crime, and experiences of incarceration?

This transdisciplinary module examines such problems (and more) across a wide variety of material.

This module is complemented by Posthumous Geographies II: Paradises. You are very welcome to take either module individually, or study both in succession.

Also available to Year 2 students.

This module examines how cultural anxieties about finding paradise shape moral and intellectual values, colonial ideologies, intercultural encounters, and built environments.

We consider the foundational tropes that underlie and generate such spaces from the biblical account of Eden to medieval and renaissance conceptions of the earthly paradise.

We examine how these ideas shape gendered visions of the earthly paradise and the horrors of Western colonialism. We consider the future of paradises, through an examination of problems concerning cloud consciousness, uploaded minds, and digital afterlives.

This module is complemented by Posthumous Geographies I: Paradises. You are very welcome to take either module individually, or study both in succession.

Also available to Year 2 students.

We are frequently confronted with the claim that A causes B, or the requirement to verify whether a relationship between A and B exists. While anecdotal accounts can help inform our opinion, it is dangerous to rely on one-off observations to verify more general relationships.

This is where quantitative approaches can help us untangle the relationships we observe around us, and help us answer question of whether these relationships hold in the wider population.

The skills acquired on this module will be invaluable for any student wishing to pursue research which involves large numbers of participants, or which involves the analysis of datasets from official sources.

Also available to Year 2 students.

How do we measure health and wellbeing?

How might our biological health be impacted by social events and situations?