This module gives students a chance to compose for jazz and jazz influenced ensembles. This module will embrace the rich tradition of jazz writing and its conventions as heard in the works of the great jazz composers, such as Duke Ellington, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. The module will explore contemporary approaches from artists as developed by composers such as Gil Evans, Kenny Wheeler and Maria Schneider. We will also look at how crossover composers such as Jacob Collier, Louis Cole and Snarky Puppy have integrated jazz composition techniques into their music too.
This module draws upon the expertise of three US historians to explore different dimensions of the American past, from the founding of the republic forward. This year, we will be focusing on the theme: ‘The other among us: conspiracies, cults and counterradicalism in US history’. It will explore the concept of an American ‘paranoid style’ and its application to a range of different movements, crusades and moral panics from the post-bellum period through to the present day. Topics will include: the Ku Klux Klan, Voodoo, Anarchism and populist anti-capitalism, Red Summer/Red Scare: white violence and state repression 1919-20, McCarthyism, Black Panthers/COINTELPRO, Waco and its consequences, the FBI entrapment of American Muslims, and QAnon.
In this module, you will explore some of the social, cultural and political forces that transformed the medieval and early modern worlds. This was a period of momentous change characterised by invasion, political upheaval, religious conflict and a rapidly globalising world. International developments like the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment shaped the way individuals and societies engaged with each other and the wider world. Our focus is on the transformations that took place in the British Isles and the emerging overseas empire. But there are opportunities to range further afield and consider this period of transformation from other European or global perspectives. You will explore themes such as: political upheaval; kingship and diplomacy; exploration, commerce and empire; religion and reform; violence, warfare and conflict; art, architecture and literature. In doing so, you will consider to what extent developments in this period laid the foundations for the world we live in today.
Historians have become interested in ‘ordinary people’ in recent years. Why? This module explores this question through looking at case-studies of women’s, men’s and children’s histories in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, and at varieties of ‘ordinary sources’. We examine how a focus on ‘the ordinary’ maps onto, and complicates, other historically-shifting identities – race, ethnicity, class, gender, age, ability, region, and religious faith – and the implications. Claire Langhamer has asked, ‘Who do we mean when we refer to ordinary people and who did the people we study mean?’, and we will also consider this key question through tracing the roots of the historiographical turn to ‘the ordinary’, drawing on the wide-ranging expertise in the histories of modern Britain we have at Southampton.
Ancient history covers a vast geographical and chronological span, from Ancient Egypt to Classical Greece, from Rome to Imperial China, and from the Mediterranean into Europe, Africa, and the Near East. This module allows you to explore your interest in the Ancient World, and to learn about approaches to studying its past.
This module introduces students to mathematical and numerical methods to solve practical problems in acoustics. It provides a self-contained review and derivation of the equations of linear acoustics in the time and frequency domains. Mathematical modelling of sound fields generated by complex source distributions is introduced. This leads to more advanced mathematical methods commonly used in acoustics such as the acoustic Green function and integral solutions of the acoustic wave equation. The numerical methods which are covered in the course are available as commercial software packages but the underpinning theory and analysis is discussed in sufficient technical detail to serve as a starting point for those seeking to apply or extend them to research problems.
This module will provide you with a developed understanding of what is law; how much law can be justified; how law relates to morality and justice, indeed whether there is any morality that is unique to law. The first part of the module will canvass what is unique about legal obligation and law’s claim to authority. In the second part of the module you will look at different theories of justice and the tension they pose between individuality and community. The third part of the module will apply the work from the first two parts towards examining how we might the law be used to promote justice. The theory and practice of law will be examined and reflected upon in a slower and more advanced way than in the LAWS1012 Legal System and Reasoning module taken in Year 1 of the Programme. The module will be taught in holistic way, so that theories of law and theories and justice can be seen in the way they relate and complement one another to reflect both justification and limits for good governance. As a prospective lawyer, it is believed that significantly better and more sophisticated legal analysis and argument can be formed once central legal concepts and principles can be seen in the way they relate to theories of law and justice. As such, this module will deeply inform your doctrinal study of law with the conceptual analysis which underpins law’s search for justice.
This module examines different approaches to political leadership through a variety of lenses, mostly grounded in historical and contemporary political theory.
Variational methods in classical physics will be reviewed and the extension of these ideas in quantum mechanics will be introduced.
Although a ‘common sense’ view of world politics is often presented in non-academic contexts, there is little agreement among experts on what international relations is, and how we should think about the discipline. This module enables students to critically examine the conventional wisdom and as a result to gain a more critical understanding of international relations. The module emphasizes that ‘the truth’ about international relations is disputed and analyses competing knowledge claims Pre-requisite for PAIR3001 and PAIR3005
This module focuses on how social theorists have tried to address particular questions and problems in the social world. What conceptual tools have they developed to help us understand various dimensions of our world from the 19th century through to the present day? On this module we take a journey through 10 of the problems or questions that have tested the thinking of theorists and philosophers for over a century - problems such as the nature of the self, the structure /agency debate, the meaning of the body and physical embodiment, the operation of institutions - material and virtual, questions about the nature and role of culture, the divisions of labour, and the operation of the digital world. We pick out and explore particular theorists and focus in on the conceptual tools they developed and the solutions they propose. The aim is not to provide a comprehensive account of any one topic or any one theorist– quite the opposite. The aim is to show the diversity of approaches and conceptual frameworks that social theorists have developed to address a specific question – and the underlying ontologies and epistemologies that underpin them. We draw on theories from across the theoretical landscape from classical, to modern and post Modern, and capture a range of broad debates and paradigms from critical theory to feminist theory to post-colonial theory. In the process we use comparison and contrast and the application of conceptual tools to provide a critical understanding of theoretical ideas and tools Each lecture explores a specific problem or question and draws on the work of a small number of key theorists and their concept tools and approaches to illustrate the different debates. By comparing different approaches to a particular question, we can begin to critique theoretical ideas. Weekly interactive seminars provide a space to explore these ideas and their application and look at the development of theory.
The module asks big questions. What do we do when we interpret literature and culture, and how can we analyse our practices of interpretation? Can anything be a text, and if so what do we understand by ‘literature’? How does literature shape our identity, and does our identity shape how we read literature? Thinking about how we think about a text is dizzying but exhilarating, and crucial to the art and practice of reading and criticism. This module will introduce you to a range of thinkers who are fascinated by these questions, and encourage you to develop answers of your own. You will encounter a variety of theoretical approaches, and consider their insights and limitations. By doing so, you will develop the intellectual tools necessary to make sophisticated arguments, and discover the pleasure of becoming a self-reflexive reader and writer and a theoretically-engaged critical thinker.
