Lecture Courses
ECSP offers a wide range of lecture courses and the Individual Research Tutorial. There is no fixed academic path: you choose any two from the list below. Syllabi can be accessed by clicking on the titles:
- Literatures of Modernism
- How to Read Painting
- The Art of Ghosts (Nineteenth Century to the Present)
- Historians and the Problem of the Archive
- Beyond International Relations- Theories and Challenges of Global Politics
- Anthropology and Climate Change
- Introduction to International Law
- Why Be Good? An Introduction to Ethics
- The Behavioural Ecology of Animals
- Forensic Linguistics
- Mathematical Modelling
- Quantum Computer Science
- Individual Research Tutorial Syllabus – click to download an IRT Research Proposal Form
We will endeavour to place you in your first-choice lecture courses but ask you to provide a reserve choice in your application, as your first choice may already be filled. We limit numbers in each course to ensure classes are small and learning is discussion-based.
While you are free to choose any two lecture courses, we recommend selecting one lecture course within, and one course outside, your major subject, and so take advantage of the opportunity to try something new and different. Some lecture course combinations may be restricted due to timetabling constraints.
Most courses do not have prerequisites and are therefore open to everyone. Please read the lecture course descriptions carefully and take time to choose wisely. Post admission, requests to switch classes will be subject to availability and approval from the Academic Director.
Exeter reserves the right to alter or cancel any course in the event that a lecturer becomes unexpectedly unavailable, or in the unlikely event of a course being undersubscribed. In both cases we will use our best endeavours to find an alternative teacher and/or advise you of the best alternative course.
Faculty
Course: Literatures of Modernism: the Modernist Novel in English, Lecturer: Dr Michael Mayo
Dr Michael Mayo was a first-generation student at Harvard College, where he received an honours degree in English. After working as a teacher and principal at urban public schools, he received his M.A. in English from Middlebury College and an MSc in Literature and Modernity from the University of Edinburgh. For his DPhil (on James Joyce) he came to Oxford, where he was a lecturer at Exeter College; he is now the Junior Research Fellow in English at Worcester College, Oxford. He is currently writing a book based on his DPhil research on the formal relations between the texts of James Joyce and Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, the order of priests who taught Joyce at school. He uses psychoanalytic theory, particularly that of Melanie Klein, to trace the ways both Loyola and Joyce use frustration and satisfaction to drive their readers into a peculiar position, one both hermeneutic and existential, ironic and earnest, tragic and (potentially) hilarious. Still a lecturer teaching Exeter undergraduates, as a Fellow of Worcester College, he teaches Literature in English from 1830 to the present, with special focus on modernist narrative. Read more about Dr Michael Mayo here.
Course: How to Read Paintings, Lead Lecturer: Rachel Smith
Course: The Art of Ghosts (19th Century to the Present), Lecturer: Professor María del Pilar Blanco
María del Pilar Blanco is Associate Professor in Spanish American Literature and Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Oxford (UK). She is the author of Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination (2012), co-editor, with Joanna Page, of Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (2020) and, with Esther Peeren, of The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Critical Theory (2013) and Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (2010). She is completing Modernist Laboratories: Science and the Poetics of Progress in Spanish America (1870-1930), which will be published by Oxford University Press.
Course: Historians and the Problem of the Archive, Lecturer: Giuseppe Marcocci
Giuseppe Marcocci is Professor of Early Modern Global History at the University of Oxford and Fellow in History at Exeter College, Oxford. His research focuses on histories of empire, knowledge, and religion, with special but not exclusive reference to the early modern Iberian world. He is the author of The Globe on Paper: Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe and the Americas (2020), and co-editor of Space and Conversion in Global Perspective (2014) and Machiavelli, Islam and the East: Reorienting the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2018). He is currently completing a book on visual dissent in Spanish and Portuguese colonial cities during the seventeenth century and co-editing, with Yonatan Glazer-Eytan (Princeton), a journal special issue on the intersection of the archival and material turns in early modern history.
Course: Beyond International Relations – Theories and Challenges of Global Politics, Lecturer: Dr Pierre Parrouffe
Dr Pierre Parrouffe is a lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster’s Centre for the Study of Democracy. Pierre has broad research interests including theories of emancipation, critical International Relations, radical political theory, and contemporary continental philosophy. Recent research has focused on conceptualising emancipatory politics through theology, the ontological interactions of contingency and utopia, and the relationship between ‘the people’, knowledge, and conspiracy theories.
Course:Anthropology & Climate Change: Exploring Collective Futures in the Anthropocene Lecturer: Professor Ann H. Kelly
Professor Kelly is a Fellow in Medical Anthropology at Exeter College, Oxford and a Professor in Oxford’s Department of Social Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. She received her BA from Princeton University (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), where she studied Anthropology and received certificates in European Cultural Studies and Creative Writing. With the support of a Gates Fellowship, Professor Kelly then went on to pursue a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, investigating the relationships and everyday interactions of the local communities and health care workers involved in a clinical trial for a new malaria vaccine in Gambia. That doctoral project raised several (often confounding) questions about the ethics and social value of global health—questions that continue to animate her scholarship.
Over the years, Professor Kelly’s research has benefited hugely from the diverse scientific communities and interdisciplinary settings where she has worked. After completing her doctorate, Ann went on to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where, with the support of a Wellcome Trust Fellowship, she investigated ways of controlling mosquitoes (and the diseases they carry) through improvements in housing and urban infrastructure. Professor Kelly then joined the University of Exeter’s Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology before taking up a position at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London. Ann’s last stop before coming to Oxford was Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, where she spent a year working on new approaches to the design and execution of biomedical research under conditions of emergency—a project inspired from a decade of serving as a member of the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) for Ebola Vaccines and Vaccination.
Course: Introduction to International Law, Lecturer: Professor Laura Sjoberg, PhD, JD, SFHEA
Professor Sjoberg is Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford Department of Politics and International Relations, and Kloppenburg Official Tutorial Fellow and Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Exeter College. Prior to joining Oxford, she was British Academy Global Professor of International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London and Professor of International Relations at the University of Florida. She holds a BA in Political Science and History from the University of Chicago, a PhD in International Relations with a certificate in Gender Studies from the University of Southern California, and a Juris Doctorate from Boston College Law School. She has taught International Relations, International Security, International Law, and Trial Advocacy for more than two decades in the United States and the United Kingdom. Dr. Sjoberg’s recent books include Women as Wartime Rapists (New York University Press, 2016), (with J. Samuel Barkin) Interpretive Quantification (University of Michigan Press, 2017), (with Caron E. Gentry and Laura J. Shepherd) Routledge Handbook of Gender and Security (Routledge, 2018), (with J. Samuel Barkin) International Relations’ Last Synthesis? (Oxford, 2019), and (with Jessica Peet) Gender and Civilian Victimization (Routledge, 2019). Her recent articles have explored failure in critical security studies, characterizations of women in and around the Islamic State, what counts as feminist work in Security Studies, sexuality in US-Cuba rapprochement, gendered insecurity, and everyday counterterrorism.
Course: Why Be Good? An Introduction to Ethic, Lecturer: Professor Michael Hannon
Professor Hannon is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham and Honorary Director of the Aristotelian Society—the oldest philosophical society in the UK. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, King’s College. Michael has published on topics such as the role of truth in politics, the value of knowledge, skepticism, and the importance of empathy.
Course: The Behavioural Ecology of Animals, Lecturer: Dr Ada Grabowska-Zhang
Dr Grabowska-Zhang is a Stipendiary Lecturer in Biological Sciences at Brasenose College (Oxford), a Departmental lecturer in Environmental Sciences and also co-directs the Postgraduate Certificate in Ecological Survey Techniques at the University of Oxford. Ada received both her BA in Biological Sciences in 2008 and her DPhil in Zoology in 2012 from the University of Oxford. Ada has broad research interests ranging from evolutionary ecology to conservation and society. Her doctoral research focused on the behavioural ecology of the great tit (Parus major) and she has subsequently researched ethno-biological approaches to bird conservation, as well as studied bird diversity in urban and fragmented landscapes.
Course: Forensic Linguistics, Lecturers: Professor Luna Filipović and Professor Maria Gomez-Bedoya
Professor Filipović (PhD Cantab) is a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California Davis. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, funded by a Leventis Foundation scholarship and Cambridge Overseas Trust grant. She held two postdoctoral fellowships, one in psycholinguistics at the Department of Psychology, University College London, sponsored by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and one in linguistics at the Department of Linguistics, Cambridge, supported by the Leverhulme Trust and Newton Trust. She has authored/co-authored and edited/co-edited 8 books and numerous journal articles and peer-reviewed book chapters. Her specialisation is in forensic linguistics, experimental psycholinguistics, and bilingualism. Her most recent monograph Bilingualism in Action: Theory and Practice (2019) was published by Cambridge University Press. Recent research examines language effects on memory and on the description and translation of witnessed events. Professor Filipović has conducted experiments showing how a specific language spoken by a witness or suspect can affect the quantity and quality of information given, and how, why and when this information can be distorted in translation, impacting witness memory and jury judgments. She has advised the UK Government on the integration of randomised control trials into policy-making in her role as a select member of the Cross-Whitehall Expert Advisory Panel. She has studied multilingual police interviews in both the UK and the US for 20 years and discovered important problems in police communication and police interpreting. She leads a multidisciplinary project TACIT – Translation and Communication in Training (www.tacit.org.uk), which feeds the latest research findings on bilingualism and communication into training materials for police officers, language professionals and university educators.
Maria Gomez-Bedoya has been Associate Professor in Spanish at the University of East Anglia since 2015. She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics, a degree in English Language and Communication, and two Masters in Spanish Teaching and Hispanic Linguistics. Her research focuses on empathic communication and soft skills applied to legal and educational contexts. She has an international background and has worked in several countries as a teacher, teacher trainer, and team manager, bringing with her intercultural experience and soft skills knowledge. Before joining UEA she worked for the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Japan and Brazil, as a Fulbright Scholar in USA, and as a presenter in NHK Japan National Public Broadcasting Organization, among others. She is currently a trainer in Forensic Linguistics for one of the national Spanish police forces.
Course: Quantum Computer Science, Lecturer: Professor Andrew Steane
Andrew Steane has been teaching and researching in physics since completing his D.Phil. thesis “Laser cooling of atoms” in Oxford in 1991. His research interests spread over a range of areas, but the common theme is elucidating basic principles or ideas. His main work has been in the interface of quantum physics and information science, from both a theoretical and experimental point of view. He co-discovered quantum error correction and initiated the ion trap quantum computing experiments in Oxford. He has also been interested in physics teaching and has written several textbooks aimed at undergraduate study, especially with a view to self-study and understanding in depth.
Course: Mathematical Modelling, Lecturer: Dr Tom Crawford
Dr Crawford is a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford where he teaches mathematics to the first and second year undergraduate students. Tom specialises in Applied Maths and completed his PhD in Fluid Dynamics at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Prof. Paul Linden. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Maths from Oxford in 2012 where he studied at St John’s College.
Alongside his teaching commitments, Tom works closely with the outreach team at Teddy Hall and regularly gives talks in schools and universities across the UK. His award-winning website hosts videos, podcasts, puzzles and articles that aim to make maths entertaining and understandable to all. Tom works with several partners including the BBC and the Numberphile YouTube channel – the largest maths channel on the platform with over pi-million subscribers. His persona the ‘Naked Mathematician’ has even seen Tom become something of a minor celebrity in the world of maths communication as he quite literally strips maths back layer-by-layer…
For the latest updates be sure to follow Tom on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram @tomrocksmaths.
Academic Resources
All ECSP students will have access to Exeter College’s Library, open 24-hours a day, 7-days a week. Students taking an Independent Research Tutorial will also have access to ‘the Bodleian’, a collection of 28 libraries that serve the University of Oxford. To further support your studies, ECSP Faculty will provide course readers and supplementary resources. You will be advised of any pre-course reading prior to the start of the Programme.
