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This course will provide an introduction to the illuminated world of William Blake - poet, prophet, mythmaker, and visionary artist. Blake was also a critic of capitalist modernity writing in an age of industrialization and urbanization, political revolution, religious doubt and doomsdayism, scientific breakthroughs in fields like chemistry and biology, the making of feminism, the birth of animal rights, agitation for the abolition of slavery, challenges to class hierarchy, and the commodification of life. Students will gain familiarity with Blake's illuminated poetry, including The Songs of Innocence and Experience; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; The Book of Thel; Visions of the Daughters of Albion; The Book of Urizen; America a Prophecy; and Europe a Prophecy. We'll visit places important to the development of these artworks in London, including St. Paul's Cathedral and the Royal Academy of Arts. We'll also have a private tour of Blake's work in the Tate Britain. Students will gain familiarity with Blake's symbolic artwork, the basic principles of his belief system and ideology, and the unique method of illuminated printing peculiar to him as a poet, visual artist, engraver, and bookmaker.

Emergence and rise of the professional woman writer from playwright and Royalist spy Aphra Behn (1640-89) to novelist and proto-feminist Charlotte Bronte (1816-55). How women writers dealt with criticism for writing publicly, placing each author and text in its historical and literary context. Range of poets, playwrights, and novelists including Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Topics: gender roles and proto-feminism, the public versus the private sphere, sexuality, courtship and marriage.

What is it like to start your own company? Creative industries and arts consulting are often overlooked by those with an entrepreneurial spirit. Changemakers, meanwhile, look onto big arts institutions with exasperation. This course teaches the fundamentals of starting an arts business from the ground up, and offers students a chance to meet successful entrepreneurs in the UK and learn from their experiences

Includes all of the sessions and requirements of the seminar Digital Technology in the UK, with an additional hour per week of meeting time focused on more technical readings from British computing pioneers. Please note that students can take this seminar or OSPOXFRD 63, but not both

A seminar focused on the British experience with computer and informational network technologies, and their social context and impacts. The course covers the development of computing from Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, to Alan Turing, to the present. The emphasis will be on broader social lessons and applications beyond the UK, including the role of gender and cultural norms in shaping the experience of technology's contributors, and uses of digital technology in democratic institutions. Please note that students can take this seminar or OSPOXFRD 62, but not both

This course builds on the concepts explored in 'A Model Island' with cultural engagement activities in Oxford and UK and an individual enquiry into the culture as you experience it on the BOSP Oxford Programme.

This course's main objective is to present and discuss contemporary issues and challenges to democratic governance and political institutions. In particular, it seeks to identify and assess these challenges by comparing different political systems and observing the differences/similarities among them. The comparative nature of this course will examine: (i) the structure and dynamics of different political systems; (ii) some of the challenges that modern democracies face; and (iii) the benefits and limitations of comparative analysis.

Understanding and managing human behavior dynamics in the negotiation process. Topics include understanding and influencing leverage, communicating effectively, differentiating interests from positions, using effective table tactics, and optimally closing the deal. Pedagogical goal: systematic understanding of the dynamics individuals typically use in negotiations. Lectures, followed by simulations to combine theory with practice. Intellectual and experiential learning integrated through combination of readings, presentations, and simulations.

AI has attracted significant attention in the last year, initially due to the release of ChatGPT, followed by backlash and efforts at creating effective regulation. Questions of ethics underlie every aspect of AI, beginning with the question of whether it is even coherent to speak of an intelligence other than humans. This course presents current ethical issues in the development and application of artificial intelligence through a series of recent case studies. We will spend the first part of the course studying major ethical frameworks (consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics) and closely-linked research areas within AI and machine learning. In the second part of the course, we will apply these principles to case studies from major areas of debate in AI, with a focus on the translation of ethical principles into practical decisions.The first examples from AI we will cover are existential risks in the context of utilitarianism, the "hidden" labour force of AI in the context of deontology, and the problem of replacing humans in the context of virtue ethics. For the case studies, we will first study fairness and bias in the training and deployment of machine learning models. We will ask what it means for an AI system to be "fair", and how to regulate models which are not interpretable. This is followed by the problems of copyright and large scale training datasets for generative AI models, where we will ask what constitutes unfair use of existing material when it is only being used to train. We continue in a more hypothetical lens with a discussion of whether or not an AI system could be a moral agent or patient, and what rights a non-human intelligence might have. Finally, we conclude with the alignment problem, where we focus on the practical challenges of value alignment and the plausibility of finding a set of values which could be universally accepted. In the last week of the course, students apply their learnings with group presentations on published academic research, unpacking the ethical questions underlying technical developments