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Entrepreneurship is often understood as venture capital-backed, high-growth, Silicon Valley-style venture creation. However, entrepreneurship is a more diverse phenomenon with many forms and shapes in very different contexts. By including different motivations and goals for entrepreneurial activities, such as family entrepreneurship in small and medium enterprises or necessity entrepreneurship in micro-businesses and non-US contexts, we can broaden our understanding of what entrepreneurship is and the societal and economic role it plays in our world today.

Being creative is not just a way to make personal sense of our world. It can also make that world much more interesting, for ourselves and for others. Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney even floats the idea that 'the imaginative transformation of human life is the means by which we can most truly grasp and comprehend it'. That's the best-case scenario I would like us all to aim at in this seminar, as we immerse ourselves in a series of creative endeavours, prompted by wide-ranging weekly discussions of landmark literature of all descriptions. You don't need to have written anything already (poetry, short stories, screenplays, whatever), since the syllabus caters for aspiring writers as well as those already practising. But the readier you are to immerse yourself in the creative process ¿ over and above attending class and turning in assignments ¿ the greater your rewards may be. My own non-prescriptive approach as an instructor focuses on 'tools not rules', inviting active student contribution at every turn, whether the students' specific interests lie in traditional genres such as fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction and playwriting, or in more hybrid forms like the verse play, the haibun, flash fiction, or autotheory. Outside the classroom the emphasis will be on writing rather than reading. But few writers at any stage of their development fail to benefit from exposure to works already in the canon, so to get the most out of each class we'll be looking at a handful of literary gems: and since the course takes place in Oxford, the small number of core texts will mainly be British, ranging from classic works including Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Shelley's Frankenstein to newer, equally innovative but maybe less familiar material across a variety of forms. The term will culminate in a different kind of learning opportunity: a Showcase Event designed for individual students to share examples of their work with the rest of the group and the wider Program cohort.

In this course we will study and discuss examples of the gothic, sensation, and detective fiction that flooded the literary market during the Victorian period. Like their eighteenth-century gothic predecessors, many of these texts lacked literary respectability, though they achieved best seller status. Far beyond simply providing a jaded reading public with scandalous and suspenseful narratives loaded with sex, crime, mystery and even the supernatural, these texts attempted to expose not only the secrets of their protagonists, but also the seamy underbelly of outwardly respectable Victorian society, epitomized by the family with its angel of the house. Topics for discussion will include the literary and moral value of these sub-genres of the novel and what they reveal about Victorian society's anxiety over transgressive - and therefore prohibited - elements in the domestic and public sphere.

It is not a coincidence that the first president of the Stanford House was Dr Geoffrey Tyack, a renowned historian of architecture: over centuries, the setting for the intellectual and creative activities at Oxford has been as important as the activities themselves. We are embodied creatures, so space affects the way we think and the way we feel ¿ and Oxford uniquely offers a diverse open-air classroom to examine a thousand years' development of spaces used by people for multiple purposes as well as the history of people's responses to them. Answering Juhani Pallasmaa's call voiced in his famous work The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, we will attempt to break away from the study of space from the exclusive perspective of discourse analysis by treating our examples holistically as multisensory objects and by experiencing them directly, in situ, as a small group of scholars. E-motion about Oxford Seminar uses the wealth of the city's heritage to achieve two main objectives: one is to help students recognise and make sense of the main artistic and architectural styles and their key ingredients; the other is to apply environmental psychology and affect theory to explore the relationship between man-made space and emotions. After all, affect arises from relationships between people, between people and spaces, and between people and objects ¿ it's about how things make us feel through interaction.

After the Second World War, certain Oxford philosophers resolved to reflect on our ordinary talk and ordinary conduct as the key to philosophical reflection. They rejected the grand programmatic efforts of prewar philosophy - utilitarianism, existentialism, logical positivism - to purge philosophy of metaphysical excess, arguing that these "isms" misrepresented the real logic of our language and conduct just as badly as the older metaphysical systems did. Three things contributed to this reorientation of philosophical ambition: the wartime experience of men returning to philosophy from life-changing forms of military and public service, the entry of substantial numbers of women into academic philosophy for the first during the war, and the broadly therapeutic approach to philosophical difficulties practiced at Cambridge since the 1930s by Ludwig Wittgenstein. This course examines two important efforts to resume work on the grand prewar philosophical programs at Oxford and to explore two enduringly important products of Oxford ordinary language philosophy: (i) J.L. Austin's account of speech acts, and (ii) the effort to free modern moral philosophy from its preoccupation with moral laws, in postwar work by Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and Philippa Foot. We will read works by these philosophers and gain an understanding of this revolution in analytical philosophy.

The modern landscape of democracy is increasingly viewed as being in crisis. Concerns about democracy's future are widespread and include fears about increased polarisation and disillusionment, a growing divide between political elites and the electorate, and backsliding on civil rights and political freedoms. There is anxiety that democracy, as it currently exists, may not be equipped to handle these challenges as it struggles to adapt to the rapid social, economic, and technological changes reshaping societies worldwide. This seminar begins with the question: Can we address these shortcomings by introducing alternative approaches to democracy? Our inquiry will examine a range of contemporary approaches including participatory, radical, realist, and deliberative democratic theories. Each one offers distinct insights into what we might value in a democracy: active citizen engagement, equality in our procedures, informed and empathetic discourse, among others. The approach will balance normative critique with real-world cases, examining the ideals these theories promote alongside examples of how they function in practice. Through this exploration, the aim will be to help students critically evaluate how non- traditional interpretations of democracy and their connected innovative mechanisms might offer a means of responding to the current democratic crisis.

Medieval people practised magic. To think about the history of medieval magic is to think about a wide swathe of human activities and anxieties, from the prevention of illness to the pursuit of wealth, from the hunt for military glory to ensuring personal safety during travel. Magical practices were everywhere. and practised at every level of society. Medieval people also, worried about magic. The line between scholarship and heresy, the miracles of saints, and the practices of witches and necromancers was fine and contested. For some medieval thinkers, religion and magic were as obviously opposed as scientific method and magical thinking are in the twenty-first century. For others, magic was a respectable branch of learning, supported by authority and tradition, new learning from the Muslim world, and precedent from Christian teaching. Magic in the Medieval West explores this important area of medieval life. It presents the challenges and the opportunities of discovering what practices were actually followed by medieval people, what they thought others were up to, and how these related to their wider understanding of the world they inhabited. It takes advantage of the unique manuscript resources available in Oxford, the expanding body of primary sources now available in translation, and the increasingly rich scholarship on this important area of medieval social and cultural history.

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