Lectures on cosmic inflation and its potential stringy realizations

These notes present a brief introduction to Hot Big Bang cosmology and Cosmic Inflation, together with a selection of some recent attempts to embed inflation into string theory. They provide a partial description of lectures presented in courses at Dubrovnik in August 2006, at CERN in January 2007 and at Cargèse in August 2007. They are aimed at graduate students with a working knowledge of quantum field theory, but who are unfamiliar with the details of cosmology or of string theory. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike Licence.