King's College London

This course examines the political economy of global monetary and financial relations. It is structured around such questions as: What is the global financial system and what purposes does it serve? What are the choices of monetary and financial policies open to national governments, and what determines governments’ different policy choices? How do governments and markets interact in the arena of global finance? How do private actors influence the governance of international finance? When and why are efforts to regulate global markets successful, and what are the distributional consequences of such efforts? What are the political causes and effects of global financial crises? In seeking answers to these questions, this course focuses on empirical and theoretical political economy models of money and finance. 

This course introduces students to the history of the area surrounding the present-day political boundary between the United States and Mexico. How did this peripheral region, far from the centers of state power, become a place of great interest for those who sought to sustain and resist that power? As the course grapples with that question, students learn to think historically across and about national borders. They begin with the first contacts between Spanish explorers and native peoples and continue through NAFTA, the war on drugs, and the contemporary migration crisis. Students look for common trends in regional history that nation-based surveys and nationalistic media coverage tend to overlook. Simultaneously, they chart the emergence of the border as a political boundary, a social space, and a cultural entity.

This course introduces students to the languages of the Bible. It provides students with a basic orientation to the biblical languages: Hebrew and Koine Greek. It enables students to read and translate simple Hebrew and Greek phrases and constructions. Students are able to read and translate, with assistance, selected biblical passages.

This course introduces students to the political science concepts, theories, and methods used to understand how these disciplines explain international development in the emerging economies. Students are exposed to the foundations of classical political philosophy and democratization theory, while also learning the foundational knowledge of capitalism, modernity, and social change from classical and contemporary scholars. Students gain an understanding of the different trends of development, policy reform and outcomes throughout the emerging regions, and how approaching development issues from political analytical frameworks can strengthen their understanding of development issues and challenges in the emerging economies.

What impact does war have on changing societal norms, such as sexual behaviour and the roles and status of women? How have societies altered the conduct of war, through the mobilization of resources or the persecution of minorities, for example? This course addresses these questions, exploring the dynamic relationship between culture, conflict and change to fully explore people at war. Through both a thematic and case study approach, it draws on a wide range of historic and contemporary conflicts to investigate the destructive and transformative power of conflict on social, cultural, and political life, as well as the ways that societies shape the motives, methods, and constraints of conflict. 

The Spanish Civil War is one of the iconic events of the 1930s, capturing the attention of the world from its outbreak in July 1936. But the conflict was also deeply embedded in the broader history of its era, not just as a prelude to the Second World War but also as a reflection of deeper patterns of imperialism and anti-colonialism, internationalism, social conflict, religious belief and political violence. This course explores the uniquely Spanish features and origins of the conflict, but also asks how the Spanish Civil War can help us to understand the global interwar crisis in all its dimensions. 

This course examines the body in relation to religion and identity. The course offers opportunities to examine historical, religious, and philosophical conceptions of the body in relation to broader frameworks of culture and society. It examines how societal norms intersect with embodiment, and may engage critical perspectives such as gender, sexuality, race, power, and/or identity formation. 

The course provides students with an understanding of the pharmacological actions of a selection of the main classes of drugs in current therapeutic use. Lectures provide insight into the use of drugs in the treatment of a variety of human diseases ranging from cardiovascular and respiratory disease, through to inflammation, allergy, and pain. The drug treatment of the diseases is considered against the backdrop of the underlying disease processes, focusing primarily on the mechanisms by which the drugs bring about therapeutic relief. 

This course brings together frameworks and methods from multiple disciplines to think about crisis, a hegemonic and deeply polyvalent concept. Using seminal ideas from queer, trans, and cultural theory, students consider how moments of crisis are often rife with contradictions and ambivalences and how the language of crisis has become ubiquitous in the contemporary world. Students also discuss seminar theories that situate crisis as endemic to capitalism, and think about how we might think about crisis as ordinary rather than exceptional. Throughout the course, students work through myriad texts and disciplines to consider the notions of crisis and catastrophe, and use different examples to research how crises often unfold in drastically different ways. Topics may include climate change, migration, epidemics and pandemics, moral panics around trans rights and bodies, and settler colonialism.

This course focuses on the cultural construction of revenge and revenge tragedy as a dramatic genre in the early modern period. Students engage with a thrilling and variously gruesome / funny / deeply moving play, not studied elsewhere on the program. The course spans the early modern period quite broadly, starting with translations of Seneca and Elizabethan attitudes toward revenge, and ending two-monarchs later on the Caroline stage. Typically, these plays enable students to explore, among other things: sexual revenge and gender politics; constructions of racial and national identity; ideas of parody and metatheatre; and madness and moral ambiguity. Students analyze both canonical and less well-known works to map the evolution of the genre. These plays present students with a limited author demographic, but the course draws on work by women and writers of color responding to early modern revenge drama, exploring performance (contemporary and early modern), adaptation and appropriation wherever possible.