King's College London

Drawing on a historical, institutionalist, and policy perspective the course examines comparatively changes in the political and economic domains in relation to Spain, Greece, and Portugal in the process of EU integration in their post-dictatorship period and beyond. The course traces processes of economic restructuring as crisis management strategies adopted in the 1980s to deal with the political and economic crisis of the 1970s. Drawing on these institutional legacies, the consolidation of the Eurozone in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the unravelling of the North Atlantic financial crisis in 2008, the course seeks to understand the unfolding of the financial crisis in Southern European Countries, the adopted political and policy solutions, and the ensuing political crises. 

This course introduces students to the key principles of genetics including Mendelian genetics, inheritance of genes, gene interaction, sex determination, polyploidy, casus and effects of mutations, gene cloning, prokaryote and eukaryote gene expression, recombination and its use in gene mapping, bacterial genetics, population and evolutionary genetics, basic molecular biology techniques including plasmid construction, PCR and DNA sequencing, and research applications of genetics. Students develop skills through data handling and problem solving, and through laboratory-based practical work.

The field of international relations and political science has given little attention to organized crime and corruption, which has become a focus of interest within these disciplines only recently. From an international relations perspective, it is worth investigating how organized crime is embedded in a larger political context, how politics interconnects with criminality on national and international level and how globalization affects internationalization of crime and corruption. The course covers definitional and conceptual issues related with organized crime, corruption, and terrorism; the impact of globalization on the internationalization of organized crime; the nexus and interaction between crime, corruption, and terrorism; variations in crime-terror nexus across different parts of the world; the anti-crime and anti-terrorism policies, and other issues.

The course develops an awareness of the structure and function of tropical forest ecosystems and provides an intellectually stimulating understanding of the biophysical, ecological and anthropic processes which characterize these environments. To develop an awareness of the human impacts on these important systems and the kinds of geographical tools available for monitoring, modelling, and mitigation of the worst effects of these impacts. 

Jews and Christians in the ancient, medieval, and modern world were fascinated, scandalized, and inspired by religious difference and the challenges it posed to their intellectual, moral, and cultural projects. In this course, students focus on explorations of Jewish-Christian relations in various literary genre, and students discuss how they take up, question, and disrupt prevalent representations of "the other" and themselves.

This course explores why it is that the coming of age narrative is such an enduring form in US culture. It covers a range of different modes, including autobiography, fiction, film, and music and crosses over the past two centuries to capture the varied historical experience of entering into adulthood within the United States. It has a particular interest in identities, selves, and experiences whose testimonies are antagonistic to the developmental objectives of the genre in its most canonical renderings. Students are also encouraged to reflect on their own experience at university—their own coming of age tale—in order to elucidate and theorize the central critical issues of the course. 

This course traces the history of gothic, ghost stories, and science fiction literature through the 19th century, giving students the chance to consider the development of a range of dark and frightening imaginaries in this period. Exploring the political, psychological, and creative functions of these dark imaginings in writings by Charles Dickens, Hannah Crafts, George Eliot, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jean Toomer and others, students consider the role and function of monsters, ghosts, werewolves, and the uncanny in 10th-century culture (and in culture at large). 

This course offers an introduction to key aspects of film history and film cultures in Spain from the Transition years to democracy (1973-1982) to the present day. Drawing on methodological topics such as film style, authorship, genre, and gender, the course has a dual focus: on the one hand, it looks at the challenges to the idea of nation that shaped film history after the Civil War and during the Transition in order to contextualize the transformations that Spanish cinema undergoes in the 1990s; on the other, the course explores the new configurations (digital, transnational) that have come to shape the label "Spanish cinema" in the 21st century, in the context of the global image markets.

This course introduces definitions, concepts, and debates relating to museums and heritage, and associated cultural organizations and industries. It draws on both theory and contemporary practice to encourage students to think critically and reflexively, and to interrogate the roles of museum and heritage institutions in the past, present and future. It poses questions, such as: What are the different roles played by museums and heritage, and the people who work in these sectors? Who and what are these institutions for? Who do they reach and speak to, and who is excluded or marginalized in the spaces and discourses of museums and heritage? Scholarly texts are combined with policy and industry materials, and lectures and seminars are augmented by visits to museums and heritage sites.

The course introduces students to the extraordinary variety of Irish literature produced during the 20th century.  Students study major writers such as James Joyce, W.B Yeats, J.M Synge, Elizabeth Bowen and Seamus Heaney, and place their work in the context of a period that included such traumatic events as colonial occupation, a war of independence, partition, civil war, and a protracted period of social violence in Northern Ireland. The course is organized thematically around significant events, cultural movements and social phenomena. No prior knowledge of Irish literature or history is assumed.