King's College London

This course provides students with insight into the origins of modern celebrity within the literary and theatrical marketplaces of the long 18th century. The course also provides a grounding in the burgeoning field of celebrity studies and encourages reflection on continuities between the 18th century’s public spheres and our own. It traces the rise of different kinds of celebrity within 18th-century Britain’s literary and theatrical marketplaces. Students examine the fame of authors, performers, criminals, politicians, and numerous, notorious others. 

This course introduces students to the history, development, and institutions of the American political system. It provides a deeper understanding of contemporary US politics by exploring the historical origins of American political and economic development. The course examines the operation of the main branches of the US government (Congress, Presidency, Supreme Court), and the nature of political ideology and the rise of modern political parties. It also analyzes the development of the federal government, bureaucracy and regulation, and explains the importance of voting and elections in shaping the scope and breadth of public policy in the US today. 

This course takes students on the path to understanding of how religious ideas, movements, and institutions shape and are shaped by individuals, groups, and societies. Students engage with ideas and theories of classical thinkers, such as Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, and with innovative and often provocative views and concepts of contemporary sociologists. Among the questions for discussion are whether religion serves as "social cement" or causes conflict; why and how it can reinforce the existing social order or encourage change; and how we can explain why people stay in conventional faiths or choose new, even exotic, religions – or maybe they are brainwashed into them? Students discuss methods and approaches that sociologists use to study religion – and why their methodology often leads them to discoveries that challenge common assumptions about certain religious beliefs, practices, and groups.

This course offers a thematic approach to selected literary, cultural, and socio-political processes from across the Spanish and Portuguese speaking-worlds we call Global Iberias. Encompassing Spain and Portugal, Latin America, and Lusophone Africa and Asia, lectures and seminars explore questions of power and creativity, and introduce students to the key concepts for the discussion of social movements, urban regeneration, colonialism and postcolonialism, and literary and cultural movements and ideas, from Modernism and Futurism to Magical Realism. Overall, the course provides students with core conceptual, interpretative, methodological, and presentation skills for the study of the cultures and societies of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds.

In the last few decades, the number of film festivals in the world has boomed. Even more recently, film studies researchers have begun to pay attention to this phenomenon, and the sub-field of film festival studies has grown rapidly. This course combines practice and theory. Students form small groups and curate their own evenings in a week-long campus film festival to be held in the final week of the semester. Students also read a wide range of research in film festival studies. 

This course introduces students to the theory, methods, and applications of linear models. The theory of the general linear model is introduced, with an emphasis on widely used methods such as regression analysis, analysis of variance, etc. Applications in various fields are used to give students experience of applying the methods using a specialized statistical software package to analyze linear models.

Health and disease are shaped by social, cultural, political, and technological forces and inextricably linked with questions of science, technology, modernity, religion, colonialism, capitalism, racism, globalization, humanitarianism, and the state. This course focuses on recent developments towards the pharmaceuticalization of health, the molecularization of life, the commodification of the body, the privatization of medical care, and the securitization of public health. These developments have fundamentally transformed today's landscape of therapeutic governance in fundamental ways.

This is a highly interdisciplinary course about natural hazards and risk. This course is structured around a series of lectures and discussions aimed at understanding current methods for assessing, communicating, and visualizing risk and reducing disaster for hazards that are natural (e.g. earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, mass wasting, floods, climate and extreme temperatures, multi-hazards) and environmental (e.g. heavy-metal contamination, chemical hazards), and the complex relationship that exists between these hazards and society. It is expected that students are already familiar with the material in the 2nd year Natural Hazards module (5SSG2042).

This course examines a range of contemporary issues in international politics across a number of areas of economics and politics, which include events that are occurring in contemporary world politics that have significant interests for students and layperson alike.  Students get out into the real world, thinking about the wider meanings of the events that they have witnessed and are witnessing in world politics. Students question what is the relationship between IR (as a body of knowledge) and international politics (as the subject of that knowledge)? Do the IR theories make sense in terms of contemporary developments, do they shift in line with these developments or do they lag behind politics? Whilst issues form the foreground, this question forms the background to the course. 

In this course students learn skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Arabic in a range of predictable situations and contexts. Students interact in a simple way orally and in writing in Arabic. They develop strategies for coping with unfamiliar language or unexpected responses, such as asking for repetition or clarification. They also use Arabic to reinforce/further their knowledge of other disciplines.