King's College London

This course explores how the Middles Ages has been rejected, reiterated, and reimagined in modernity. Beginning with the Gothic literature of the 18th century, the course tracks medieval revivals and reworkings across period, nation, and medium to explore how the medieval past is refashioned according to contemporary ideologies. What does it mean to describe an element of contemporary culture as "medieval"? Why and how have people turned towards the Middle Ages to understand the present and imagine the future? In addition to popular medieval literature and major critical and political movements, medievalisms in art, architecture, film, photography, music, and video games are potential subjects of study. Key topics include temporality, authenticity, gender, performance, nationalism, fantasy, racism, and cultural memory. 

Drawing on a combination of philosophical, sociological, political, and legal scholarship, and taking a comparative and transnational approach, this course examines the role of law in the protection of individual liberty through the provision of civil and political rights. The course critically examines the nature and historical emergence of key civil and political rights, such as the rights to life, to liberty and security, to freedom from torture, to family life, and to hold an opinion, and the requirement for states to legislate against incitement to discrimination and torture. It explores how ideas about civil and political rights have been taken up and transformed at different historical moments and in a variety of geographical contexts. These issues are considered within a broader political framework which assumes that democracy is a necessary context for the fulfilment of civil and political rights. Case studies from recent international events are used to illuminate some of the key issues addressed in the course. 

This course is about the role played by the public sector in the economy. Students learn how the government should design tax and transfer policies given that agents will likely change their behavior in response. For example, if the government wants to tax workers with high labor incomes to redistribute resources to poorer workers, they should anticipate that workers will reduce hours of work to avoid taxation. So, the more resources are redistributed to pursue an equitable allocation of resources, the lower is the incentive for productive workers to produce resources for redistribution! Students also learn about policies that aim at fixing market failures, such as those preventing markets for health insurance to work efficiently.

The course introduces students to different types and sources of pollution and their distribution and control methods, and students explore risk assessment strategies and the source-pathway-receptor framework to assess their risks to human and environmental health.

This course explores the international history of the post-Cold War era. It examines the principal theme in contemporary international relations through a historical lens. The course covers the making of the post-Cold War international system, the causes of continued international wars and interventions, and why geopolitical competition between major powers has re-emerged as a central concern of international relations. 

This course covers basic notions of information theory. Entropy as measure of uncertainty. Constrained optimization with Lagrange multipliers. Maximum entropy inference with constraints. Partition function, free energy as generating function. Collective behavior in spin systems: from independent voters to the tight-knit model (or Curie-Weiss ferromagnet); phase transitions and spontaneous symmetry breaking.  Distributions of functions of random variables using Kronecker delta.  Laplace's approximation for integrals. Bolzmann distribution and 1d Ising chain: exact calculation for free energy. Variational approximations and trial (factorized) distributions. Time permitting: multi-party voters, stochastic dynamics and Markov Chains, models on social networks, traffic flow and epidemic models.

This course introduces a number of approaches to understanding the relationship between politics and economics, the state, and markets. The course focuses on different perspectives on, and key concepts in, political economy, as emphasized or challenged in major works in the field. The themes which the course looks at include (i) the role of class and interests, (ii) culture and the economy, (iii) the embeddedness of markets, (iv) markets versus hierarchy, (v) the role of institutions, and (vi) the distribution of capital. Within each theme, students discuss key contributions to the different approaches, including works by Smith, Marx, Weber, Keynes, Polanyi, Hayek, Olson, Ostrom, and Piketty. 

This course is intended for students who wish to gain an introduction to Indian philosophy that looks carefully at the high standard of logic, epistemology, metaphysics and linguistics that grounded the various philosophical systems. The course examines the schools of Mīmāmsā, Sānkhya, Nyāya and Vaiśeshika, and assesses their defence against attacks from the schools of Buddhism, Jainism, and Advaita Vedānta. The examination of these schools makes use of translations of the primary texts and focuses upon the vigorous debate over conceptual analysis and argumentative strategies by which the schools presented their philosophical positions, defended them against attacks by other schools, and mounted in turn their own attacks.

The course introduces some of the governing principles used to model, understand, and solve problems in optics. Students learn about light and how it interacts with different media. Topics cover wave motion, electromagnetic theory, the propagation of light, geometrical optics, superposition of waves, polarization, interference and diffraction, as well as nonlinear optics. Common applications, such as lasers, are discussed throughout.

This course provides an overview of the military conflicts that began with the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 and ended with Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945. But it is not a military history course in the narrow sense. It instead focuses on the European population’s experience of the war and its legacies for post-war European societies. The course looks closely at the Nazi policies that played a decisive role in shaping both the unfolding of the military conflict and the fate of civilian populations that came under extended periods of German rule, as well as the visions of the Western Allies and the Soviet Union that jointly shaped the post-war order.