King's College London

This course deploys literary-critical thinking and attention to literary forms in order to interrogate the narrative of the ‘raw material’, and the histories that have emerged from it. From vital materialist accounts of the agencies and powers of nonhuman things, to Marxist analyses of the hidden labor that produces the ‘raw’ material before it can even be said to exist, students consider the ways in which the Victorian invention of raw materiality contributed to violence, environmental destruction, and ideologies of domination over the earth and its species. 

The course provides an introduction to the politics and economics of European integration. It draws upon theories of international relations, political economy, and governance to assess the origins of the European project and the politics of market integration after 1945. Students analyze the EU’s evolving institutional framework by charting the constitution-building process and mapping the distribution of executive, legislative, administrative, and judicial functions over time. The course then explores the expansion of EU power and legal competence in key policy fields over the past two decades. It begins by considering the history and theory of economic and monetary union, as well as the causes and consequences of the Eurozone crisis. The course also explains the rapid development of the EU as an internal and external security actor in the post-Cold War era through cooperation in asylum and immigration policy, and foreign, and defense policy. It ends by reflecting on the scale and pace of the EU enlargement process and the wider political implications of the EU’s democratic deficit. 

The course introduces and critically analyzes the major IR theoretical traditions. Because of the complexity of world politics, assumptions (i.e., criteria for thinking about what and how to study world politics) to guide our study are needed. The different traditions – or "-isms" – provide these assumptions and offer a set of different lenses through which to explore world politics. The course, through practical application of theories, explores the ways in which the main theoretical traditions compare and contrast.

This course provides an introduction to the theory and practices of economic policy-making. To understand economic policy-making, students take an economic as well as a political perspective. Students focus on the rationale behind economic policies, and seek to understand major changes in economic policy, and variation in policies across countries. Students also look at individual preferences for these policies, and their implications for the policy-making process. In the process, the course covers areas such as economic liberalization, financial regulation, labor market policies, and policies of poverty reduction and social insurance. The course takes an empirical and comparative approach, and its focus is generic, though most of the literature is concerned with policy-making in EU and OECD countries. 

This course gives students an understanding of the intricate relationship between human health and the immune system. It provides students with tools to critically review and understand the current knowledge (sometimes contradictory) behind what we know about the origin of the disease, its clinical phenotype, and its treatment. In order to do so, an expert in the field is invited to lecture each week on a specific disease/condition, ranging from autoimmune disorders and viral infections to cancer and aging. Students also gain an understanding of how the immune system’s power can be harnessed for new therapeutic avenues that are currently explored.

The fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe brought democracy to the region for the first time in over forty years. Academics now had a new wave of democratization and intense political change to study. This provided scholars with an almost unique opportunity to apply existing methods of political analysis to newly established democratic states. Even so, no country can escape its past and previous experience and structures can continue to exert an influence long after they have been officially swept away. Now, after more than two decades of democratic rule in the region institutions and practices have been established and are ripe for study. What can existing theories of party development, electoral behavior and executive-legislative relations tell us about politics in Central and Eastern Europe? Have the specific democratic trajectories of countries in the region generated new or modified theories for political science? Are there similarities in comparative political developments across the region that lead us to believe there is a peculiarly "Central and East European political science"?

Nowadays, consumers or organizations, are more informed and more demanding as the landscape of international marketing knowledge changes. Combined with technological advancements, environmental degradation and sociocultural changes, these factors provide strong support for the proposition that marketing practices, perspectives, and assumptions are becoming outdated. This course introduces reflection and debate regarding current challenges in international marketing, bringing together culturally diverse and interdisciplinary perspectives. This course provides students with the current challenges and opportunities of international marketing. In this vein, students focus on current trends in international marketing, issues relevant to the global environment.

The course develops students' understanding of key concepts of the mechanisms by which gene expression is regulated. The multiple levels at which gene expression is regulated is described in relation to the central dogma of molecular genetics whereby genetic information flows from DNA to messenger RNA (mRNA) to protein. Students leran about how gene expression is regulated at the level of transcription, post-transcriptional processing, translation, and post-translation. 

The course looks at world cinema's origins and some of its more celebrated manifestations from the Indian subcontinent, Africa, East Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, paying particular attention to the circulation of world cinema in the era of globalization. As world cinema is marketed and consumed as a hybrid form, a fusion of the national and the international, the local and the global, students consider how, for example, China's Fifth Generation and the New Iranian cinemas of the 1980s and 1990s explored ethnically specific cultures in ways that made them (and their makers) exportable and desirable abroad. 

The course examines the peculiar nature of early modern English crime, law, and punishment through its recent historiography, testing arguments about social control, the use of evidence, levels of violence, and changing patterns of crime. From the level of state-building down to the pettiest transgressions, students will see the law in action and follow the people in court.