King's College London

This course is to help students better understand why people make certain financial choices in a way that systematically contradicts theoretical expectations. More specifically, this course is particularly interested in exploring examples of where conventional theory in finance does not hold and markets appearing to be acting "irrationally." Consequently, this course guides students through the development of the field of behavioral finance from the early ground-breaking work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the 1970s-1980s, to the extensive field that it is today, where the course covers a range of topics relating to seemingly irrational financial behavior, including spending, investing, trading, retirement planning, wellbeing, and public policy. 

Students explore, expose, and open up conversations around King's College London's historic associations with colonialism and racial injustices. It is open to students of different disciplinary backgrounds. Students do not need to have studied history before; over the course of the course, they learn the skills to become historians (or, at least, historians-in-training).

The course introduces students to the nature and applications of classical and biblical texts and traditions in English literature. The main premises of the course are that writers are also readers, and that among the factors which contribute to a reader's construction of a text is previous experience of other literature; that people have read the same texts in different ways at different times and found different texts more meaningful at some times than others; that since the 1930s, or thereabouts, we have largely lost easy, personal access to a range of expectations and knowledge of classical literatures and the Bible, which were previously shared by many writers and their readers. The course provides opportunities for students to experience at first hand, from selected texts, some of the literary forms, themes, and characteristic sensibilities of ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel, which provide meaningful contexts for English literary texts.

This course explores the role of Psychology in explaining variation in performance levels in sports and other aspects of physical activity. The course considers how levels of performance, including elite performance, might be influenced by psychological concepts including individual differences (such as in confidence, personality or perception), amount and nature of training or practice, effects of competitive stress, and other factors. The course also describes how techniques based on psychological theories and models may be used in interventions designed to improve performance (including coaching, and techniques such as imagery, arousal regulation, and goal setting). Students are introduced to the evidence base for these interventions, as well as the practicalities and challenges of applying these psychological techniques.

This course is broadly equivalent to A1 Basic User, Breakthrough Level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. 

This course introduces students to Aristotle’s wonderfully rich but intricate philosophical writings by focusing on some of the most prominent topics in Aristotle’s philosophy. Students learn how to read, how to criticize, and how to make sense of Aristotle and benefit from the wealth of Aristotle’s thought. In the early part of the course students explore some of the basic themes of Aristotle’s epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of nature. Students then focus on key topics from his psychology and ethics, perhaps of all his wide-ranging enquiries the areas that continue to provide the greatest stimulus for contemporary thinkers.

This course provides a unique combination of theory and practice. Based on the understanding of the need for global citizens to be competent in more than one language, the course presents the main language learning theories, as well as different approaches to the teaching and learning of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Students have the opportunity to apply this theoretical knowledge to their own experience of language learning. They undertake six hours of studying a new language of their choice, and are ask to reflect on and analyze this experience in their own language learning case study.

This course offers students a unique opportunity to spend a whole semester reading one single poem, albeit a very large one: John Milton’s PARADISE LOST (1674). One of the greatest works of English literature, this epic consists of twelve books, most of which we will devote a whole week to reading and talking about. Taking in a range of issues including love, marriage, religion, politics, education, freedom of speech, and the rights of rulers and citizens within a free commonwealth, students see why Milton still has so much to say to us. 

This course is about the security of networks of computers and their communications. It describes network fundamentals, and the security of Internet protocols, including wired, wireless, and mobile communication networks. It also describes network attacks and countermeasures, particularly focusing on intrusion detection and prevention systems.

This course explores the fluctuating significance of racial slavery for the development of American and African American literary tradition. It departs from investigation of the idea that particular approaches to selfhood, writing, and freedom arose from the institution of slavery and in particular grew with the slaves’ forced exclusion from literacy and their distinctive relationship with Christianity. Using Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a central point of reference, students look at the development of abolitionist reading publics and the role of imaginative literature in bringing about the demise of slavery. That controversial text also provides a means to consider the relationship of sentimentalism to suffering and identification as well as the problems arising from the simultaneous erasure and re-inscription of racial categories, as oppression and as emancipation. When formal slavery ended, new literary habits emerged in response to the memory of it and the need imaginatively to revisit the slave past as a means to grasp what the emergent world of civic and political freedoms might mean and involve. Other issues covered include the disputed place of imaginative writing in the educational bodies that were created for ex-slaves and their descendants, the issues of genre, gender, and polyvocality in abolitionist texts, the problems of representation that arose in the plantation’s litany of extremity and suffering, and the contemporary significance of slavery in the culture of African American particularity.