King's College London

In this course, students take a step back and explore what it means to perceive particular situations in terms of “crisis.” Students focus on emergency interventions and examine how sustainable these interventions are. The course investigates to what extent these interventions have changed the very meaning of “health.” A particular focus in our discussions is on the category of crisis itself. How is the category operating today in particular contexts? How is it mobilized and what are its effects? To what extent might the category of crisis enable or disable distinctive forms of intervention? What accounts for the productivity of crisis in contemporary debates about the health and well-being of populations, both in the global North and the global South? What are the analytical and political limits of “crisis” as a category of thought and action in contemporary global health and social medicine?  

Reflecting on the causes and consequences of war involves some of the most fundamental questions facing any student of conflict, and this course is an introduction to thinking about them. Students explore the theoretical and methodological questions that arise when studying the causes of war. They consider the definition of war, and examine the role of theory in explaining and understanding its causes. Students utilize historical case studies, explore contemporary international politics and explore political change over time. In the second half of the year, the course also investigates some of the consequences of war – on the international system, on society, and on individuals. The course also addresses ways in which war and conflict can be prevented and mitigated.

This course covers the main empirical methods used for causal inference in economics, political economy, political science and development: randomized controlled trials, natural experiments, instrumental variables, and regression discontinuity design. Students learn how to use these methods to address important questions in the social sciences. The emphasis is on applications and not on the derivation of estimators. Students study a large number of articles published in leading journals in economics and political science. Students consider the research question these articles address, how they address it, what data they use, and the strength and weaknesses of their approach. 

After its total defeat in World War II, a divided Germany developed differing forms of socio-political organizations in an attempt to find a sustainable response to the challenges posed by modern industrial society. While the East experimented with state socialism, the West implemented a liberal democracy. Yet despite their political division, the two German states remained deeply interconnected through economic linkages, a shared cultural heritage, and similar ambitions to redefine their nationhood and global position. This course explores their special relationship against the backdrop of the global Cold War. Topics include political consolidation, East and West European integration, consumption and identity, the role of the cultural institutions, social movements and dissent, immigration and ethnic diversity, holocaust memory and foreign policy, the collapse of communism and reunification. It engages critically with the attempts of both German states to deal with their problematic history, and the way history was used to legitimize the different regimes. 

This course discusses the basic concepts and principles that underpin geomorphic landforms and processes operating at the Earth's surface in a great variety of landscapes around the globe. It presents the significance of time and space scales for recognizing process-form linkages in different environments and the interactions between fluids and sediment transport that result in the formation and development of a variety of landforms.

This course deals with the inheritance, biological mechanisms, clinical presentation, and therapy of human monogenic disorders. Following a block of introductory lectures covering the fundamentals of Mendelian and epigenetic inheritance, various disorders are described by experienced scientists and clinicians, in order to illustrate different aspects of human genetics. Finally, the course covers approaches to gene therapy - the stated goal of most studies of human genetic disease.

The course covers: Countability, measure spaces, σ-algebras, π-systems and uniqueness of extension. Construction of Lebesgue measure on R (proof non-examinable), Independence. The Borel-Cantelli lemmas, measurable functions and random variables, independence of random variables. Notions of probabilistic convergence. Construction of integral and expectation. Integration and limits. Density functions. Product measure and Fubini’s theorem. Laws of large numbers. Characteristic functions and weak convergence, Gaussian random variables. The central limit theorem. Conditional probability and expectation.

This course introduces foundational ideas from some of the most exciting and influential thinkers from ancient Greek philosophy. Students begin by looking at several important Pre-Socratic philosophers (such as Parmenides) with a particular focus on their contributions and approaches to epistemology and metaphysics. The course then traces the thread of these debates through to three towering figures of classical Greek philosophy and the western philosophical canon: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Taught in collaboration with academic staff and theatre practitioners at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, this course aims to take full advantage of the fact that we are able to study Shakespeare’s plays in the city in which they were written and first performed. Through seminars at King’s, and lectures, seminars, workshops and demonstrations at Shakespeare’s Globe, you will learn about the cultural, theatrical, political and social contexts in which plays were produced, and students will explore the extent to which Shakespeare’s plays were shaped by the environments in which he lived and worked. Focusing on the early to middle section of Shakespeare’s career, we will look at a spread of plays from different genres, such as 1 Henry IV, Julius Caesar, Othello, Twelfth Night and Macbeth. In doing so, students will engage with topics such as urban place and space, social status, ideas of history and memory, immigration, race and multiculturalism, gender identity and experience, and topicality, terrorism and state control. Students will also draw on one of the most important Elizabethan works about London, John Stow’s A Survey of London Written in the Year 1598, and the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries such as Chapman, Dekker, Heywood, Jonson, Marston and Munday. 

This course introduces students to the basic concepts of immunology, how the immune system works to fight disease, how its dysfunction can cause disease, and how the immune system can harnessed to treat disease.