King's College London

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.

This course develops an intersectional understanding of gender and media research, examining the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Interrogating a broad range of media forms, it introduces key concepts within gender and media scholarship and equips students with the theoretical and methodological tools for undertaking independent research projects. Responding to key debates and events in current popular media culture, topics can include the shifting constructions of femininity, masculinity, transgender, and LGBTIQ+ subjectivities; feminist approaches to media production; industry appropriations of empowerment ideals and "woke capitalism"; and emerging trends of celebrity feminisms. 

This course seeks to engage with feminist global political economy and feminist security studies scholarship to offer students a more nuanced account of war and security markets.  

This course introduces students to astrophysical and cosmological concepts. Planets, stars, and galaxies will be covered in the course together with the tools that astronomers, astrophysicists, and cosmologists use to explore them. 

This course explores foundational and methodological questions about psychology and cognitive science, exploiting the tools of philosophy to equip students to reflect critically on assumptions, concepts, and methods used. In the first half of the term, students apply this distinctive approach to five specific topics: change blindness and inattentional blindness; experimental evidence about conscious choice and free will; unconscious bias and implicit attitudes; the concept of mental disorder; social cognition, and mirror neurons. In the second half of the term, students investigate more general questions about aims, methods, and assumptions in psychology, focusing on these topics: the nature of psychological explanation and its relationship with neuroscience; the analogy between minds and computers; mental representation, the ‘Language of Thought’ and cognitive maps; and the use of neuroimaging to ascribe mental states.

Government has, and continues to have, many ways of relating to businesses. This course takes a journey through them, tracking their historical changes and investigating how they shape our world today. Its particular focus is on how government ensures the provision of public services, whether through public or private sectors, or some combination of the two. What is the role of government today? How has this changed over recent decades? And what role does business play in contemporary society? In addressing these questions, the course focuses on the role of both public and private sectors in the management and delivery of services including health, education, transport and culture. It investigates the different ways such organizations coordinate their work and equips students to make critical decisions about whether services are best provided by hierarchical governments, businesses within markets, or in some other way.

This course looks at some of the varieties of independent cinema that have emerged from America since the early 1980s. Films by directors such as John Waters, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Spike Lee, Todd Haynes, Lisa Cholodenko, and Richard Linklater, are examined both within the context of their cinematic precursors and influences, and the wider social and institutional circumstances that helped to create audiences for them.