King's College London

This course introduces students to the changing nature of modern medicine. It offers insights into the emergence and evolution of modern medicine, its key actors and institutions, as well as discourses and practices. Health and disease are more than medical matters. They are shaped by social, cultural, political, and technological forces. Questions of health and disease are inextricably linked with questions of science, technology, modernity, religion, colonialism, capitalism, racism, globalization, humanitarianism, and the state.

The course develops students’ understanding of fiction writing and its techniques. It is a practice-based course which involves close reading and academic investigation of the short story and novel forms. Through lectures and weekly workshops, the course exposes students to questions of inspiration and choice, method, application, revision, and editing.

This course teaches students the basic structures and syntax of a common programming/scripting language Python. Programming is at the heart of the human control of the digital world; through the use of programming and scripting languages, we can gather, manipulate and share data, create new applications and extend the existing ones. Further, learning the logic, possibilities and limitations of programmatic structures allows us to better appreciate and understand the technology within the greater digital world.

The cities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries surged with light, money, ideas, and people. New aspects of city life included the arrival of electric modes of mass transit, new technologies of communication, luminous arcades filled with consumer goods, and opulent palaces for commercial entertainment. Successive waves of newcomers sought a better life amidst the bright lights, swelling the cities with restless endeavor. Photographers, artists, poets, journalists and others looked to capture this era of rapid urban change, and make sense of the metropolitan spaces unfolding outwards and upwards before them. Where there was illumination there was also shadow. Amidst the dazzling opportunities offered by the metropolis could also be found its benighted citizens, those whom fortune did not favor. Outcasts and malcontents shared the city’s public spaces, from time to time terrorizing middle-class imaginations. It is this tension of extremes – between the city filled with prospects and the city as the terminus of hope – that this course explores. Focusing on four cities where the possibilities and pitfalls of modernity were felt especially keenly, weekly readings and discussions seek to comprehend what it was like to experience profound transformations in urban living. Rather than try to understand the four case study cities in totality across more than half a century, the course offers specific excursions into the social and cultural histories of London, Melbourne, New York, and Paris. 

The course introduces students to the social, political, and cultural contexts out of which its set texts emerge and explores the diverse ways poets, novelists, playwrights and essayists have engaged with their historical moments and written the city. The course is arranged in reverse chronological order, to give a sense of digging down into the strata of London’s accumulated meanings. The course also helps lay the foundation for students' own writing life in London over the course of their study at King’s. 

This course examines the challenges women filmmakers have faced, as well as the unique and innovative contributions they have made to film aesthetics and narrative form. It introduces students to some of the central debates within feminism from the 1970s onwards, in particular feminism's influence on women's independent film production, and with a focus on questions of female authorship. What kind of aesthetic and narrative strategies have women filmmakers used to create alternative fictions and documentations of gender conventions, female pleasure, everyday life and social experience? Analyzing the work of female filmmakers who have broken with or resist institutional and aesthetic conventions, and who work primarily on the margins of mainstream industries, this course will address the relationship between film form and ideology.