King's College London

This course considers how American literature explores the relationship between various American peoples and the land from the earliest colonial settlements to the present day. It ranges across genres, from philosophical writing and journalism, through the novel and poetry, to the short story and theatre, to narrate the spaces that accommodate the current U.S.A and the contingency, precarity, and fragility of human and animal life upon them. From famed urban spaces, through the plantations that perpetuated slavery, to ideas of the wilderness and the seascapes of the whaling industry, the course tracks how literary texts of the U.S. canon and countercanon manifest, and often too critique, American political projects and geographical fictions that have contributed to current environmental conditions. 

This course explores accounts centering on the movement and displacement of people in the French, German, and Spanish-speaking worlds. Beginning with an introductory guide to studying culture(s) in a Modern Languages' context, it then focus on experiences resulting from movement or displacement, whether forced or voluntary, and engages with themes such as alienation, belonging, difference, borders, and otherness. Its case studies are taken from a variety of media (including literature and film) and are considered in terms of their specific local and national relevance as well as their transnational implications. The course offers diverse perspectives on the issues arising from cultural encounters occasioned by, for example, diaspora, exile, migration, urbanization and colonialism. 

This course explores the role of music and sound in perhaps the dominant art form of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: film. From the live accompaniments of early silent movies to the Oscar-winning soundtracks of today's Hollywood productions, music has been an integral part of cinema from the outset, structuring narratives and shaping audience responses. This course introduces students to key aesthetic concepts and debates surrounding film music as well as providing a historical overview of the development of film sound. 

This course offers an introduction to US Constitutional law. It provides a solid foundation in the constitutional law of the US both for commercial lawyers, and for lawyers interested in public law and human rights. In addition to examining questions of interpretive method, the course focuses on the powers of the federal government and the allocation of decision-making authority among government institutions, including federalism and separation of powers. 

Students will gain a thorough grounding in the life cycle of stars. Students learn to describe the stages of nucleosynthesis in stars; calculate the equations of hydrostatic equilibrium; use the equations of energy transport to calculate basic properties of stars; describe in detail the evolutionary stages different classes of stars are thought to go through; and describe in detail the end stages of the life cycle of a star and the different types of stellar remnants.

This course provides students with a comprehensive, critical analysis of fashion. It provides historical context for the emergence of the fashion industry, examines theories that account for its development and the role it plays in modern societies, and explores critical responses to key issues facing the industry today. The course critically examines the idea that the emergence of fashion both shapes and reflects modern culture and society. From a historical perspective, and in terms of western fashion specifically, this means understanding how fashion has moved from being the preserve of an elite practice to an everyday one, charting its movement from courtly societies in Europe to 20th century spread of fashion to the high street and to subcultural fashions, and from a system of style controlled by a small group of elites (couture designers for example) to street style worn by "influencers." The course also explores the industry from a global perspective, challenging standard of classical narratives about fashion and decolonizing our understandings of the industry, to think about the different ways in which fashion has emerged, developed, and is engaged with and around the world. 

The first part of the course deals with the historical development of European integration from WWII through to the Lisbon Treaty and the main actors that contribute to the working and functioning of the EU. The second part focuses on some key policies of the EU: students look at economic and monetary policies, justice and home affairs, the common agricultural policy, environmental and climate policy, trade, and democracy promotion. The third part looks at some current challenges and controversies that the EU is facing. Students consider whether the EU is an efficient and legitimate system, current challenges to the rule of law, Euroscepticism and the increasing domestic contestation. The class then concludes with a discussion on differentiation, (dis)integration, and the future of the EU.

This course introduces students to two ways of making sense of public health. The first is by exploring some of the key sites that are central to the making of public health. The second is through acknowledging that whilst public health (and its sidekick, epidemiology, the study of health across populations) sounds like it would be about actually existing people, it is often about people at the aggregate. In other words, statistics. This course takes a different approach: students study the observable behavior and attitudes of actually existing people—whether in the present or the past. This course introduces students to some key research methodologies in the social sciences and humanities-doing fieldwork, using archives, and unlocking the mysteries of university libraries in order to enable students to understand and master key concepts in the anthropology, history, and social science of life, death, and illness as part of the practice of medicine; to familiarize students provide students with key debates in the anthropology, history, and social science of life, death, and illness; to familiarize students with how medical understandings of life, death, and illness have changed over time; to familiarize students with how medical practice and understanding of life, death, and illness differ across cultures.

The Early Modern period in England – by which we mean, very roughly, 1550-1660 – was a time of immense intellectual, geographical and literary expansion. The period offers us a double perspective: looking back to classical learning and achievement and using that as a model for the present, and offering us a glance forward to what we now think of as ‘the modern’ – that is, modern subjectivities, sexualities, politics and cultures. This course is designed to introduce texts from a period that stretched from the reign of Henry VIII to the English Civil War, with a focus on the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. The course tracks the creative intersection of individual writers, literary forms, and the spirit of the age, and opens up a set of new magnificent texts for students to immerse themselves in, through which they develop a sense of the culture out of which they emerged. The primary texts studied in this course are chosen to reflect a broad generic range typical of the Renaissance, including prose, drama, masque and lyric and epic poetry.  

This course gives students insights into the dynamics and effective leadership and management of teams within organizations. It provides students with the knowledge, skills, and analytical capabilities needed to practice teamwork in modern organizations and to lead teams to achieve successful outcomes. It explores the nature of teamwork in terms of how individuals effectively build agreement to shared goals and courses of action and facilitate organizational movement toward the achievement of these goals. In particular, it highlights theory and research that accounts for the characteristics, issues, and contexts of teams. Students make note of individual differences that contribute to team behavior and examine the situations that determine the salience of these differences.