King's College London

This course introduces students to key religious texts that have been foundational in shaping religious traditions. This course is intended for students who may or may not have some prior knowledge of the religious texts in question, but who have no prior knowledge of the critical methodologies used in academic study.

Since the Middle Ages, Germany has been part of wider transnational networks of commerce, religion, diplomacy, scholarship, exploration, tourism, and migration that have involved encounters with other peoples, languages, and customs. This course explores ways in which German literature and culture, at different points in its long history, has engaged with these networks and has imagined the resulting encounters with nations, cultures, and languages beyond its boundaries, both in Europe and further afield. Always bearing in mind that these encounters take place as much in the imagination as in reality, students study a range of texts and other forms that represent journeys, whether real or imagined, and the course considers what light can be shed on these by critical theories that explore ideas of otherness, boundaries, and identities.

This course explores revolutionary thought and practice from the early 20th century to the present day. Reading the cultural production of anticolonial, anti-caste, feminist, indigenous, and anti-capitalist activism, students critically examine the relationship between revolutionary social movements and the autobiographies, essays, poetry, and music they produced.  Students consider the theoretical work of these revolutionary movements as essential to the development of a Marxist tradition that is rooted in praxis. The course also includes a self-organized reading group component to encourage students to extend their engagement with these ideas beyond the university.

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

The course provides students with an understanding of the key issues in the historical, philosophical, ethical, and sociological approaches to the study of war and the military. It develops students’ understanding of the relationship between armed forces and the societies they protect, and it engages with war as a moral problem and the tools that philosophers have created to limit its brutality and guide belligerents. It explores why, in spite of these tools, wars can descend into barbarity, crime, and genocide, making a special case study of the Holocaust in the Second World War. It looks at dynamics of protest against war and then goes on to interrogate the intellectual, economic, and financial factors that drive outcomes and shape war as a social dynamic. The term concludes with explorations of what war teaches us about human nature and the social contract, humans’ relationship with their environment and national identity.

This course focuses on the afterlife of a selection of controversial tragedies, which shocked their original audiences in Elizabethan and Jacobean London as much as they continue to challenge and entertain us today, both on the contemporary stage and on screen. The course focuses equally on the original context within which these tragedies were first written and performed, and on the history of their reception, with special emphasis on cinematic adaptations spanning over the late 20th and the early 21st centuries. 

This course provides and understanding of group theory and some of its applications. In this course, students work with cyclic groups, permutation groups, dihedral groups, equivalence classes, cosets, Lagrange's theorem, and direct product groups; are introduced to quotient groups, construct the groups of low order, learn about the conjugation map, and construct conjugacy classes; meet the classical matrix groups, which are examples of continuous (or Lie) groups; work with group homomorphisms, isomorphisms, automorphisms, normal subgroups, kernels of homomorphisms, and prove and make extensive use of the group homomorphism theorem (also known as the first isomorphism theorem); learn about the semi-direct product and semi-direct product groups; construct and investigate the Euclidean group; investigate the geometric structure of some of the classical matrix groups, in particular SU(2)and SO(3); work with group actions on sets, stabilisers and orbits; and prove the Sylow theorems.

This course provides an introduction to sets and functions: defining sets, subsets, intersections and unions; injections, surjections, bijections.; compositions and inverses of functions; an introduction to mathematical logic and proof: logical operations, implication, equivalence, quantifiers, converse and contrapositive; proof by induction and contradiction, examples of proofs. These ideas are then applied in the context of the real numbers to make rigorous arguments with sequences and series and develop the notions of convergence and limits. 

This course teaches students certain key literary texts and the philosophical topics they explore. It also allows students to explore certain key conceptual issues concerning the relations between philosophy and literature. Topics include: what is the distinctive contribution that literature and philosophy each make towards an understanding of religion and morality in the broadest senses of these terms? Are there topics which can best be understood from a philosophical, rather than literary, point of view, or vice versa? What kinds of critical concepts does one need in exploring philosophical, alternatively, literary texts? Can one even speak of texts as "literary" and "philosophical" in such a broad-brush way? And, most importantly, what are the respective contributions of philosophy and literature to a humane education? There is no requirement to read foreign language texts in the original languages, but students are encouraged to do so if possible.

This course discusses what it means to read for the politics of a text and to read a text politically. We reflect on the different kinds of desire at play in the class: desire for social justice, for solidarity, for purpose in what we, as readers, activists and critics, do. In so doing, we learn to situate texts in terms of their contemporary commitments and in relation to our own. In the second half of the class, students discover literature in the context of, and in service to, a series of social movements and hone our skills in the archive to recreate these past moments of insurgency.