King's College London

The Spanish Civil War is one of the iconic events of the 1930s, capturing the attention of the world from its outbreak in July 1936. But the conflict was also deeply embedded in the broader history of its era, not just as a prelude to the Second World War but also as a reflection of deeper patterns of imperialism and anti-colonialism, internationalism, social conflict, religious belief and political violence. This course explores the uniquely Spanish features and origins of the conflict, but also asks how the Spanish Civil War can help us to understand the global interwar crisis in all its dimensions. 

This course examines the body in relation to religion and identity. The course offers opportunities to examine historical, religious, and philosophical conceptions of the body in relation to broader frameworks of culture and society. It examines how societal norms intersect with embodiment, and may engage critical perspectives such as gender, sexuality, race, power, and/or identity formation. 

The course provides students with an understanding of the pharmacological actions of a selection of the main classes of drugs in current therapeutic use. Lectures provide insight into the use of drugs in the treatment of a variety of human diseases ranging from cardiovascular and respiratory disease, through to inflammation, allergy, and pain. The drug treatment of the diseases is considered against the backdrop of the underlying disease processes, focusing primarily on the mechanisms by which the drugs bring about therapeutic relief. 

This course brings together frameworks and methods from multiple disciplines to think about crisis, a hegemonic and deeply polyvalent concept. Using seminal ideas from queer, trans, and cultural theory, students consider how moments of crisis are often rife with contradictions and ambivalences and how the language of crisis has become ubiquitous in the contemporary world. Students also discuss seminar theories that situate crisis as endemic to capitalism, and think about how we might think about crisis as ordinary rather than exceptional. Throughout the course, students work through myriad texts and disciplines to consider the notions of crisis and catastrophe, and use different examples to research how crises often unfold in drastically different ways. Topics may include climate change, migration, epidemics and pandemics, moral panics around trans rights and bodies, and settler colonialism.

This course focuses on the cultural construction of revenge and revenge tragedy as a dramatic genre in the early modern period. Students engage with a thrilling and variously gruesome / funny / deeply moving play, not studied elsewhere on the program. The course spans the early modern period quite broadly, starting with translations of Seneca and Elizabethan attitudes toward revenge, and ending two-monarchs later on the Caroline stage. Typically, these plays enable students to explore, among other things: sexual revenge and gender politics; constructions of racial and national identity; ideas of parody and metatheatre; and madness and moral ambiguity. Students analyze both canonical and less well-known works to map the evolution of the genre. These plays present students with a limited author demographic, but the course draws on work by women and writers of color responding to early modern revenge drama, exploring performance (contemporary and early modern), adaptation and appropriation wherever possible. 

Forget about the American Dream. This course explores the nightmarish and phantasmagorical hinterlands of the American project. It covers that which is repressed, depraved, monstrous, grotesque, terrifying, disturbing, unsettling, marginal, and bizarre in its culture. Together students seek to account for the existence of these horrors, through historicizing, close reading, and conceptualizing them via the contested histories of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the US. Students are looking at different genres and the troubled worlds contained within them. Students can expect to read in any given year works in the gothic, horror, noir and neo-noir, grotesque, racial melodrama, black comedy, crime, war, dystopian, science fiction, and mystery traditions. 

This course examines the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on work processes in organizational contexts, on the professions and on expertise. It starts with defining what AI is, examining how it exactly works, how it is used in professional contexts, and how its uses should be regulated. The course uses a number of case studies from across finance, health organizations, or urban planning to investigate how AI changes the professions, expertise, and organizations. 

The course familiarizes students with epidemiological methods to develop and test hypotheses pertaining to physical activity and health and disease outcomes at the population level. It also develops skills in designing, implementing, and evaluating interventions for improving physical activity at the population level, and provides an opportunity for in-depth analysis, critical thinking, and discussion on how epidemiological methods are used in studying physical activity behavior.

This course examines the institutional and cultural production of knowledge as well as the various forms of power that structure and legitimize it. It is co-taught by colleagues from different departments. Engaging with a range of anticolonial, anti-caste, feminist, indigenous and anti-capitalist texts, the course decenters the university as the exclusive site, and the individual as the paradigmatic source, of intellectual work. It (re)considers knowledge produced in other settings such as radical and revolutionary movements, forms of collective study, and its tension with extant structures of power. Central to the course is prioritizing engagement with, rather than mastery of, theory as part of a broader political commitment to praxis and “doing” intellectual work collectively. To that end, the course incorporates a form of assessment that recognizes and rewards this style of engagement.