King's College London

This course explores the age of reason, revolution, and Romanticism through focusing on two generations of a single literary family: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, their daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. It will place the writings of Wollstonecraft and Godwin within the context of intellectual life in London during the tumultuous aftermath of the French Revolution. The second half of the course examines Mary and Percy Shelley's inheritance from Godwin and Wollstonecraft through fiction, poetry, and life-writing. A central theme of the course is finding ways to describe the complex literary relationships between members of the family and their circle, which extend beyond traditional models of literary influence towards a form of collaborative authorship. It also asks why writers who were attacked in their day for undermining the institution of the family have attracted increasing critical attention highlighting their identity as a family. Topics which students may choose to focus on include literary responses to the French Revolution, the beginnings of modern feminism, literary celebrity, life-writing, and literature and science. 

This course examines human experience as a source of truth, knowledge and belief about war. Representations of human experiences of war play a significant role in human culture and society, often defining social memories and collective understandings of war. As such, this course examines how human experience is transmitted and interpreted via historical sources as well as cultural objects such as films, novels, and video games. It also engages students with key social, political, and moral arguments about the representation of war experience in the media, museums, monuments, and commemoration rituals. This is the Fall only version of the course.

Global Health is a field of study, research and practice that recognizes that the project of reducing disease, safeguarding well being and providing adequate health care is shaped by factors that transcend national boundaries and which are thus beyond the capacity of individual nation states to address individually or through their domestic institutions. This course introduces students to the key concepts and debates in global health, and uses case studies to illuminate these inequalities and the political, economic, social and structural forces that perpetuate them. In this course we examine the concept of global health, analyze the different actors and agencies involved in the global health movement, examine the ways in which global health inequalities are measured and mapped, and focus in detail on the social and economic determinants of health inequalities and the ways in which these are linked to social development and ‘epidemiological transitions’ in the nature and burden of disease in different societies.

The course introduces students to historical and contemporary debates concerning the nature and characteristics of 'political Islam'. By examining key Islamic thinkers, movements and currents, the course aims to provide intellectual and analytical tools to make better sense of this complex and multifaceted phenomenon, drawing on a variety of disciplines (history, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, international relations) while grounded in a political science approach. The course is divided into three parts. An introductory section devoted to Islamic thinkers, conceptual frameworks and Islamist states. A second section dealing with Islamist movements – charting the evolution of Islamic liberation groups (Hamas and Hizbullah), revolutionary trajectories (Iran) and resistance movements (Islamic movement inside Israel). A third and final section will focus on internal dynamics and global challenges – exploring Islam and democracy, transnational jihadism, sectarian division and the legacy of the Arab Spring. The course rejects simplistic readings of political Islam but instead seeks to provide a dynamic and complex examination of Islamic thinkers, concepts and movements through discursive frames of ideology; state power, democracy, geo-politics and local socio-political realities.    

This course focuses on those dimensions of 19th-century American literature and culture that stand out as most distinctive to the culture of the new nation. The course explores four major cultural and intellectual arguments and their overlapping concerns. It begins with the dominating and inescapable presence of slavery and its representation across the middle decades of the century; briefly taking in questions about industrial wage-slavery in the republic. It explores the troubling questions raised by Nature and the natural for the writers and painters of the early 19th century, including the Anglo-American representation of the "Indian" and the writing of the American West. Next students consider ideas of the self, self-culture, the American self before, finally, tackling late-century fiction dealing with Americans in a sophisticated and corrupt Europe.

Should the different countries obey international law? Is international law really "law"? It is just? Who should enforce it? What kinds of values should it reflect and what kinds of institutions should support it? Is it merely an expression of Western values or is it universal? Through these questions this advanced course discusses the nature, sources, justification, and effects of international law. We use international law cases to tackle complicated philosophical and empirical questions about the character of international law. The readings blend analysis of core areas of public international law and classical texts in the philosophy of law.

In this course, students develop a deeper understanding of the diverse ways in which European imperialism and colonialism changed musical culture in South and Southeast Asia through a detailed, comparative examination of changing contexts for music making in the Indian Ocean region c. 1750–1950. Students focus mainly on British imperialism and colonialism in the Indian subcontinent and the Malayworld; and transition and interplay between cultures, over time, and geographically across the Indian Ocean. Topics may include but are not restricted to different approaches to music and empire; postcolonial and paracolonial; Orientalism and race; circulation; musical knowledge; sound and affect; religion; gender and sexuality; sovereignty and decolonization. 

This course examines the period from the fall of the empires of the Bronze Age Near East (ca. 1150 BCE) until the time when the city of Rome began to expand its power into the Mediterranean (ca. 31 BCE), as well as exploring the eastern Mediterranean, including Egypt, and the Near East. Students enrolled in this course undertake only the fall semester (semester 1) of the year-long course.