King's College London

In this course, students "place" Austen in a number of different senses: socially, environmentally, and with a view to her lasting legacies and impact on our modern cultural industries. They attend to the treatment of place as a theme across her own novels, the way that her characters navigate space and that particular geographical locations bear witness to social interaction. Though Charlotte Brontë famously complained that Austen's works offered only a "highly cultivated garden" with "no open country", students discuss Austen's interest in a much wider range of settings, which in turns allows for a complex engagement with ideas of nature, colonialism, health, leisure, and mobility. 

This course provides an overview of the British political system in theory and in practice. Students learn about the key British institutional structures such as the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Civil Service, and Parliament. They learn about key areas of change: the development of devolution, nationalist movements, and parliamentary reform. The course provides an insight into the party and electoral systems. It also considers how the British political system relates with the outside world, including the aftermath of the vote to leave the European Union of June 2016. Students combine empirical study with the application of a variety of theoretical approaches.

This course introduces students to the physiological basis for requirements for energy, macronutrients and micronutrients, causes and consequences ofvitamin and mineral deficiency, current dietary guidelines for the UK.

The course examines the political theory of finance, which investigates the broad normative and theoretical questions provoked by financial markets, institutions, and crises in contemporary societies. Large-scale financial intermediaries and global financial markets are reshaping capitalism, and these transformations raise fundamental issues of efficiency, fairness, inclusion, and democratic accountability in the design and functioning of finance. Topics include historical debates about usury and speculation, the contemporary philosophy of money and debt, the right to credit and to default, discrimination and credit ratings, systemic risk and collective responsibility, the challenges finance and central banking pose to democracy, and the potential for radical alternatives, ranging from cryptocurrencies to public finance.

This course helps students make sense of globalization by treating it as an historical phenomenon. They consider what has and what hasn't changed in how societies, economies, and politics are organized across the world. Students trace the emergence of technologies and practices which facilitate global interaction, from the container ship to the world wide web. They understand how globalization has been debated, examining the emergence of the idea of globalization, and the history of arguments about what it is and whether it is a good thing or not. Finally, students study its political consequences, charting debates about the effects of global interaction on the choices available to publics and their leaders, and asking how far institutions and individuals are able to shape phenomena which occurs on such a large scale.