King's College London

This interdisciplinary course aims to make sense of what it means for children to grow up into adults. It considers competing arguments that childhood has been extended in recent decades and that children are growing up "too fast," and it assesses the factors that contribute to a successful transition to adulthood. The course draws on perspectives from psychology, sociology, public health, cultural and environmental studies, anthropology, and geography. Students gain an understanding of the different perspectives from which this range of disciplines debate issues around transitions to adulthood, problematizing the key concepts and assumptions underlying these debates and critically examining processes of personal development and identity formation.

The course explores different models for explaining and predicting how individuals behave. The course considers social influence, including notions of conformity and obedience; the role of individual differences including models of personality, how personality develops and what behavior we can predict from personality. The course introduces students to learning theory and ideas of behavioral psychology, understanding how experience of environment and rewards shapes how people choose to behave.

The course develops a comprehensive understanding of microeconomic analysis, including the economics of the consumer, the firm, markets and market failure, and welfare economics, building on the microeconomic content of 4QQMB102 Principles of Economics. The course outcomes include developing a critical awareness of the applications and limitations of microeconomic models in relation to policy issues in particular markets.

This course explores what comedy can do through a survey of the stage comedy of the two greatest periods of theatrical creativity in London: the Elizabethan-Jacobean era and the Restoration era. It spans the the entire 17th century, with attention to continuities and revolutions in dramatic practice and the changing forms of comedy.

The end of the 19th century, roughly from 1880-1900 or so, has become one of the most dynamic fields in literary studies in recent years. The 1890s was a time of literary innovation, epitomized by a figure like Oscar Wilde, in which the "new" was championed. The course focuses on a range of literature and some visual culture from the period to consider the ways in which aesthetics and politics intersect. What is art for art's sake? How did agitation for women's rights or Irish home rule find their way into the culture of the day? Why were gender and sexuality so hotly discussed? How was empire imagined by the end of the century? Students examine ideas around aestheticism, decadence, degeneration, radical politics, urbanism, and empire.