King's College London

This course explores "popular" cinemas of East Asia, in particular Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Students focus on popular genres (crime/policier, family drama, anime, and monster/zombie films) in relation to their production circumstances, distribution, and reception. Further they discuss the film style and individual authorship of such directors as Kurosawa Akira, Johnnie To, Bong Joon-ho, Ozu Yasujiro and Kore-eda Hirokazu. Throughout the course, the cultural aspects of popular cinema are considered, including issues of historical specificity, local identity, and family and gender relations within the popular imagination.

How do religious and literary texts interact and influence each other? What is the place of the sacred in literary writing? How do ideas about the divine operate in a secular framework? These are some of the themes that are explored in this course. Students trace a large narrative arc going from ancient religion to contemporary world literature to investigate the myriad ways in which the two discourses affect each other, and map the spaces wherein these effects are most legible. Although the focus is largely on the Abrahamic monotheisms, students will be encouraged to explore other traditions in their essays.

The course teaches students about the function of intelligence in the 20th and 21st centuries, and promotes reflection on the nature of scholarly work. The connection between scholars and the spies is not just a fanciful one dreamed up by novelists. During the world wars and the Cold War, academics swelled the ranks of Anglo-American intelligence organizations. Early pioneers of intelligence theory and practice, were also distinguished scholars. By learning about the problems of gathering evidence, interpretation, analysis, presentation and distribution of intelligence, students also learn to be better War Studies students. 

This one-semester course introduces students to world history since the end of the Second World War, looking beyond Eurocentric perspectives and taking a global approach. World history is both a way of thinking about, approaching and doing history, as well as a way of understanding the history of the world. The course traces the history of globalization in this period: the expanding processes of economic, technological, social, cultural, and intellectual change, and the increasing but still uneven integration of different parts of the globe into these processes since 1945. Students explore a diverse range of grounded perspectives on everyday life across the globe in this period, considering the different historical scales (communal, regional, national, transnational, global) on which human lives were lived and shaped. The course also examines the key historical processes and events of the period: the 1960s, the Cold War, emancipations and decolonisations, student protests, consumerism, poverty, political ideologies and alternative futures, thinking beyond dominant Western narratives. Energy, natural, and environmental resources and catastrophes and the challenges of planetary sustainability form an additional strand of historical structure and historiographical discussion.

Students study a range of epistemic issues that emerge in politics and political philosophy. Potential topics include democracy vs. epistocracy, deliberation, epistemic diversity, polarization, and the wisdom of crowds.

This course examines filmic representations of key social, political, and historical events in Portugal and Brazil, focusing on efforts by directors and producers in both countries to articulate history, memory, and national identity. Key concepts students engage with are race, gender, colonialism/post-colonialism, social inequality, memory, identity, among others.

This course examines in depth the critical legacies of and debates surrounding film authorship. The course surveys key theoretical texts and explores them in themselves as well as through comparative case studies of two directors-Robert Bresson and Takeshi Kitano-who have both produced a significant body of work and given rise to substantial attention to their respective careers in film. Students consider how Bresson and Kitano fit into and/or defy the "auteur theory" and its variants through close attention to both the films themselves and the critical discourses (aesthetic, historical, national, generic) they have generated. The course invites students to consider what "film directing" is, as artistic, and cultural practice.