King's College London

The South is a region that has always been obsessed with boundaries, whether territorial (the Mason-Dixon line), or those related to gender, social class, sexual orientation, and particularly race. In this course, students examine the ways in which the grotesques, monsters, freaks, and doppelgangers that populate the Southern Gothic are directly linked to the region's past, particularly to its difficulties in coming to terms with its history of slavery and with interracial sexuality. Authors to be studied include Edgar Allan Poe, George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Natasha Trethewey. 

This course is concerned primarily with the question of meaning: what is it for words or sentences to have meaning? In this course, students look at some of the most important theories offered by 20th-century philosophers in response to this question – theories that to this day continue to be hugely influential in linguistics and related fields. With each session focusing on the ideas of an individual thinker, students explore some of the most radical and provocative questions about language. 

This course examines the history of London on the cusp of the modern age. Between 1550 and 1750 the city was transformed from a packed square mile of workshops and churches, bounded by a city wall and intensively governed, to a metropolis of trade and empire, bustling shops, polluting industry, enticing leisure and low-level crime, stretching from Wapping to Westminster and Islington to Vauxhall, and with connections to the Atlantic and Caribbean. The city's population was young, disproportionally female, and increasingly diverse. This course focuses on London's people and the structures with which they lived, introducing a range of historiographical approaches to put individual lives and themes in historical context. 

The course provides students with an understanding of ‘who does what’ in the Russian echelons of power, who makes law, how laws are made, how they are structured and how they are applied. Example seminar topics include: division of legal systems into legal families, key characteristics of Russian law: codification of the law and the key codes, sources of law, including the highest law of the land, the 1993 Constitution, notable international treaties and the role of court decisions, Russian legal culture, including judges’ reasoning, and Russia’s government structure and key institutions, including the role of the President, the concept of super-presidentialism and also, silovyki or power ministries. 

In this course students explore the history, structure, and functions of the UN, developing an understanding of how international politics has influenced the operations of the UN over time, how the UN has itself influenced the shape and direction of international politics, and how the UN has contributed to the development and direction of international politics and international justice.