King's College London

The course explores the relationships between urbanization and broader social, economic, political, and environmental transformations.  Exploration in this course is employed both as a tactic to thematically investigate contemporary cities, and as an opportunity to re-imagine what we might understand to be 'the city' and 'the urban' using recent theoretical approaches. While the course addressed a wide-range of cities across the global north and south, London is used throughout as a pivotal case through which to ground the thematic and theoretical explorations.

The course investigates the musical life of a specific city to investigate different themes, movements, events, composers, and/or other musical figures, and the social, political, and aesthetic issues with which they engaged.

Modern Jews address contemporary issues by communicating across time and space, in words and practices, with other generations and other communities. Is this a "traditional" approach? How did Jews in early modern Europe think about "tradition"? How did they create traditions in the age of the European Enlightenment, how did they challenge them in the nineteenth century, and how do they argue about them today? We will explore these questions by looking at unity and diversity among Jews in early modern Europe; examining the implications of the European Enlightenment for their innovations; studying major movements, texts and practices that will allow us to understand Jewish perspectives on tradition and modernity in Europe, America, and the Middle East.