King's College London

In antiquity, the city as idea and as experience provided a central trope for Greeks and Romans to think about their place in the world, their social and political organization, the relationship between culture and nature, self and other, morality, and history. This course focuses particularly on the presence of urban everyday life in classical literature and asks students to explore ancient representations through the lenses of cultural history and current critical approaches to the city. Our starting point is to think about what is ‘natural’ to us and put it at a critical distance: the ways in which the city has featured in literature and film in modernity. Students proceed to explore the extent to which these modern representations and their cultural context find antecedents in antiquity. Students pay special attention to urban space (house/home, street, theater, baths and barbershops) as well as time and occasion (city at night, erotic city, landscapes of disaster, routine).

The course provides students with a theoretical and practical understanding of the relationship between business and society through the umbrella concept of corporate social responsibility. It focuses on three main aspects: understanding corporate social responsibility, applying corporate social responsibility, and managing corporate social responsibility. The course analyzes different perspectives to understand corporate social responsibility. It explores the relationship of the corporation and a variety of stakeholders such as employees, suppliers, investors, and the environment. 

This course explores some of the relationships between ethnicity, migration, imperialism, place, race, technology, and modernisms in US artistic and literary culture from the turn of the 20th century through to the 1930s. The period under question includes cultural responses to the fallout of late 19th-century governmental Americanisation projects; competing claims for the ‘new’; responses to the Great Depression and New Deal state interventions; and the development of an American modernist aesthetic avant-garde. Students focus on four points of activity: New Mexico, the Mid-West, Paris, and New York. In each case students look at written texts within an interdisciplinary approach that learns from looking at painting and photography, journalism and the world of ‘little magazines’, new styles of dance and, of course, jazz.

The archives associated with King George III held at Windsor Castle are exceptionally rich and voluminous and in many cases largely unexplored. King’s College London is currently working with the Royal Household to digitize these archives and make them more widely accessible through the Georgian Papers program. This course gives students an extraordinary opportunity to experience this project and learn how scholars in a range of disciplines engage with an archive and help interpret it to both scholarly and wider public audiences. During the course they learn about the history of George’s reign from a range of expert scholars, in preparation for themselves selecting, and then editing and preparing an edition of a document from the archive. Throughout the course students receive training and guidance on how to prepare an edition to a high scholarly standard and have the opportunity to practice these techniques in a group project before embarking on their chosen assignment.

This course explores contemporary developments in marketing, in light of recent developments in socio-economic, technology, and regulatory trends in society and their influences on attitudes and behavior. It draws in several external expert guest speakers to help consider not only the drivers of change that have shaped marketing in our current era, but also stimulate thinking about the implications for lifestyles in the not-too-distant future and the practical and ethical issues that may arise for individuals and society. It adopts an active, collaborative, and inclusive style of teaching in tutorials. Many industry professionals come to class to provide real case studies, problems, and insights which mainly focus on equality and diversity, and sustainability issues. These guests provide the briefs for students' real-life authentic assessment task.