King's College London

This course reads against the grain of those dominant narratives of colonialism as world-making by focusing on the pirate as an interruptive force, who derails the movement of peoples, goods, ideas, and laws across the maritime routes linking the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Important tools in the course are the reading practices of postcolonial theory, which will teach us to extract and assess this alternative history of the post/colonial pirate. The course also teaches students to nuance standard maritime historiographies through literary reading practices, as well as evaluate the metaphoric application of piracy to contemporary, interruptive, economic practices.

This course introduces students to scholarly debates about contemporary Russia. It develops a comprehensive analytical toolkit required for understanding the various patterns and dynamics in Russian politics, state, and society. The course is motivated by the growing prominence of "the Russian challenge" issue in contemporary global political debates and is structured around a series of questions that allow for exploring commonly used explanatory variables as well as key issue areas structuring public and scholarly debates on Russia.  

This course examines human experience as a source of truth, knowledge, and belief about war. Representations of human experiences of war play a significant role in human culture and society, often defining social memories and collective understandings of war. As such, this course examines how human experience is transmitted and interpreted via historical sources as well as cultural objects such as films, novels, and video games. It also engages students with key social, political, and moral arguments about the representation of war experience in the media, museums, monuments, and commemoration rituals. 

The course covers the last generation of the Roman republic, primarily focusing on the political and military events between 88 and 43 BCE. It traces the process which led to the replacement of the traditional system of shared aristocratic government by a hereditary monarchy. Central themes include the rise of the late republican dynasts, above all Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar, the role of the army in politics, the gradual destabilization of domestic politics, and the challenges posed by the expanding empire as well as its socio-economic impact. The current debate about the nature of the "fall" of the republic – accidental or inevitable - is also analyzed and placed in a wider historiographic context.

From Roman traders to modern commuters, millions of people have lived in the same few square miles where students now study. In this course, students form into groups with fellow Liberal Arts students and stage an investigation into some of these London lives. Students begin an interdisciplinary exploration of the history and culture of London and are introduced to some essential skills and methods of academic study that students use throughout the course. Students form into groups and enquire into an aspect of London, past, or present. Guided by a tutor, students seek to answer questions by engaging not only with primary and secondary readings and resources for study within King’s, but with the streets and spaces of the city itself. They present their findings via a digital portfolio and a group presentation. As students come to see by the end of this course, London - in all its struggles and achievements - is a fascinating microcosm of the wider world; and as such, an ideal laboratory for the study of Liberal Arts.

The course introduces the basic concepts of discrete mathematics needed for the study of computer science. Student learn to work with sets, relations, functions, recursive structures, graphs, trees, basic combinatorial principles, discrete probability, finite automata, and regular languages. 

This course introduces students to a variety of philosophical thinking from around the world. It prompts students to explore some key questions and concepts in philosophy across different religious traditions and time periods. The religious traditions to be explored in this course may include, but are not limited to: Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.  

Intellectual history of antiquity and the Middle Ages is typically conducted with sparse attention to women authors, and women thinkers whose works are not preserved. This course challenges that approach, by focusing on the achievements and contributions of female thinkers spanning a period from classical antiquity, with figures like Aspasia and Diotima, down to Christine de Pizan at the dawn of the European Renaissance. Some attention is paid to other cultural traditions, especially India and the Islamic world, though the richest materials are to be found in the Greek and Latin textual traditions. Many of the figures covered are, in a broad sense of the term, “philosophers,” but figures more usually described as “mystics,” such as Rabia and Hildegard of Bingen are also included.

In this course, students are introduced to the main ways in which the rise of digital cultures have disrupted existing political forms and structures. Students focus initially on identifying different understandings of politics prior to the rise of digital cultures and then explore the ways these have been changed. Part of this change is the increasing advancement of digital technologies and rise of platforms, leading to new shapes of political communication and the mediation of politics. In this course, digital politics is examined through some of its key political manifestations: for example, through changes in election campaigns globally, including in the Global South, through piracy and the Pirate Party; online censorship in the UK, China, and other parts of the world; privacy and ownership in Facebook and other social media platforms.