King's College London

Through this course, students examine the cultural construction of time and temporality in the early modern period, closely reading one of Shakespeare’s plays in each week of the course. Students take an historicist approach, working toward defining an early modern temporal consciousness. Students consider the temporal conditions and contexts of early modern performance - the temporal experience of the theatre for playwrights, actors, and audience members - engaging with different critical approaches to Shakespeare’s plays that are themselves often reliant on specific constructions of time (e.g. Feminism, New Historicism, Performance Studies, Postcolonialism, Presentism, Queer Studies etc.).

The course equips students with the critical tools required to analyze the variety of British colonial representations of India in the 19th and 20th centuries. Students gain the necessary historical knowledge that enables them to contextualize a range of novels and shorter fiction, as well as key historical documents and works of historiography.

This course focuses on expression in the solo keyboard music of C.P.E. Bach, Haydn and Mozart. J.S. Bach and Beethoven will appear as "book ends" to help establish a broader music-historical perspective. The central aim is to develop a refined, historically informed understanding of the musical materials used in keyboard music, encompassing the theory of musical topics, the rhetorical concept of musical form, stylistic registers (from tragic to comic), and notions of character and representation. The course is notes based, but not concerned with structural analysis for its own sake. Instead, the materials and expressive intentions of solo keyboard music are related to period aesthetic ideals, instrument design, music publishing, the rise of the professional solo fortepianist, and­—in the home—the bourgeois ideal of female musical accomplishment. An over-arching theme is the special place of solo keyboard music within the culture of sensibility: in many ways a more productive rubric than that of Viennese Classical Style.

This course introduces students to the avant-garde literary and artistic movement called surrealism that developed across Europe in the early part of the 20th century. Beginning with an examination of the first theories of surrealism which were written in France, the course looks at the movement’s influence across European media before ending with a discussion of the movement’s continuing international development. This course compares surrealism across national boundaries and literary and artistic disciplines. The emphasis of the course is on the interrelation of different media employed by surrealist practitioners, including but not limited to prose, poetry, periodicals, film, painting, and photography. 

This course introduces students to key religious texts that have been foundational in shaping religious traditions. This course is intended for students who may or may not have some prior knowledge of the religious texts in question, but who have no prior knowledge of the critical methodologies used in academic study.

Since the Middle Ages, Germany has been part of wider transnational networks of commerce, religion, diplomacy, scholarship, exploration, tourism, and migration that have involved encounters with other peoples, languages, and customs. This course explores ways in which German literature and culture, at different points in its long history, has engaged with these networks and has imagined the resulting encounters with nations, cultures, and languages beyond its boundaries, both in Europe and further afield. Always bearing in mind that these encounters take place as much in the imagination as in reality, students study a range of texts and other forms that represent journeys, whether real or imagined, and the course considers what light can be shed on these by critical theories that explore ideas of otherness, boundaries, and identities.

This course explores revolutionary thought and practice from the early 20th century to the present day. Reading the cultural production of anticolonial, anti-caste, feminist, indigenous, and anti-capitalist activism, students critically examine the relationship between revolutionary social movements and the autobiographies, essays, poetry, and music they produced.  Students consider the theoretical work of these revolutionary movements as essential to the development of a Marxist tradition that is rooted in praxis. The course also includes a self-organized reading group component to encourage students to extend their engagement with these ideas beyond the university.

This course is broadly equivalent to A1 Basic User, Breakthrough Level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. 

The course provides students with an understanding of the key issues in the historical, philosophical, ethical, and sociological approaches to the study of war and the military. It develops students’ understanding of the relationship between armed forces and the societies they protect, and it engages with war as a moral problem and the tools that philosophers have created to limit its brutality and guide belligerents. It explores why, in spite of these tools, wars can descend into barbarity, crime, and genocide, making a special case study of the Holocaust in the Second World War. It looks at dynamics of protest against war and then goes on to interrogate the intellectual, economic, and financial factors that drive outcomes and shape war as a social dynamic. The term concludes with explorations of what war teaches us about human nature and the social contract, humans’ relationship with their environment and national identity.

This course focuses on the afterlife of a selection of controversial tragedies, which shocked their original audiences in Elizabethan and Jacobean London as much as they continue to challenge and entertain us today, both on the contemporary stage and on screen. The course focuses equally on the original context within which these tragedies were first written and performed, and on the history of their reception, with special emphasis on cinematic adaptations spanning over the late 20th and the early 21st centuries.