King's College London

This course traces the premodern histories of contemporary constructions of race and gender, exploring the figuration of these concepts in (mainly) non-dramatic texts from Old English to the 17th-century. Students read works including Old English texts scrutinizing the practices of slavery, early modern women’s conduct books, the diplomatic correspondence between Elizabeth I and the Ottoman “Sultana” Safiye, travel writings by Leo Africanus and Al-Hasan al-Wazzan, and Zadie Smith’s reimagining of Chaucer, THE WIFE OF WILLESDEN. Students draw upon important recent scholarship in Premodern Critical Race Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, Gender Studies, Trans Studies and Queer Temporalities to trace how premodern texts helped to construct, perpetuate, challenge, critique, or explore ideas of race and gender, and how this has shaped our field and our world today. 

The course introduces theoretical perspectives on the "public sphere" by drawing on political and philosophical arguments, and illustrating them in the context of the competition/complementarity of political and religious discourses and movements in the age of mass communication. The course also focuses on how religious and political authority is communicated through both conventional and new global media. Topics include the study of religion in the public sphere, power, media, and religion, media representations of religion, media and religious political conflict, and others.

The course combines theoretical and empirical content in the analysis of digital campaigning. Digital campaigning is hereby understood as comprising all forms of social and political campaigning that make intense use of digital media. Theoretically it covers a number of concepts and theories that are relevant to the understanding of this issue, including social movement theory, and digital politics theory. Furthermore, it covers a number of important concepts such as the digitization of political activity, the notion of hybrid media system, the consequences of interactivity, crowd-sourcing, networking, and participatory culture for social and political campaigning. Empirically, it will draw on a number of digital campaigns, from social movements, to charity and civil society campaigns. Its geographic scope mostly focuses on the Western context, but with some attempts to explore similar developments in other word areas including India, China, and South America. 

The course introduces key ideas and processes in the area of Entrepreneurship using an applied approach. The course focuses on the generation of business ideas followed by development, articulation, and formulation of a business plan. Relevant areas such as business model development, the external environment, resource management and financial planning are integrated in an entrepreneurial context. Theoretical and empirical foundations of entrepreneurship are explored at the start of term; the remainder of the course is dedicated to students designing their own entrepreneurial venture and experiencing the entrepreneurial process in action.

Family firms are the dominant organizational form worldwide, yet a distinctive field of study due to the potential tensions and synergies between family and business systems. This course explores these tensions and synergies, which are manifested in the resources, governance, succession planning, and most important the entrepreneurial orientation and transgenerational value creation potential of family businesses. While research has found consensus on some general trends and characteristics of family firms, there are some surprising outcomes that challenge existing theories. 

This course explores the relationship between literary texts and their precursors. The course moves from the ancient world of classical Greece, Rome, and the Middle East to the present day. Students focus on the transhistorical, however, not chronological. The course introduces some of the ways in which writers speak to one another across and through time, considering what it means for a writer to invoke other literary texts in their work. Students explore different theoretical models for thinking about this relationship, moving beyond ideas of influence to instead consider more creative ways in which texts have existed in relation to one another. 

In this course, students read, view, and analyze a selection of plays, performances, and other texts that pose gender as a central problem. In conjunction with these performance texts, students also read a variety of theoretical texts that offer methods both for interpreting gender in performance and for understanding gender as performance. The course focuses on theatre and performance works produced from the 1950s to the present and covers a range of performance forms, including dramatic realism, experimental theatre, performance art, and drag performance. 

In this course, students learn how to use a range of marketing analytics techniques to analyze, visualize, and interpret data from various sources such as surveys, transaction data, and data from social media platforms. To effectively analyze these data, students learn how to use typical software packages to develop practical solutions to specific marketing problems. In contrast to other marketing courses, particular emphasis is placed in guiding students step-by-step on how to conduct specific data analyses using suitable software. Students learn how various marketing analytical techniques, tools, metrics, and data sources can be used to address fundamental challenges marketing managers face today in the age of Big Data. 

The course educates students in the main features of the art form, how to achieve them on the page, and how to recognize and appreciate the literary contexts out of which they emerge. Students work through their notebooks and workshops to recognize their own poetic impulses and render them with greater precision in what they write. Students are encouraged to write poems in the workshops, to be discussed by the group. 

To give students the opportunity to understand the key aspects of chemistry that are relevant to biochemistry, including the important structural implications of biologically relevant macromolecules, thermodynamics, and chemical reactions together with their reaction kinetics.