University of London, Queen Mary

With a career spanning nearly 50 years, Stephen King is one of the world's most popular and influential writers, his stories and iconic characters forming an integral part of the American cultural landscape. Film adaptations of his work continue to receive critical acclaim and extraordinary box office success. The analysis of Horror film and fiction can reveal cultural anxieties at significant socio-historic moments. In this course, students explore the ways in which Stephen King's shorter novels, novellas, and film adaptations of his work interrogate the American psyche, capturing its fears and apprehensions at defining points in modern history. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this course uses King's work as a lens through which to examine developments in American horror cinema and fiction, investigating the articulation of cultural anxieties from the New England Puritan imagination in the influential works of Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. 

This course explores the field of cultural geography. It draws on examples both historical and contemporary, in the UK and beyond, to demonstrate how spaces, places, and landscapes are laden with meaning. It shows that culture is not something that is fixed, but rather constructed through relations with different people, places, ideas, objects, and practices. The course therefore helps students understand and interpret matters of culture critically, with careful attention to plurality, complexity, and power. Students examine power and identity, cultural representations, more-than-representational geographies, geographies of embodiment and mobility, cultural geographies of food, emerging cultural landscapes and politics, and tensions and new directions in cultural geography. 

This course traces the origins, development, socio-cultural significance, and critical appreciation of the form from its beginnings in the amusement arcades to the mobile games of the present day. Considering video games as uniquely interactive visual sources, the course employs a diverse range of methods, approaches, and critical contexts, from the circumstances of socioeconomic national production in Japan, Europe, and the US to global gaming cultures, the representation of history, the video game's relationship to cinema, and the theoretical ways in which we might understand the nature of human leisure and play.