University of London, Queen Mary

The course explores the work of key thinkers who focus on the politics of modernity, with a three part division based on society, the state and the economy. It looks at writers such as Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Spencer, Keynes, Polanyi and Hayek, and their influence on issues that continue to dominate political debate in the current era, including class, the state, social and political movements, and national identity.

Subsequent to the introductory lecture, this course is divided into three sections. The first main section provides an historical and political overview of the "war on terror" in relation to thinking about other types of wars. It considers how the prosecution of the war on terror has come to shape not only military, but also legal and governmental discourse and practice in the post 9/11 era. The second section invites students to consider ideas and practices of security as a central feature of this. It considers the rise of private military contracting, immigration, humanitarianism, urban geopolitics, and the overlap between health and security concerns. The third section focuses on the political-economic underpinnings of many of these developments and challenges students to think of conflict as an embedded social phenomenon: as much a part of contemporary discourses on the economy as it is something with merely economic implications. 

This course equips students with skills for analyzing performance as distinct from written text. It facilitates students' critical and productive engagement with London and the vast cultural resources and history it has to offer and explores some of the current issues in cultural politics and critical ways of approaching them. The course involves fieldwork at various sites around London and attendance at performances and events, and it requires critical response to seminar-based discussion.

Taught by seminars, site visits and museum sessions, this course introduces students to life in medieval and renaissance London. The central themes of royal power, gender, marginality, the Black Death and popular revolt, are studied in class and in the streets of London. Students visit key monuments of medieval London (such as Westminster Abbey), trace the path of rebels in 1381, or handle medieval and early modern artifacts in the Museum of London. Sites, monuments, topography, and artifacts lead to a new understanding of politics, devotional practices, trade, and family life. This course enables students to develop professional networks, and foster an understanding of multi-disciplinary approaches. Through their work with curators, paleontologists, and historians, students evaluate approaches to past objects from various disciplinary perspectives, and demonstrate how historical research can be applied in the environment of museum studies, public engagement, and object analysis.

How and why are Shakespeare’s plays performed, filmed, read, and taught from China to Chile, from Singapore to South Africa? What makes Shakespeare a “global” force? Shakespeare's plays display the vast panoply of human desires and emotions: from passionate love to bewildering fear, from unswerving loyalty to basest envy, from the noblest instances of self-sacrifice to the desire to inflict unspeakable pain. His depictions of these emotions are often shocking in their vividness, yet always recognizable as fundamental facets of human experience. This course will look at Shakespeare’s afterlives in different parts of the world, and include hands-on workshops in which students try out different possible ways of interpreting “global” plays like Antony and Cleopatra.