This course investigates the experience of watching and being watched in London while giving students the opportunity to pursue a quarter-long individual research project. Through texts ranging in genre, medium and period, we will explore explicit and implicit surveillance in London: the formal modes of observing and regulating people in public (government CCTV, private security technology), and informal instances of overseeing and overhearing. How has London's literature, history, and culture registered its status as a site of particularly intense surveillance? We begin the quarter with theoretical (l-berlant, Michael Warner, Jeremy Bentham) and imaginative texts (Daniel Defoe, Oscar Wilde) alongside film and television (Francis Ford Coppola, Bodyguard) which illuminate the key paradox of how surveillance blatantly regulates public identities while, paradoxically, encouraging voyeurism of bodies labeled other or perverse. Fieldtrips to related historical and cultural sites will contextualize student research aims as we shift to independent projects in the second half of the course. Students will pursue archival and fieldwork opportunities in London with freedom to select topics under the umbrella of surveillance. Through rigorous engagement with course texts and individual research, students will strengthen textual analysis skills, become better acquainted with the city, and develop a reflexive relationship to their embodied and intellectual journeys through London.