University of Melbourne

From illegally spray-painted stencils to secret exhibitions in abandoned warehouses to exclusive multi-million dollar art fairs, this course explores the rise of street art in the contemporary city. The course examines the diversity of artists, materials, and political impulses that drive street art and graffiti and its shift from an illicit subculture to a mainstream practice. Using examples from Melbourne and other key cities such as New York, Rome, and Berlin, the course investigates how the meaning and impact of street art derive from spatial and social contexts and how street art can provide new ways of understanding a city. It also covers broader debates about art, public space, and urban development. Students develop skills in identifying, mapping, and designing street art in Melbourne’s laneways.

This subject examines Romanticism from the perspective of the massive, though long neglected, cultural force of women writers and readers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It locates the emergence of feminism in this historical context, when, in the wake of the French revolution, changing notions of literature, culture, sexuality and emancipation gave rise to the first concerted articulation of feminist ideas in modern European culture. Through close readings of some of the best writers of the last two centuries, including Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld, and others, students gain a firm understanding of the literary, philosophical and cultural foundations of Romanticism and early Feminism movement that have played key roles in the construction of the modern world.

This course examines the craft of writing hard and soft news stories for a range of digital and print mass media news publications. With an emphasis on news writing, it covers what news is and how (and why) news priorities and story treatment may differ between print, broadcast and online; how to write news and feature stories; accuracy, as well as clear and concise language; and professional codes of ethics and editorial policies.

This course examines chemical reactions involving various types of reactive intermediates. The application of molecular orbital theory will be used to understand the nature of pericyclic reactions and the concept of coordination in main group (including carbon) and transition metal elements. An investigation of inorganic reaction mechanisms will focus on transformations involving coordination and organometallic complexes of d-block metals. Discussion of synthetic aspects will cover methods for carbon-carbon bond formation and functional group transformations, as well as principles of catalysis involving transition metal complexes and their chemistry in synthetic and biological systems.

This course examines the economic principles underlying various areas of the law and which are relevant to legal practice. It covers competition law and consumer protection; property rights, including intellectual property; and issues of damages and compensation. The course will develop economic tools to analyze these legal issues including incomplete contracting, oligopoly analysis and incomplete information.