University of Bristol

This course takes students on a journey from the seemingly familiar surroundings of everyday France to a more complex and enriched understanding of the key debates and issues which have defined French and Francophone identities over the centuries. Using source material in French (also available in translation for ab initio students), it focuses on figures and places that seem easily recognizable to many students and scholars of France and explores the networks of often competing ideas and values that have shaped who or what they are perceived to be today.

Students learn to identify and remove simple trends and seasonalities from time series data; describe the properties of stationary time series and their autocorrelations; define various time series probability models (ARMA, ARIMA, GARCH); construct time series probability models from data and verify model fit; define the spectral density function and understand it as a distribution of energy in the frequency domain; compute the periodogram and smoothed versions; and analyze multivariate time series.

In this unit, students study five major authors working in a range of genres and offering radically different outlooks and outputs. Students explore the conditions in which their work was produced, and the social and political contexts in which it was consumed, reflecting critically throughout on the category of the "woman writer," and the history of scholarship thereon.

This course examines some of the issues that face human kind at the beginning of the 21st century and show how geographers approach the problems facing the modern world. It includes topics that are currently reported in the media and examine the realities and uncertainties behind these issues, focusing particularly on the tools available to address key questions. The course facilitates cross-disciplinary discussion and to promote an in-depth understanding of problems facing us all. The course provides an insight into how these issues are influenced by complex interactions between social, cultural, economic, physical, and biological processes.

This course introduces students to ideas about objects and helps them achieve a broad understanding of many of the ways in which objects function in human societies, in the recent as well as more distant past. The course provides a comprehensive introduction to the interdisciplinary study of "objects in cultures;" and it demonstrates how societies create objects which in turn create individual identities, and reify cultural traits. 

This course examines key trends and changes in contemporary television drama. This includes the exploration of different genres and narrative forms, along with the impact of new styles and technologies in changing industrial contexts, to include both broadcast and streamed services. The course also explores broader theoretical ways of understanding contemporary television, such as its relation to modernity and the nation state, globalization, and the place of television in contemporary culture. Although much of the emphasis is on English language television, students are invited to explore comparative examples from other countries and cultures in the context of developing a specific area of focus for a case study.

This course provides an overview of the economics of Globalization and Development. The first part of the course takes a historical perspective and focuses on globalization and development up to the Industrial Revolution. The course discusses the main driving forces: geography, culture, and institutions. The second part of the course first introduces several models of development and underdevelopment, with an emphasis on capital accumulation, rural-urban migration and the possibility of poverty traps. Next, it moves on to explore the influence that international trade, financial globalization and international migration have on modern development. Finally, the course turns to examining in more detail the agricultural and industrial sectors and what governments can do to facilitate their transformation as well as the development of the whole economy.

This course examines a selection of epic poems from ancient Greece and Rome - all studied in translation - to trace the development of the genre from the oral tradition of Homer through the literary composition of later Greek and Latin poets. Authors and texts studied in this course may include Homer, Hesiod, Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius. Themes studied may include genre, gender, myth, the gods, destiny, mortality, narrative technique, oral, and literary culture, or paradigms of heroism. Students also reflect on the cultural and political contexts of these works, including differences between Greek and Roman epics.

The course explores the concept and principles of marketing. It reflects upon the factors that affect markets, demand and supply, the range of stakeholders associated with any given market, the function that marketing fulfills for organizations, customers, consumers and society more broadly, and the key principles and practice of marketing. In this way, it provides an introduction to essential concepts associated with marketing and consumption, while also highlighting interconnections between marketing and other fields of study.