University of Bristol

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.

Students explore a range of different types of painting from a number of different cultural traditions, geographical, and historical contexts. They consider the ethical questions that arise through the global trade in different pigments and supports. Adopting a transhistorical approach, they also examine the possibilities and challenges these materials present for makers and conservators. One key theme is the issue of representation itself and how this is achieved through the medium of paint, as well as how the viewer interprets the painted surface.

The course examines how Ireland’s landscape has changed in the period 1850-present, and examines the sources and methods we can use to understand the history of landscape. Throughout this course students try to make sense of the overlapping influences of conflict, economic change, and social life on the making of the landscape and explore the impact that place and land has had on the creation of modern Ireland.

This course introduces students to the uneven scope, scale, and pace of change in contemporary Britain. Students interrogate the ways in which different narratives of continuity and change emerged in and about the 20th century in Britain, and the purposes they have served. By exploring different areas of life – from politics, voting, and protesting, to working, shopping, belief, and love – students engage with alternative ways of understanding this period in British history. In this course students tackle big historiographical debates in the field and develop a more complex understanding of the political turmoil, economic uncertainty, and social upheaval of the 20th century.