University of Manchester

This course explores the development of ancient science and technology and its interrelation with Greco-Roman societies and the environment. The course encompasses the ancient Mediterranean area and the Near and Middle East and range from the Bronze age to the early Middle Ages, with a focus on the Roman period. It takes a wide view of technology, ranging from primitive tools and agriculture to automata (robots), aquaducts, and catapults. The course uses texts and archaeological evidence, and incorporates field and museum learning experiences as well as explaining the latest scientific advances.

This is an introduction to the fundamental importance of law in everyday commerce in the common law world. The course deals with the common law approach to law, its creation, dynamic development, and practical application to business, focusing on two of the most important areas regulating business obligations: contract law and negligence. It also deals with risk evaluation and the capacity to influence, develop, and change the law itself. 

In this course students develop writing skills through a series of focused writing exercises that are critiqued in class. Students are introduced to some of the major theories of story design, and are taught how to develop their work draft by draft. Weekly classes cover (among other issues) the classic three act structure, beginnings and endings, the importance of genre, universal themes and their audience relevance, and dialogue. 

This course enhances students’ knowledge of emotion science and their capacity to evaluate empirical data and current emotion theories, show how findings from a range of methodologies contribute to our understanding of emotion and strategies for enhancing emotional wellbeing, and enables students to discuss and evaluate contemporary research in written and oral formats, both independently and in groups. 

This course provides an understanding of the structure, organization, and function of cellular membranes. Particular emphasis is placed on membrane composition and organization, and involvement of membranes and membrane proteins in ion and solute transport, signal transduction, and vesicular transport. Diseases that arise from defects in these processes are used to exemplify the importance of this topic to life science.

In this course, students study the contested dynamics of police-work and policing, classic and contemporary research on policing, and nature of contemporary debates on policing and the police.

The course gives students a first look into one of the most fundamental functions of any organization, its operations and its relationship with strategy. The operations function of a business, whether manufacturing or services, has the responsibility of making whatever it is the organization sells (product or service). Students study this core function extensively and see the vital role it plays in strategy as well as analyze some of the important decisions that must be made by operations managers when it comes to design, planning, and control and improvement of the organization’s industrial engineering system.

In this course, students read a range of literature by writers from the British Romantic period (c1776-1832) – an age of political, social, environmental, and aesthetic revolution. In a period marked by rapid industrialization at home, and overshadowed by the practices and legacies of slavery and empire internationally, writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, Lord Byron, Mary Prince, Jane Austen, Felicia Hemans, and P. B. Shelley were negotiating what it meant to live and write in a rapidly changing world.

This course introduces students, especially those beginning the study of ancient history, to the politics, society, and economy of the Greek world and its relations with neighboring peoples in the archaic period (800-478 BC). The principal themes of the course are the emergence and character of the leading Greek city-states and their geographical spread throughout the Mediterranean world; the rise of powerful non-Greek neighbors, especially Persia, during the sixth century; and the interaction between them, culminating in the Persian Wars. Particular attention is paid to the nature of our evidence for the period: students study the first work of western historiography, THE HISTORIES of Herodotus; and the potential and problems of using other sorts of archaeological, documentary, and literary evidence to write the history of this period.

This course examines a selection of key historical periods between 1607 and 1877. Introducing students to the significant events that went on to shape 20th Century America, it engages with influential historical, political, and social works to present a pattern of national development leading from the Puritans through the formation of the Republic and the divisions caused by the Civil War, to the tumultuous political struggles during Reconstruction. The course addresses theories of democracy, of state power, and critically investigates arguments concerning race, gender, and identity as a whole.