University of Manchester

This course provides students with an overview of innovative and experimental writing by women in the twentieth century – and beyond. The texts studied allow for a consideration of various kinds of formal, linguistic, generic, thematic and material experiment, and for discussions of diverse literary categories, practices and movements, such as modernism, postmodernism, multimodality, cut-up, lipogrammatic writing and the nouveau roman. Accompanying critical material facilitates a discussion of the various avant-gardes of the 20th century (such as Dada, Surrealism, and the Oulipo group), and their contextual and cultural significance.  

The course introduces students to the study of nations and nationalism from both an empirical and a normative perspective. It encourages students to explore the advantages and disadvantages of nationalism and national identity in light of recent history and current political developments. Students are introduced to contemporary normative debates on the political morality of nationalism and provided with conceptual tools to engage in these debates in a theoretically sophisticated way. They employ their conceptual and theoretical knowledge to explore possible solutions to contemporary political problems involving nationalist claims, and they deepen their understanding of the relationship between empirical and normative analyses of politics.

In this course, students study the defining features of British society, politics, and culture in the period 1880-1990; the dominant historiographical traditions defining this field; and the relevant and appropriate key primary sources.

In this course, students study animal physiology, emphasizing how to compare and contrast the physiological processes across different animal groups that govern their day-to-day function. Students gain an appreciation of how response strategies are used to cope with different external environments and how physiological plasticity is key to maintaining and adjusting physiological processes in terrestrial and aquatic animals.

Developmental biology deals with the various steps necessary for the correct and complete formation of the body of a living organism. In this course, students are introduced to the mechanisms used to produce different cell and tissue types and ensure these cells develop in the correct position and identity. Students learn, using examples such as the eye and limbs, that similar developmental mechanisms are employed by diverse organisms. The role that developmental biology plays in medicine in stem cell therapy, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine are also considered.

This course looks at the vast socio-economic changes that have occurred in China, the most populous and fastest-developing country in the world, a country that was a "blank sheet of poverty" in 1949 and is the second largest economic power in the world now.  

This course explores viruses and viral disease by examining viral structure and function. It explains how viruses subvert host cell function to generate viral factories. Citing examples such as the influenza and HIV viruses, students examine details of the pathogenic mechanisms used by viruses to cause disease. The course also covers the design of viral vaccines and their use in eradicating viral infections such as polio.