English

The Irish geological record contains over a billion years of Earth history preserving memories of the uplift of Himalayan-sized mountains, volcanic eruptions, warm tropical seas, and polar ice caps. This course introduces through field classes and online material how we can interpret the ancient rock record to reveal the past, and explore the links between the bedrock beneath us and today’s landscape and society. Students visit sites of outstanding geological interest and beautiful scenery in North and South County Dublin. Students are required to attend field classes, and the dates of field classes cannot be changed.

This course develops a fundamental understanding of the inherent dynamics of international management. It provides a comprehensive overview of the management decisions in the global environment and challenges students to analyze complex situations and develop recommendations for strategic decisions independently. Through the analysis of case studies, interactions with guest speakers, and an in-depth group project, the course offers a theoretical understanding of international management, but also a more practical application, analyzing best practices in management and frameworks as well as failures and lessons to be learned moving forward.

This course examines the security challenges facing the Pacific Islands and, in particular, Australia’s role in the security of the region. This includes cooperation on transnational crime and counterterrorism; intervention and stabilization; criminal justice assistance; governance capacity-building; natural disaster response; and substantial development assistance. It also considers ways in which Pacific understandings of security differ from Australia’s, and the implications of this for Australia’s engagement with Pacific Island governments, security agencies and societies. It also assesses the outlook over the next decade for security in this strategically important and rapidly changing region.

This course concerns the “Indo-Pacific” space, which has both a geographic and a geostrategic dimension. The course questions these different representations of space, their political use, and the related cooperation policies, at the intersection of military and development issues.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. The course is graded P/NP only. The course covers the main skills related to data communication: design of a data communication product, from the sourcing and interpretation of data to their graphic representation; and the creation of data visualizations, charts, and dashboards using the main tools of the industry. For both of these points, there are practical exercises, to gain mastery in specific data visualization tools or to favor a creative design process. The course discusses key topics related to these two skills, such as: evaluating accessibility and inclusivity of data communication products; the elements of visual and info design; audience-driven design; perception and bias, and their influence in data communication; exercises of creativity in the representation of data; a focus on maps and geo data; and a critical evaluation of data visualizations, to improve the efficiency and clarity communication products.

This course is a connected and comparative history of Asia before 1750 that introduces the region’s major political, economic, and intellectual contours prior to British colonization. The course focuses on tracing the history of premodern Asia through three types of transregional cultural formation: large empires, trading zones, and religious ecumene. The course explores and discusses how these formations unfolded across Central and Eastern Asia and South and Southeast Asia and uses them as a lens for thinking critically about the scope of Asia as a geographical, political, economic, and cultural category in premodern history.

This course examines people and cultures. Women and men, merchants and monks, Christians and Jews all formed the cultures, classes and statuses which constituted late medieval European society. The study themes of this course focus on the means by which ideas, cultures and expectations were constructed and transmitted, and include topics such as healthcare, civic life, the body, gender and sexuality, religious beliefs and practices, otherness, death, political theory, art and architecture, travel.

This course introduces students to contemporary plant biology. It focuses on the flowering plants (angiosperms), one of the most successful plant groups that sustains all life on earth, and examines how they are organized, grow, and respond to the environment. A major theme the course highlights is that plant growth is highly dynamic – plants control growth and development through integrating intrinsic and external signals to best adapt to the changing surroundings. The concepts and techniques of gene manipulation for studying plants, as well as their applications in plant biotechnology, are also discussed.

This course must be taken simultaneously with LABOR ECONOMICS AND PUBLIC POLICY A. This course explores how labor markets work and analyzes a wide range of labor issues within Japanese and US economies. Each class begins with the theoretical background of labor economics, then students analyze a related research article to understand how and whether the standard, neo-classical model is applied to real economic life.

This course introduces the basic issues associated with contemporary globalization. While the focus is on contemporary issues, the course begins by examining challenges of development in the context of the history of the past two centuries. And while the course conceives globalization as a process driven by economic and technological forces, it recognizes distinct and significant social, political, and cultural manifestations and consequences. Thus, it analyzes the most important social, cultural, and political factors interacting with the dynamic forces of the world economy.