English

This course is divided into two parts: the Cold War period and the Global Age. Part one focuses on international conflicts related to the Cold War and its effects. Part two focuses on globalization, international relations, and global risks.  

This course introduces students to some of the main changes in human prehistory and history which have contributed to creating the world as we know it. It achieves this by focusing on 20 different "things" (e.g. pots, metals, houses, burials, and more), which can be expanded outwards to understand societies, whole periods, and key episodes of social and political change. The course takes a broadly chronological structure, stretching from the Neolithic to Medieval periods, and covers an area encompassing Europe, the Mediterranean, and Western Asia.

This course examines the concept of security and governance of security, and its application in different contexts and at different levels of analyses with a focus on developing societies, particularly Africa. It considers key theories and relates them to particular contexts. The course provides an intellectual and practical context to the notion of the security sector and the governance of security and develops and demonstrates knowledge, understanding, and skills to investigate the various ways through which "security" can be brought under "democratic governance."

The goal of this course is to understand the relationship between policies, institutions, and economic growth and development. Topics include the analysis of Irish economic growth, economic models of growth, determinants of Irish economic growth, and importance of institutions and geography for the development of modern economies.

This course examines the past three decades' explosive surge in neuroscientific explanations of human nature, promising clear-cut biological answers to commonplace philosophical questions concerning rationality, emotion, behavior, values, and ethics. It explores to what extent such a promise is warranted, in particular concerning existential questions such as anxiety, responsibility, and religious faith.

This course examines the main techniques and theories for analyzing and understanding how governments make foreign policy decisions. It will be divided into two main interactive components. The first will be dedicated to surveying the leading theories on foreign policy decision-making to provide an avenue for addressing questions such as: What role do personalities play in the process? Does the bureaucracy have an impact? Where do questions of national identity and ambition fit in? How does the form of political regime - democratic or authoritarian - impact the decision-making process? What impact do external factors and structural constraints have on foreign policy decision-making? The second component will emphasize participation and application of the theories through the research and presentation of selected case studies.

This course examines east central and southeastern European history from the twilight of nineteenth-century imperialism to the most recent expansion of the European Union. Consideration will be given to the two world wars and their consequences; nationalism, fascism, and socialism; and the revolutions of 1989.

The "hero" is one of the central, if particularly diverse and changeable concepts that define and structure private identities and public patterns of authority in the ancient Greco-Roman world and beyond, right up to the present. In this course, students examine and interrogate the idea of the hero through the lens of ancient epic, exploring Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as well as Virgil’s Aeneid in search of what heroism might mean, then and now.

The course analyses what it means to be a man or a woman in different socio-cultural contexts, how gender roles are learned, and how these gender roles translate into gender needs. The concepts of sexuality and gender, gender roles and how they are shaped and learned, triple roles of women, practical and strategic gender needs, gender-based access to and control of resource within households are explored. Gender equality, gender-based violence, gender mainstreaming and roles of the state, role of men and women in technology development and the innovation process are reviewed. During the practical session, students visit communities to identify gender roles and how such roles influence control and utilization of resource for crop and livestock production.

In this course, students discuss the "extreme internationalism" of Conceptual art shows since the late 1960s, and the "global contemporary" framing of survey exhibitions - notably art biennials - since the late 1980s. Students consider the roles played by concepts such as national representation, multiculturalism, and anti-imperial nationalism. They analyze how numerous factors - for example: artist networks, curatorial agency, installation serendipity, national backing, educational experience, and cultural identity - may affect visibility, especially when exhibiting "at large" rather than "at home" (however many places may be counted as "home"). Visibility afar, or critical engagement in a distant locality, is prioritized above successful commercial access to new art markets, when thinking about exhibiting abroad.