English

This course explores the historical and contemporary complexities of Irish culture, place, and landscape through select case-studies, thematic and/or locational, and through a range of theoretical concerns from both archaeology and geography. It engages the key challenge of carefully contextualizing and historicizing understandings of landscape, heritage, and environment, and exploring urgent contemporary questions of landscape/environment sustainability, governmentality, and management. The course provides an introduction to the various ways in which human societies interact(ed) with their environment, and will provides both chronological depth and thematically-specific case-study knowledge of key sites and spaces across the island of Ireland. Particular attention is given to the range of competing discourses on issues of environment, landscape, and development in both rural and urban Ireland and their implications for communities in the present and the future. 

In this course, students explore German history from the Reformation to the present day. The course covers major events in early modern times, including the Reformation and the Enlightenment, but the main focus is on the 19th and 20th centuries. Students engage with a variety of topics, including nationalism and nation-building, revolution and reaction, industrialization and urbanization, changing gender roles and social structures, empire at home and abroad, mass politics and culture, Germans’ roles and experiences in two world wars, Nazi racism and genocide, and Cold War division and unification. The common threads throughout are Germans’ persistent experimentation with defining "Germany" and the consequences for those variously included and excluded according to gender, class, religion, race, politics, and other categories. 

This course examines the methods and techniques to efficiently explore and analyze large data collections. Students will learn how to ingest, combine and summarize data from a variety of data models which are typically encountered in data science projects, such as relational, semi-structured, time series, geospatial, image, text. As well as reinforcing their programming skills through experience with relevant Python libraries, this course will also introduce students to the concept of declarative data processing with SQL, and to analyze data in relational databases. Students will be given data sets from, eg. , social media, transport, health and social sciences, and be taught basic explorative data analysis and mining techniques in the context of small use cases. The course will further give students an understanding of the challenges involved with analyzing large data volumes, such as the idea to partition and distribute data and computation among multiple computers for processing of 'Big Data'.

This course provides the opportunity to analyze works representing different types of hero: classical, tragic, popular, traditional, comic, anti-heroes, and others; explore the notion of heroism, its absence in our lives and our longing for it as this finds expression in various historical contexts and cultures; deal with the notion of masculinity as a cultural and historical construct; apply the analytical skills students have gained to a wide range of problems which may confront them in different situations and contexts in later life; and allow students to explore the features of a number of literary/cultural forms, providing a framework of ideas and methodologies appropriate to specific genres, ideas which students apply to the comparative study of texts.

Set as a new objective of the European Union (EU) by the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) has since proven to be one of the most dynamic EU policy-making domains. It now encompasses key individual policies addressing fundamental concerns of European citizens: police cooperation, judicial cooperation in criminal and civil matters, border management, visa and asylum policies etc. This course analyzes the progressive development of the AFSJ by providing insights on three main considerations: who are the individual and collective actors contributing to that policy domain; which theories and concepts help us to understand the creation and evolutions of the AFSJ; and what are the key reforms, debates, and controversies of the individual AFSJ policies. 

The course introduces foreign students to Icelandic folk culture past and present: from the folk beliefs implied by the Icelandic sagas to the famous collection of folk tales concerning "hidden people", elves, magicians, seal-folk, ghosts and more which was published by Jón Árnason in 1862-64; the ballads and music enjoyed by the people in the countryside; and the beliefs, behavior, and lifestyles encountered by the somewhat dumbfounded and awe-inspired early foreign travelers to Iceland during the last century. Students are introduced to modern Icelandic traditions and beliefs, from the Christmas men to the "elf stones" that road builders avoid, to the eating of sheep heads, and the continual interest in the supernatural. 

This course explores the ways in which music operates as a means of challenging, disrupting, and resisting the social order. It encourages students to reflect on the relationship between art, power, and resistance by critically engaging with a wide range of "protest" songs. To this end, the course critically analyses specific pieces of music through the application of a wide range of conceptual tools drawn from critical, decolonial, race, and feminist theories. It intends to advance students’ sociological imagination by fostering the awareness of the value of the "aesthetic dimension" as a means of dissensus, with a particular emphasis on the theme of social change.
 

Discos, clubs, and raves have been focal points for the development of new and distinctive musical and cultural practices over the past four decades. More recently, they have also become the subject of much scholarly research. This course introduces key themes, theories, and scenes of electronic dance music. Particular emphasis is given to the intersection of music, identity, and history. Other themes that will arise include genre, dance and embodiment, musical form, place, and underground/mainstream interactions.

This course explores how memoir has developed as a literary form in Ireland. The claustrophobic relationship between the stories of the nation and the individual has been a commonplace since at least the 1920s, when the Blasket Island autobiographies were at once held up as a model for the new Free State while also recording a way of life that was to quickly vanish. Beginning with an introductory session which establishes how this relationship has developed since then, this course examines the form of the memoir as a way of negotiating the relationship between the individual and society in Ireland, north and south. It asks students to critically examine the forms and themes by which we are called to remember the past century, and to investigate the contexts in which Irish memoir has been written and received.

This course covers supply chain strategy and concepts by focusing on a few Japanese cases, providing the class with a solid understanding of the tools and techniques necessary to solve supply chain problems. The course covers key drivers of supply chain performance such as forecasting demand, logistics and transportation, decision-making tools, information, and sourcing.