English

This course offers students the opportunity to improve their mastery of skills necessary for success in university study, including time and workload management, written communication, note taking, academic writing, successful use of the library, and approaches to research. Students are introduced to university structures, systems, and resources.

This course introduces students to global mental health from a critical perspective, with a particular focus on contextual constructions of mental illness, mental health programming in low resource and humanitarian settings, and for marginalized populations. The course covers global differences in definitions and incidence of psychiatric disorders, the validity and effectiveness of mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) interventions, and the wider role of power and inequity in shaping national mental health policies and international guidelines. 

This course examines health and wellbeing with an emphasis on communicable and non-communicable diseases including long-term conditions, health literacy and health promotion.

This course examines the golden age of English theater, involving a detailed study of a selection of tragedies by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The theatrical emphasis of the course is intended to help students respond to the plays as theatrical artifacts and not merely as literary texts.

This course examines the science of what enables individuals to operate at the peak of their potential, including the conditions that are thought to give rise to optimal motivation, emotional agility, resilience, and other factors that support wellbeing and performance. It explores skills and pathways for cultivating wellbeing while giving consideration to relevant individual differences and cultural factors. The content draws on a variety of disciplines, including psychology, education, philosophy, sports science, and organizational science. It covers the historical and philosophical views of wellbeing, motivation, and performance; the paradigm shift from problem-focused to strengths-based approaches; and the evolution from individual- to system-level perspectives of what contributes to wellbeing. 

The course introduces rings, subrings, homomorphisms, ideals, quotients, and isomorphism theorems. It includes integral domains, unique factorization domains, principal ideal domains, Euclidean domains, Gauss' lemma and Eisenstein's criterion. Fields, field of quotients, field extensions, the tower law, ruler and compass constructions, construction of finite fields.  Students state the definitions of concepts and prove their main properties, describe fields and rings and perform computations in them. Students discuss the theoretical results covered in the course and outline their proofs. They perform and apply the Euclidean algorithm in a Euclidean domain, giving examples of sets for which some of the defining properties of fields. They focus on proving the tower law, and use it to prove the impossibility of some classical ruler and compass geometric constructions. Students learn to identify concepts as particular cases of fields, rings, and modules (e.g. functions on the real line as a ring, abelian groups, and vector space).

This course examines theories and practices of persuasive communication. It also emphasizes the ethics of persuasive communication, exploring themes such as the difference between persuasion and manipulation, and the relationship between persuasion and power.

This course examines the deeply intertwined relationship between literature and the city. On the one hand, the rise of the modern metropolis saw the production of new literary modes as writers responded to changing social and economic relations, new opportunities for self-fashioning and cultural exchange, as well as experiences of exploitation, segregation and exclusion. On the other hand, the literary imagination itself has produced indelible urban worlds and underworlds, from James Joyce’s Dublin, Virginia Woolf’s London or Claude McKay’s Marseille, to novels, short strories and speculative fictions that reimagine Singapore, Melbourne or Johannesburg. Reading widely across twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary geographies, students will engage with different genres of city writing – poetry, short story, novel, and graphic novel -- as well as read theoretical texts that explore key concepts such as the production of space, the flaneur, space and gender, the imperial/colonial metropolis and the global city.

The course situates Chaucer’s exceptionally diverse canon within the literary and historical contexts that produced them, while also considering how archival discoveries and fresh theoretical approaches make possible new understandings (or at times misunderstandings) of the medieval author and his works. Given the increasingly diverse and global readership of Chaucer’s work in 21st centuries, it is unsurprising that these works elicit such varied and often contradictory responses. As readers of Chaucer in the 21st century, students are encouraged and supported to develop their own voice and critical skills, and it is not expected that they have extensive previous experience with medieval literature. 

This course charts the evolution of modern Ireland from the height of colonial expansion in the 17th Century, through the era of the landlords to the Act of Union, and through the Great Famine to the revolutionary period of the War of Independence and the creation of the Irish Free State. This course examines the historical geography of Ireland through the prisms of colonialism and decolonialism and challenges the notion of Ireland as a 19th Century colony raising questions about this island's position within the British Empire. The course focuses on both urban and rural areas and discuss the importance of historical geography in understanding the contemporary Irish landscape. Course includes a compulsory one-day fieldtrip.