University College Dublin

In Ireland, as internationally, the period from 1500 to 1800 was characterized by major political, economic, and social change. Recently, historians have placed increasing emphasis on the impact of early modern environmental and demographic transformation at a time of sustained political upheaval and social reorganization. In the three centuries between 1500 and 1800, Ireland was subject to a complex process of evolution from an essentially rural island controlled by diverse Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lordships to an island dominated politically by a colonial elite who effectively differed from the native population in terms of ethnicity, language, religion, and financial status. This course examines the transformation of Ireland in the period 1500 to 1800 from the perspective of migration and environmental change. In particular, the course considers how changes in demography, land ownership, land management, climate change, urbanization, and commerce significantly reconfigured Ireland’s landscape and environment.

Sport is central to life in the modern world. Why do people play sport, watch sport, talk about sport, dream about sport? And why do they choose the sports that they choose? This course examines the modern passion for sport and seeks to explain this passion. It assesses to what extent the straightforward pursuit of pleasure overwhelms everything else when people chose to engage with sport. But it also looks at how such choices are defined (or refined) by the influence of ideology and tradition, class and gender, commerce and geography, education, and employment. From the colosseum of the Roman Empire to the stadia of the 21st century, this course considers the creation of the modern sporting world and analyzes the place of sport within the context of social, cultural, political, and economic change.

 

This course introduces students to contemporary feminist ideas and key feminist debates, specifically feminist legal theory. The course illustrates the ideas by focusing on specific campaigns that relate to women and girls’ human rights and gender justice in both Irish national and global arenas. The course focuses on some important areas of contention, debate, and power struggles to see how feminist approaches to legal issues are deployed in important campaigns relating to: reproductive justice; prostitution/sex work; lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) issues; and redress and restorative justice for survivors of trauma and abuse relating to gender violence. Through case studies the course offers an introduction to feminist concepts and to international conventions relevant to gender justice such as the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), United Nations Conventions on Human Rights and relevant Security Council Resolutions as well the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the Yogyarkarta Principles. The case studies are also used to introduce and illustrate key concepts of feminist legal theorists such as Martha Fineman, Catharine MacKinnon, Suan Moller Okin, Martha Nussbaum, and Janet Halley.

Students are introduced to environmental sociology with a focus on the interactions between human societies and the natural environment. By focusing on this two-way interaction, the course examines key theoretical perspectives, debates, and issues within environmental sociology. The course considers interdisciplinary perspectives examining a range of topics such as environmental inequality, sustainability, public attitudes towards climate change, renewable energy, consumption, pollution, environmental social movements, climate-induced migration, green crime and transformation to "green societies."  These issues are examined at multiple levels, including rural and urban, local, and global, and from different perspectives of key stakeholders. 

This course focuses on introducing students to the core concepts of the Unix operating system and how to program this system. Today, Unix and Unix-like operating systems are ubiquitous; they are widely used in servers, embedded devices and have a growing desktop and mobile market (Linux, Mac OS X, Android etc.). This course teaches students how to develop applications for such systems, assuming no other software layer but OS. Students improve their existing C programming language skills and learn some key POSIX APIs to support designing and writing programs in a portable, maintainable fashion. They learn how to write multithreaded and multi-process applications as well as some basics of Unix networking. This is done through the Unix command line, and students learn basic tools and how to write shell scripts to automate common tasks. Students need a version of Unix installed on their own laptop (ideally Linux), help with this is provided in the first lab.

Dublin is one of Europe's oldest and greatest historic cities, and one of the fastest-growing. This course explores that long history, from the late first millennium AD when Vikings began a formal process of settlement to the early 21st century when global migration patterns enlarged its population and enriched its culture. The course focuses on the city's history as represented in its layout and physical fabric, two concerns of interest to archaeologists. It is intended to inform students about Dublin's history, but it also to equip them to read the evidence for that history in the physical character of the city. The course has three main components: the medieval city (to 1600), the early modern city (1600-1800), the modern and contemporary city (1800 to the present).

The course introduces and develops an understanding of American modernism, both in terms of the particularities of American culture in the early 20th century, and in relation to its complex relationship with Europe. Particular attention is paid to concepts of race/ethnicity, gender, politics, and social activism as ways of emphasizing the plurality of American modernism, as well as the diverse aesthetic forms which give it expression. In its geographical reach, the course encompasses writing from the American West, rural Wisconsin, New York (from Harlem to the Jewish American community of the Lower East Side), and expatriate experience in post-war Britain. At the core of the course is an exploration of the complex, shifting and dynamic nature of American Modernism, both in terms of the creative output of its writers, and in relation to the critics and theorists who attempt to define it.

This course traces both the development of English literature and the development of Medieval English society, through the transition from a shame culture to a guilt culture. Students read a selection of outstanding literary works of the early and late medieval period. Beginning with some Old English literature in translation, students consider the heroic ethos and its consequences for personal relationships and societal structures. The course then looks at a variety of key Middle English texts, including some works by Marie de France, Chaucer, and the Pearl-poet, tracing first the transition to feudalism and later the medieval rise of the middle class.

This course examines the practice of folk medicine in Ireland, in the past and in the present. Irish popular tradition includes a great richness of material on this subject, encompassing a wide range of healing agents and media, from botanical remedies to prescribed rituals and actions, and from specific locations to particular individuals who were credited with special powers. The importance of ritual behavior will be examined, as will the position of the healer in the community. The course looks at what we might learn about the dynamics of popular tradition, and the ways in which popular tradition functions, from an examination of folk healing practices. The remarkable resilience of many such practices is also explored. 

Hundreds of myths and sagas survive from medieval Ireland. Many of these display intricate narrative techniques and structures, and their contents often reflect contemporary ideologies as well as inherited mythological motifs. In this course, students focus on one specific long narrative from the early Middle Ages and conduct a thorough and critical analysis of the text. No knowledge of Old Irish is required, as students read the story in full in English translation, but throughout the course key Irish terms and concepts are examined and their significance explained.