University of Galway

The course involves an exploration of early historic and medieval Ireland in its European context. Topics include an examination of Roman influences, the archaeology of the Christian church, the exciting developments associated with the Viking Age in Scandinavia and the North Atlantic, the impact of the Norse on Ireland, and the transforming influence of the Anglo-Normans in castle building, town development, and rural villages in the Irish landscape.

The focus of this course is a selection of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. The critical tools used in class include structuralist, post-colonial, and gender studies. Through this course, the students appraise each text individually and look at the global issues pervading the Sherlock Holmes corpus. The proposed method of study is comparative analysis.

Efforts to support child health, including those made by health professionals and services, humanitarian organizations, interventions, and policymakers, are often hindered by common sense or ageist assumptions about who children are and should be. This course unpacks and contrasts those assumptions with evidence from actual children in their lived contexts. Questions will include: Can and should children be responsible for their health, health management, or medications? How do children cope with and care for illness? Who should decide whether a child receives medical treatment? What do and should children know about issues like sexuality, death, and bodily functions? Should we tell a child if they are dying? What happens when health interventions forget children are people? How can health policy perpetuate or address child health inequities? What’s wrong with saying “children are resilient”? Students learn how to think about child health from four perspectives: constructionist, child-centered, critical (structural), and biosocial.

Ireland’s symbolic and gendered construction as a musical nation offers a starting point for discussions of music, gender, and Ireland. Following that, the course surveys a range of genres, performers, and performance platforms from the 19th century onwards to explore the relationship between gender and music in the Irish context. Particular emphasis is given to traditional and popular music examples. 

This course explores key texts and themes in developing an understanding and appreciation of European film practices from 1940 to the present day. Using a series of case studies, students learn to situate a range of film texts according to historical, cultural, and social contexts, in addition to relevant theoretical debates.

Using an “ecocritical” approach, this course examines how literary texts have represented the relation of humans to “nature” and to environmental change from early mythological writings to present-day fiction. Among the texts to be studied are the Epic of Gilgamesh, Greek and Roman pastoral poems, Romantic landscape poetry, American environmental writing, Irish nature poetry, and contemporary ecological dystopic fiction.

This course looks at how the experience of migration is represented in 20th-century Irish writing. While the central focus is on literary representations of the Irish diaspora, contemporary representations of the immigrant experience within Ireland is also examined. English language and Irish language texts (in translation) are considered.

This course provides students with an overview of the major developments in the depiction of sport in film. Considering fiction, documentary, and newsreels, the course explore the diverse ways different cultures have depicted sport in film.

This course examines the evidence for one of the most successful forms of state society in the ancient Mediterranean, namely the polis or city-state, making use of evidence from archaeology, ancient history, epigraphy, numismatics, and ancient literature. It explores the emergence of the first city-states in Greece following a period of economic decline, the so-called Greek “Dark Age” and slow recovery. The key features of the city-state and particularly the features of the urban environment are discussed as are the political structures required to govern large urban populations. The re-emergence of writing, in an alphabetic system, is given attention due to the importance of written law and constitutions for social and political stability. The course considers different systems of government used at various city-states and the economic and social systems that emerge alongside and within the various poleis. The connection between the emergence of the polis and the foundation of new Greek communities overseas – colonization – are discussed. The course makes a comparative study of early constitutional history of Athens and Sparta. The invention of coinage is studied as are relations between different Greek city-states. The course concludes with a consideration of the first contact and conflicts between the world of the city-states and the imperial power of Persia.