Trinity College Dublin

This course discusses how languages are related to one another and how they change over time. It provides familiarization with reconstruction and the comparison method, as well as the importance of analogy in the shaping of language histories. The course gives an introduction to descriptive and theoretical aspects of historical linguistics, covering phonetic, phonological, morphological and syntactic change with data from European and non-European languages.

This course introduces embodiment theory and practice in arts education. Taking a praxial approach, where theory informs practice and reflection to create new understandings, the course encourages engagement with and reflection on the principles of embodied pedagogy and their implications for teaching and learning through the arts. Embodiment conceptualizes learning as a process not limited to the thinking brain, but one that is situated in the body and activated through presence, experience and reflection-in-action. An embodied approach to pedagogy can help learners access knowledge beyond words, which is particularly beneficial for students who find verbal language challenging, exploring engagement through movement, imagination, emotions and creativity. The course considers embodiment from an inclusive perspective, covering areas such as embodiment and multilingualism, embodiment in forced migration educational settings, and embodiment in the context of learning and intellectual disabilities.

Standard economic theory assumes that individuals make choices to maximize their utility, using the information available, and acting in their own self-interest. However, experiments in both the psychology and economics literature show that individuals are time-inconsistent, care about others, form “irrational” expectations, and use heuristics to solve complex problems. These deviations can be systematic, mathematically modelled, empirically tested, and incorporated into economics. This course explores the implications of these new assumptions for economic analysis and understanding.

Between 1688 and 1832, Britain emerged from a period of chronic instability to become a global power and the world’s first industrial nation. This course examines some of these transformations, exploring the political, social and economic changes of the period and considering the impact of change on the everyday lives of the men, women and children who lived through it. Most aspects of Britain’s evolution towards ‘modernity’ are contested by historians and a core aspect of the course covers the development of critical skills in relation to these debates. The course considers, for example, the appropriateness of the term ‘revolution’ with regards to industrial developments; the validity of the ‘moral economy’ with regards to popular protest, and the significance of the ‘bloody code’ as a tool of social discipline and control. The course also examines ideological developments in the period and their broader social and cultural significance, focusing on issues such as the growth of ‘politeness’ and new concepts of male and female behavior.

This course introduces students to key debates about migration in Mexican and Chicanx Studies through cultural productions that focus on migration and diaspora. This interdisciplinary course introduces students to Mexican and Chicanx literature and film through narratives of migration. It examines how representations of migration and diaspora have evolved from the 1940s to the present day in the light of debates about citizenship, ethnicity, narco-culture and gender.

This course is an introduction to three main areas of linguistics: (1) language variation and change, (2) multilingualism, bilingualism and second language acquisition/learning, and (3) speech and language processing, from the perspectives of the human and machine. The first area explores how languages vary in different social and geographic contexts and how language can change over time. The second illustrates the difference between individual and social multilingualism and discusses patterns of language learning in monolinguals, bi/multilinguals, and heritage language learners. The third focuses on speech and language processing, by human and machine.

This course provides an understanding of the ecological and evolutionary principles that underly disease symptoms, emergence, and outbreak. Though a series of lectures, supplemented with practical lessons the course explores how natural selection acts on hosts and their pathogens, what factors facilitate disease outbreaks, and how we might prevent pathogens from escaping our control. Using examples in human medicine, animals, and plants the course explores: why people get sick; how diseases emerge; super spreaders, individuals who generate many infections; how global warming can alter the interaction between diseases and their hosts; the evolution of antibiotic resistance and the evolution virulence; evolution proofing drugs; and many other concepts in evolutionary medicine, ecology, and evolution.

This course conveys the idea that there are other ways of approaching the study of brain structure and function beyond the conventional focus of parsing cognitive, affective and others functions using standard tools, such as brain imaging. There is a very large amount of important and interesting research work being conducted at the intersection of the brain, other disciplines and society at large. These topics vary dramatically and can include the impact of the brain sciences on the courtroom to understanding the nature of the brain’s response during aesthetic experience, or neurobiology of poverty and adversity on development. The course explores topics of contemporary relevance and interest to the individual and society at large on the implications of discoveries about brain and cognitive function through the prism generated by the brain and cognitive sciences. The course is broad and deep, moving from the immediacy of the impact of the local familial environment, to the effects of poverty and adversity on brain development, structure and function, to considering the nature of the neuro-aesthetic response, to questions of ethics and law, and finally to extreme brain states (e.g. torture), and a consideration of principles-based counterfactual neuroscience analysis (‘impossible’ brains, such as the zombie brain).

This course covers the following topics: Calculus of variations: functional, variation, extremals, Euler-Lagrange equation, Beltrami identity, brachistochrone, catenary, natural boundary conditions, isoperimetric constraints; Conservation laws: transport equation, Burgers' equation, method of characteristics, weak solutions, Rankine-Hugoniot jump condition, Oleinik entropy condition; and Wave equation: Spherical means, Euler-Poisson-Darboux equation, Kirchhoff's formula in 3 dimensions, Poisson's formula in 2 dimensions, energy method, finite speed of propagation, domain of dependence.

This course is an introductory writing course that combines a creative writing workshop with literary seminar on the short form. Students study and write prose poems, prose sonnets, haiku prose, palm-of-the-hand stories, auto flash fiction, flash fiction, prose portraits, short lyric essays and short stories. Each week, representative works are read alongside critical assessments, followed by discussion and attempts at producing original versions. The course considers the lyrical in short form prose—the use of compression, line breaks, metaphor, analogy, juxtaposition and paratactic structures, the primacy of language over linear narrative, sonic resonances, associative writing strategies, and fragmentation. Class-time is divided between critical discussion and writing workshop.