Trinity College Dublin

This course introduces students to Wilkie Collins's THE WOMAN IN WHITE (1859‐60), widely considered to be the first and best Victorian sensation novel. Using online resources, the class reads Collins's novel in instalments, as Victorian readers would have done. Students read 40 instalments over 10 weeks, reading four instalments per week. This relatively small amount of primary text reading per week is guided by specific questions about theme and genre and supplemented with contextual reading from ALL THE YEAR ROUND magazine, other historical sources, and secondary reading on periodical theory. Students examine issues such as women's property and inheritance rights, the marriage market, emerging proto‐feminism, alongside themes of madness, criminality, class, and national identity.  This slow and detailed method of reading and studying the novel not only allows for deep examination of the novel's many plots and subplots, themes, motifs, and generic influences, but also allows students to experience the thrill of the novel's many twists and cliffhangers in the same way as contemporary Victorian readers would have done. 

This course investigates some of the events and processes which have led to a more integrated world order between the mid-19th century and the later 20th century. For most of that period much of the world was carved up between a number of inter-continental empires centered in Europe. How those empires grew, exerted control and in due course retreated will be the particular focus of the course. But other processes, too, are considered, as are the evolution of such ideologies as imperialism or communism and whether such ideologies impacted upon changing global power relationships.

This course offers students the opportunity to consider the ways in which the arts, and specifically music, can play a part in relation to the challenges we face in contemporary society, including climate change, mass migration, civil unrest, social exclusion, and navigating power relations. Students explore ways in which citizens can engage in the arts to engender social change. They question whether artists have an obligation to serve communities and how they might do this. Students are guided from engagement with theoretical concepts, multidisciplinary literature, and real-world examples (in the lectures), through action, creation and communication (the in-person music creation sessions and the group assignment), to reflection (the individual assignment).

This course is designed to guide students through a fascinating and fast journey from Middle Ages to current times to show and let them understand the extraordinary peculiarity of a language which was born many centuries before the effective geopolitical birth of the Italian nation in 1861. The focus of this course it to show through a selection of short popular Italian texts how all this affected the current use of written and oral Italian. 

This course is an exploration of Italian art – painting and sculpture - from c.1300 to c.1700 in the major centers of Florence, Rome, Venice, Naples, and Milan. The era is distinguished by a revived interest in Italy’s classical past and the emergence of humanist philosophies. The evolution of religious subject matter is analyzed via a number of different typologies – the fresco cycle, the altarpiece, the sculpted figure. The emergence and development of secular themes, including representations of classical mythology, are considered. The course examines evolving stylistic debates around the values of naturalism and classicism over time, and the ways in which artists reflected on the very concept of the “Renaissance” in different artistic centers. The role of patronage, both civic and private, and the rising status of the artist feature prominently, and particular attention is paid to artistic processes and means of production. The “long” of the title of the course touches on the idea of the iteration and reiteration of the themes summarized here over an extended timeline.

This course focuses on the Roman Empire from the first to early third centuries AD. In this period the hegemony of the city of Rome grew, spreading over almost two million square miles: a vast territory encompassing almost all of modern Europe and also North Africa, Egypt, and the Near East. This course traces the evolution of this political unit and explores the consequences for those who lived under its control. In what ways did the inhabitants of the empire become "Roman"? What were the benefits and drawbacks of inclusion? How did the systems of governance work? What held things together, both practically and ideologically? Students also discuss shifts in modern approaches, from the glorification of the Roman state to more critical post-colonial approaches to imperial rule.

This course examines the impacts of disease and disaster on individuals and societies in the Middle East from Medieval times to the 20th century. It uses primary and secondary sources to analyze how the Middle East conceptualized disease and crises, and how they dealt with their effects when they struck. This course trains students in the interpretation of Mesopotamian (Babylonian, Assyrian, and Sumerian) literature in translation. It equips them with both questions and methods, and pays detailed attention to the examination of primary sources.

The content of the course is a cultural history of popular music from 1900 to modern times. This course examines the social and political conditions that influenced the development of genres in popular music by evaluating key releases from influential artists. Students analyze the growth of popular music from the turn of the 20th century onwards. They study the development of successive genres from delta blues and early jazz onwards, exploring the dynamic relationship between popular music, popular culture, and social change. The course also provides an introduction to critical approaches to culture and popular music such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism, and Marxian analysis.

In this course, students translate passages of Old English poetry using the resources of a modern edition; comment in detail on the language and poetic form of Beowulf; discuss the Beowulf manuscript; and analyze the thematic content of the poem, relating it to appropriate historical and literary contexts.

What has become known as the "spatial turn" in the humanities has alerted us to the ways in which the spaces we inhabit are produced by culture. These seminars take as their starting point the premise that Irish writing since the end of the 18th century (the massive exception of Joyce notwithstanding) has traditionally defined itself in terms of versions of the pastoral, and this in turn has had implications for the ways in which it has been possible to write the city as an Irish space. The central avenue in this course runs through the question of how literature produces space, and how this occurs differently across literary forms (fiction, poetry, drama).  However, there are diversions down alleys to encounter ghosts, crime, history, the flaneur, psychogeography, modernity, and the mediations of culture. There are glances in the shop windows of visual culture, as well as excursions into history, architecture, and philosophy, all with a view to sketching an outline map of Dublin in literature.