Trinity College Dublin

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.

Originating in romance and comedy, the marriage plot became a major element in the novel. In its classic versions the marriage plot permits the satisfaction of desire: of characters and readers alike. It may also be involved in the negotiation of complex moral choice and in the resolution of difficult social issues.  This course examines how the marriage plot functions across the history of the English novel. The first half of the course examines important 18th and 19th century examples of the marriage plot. The second half of the course asks how, in the social circumstances of the 21st century— including the availability of divorce and changed concepts of gender—novelists deploy or adapt the marriage plot.

The course examines a range of Yeats’s poetry, drama, and prose. Structured loosely around different phases of the poet’s career, seminars will emphasize key historical and cultural contexts, ranging from Yeats’s use of Irish myth and folklore through to his engagements with eugenic theory and global politics. They also attend to key question of poetics and ideology, including Yeats’s revisionary compositional practices, his use of poetic form, his attitude towards literary tradition, and how his work intersects with issues of race, religion, gender, and nation. 

The course is to build upon students’ knowledge and understanding of Modern Hebrew through regular in-class practice with reading, writing, grammar, and conversation skills. In addition to the completion of homework assignments included in the text and unseen. 
Students must have taken an elementary Hebrew class or equivalent. 

This course presents a thematic introduction to Irish art, architecture, and design in its broader international context. Subjects are connected across periods and styles – the focus not on presenting individualized summarized histories but rather considering how aspects of Irish visual history are connected and have evolved over time.

This course provides an overview of the basic approaches to the study of religion as a human phenomenon. As an introductory course it covers classical positions on religion; sociological, psychological, phenomenological, and anthropological approaches; and contemporary debates in the academic study of religion. On successful completion of this course, students are able to identify key approaches in the development of the academic study of religion; distinguish the methodologies of the disciplines investigating religion; characterize classical positions and their foundational concepts; relate theories to their historical, social, and philosophical context; and discuss the changing relationship of religion to society in different eras.