Trinity College Dublin

In 1394, John Rykener, having been detected in women’s clothing and calling themself 'Eleanor’, was arrested in London for ‘committing that detestable, unmentionable, and ignominious vice’ with John Britby. This case went unremarked for decades despite the printing of a calendar of these records, because the editor summarized it only as ‘Examination of two men charged with immorality’. This course takes this case as a starting point and asks: was Eleanor Rykener a trans woman? Was John Rykener a man in drag? Were they genderfluid? Are these terms applicable in the Middle Ages? Did this case even happen or was it all a political satire? Students read comparable cases from elsewhere, recent scholarship on the issue, other sources relating to queer identities in the Middle Ages, and historical fiction focusing on Rykener as a character.

In Autumn 1720 the South Sea Bubble burst. Generally regarded as one of the first great stock-market crashes, this was a seismic moment in the early history of global financial capitalism. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources including private correspondence, pamphlets, poems, prints and other printed ephemera, this course traces the fortunes of the South Sea Company, its slave trading activities, and its investors over the course of a dramatic year which featured economic chaos, speculative fever and fears about plague across Northern Europe. Students learn how and why investors chose to invest in the South Sea Company and the many other bubble companies that followed in its wake. It explores the cultural impact of the crash and the anxieties it generated in contemporary Britain and Ireland looking at the commentary of Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley, and William Hogarth amongst others. It also discusses the post-bubble blame-game, the role of xenophobia, the treatment of female investors and the political fallout of the crisis.

This course examines the international politics of environmental problems through a comparative lens. It explores how global environmental challenges – such as ozone depletion and climate change – are addressed through international regimes, multilateral agreements, and the participation of various state and non-state actors. Emphasis is placed on regime design, participation, and effectiveness, as well as the institutional complexity that often limits coordinated responses. The course also analyzes the link between climate change and conflict, the trade-environment nexus, the issue of environmental justice and prospects for future global environmental governance. Throughout, students engage with key theoretical frameworks and empirical cases to critically assess why international cooperation succeeds or fails. We also consider how environmental governance is shaped by power asymmetries, competing interests and evolving global norms.

This course provides comprehensive knowledge of public policies found in the European Union, a political system that has increasingly taken on responsibility in key policy areas. After briefly reviewing the EU’s institutional structure, it analyzes key economic policies of the EU, including the single market, economic and monetary union and competition policy. It then examines the fascinating aspects of merger and acquisition control and state aid. It also covers other significant policies, including agriculture, social, freedom, security and justice, as well as the external policies of the EU.

This course covers a range of films that map issues affecting Galician culture and society. It identifies the major historical, socio-economic, political, and cultural shifts that have affected Galicia in the 20th and 21st centuries. It provides an understanding of key issues affecting Galician society such as linguistic diglossia, climate change, migration, rural abandonment, industrialization and Minoritization. This course helps develop key skills in film analysis, how to read and critically evaluate academic sources on a range of topics related to Galician cinema, culture and society, and how to combine the studied themes into a coherent overview of Galician culture and society.

This course asks whether the welfare state is justified, how extensive it should be, and what level of inequality and/or poverty is acceptable in a just society. Thus, the course examines the main theories of distributive or social justice in contemporary analytical political philosophy. Distributive justice is about the fair distribution of burdens and benefits in a society and some of the main approaches to this issue that we look at include liberal egalitarianism, libertarianism (left and right), luck egalitarianism, and relational egalitarianism and republicanism. The course also looks at some of the critiques, alternative approaches and applications of these theories, to areas like health and education.

This course provides students with a solid grounding in various aspects of software engineering process related to building large software systems. The course covers various aspects related to building software systems ranging from the use of software lifecycle models, to project management, to large-scale software architectures. Specifically, software lifecycle models, including variations of the waterfall and spiral models as well as extreme programming and agile, are introduced along with concepts that are relevant to the specific model stages. These concepts include domain analysis, requirements and specification analysis, testing and debugging, and version control. Moreover, strategies for managing large software projects and their contracts as well as project teams are presented and contrasted.

This course is a detailed study of selected topics from the Archaic period, c.750-490 BC. It focuses on the origin and development of socio-cultural phenomena in the Greek world, from South Italy to Asia Minor. Topics include the development of new political systems such as tyranny, the origins of law and literacy, the formation of the polis, warfare and empire, as well as social issues such as the symposium and slavery.

In contemporary cinema and media studies, few concepts are invoked as often the ‘the digital’. Despite our familiarity with the term, the issues associated with it are complex and part of a much longer relationship between media, technology, and production practices. To address these issues from a theoretical and practical perspective, this course explores a range of topics related to digital aesthetics, data, bodies and performers. Across the course, students engage in related practical tasks that provide an experiential form of understanding and encourage embodied reflection on the topics under focus. The tasks offer students increased awareness of the range of easily accessed digital tools, and instill increased confidence when it comes to incorporating such tools into practice-based work.

In the high and late middle ages, monarchs and urban governments across Europe enacted laws dictating what people could wear, what hairstyles they could have, what they could eat, what types of hawks they could hunt with, as well as creating a range of other restrictions on visual display. This course examines why. What was the purpose of these ‘sumptuary’ laws (as historians have named them)? What conditions led to their enactment? How did they differ across time and space? What types of people were regulated and who was allowed to dress as they pleased? Through weekly seminars, students interrogate these questions of the original sources and select a subset of sumptuary law to examine in their essay.