Trinity College Dublin

The course covers key aspects such as website analysis, game design, and avatar interactions. Students learn to measure and analyze digital engagement via metrics and analysis and to understand and evaluate ethical and privacy issues. They attend a series of lectures from world-renowned scientists to get a deeper understanding of how the algorithms behind digital engagement work and what data they use. They identify approaches to maximize the effectiveness of media engagement in areas such as immersive games, and social media, and evaluate case studies with respect to digital engagement usability and effectiveness.

The course introduces students to a diverse selection of medieval literature, including works by both highly influential writers and less familiar figures. The medieval period witnessed many turbulent events, including war, plague, religious conflict, and social revolt, but was also a period of dynamic cultural invention, as English writers drew on rich Classical and biblical traditions, while also engaging in cross-cultural dialogue with works in other European vernaculars, such as French and Italian. These early writers test the limits of literary possibility across a range of genres, from tragedy to comedy, romance to exemplum, dream-vision to autobiography; as they imagine a world of gods and fairies, of heroes and monsters, they challenge modern readers to question our assumptions about what literature can or should be.

This course examines the popular experience of life in 20th-century Ireland. Rather than seeing Irish culture in terms of elite experiences, this course explores life as it was lived by the majority of Irish people. To do this, the course broadly traces key experiences from birth to death, examining each experience from as many viewpoints as possible. Certain key themes run throughout the course such as the social and cultural effects of economic, political and demographic change, the evolving role of the state and legislation as it affected daily life, the process of secularization, changes in public and private morality, an increasing openness to international influence and the conflicts, and tensions that these various developments unleashed. The course examines the interpretative challenges of social and cultural history in an Irish context, and examines some of the new certainties that seem to be emerging in the growing literature on various aspects of Irish experience.

The course is an introduction to the study of comparative politics and provides an overview of some of the key theoretical frameworks, concepts, and analytical methods of this field of study, as applied to the developing world. We particularly examine non-democratic forms of politics, asking why authoritarian regimes persist and whether corruption undermines democracy. Other topics covered include the causes of civil war, the clash of civilizations, and ethnic violence.