Trinity College Dublin

Students learn to express knowledge, understanding and critical appreciation of the practice of film writing. Students describe the different approaches to writing about film and the respective purpose, audiences, and outlets for them shows the development of original thought. They demonstrate independence of thought and creative expression in the synthesis of research and ideas in seminar debates and through assessments. The course teaches students how to use critical thinking to produce a piece of film writing that investigates or reflects contemporary culture. 

The course focuses on the ethical issues involved with innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and critically examines the role played by social, political, cultural, and human factors when designing, introducing, and using technologies.  This course therefore contributes to the broader program outcomes related to ethics, reasoning, and moral inquiry. The course links most strongly with the SDGs which can be addressed by new, disruptive, and innovative approaches and technologies.  This course focuses on the SDGs which can be addressed by smaller, community-level and citizen-led technology-based initiatives.  Examples of this include designing innovative ways of leveraging the ubiquity of mobile phones in the Global South for healthcare and education, and the design, evaluation, and implementation of innovative techniques which are designed to be ethically, socially, and culturally appropriate for their particular context. The course content includes relevant, authentic, situated cases from the Global South and Europe that have been developed specifically for the course.  These multimedia-enhanced cases focus on projects from Ireland, India, Uganda, and Ethiopia. 

This course explores the art of Europe in the long 15th century (approximately 1380-1520) with particular attention to religious culture and belief; how gender and the body were understood and expressed; the role of pilgrimage, suffrages and the saints; the differences of artistic expressions between northern Europe (e.g. Flanders) and southern (Italy); the art of crises such as witchcraft, plague and religious reform; and the ways in which naturalism and humanism challenged existing modes of artistic expression. Students also look at whether the view of the period as one steeped in pessimism, the macabre and thoughts of decay, known according to the formulation of Jan Huizinga as the "waning of the Middle Ages" is still useful. The dominant centers to be examined are the cities of Flanders and Italy, but the art of northern France, England, Germany, and elsewhere is also drawn on.

The course educates students in the area of medical device design. This is a broad course and its focus does not solely revolve around the engineering challenges associated with designing a medical device, lectures focus on many aspects: understanding clinical trial data, understanding the anatomical fundamentals associated with the device area, developing intellectual property strategies, regulation of medical devices, risk analysis, manufacturing techniques and requirements, reimbursement, and case studies of successful and unsuccessful medical device development.

Political leaders use architecture to convey power, to express political ideas, and to influence how people think and act. In 20th-century Europe, political ideologies including fascism, communism, colonialism, and democracy influenced the creation of new buildings and cities. Students explore those ideologies through the spaces that they produced, and a selection of examples spanning between Hitler’s plans to transform Berlin to public swimming pools in post-war Britain. Under the banner of democracy, students also explore how forces within Irish politics impacted the Dublin cityscape. This is a history of modern Europe told through the mark left by political actors upon architecture and cities.

This course provides an introduction to early modern English literature and the social, cultural, and intellectual contexts that shaped it. It begins with an introductory lecture, outlining the chronology of the period and the major themes that will be addressed in the following weeks – the concept of renaissance, the Protestant reformation, the discovery of the so-called New World, and the English revolution. The course covers a range of genres, from across the whole period of 1500-1660, and features a number of lectures on major canonical authors combined with broader thematic concerns, which trace the development of early modern literature.

The course provides students with a first introduction to language acquisition research – with particular reference to second language acquisition (SLA) research. It identifies the central issues on which such research has focused, reviews some of the principal findings which have emerged and explores the implications of such findings for language teaching. The course encourages students to reflect on their own experience as a language learner and to make sense of that experience. Topics include child language acquisition, the nature/nurture debate, errors and learning strategies, the learner’s "internal syllabus," individual learner differences, theories of second language acquisition, communication strategies, and second language teaching.

Using literary sources as well as material evidence (archaeological finds, artwork, inscriptions), this course explores customs, beliefs, institutions, and identities of the early Christians within the social, political, religious, and cultural context of the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity. The course helps students to think about central questions in the study of early Christianity such as: who were the early Christians? How did they articulate their identities across different languages and in different areas of the late antique world? How and where did they eat, pray, and live? How did they understand their beliefs and interact with the cultures around them? What did their Roman, Greek, or Syrian neighbors think about them? Students reflect on different models of cross-fertilization between emerging early Christian identities and the cultures and religious phenomena which characterized the later stages of the life of the Roman Empire.

This course explores materials used in tissue replacement including metallic, ceramic, and natural/synthetic polymeric materials. Implant applications and design considerations for these materials as well as the associated problems with long term survival are described so that the mechanical, chemical, and physiological interactions between in vivo host environment and the implanted biomaterial can be better understood. Integration of biomaterial structure and function are emphasized throughout the course. Advanced manufacturing and fabrication technologies to generate biomaterials with specialized structural and interfacial properties are introduced. Students obtain a detailed understanding of the composition and properties of the major classes of biomaterial used in medical devices. The required functionality for a range of synthetic implantable biomaterials and how this relates to material choice for specific applications are also covered. Associated failure modes are introduced through a series of real-life case studies. Sterilization techniques, regulatory aspects, and standards with relation to quality and safety are introduced.