Trinity College Dublin

This course explores the evolution of the Great American Songbook, a loosely defined canon of influential American popular songs from the early 20th century. These songs, many originating from Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood, have shaped the foundation of American popular music. Students examine the craft of songwriting, the business of music publishing, and the cultural contexts that influenced the work of composers such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers. Through musical and lyrical analysis, historical inquiry, and engagement with primary sources, students develop a critical understanding of the enduring legacy of these songs and their impact on jazz, musical theatre, and contemporary popular music.

This course enables students to apply key areas of psychology in the understanding and practice of post-primary education and specifically provides a clear, reflective, and critical knowledge of areas such as adolescent development, identity development through adolescence, bully/victim problems, growth mindset, intelligence, and applied issues pertinent to bereavement, separation, and divorce.

This course engages with practical and theoretical questions of theater and performance as social practices. By focusing on various theatrical outputs and their reception, paying particular attention to history, politics, national identity, justice and collective memory, this course showcases the importance played by theater practitioners, performers and playwrights in Latin America in terms of validating stories from subaltern groups, including indigenous communities, in relation to power.

2 years of university-level Spanish (or B1 level) is required in order to take this course.

This course offers an introduction to the history of modern Eastern Europe, with a focus on the region’s politics, society, and culture, from the late 19th century to the present. It traces the collapse of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian empires; the rise of nationalism and creation of nation-states; the impact of the world wars; the establishment and evolution of communist regimes; and the region’s transition to democracy after the fall of communism in 1989. Through engagement with primary sources, memoirs, literature, artistic works, and major historiographical debates, the course explores how the countries of the region continue to grapple with the questions of identity, memory, power, and belonging raised during Europe’s tumultuous twentieth century.

The institutional church never had the kind of control over the populace of medieval Europe that modern people think it did. This course explores the multiplicity of types of belief and practice amongst those who lived in accordance with the church’s teaching—monks and nuns, wandering preachers, pious families—and the varieties of resistance among those who did not—Jews, Muslims, and heretics, social revolutionaries, sexual nonconformists, practitioners of the occult, student wastrels. The course discusses the kinds of sources that tell us about these groups, including saints’ lives, chronicles, Inquisition registers, letters, and poetry. This course helps students appreciate how people in the past operated much as people do today, but in a very different world with a different set of assumptions. Continuous emphasis is placed on the geographical and cultural diversity of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, and the decentralized and multivocal nature of medieval religion.

In this course, students design a social research project; understand the principles and assumptions associated with qualitative research; select and justify the most appropriate research method to answer particular research questions; discuss the advantages and disadvantages of various research methods; distinguish and apply suitable types of analysis to varying research designs; apply appropriate ethical standards to research design; and understand issues of power, inequality and exploitation in qualitative research.

This course provides an introduction to the diverse and dynamic history of the United States. Through a range of historical approaches—including political, social, cultural, and foreign policy perspectives - students investigate the forces that have influenced the development of the United States. Themes such as popular culture, multiculturalism, the role of the state, sexuality, gender, race, religion, class, and varied identities are explored, alongside foreign policy, the presidency, and the evolution of America as a global power. The course provides a broad yet nuanced understanding of how power, politics, and different groups of people have intersected across different eras, equipping students with the analytical tools to engage critically with historical narratives and debates. The course is designed to encourage students to think critically about the forces that shaped American politics and culture and empower them to engage with debates about its past, present and future.

China underwent dramatic changes through the course of the first half of the twentieth century in politics, society and culture. Colonial exploitation at the hands of many different foreign powers fired up a young revolutionary generation who expressed their desire for change in cultural movements and political action. Women and men, students and workers united to oppose imperialism and explore ways of transforming society. The development of a new form of urban capitalism was followed rapidly by the emergence of a Chinese communist movement, which grew from obscure beginnings to govern the country from 1949. Civil war and the Japanese invasion of China in China’s long Second World War accelerated some changes and stymied others.

This course enables students to explore these trends that shaped the world’s most populous country.

Behavior is a unique trait in animals that allows them to respond rapidly to a changing environment. Most of the exciting, fast-moving phenomena associated with living organisms – fighting, flying, flocking, swimming, sensing, mating, communicating, spreading disease, and more – fall under the umbrella of behavior. As well as being important to understand in natural contexts, all of these traits and processes also have correlates or analogues in human behavior and society, adding further motivation to understanding them deeply and on a fundamental level. Ultimately, taking this perspective, the study of behavior is the study of rapid responses and interacting agents in all forms. This course introduces to the fundamental mechanisms and theories underlying behavioral processes and taught how to think like a behavioral scientist. The course discusses what behavior is and how it works across all possible scales, conveying the groundwork in the underlying structure of nervous systems and building through physiology, learning, communication, collective behavior, and social systems, up to responses to environmental stress. Drawing these lessons together, it discusses the role that behavioral science plays in understanding and managing animal populations and species in a rapidly changing world.

Much of insular history is determined by connections forged across the seas. This course explores significant times and places in insular history where this dynamic played an especially important role. Beginning with an introduction to Ireland and Britain at the close of the Late Antique period, the course covers themes such as the dynamics of slave trade in relation to St Patrick and Ogham culture, the origin of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the dynastic politics of Dal Riata and Iona, the cultural exchanges between Ireland and the English kingdoms in terms of book learning, the Easter controversy in the context of relations with Rome, and the significance of sea journeys in secular and ecclesiastical law and literature. The second half of the course explores interactions, both political and scholarly, with the Merovingian and Carolingian courts and with the Germanic kingdoms as well as the arrival of the Vikings and their impact on trade, literature, kingship and the geography of Ireland and Britain. The course explores each of these themes at the hand of primary sources contextualized with modern scholarship, allowing students to explore questions of historicity, genre, and source analysis.