Trinity College Dublin

If historians generally agree that Europe experienced far-reaching intellectual and cultural change during the 18th century, they rarely agree about the nature of that change or how to interpret it. This course introduces students to some of the major interpretations of, debates about, and approaches to the history of the Enlightenment in 18th-century Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. It asks students to engage with original sources (in English), alongside the historiography of the Enlightenment, and to come up with their own responses to that still troubling question.

This course provides students with knowledge of the fundamental concepts, principles, processes, and rules of public international law as well as a more in-depth knowledge of selected areas of the law. This course covers different aspects of general international law, including the sources of international law, statehood and international legal personality, the law of international responsibility, and dispute settlement. It also examines more specialized areas of public international law, with a focus on jurisdiction, immunities, the use of force, and human rights, land and sea, and the environment. The course addresses theoretical debates and uses practical examples of international law in action, many of them relating to contemporary events in international relations.

This course introduces the dramatic performance traditions of the ancient Greek world. Focusing on Athens, students study ancient plays as literary texts and performance scripts and explore elements of poetics, the production of drama such as performance venues (theatres, festivals, games) and the conventions and practicalities of staging, as well as drama’s civic and religious contexts, historical development, and value as source of cultural information. Students critically discuss the content, themes, and structure of the studied plays. Students analyze extracts from and aspects of the studied plays. Students situate the studied plays in their performance contexts and comment on the relevance of these contexts for their understanding. The course also explores the significance of ancient drama for the audiences of selected later restaging, translations, and adaptations, from antiquity to the present day.

This course explores the relationship between literature and technology. It begins by formulating an understanding of writing itself as a technology – that is as a cultural practice involving dedicated tools invented at a specific historical juncture (to be contrasted with spoken language, as a human universal). This encourages students to examine literature as a product of various writing technologies – from manuscript, to print, to typewriting, to a variety of electronic forms of textual production and presentation. How these modes of production can influence the form and content of literature are explored, as are the strategies used by authors to represent these different varieties of text within literature itself. Students consider the role of standardization in literature, and how and why a variety of writers have chosen to step outside the usual written standard. They consider the integration of images with text and discuss the semiotics of different forms of text.

This course looks at the process of first language acquisition by examining the social and cognitive mechanisms that drive language learning in the first few years of life. It is designed to provide students with an in-depth understanding of first language acquisition with a focus on spoken language in typical healthy children. The course starts with an exploration of pre-verbal communication in infancy and tracks verbal development during toddlerhood into middle childhood. Overarching issues in linguistic theory, in the form of competing explanations of language acquisition patterns, will be discussed and key debates and current research in the field will be examined.

This course is an introduction to linguistics. It gives a general knowledge of each area of linguistics drawing from a range of spoken and signed languages. It provides the students who have no previous knowledge of linguistics with a background in core areas of the field – phonetics, phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics, and their acquisition. The course is divided in three parts: the first part is an introduction to the field of linguistics, the second part is concerned with the structure of natural languages, and the third part is related to language modality, with particular attention to signed languages and gesture.

This course provides a broad understanding of language learning and familiarizes students with some pedagogical considerations and second language acquisition theory as a necessary underpinning to the use of technology in language learning. Students learn a range of speech and language technologies that can be deployed in educational applications. Students learn practical skills in the design/development of digital educational content. 

This course includes prediction using machine learning; choice of features, including for text, images, time series; model selection (e.g. linear, kernel, neural net); learning as empirical risk minimization; common machine learning techniques (linear regression, logistic regression, SVMs, kernel trick, neural nets, convolutional neural nets, kNN, k-Means); evaluating machine learning methods (cross-validation, bootstrapping, ROC, use of a baseline); and practical experience of applying machine learning methods to real data.  

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.

This course teaches the foundational concepts of geomorphology in preparation for advanced courses and a final Capstone project. It relies less on traditional rote lecture and more on activities and application of concepts presented in the text and during class time. This course focuses primarily on large-scale geomorphology, and how the large-scale topography students observe on Earth today is both created and broken down through time. Students examine the two primary drivers of geomorphology: tectonics and climate. They consider questions that on their face seem very basic- for example, why is the Earth round? but which have complex, fascinating answers with implications for the whole of the Earth surface.