Ireland

This course provides a social policy perspective on a range of issues which impact upon family life. Topics include definitions and ideologies of family; changing family structures; lone parent families; contraception and abortion; homosexuality; and strategies for policy change. Students learn to identify major theories on the family; engage in an analysis of central developments in family life in Ireland; be conversant with major policy developments relating to family in Ireland; and have an understanding of the diversity of family forms in contemporary society, and the ability to critically discuss them.

This course is an exploration of scholarly and popular perspectives pertaining to rite and ritual, life-cycle, and annual cycle including funerals, wakes, and weddings. This course advances and deepens students' understanding of time, temporality, and periodicity in vernacular culture and everyday life in general. Topics include celebration and festival, rites, and rituals as well as traditions around wakes, patterns, and pilgrimages. The contexts of these traditions in contemporary society is examined throughout the course.

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 assists in the understanding of the history of climate change on the Earth and the factors that cause it.  The course covers the causes of climate change and the history of climate change on Earth, and the contribution of historical climatology to this understanding. Students outline the key causes of climate change and their interrelatedness, discuss the history of climate change on Earth, both natural and anthropogenic, and use the principles of historical climatology to investigate past climate change.

This course provides an insight in the molecular-physiological mechanisms that plants use to adjust to their environment. Students learn how light, light quality, and daylength control plant growth and development. The course examines temperature as an environmental signal for plants, how the phytohormone mediate environmental impacts plant to plant competition, and plants and herbivores.

This course looks at the evolution of modern China's political and economic system; the Chinese state in comparative perspective; issues and problems of China's political and economic development. This course explains the Chinese political system and state administration, the characteristics of China's socialist market economy, and analyses the role of the Communist Party of China. Students assess different theoretical approaches used in current research on modern China, and develop and present individual research interests on China's political system.

In the last twenty years the history of capitalism has been one of the most important themes in Global History. In this course, students are introduced to the key debates in this area. Students learn to differentiate capitalism from other kinds of economic organization, engage with the periodization for capitalism, and explore international trade and domestic institutions in the development of the modern economy. The central section of the course is taken up with the debates around consumption, slavery, and empire. Core reading in this section will include the classic Williams thesis, and its development in the literature on the relationship between cotton and chattel slavery in the group around Rockman and Beckert. The penultimate section addresses the history of finance capitalism, looking at the inflationary effects of silver supply from the Americas in the early period, the era of financial experimentation in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the eventual emergence of a recognizable world of international finance around the Gold Standard in the early 19th century. Students conclude with a consideration of Pomeranz's "Great Divergence" between Atlantic and Asian economies.