Ireland

This course focuses on early (i.e. pre 12th-century) Irish saga literature in which a variety of texts, mainly from the Ulster, Mythological and King cycles, are read in translation and discussed in class. 

This course focuses on introducing students to the core concepts of the Unix operating system and how to program this system. Today, Unix and Unix-like operating systems are ubiquitous; they are widely used in servers, embedded devices and have a growing desktop and mobile market (Linux, Mac OS X, Android etc.). This course teaches students how to develop applications for such systems, assuming no other software layer but OS. Students improve their existing C programming language skills and learn some key POSIX APIs to support designing and writing programs in a portable, maintainable fashion. They learn how to write multithreaded and multi-process applications as well as some basics of Unix networking. This is done through the Unix command line, and students learn basic tools and how to write shell scripts to automate common tasks. Students need a version of Unix installed on their own laptop (ideally Linux), help with this is provided in the first lab.

To write a letter – whether a formal, public composition or a private letter to a friend – is to create an image, consciously or unconsciously, of oneself as writer and of ones relationship with the letter’s recipient. In this sense, Roman letter-writing can be seen as a partial equivalent of interaction via social media in our contemporary world. This course explores aspects of self-presentation through published and unpublished letters and other media of communication surviving from the Roman world. Students read the correspondence of two major literary figures – Cicero and Seneca – alongside rare examples of written exchanges from ordinary people in Roman Antiquity.

This course builds students’ understanding of the causal mechanics underlying conflicts across a variety of settings and periods, the character of the violence in these conflicts, and the prospects for resolution. Drawing on major theoretical approaches to the explanation of violence, students apply these theoretical frameworks to an empirical examination of political violence in a range of periods and settings, including Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Syria, Ireland, Sierra Leone, and others. Students explore how and to what extent the major approaches in the scholarship explain the reality of conflict in different regional, cultural, and historical contexts.

Dublin is one of Europe's oldest and greatest historic cities, and one of the fastest-growing. This course explores that long history, from the late first millennium AD when Vikings began a formal process of settlement to the early 21st century when global migration patterns enlarged its population and enriched its culture. The course focuses on the city's history as represented in its layout and physical fabric, two concerns of interest to archaeologists. It is intended to inform students about Dublin's history, but it also to equip them to read the evidence for that history in the physical character of the city. The course has three main components: the medieval city (to 1600), the early modern city (1600-1800), the modern and contemporary city (1800 to the present).

This course provides an introduction to the study of Antiquity by focusing on the mythological discourses of the ancient Near East and Greece, and on the rise of the European city-state in Classical Greece. All texts are studied in translation. The course divides into two complementary streams: (1) Mythology and the origins of western literature, with lectures focused on ancient mythology, especially the concept of the pantheon of gods and the hero as a figure poised between men and gods, concentrating on literary and artistic evidence for the study of ancient society and thought. (2) Politics, culture, and society in the Ancient City, surveying the history and culture of Ancient Greece, in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, a period of dynamic political and cultural innovation. The course covers topics including the rise (and fall) of the Athenian democracy, gender and sexuality, Greeks and barbarians, and the spectacular rise of the kingdom of Macedon. Students are introduced to original sources for Greek history.

The course introduces and develops an understanding of American modernism, both in terms of the particularities of American culture in the early 20th century, and in relation to its complex relationship with Europe. Particular attention is paid to concepts of race/ethnicity, gender, politics, and social activism as ways of emphasizing the plurality of American modernism, as well as the diverse aesthetic forms which give it expression. In its geographical reach, the course encompasses writing from the American West, rural Wisconsin, New York (from Harlem to the Jewish American community of the Lower East Side), and expatriate experience in post-war Britain. At the core of the course is an exploration of the complex, shifting and dynamic nature of American Modernism, both in terms of the creative output of its writers, and in relation to the critics and theorists who attempt to define it.

This course is devoted to a close reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION. The central concern of the course is to understand Merleau-Ponty’s importance for contemporary philosophy as well as cognitive science.

This course traces both the development of English literature and the development of Medieval English society, through the transition from a shame culture to a guilt culture. Students read a selection of outstanding literary works of the early and late medieval period. Beginning with some Old English literature in translation, students consider the heroic ethos and its consequences for personal relationships and societal structures. The course then looks at a variety of key Middle English texts, including some works by Marie de France, Chaucer, and the Pearl-poet, tracing first the transition to feudalism and later the medieval rise of the middle class.

This course explores the historical and contemporary complexities of Irish culture, place, and landscape through select case-studies, thematic and/or locational, and through a range of theoretical concerns from both archaeology and geography. It engages the key challenge of carefully contextualizing and historicizing understandings of landscape, heritage, and environment, and exploring urgent contemporary questions of landscape/environment sustainability, governmentality, and management. The course provides an introduction to the various ways in which human societies interact(ed) with their environment, and will provides both chronological depth and thematically-specific case-study knowledge of key sites and spaces across the island of Ireland. Particular attention is given to the range of competing discourses on issues of environment, landscape, and development in both rural and urban Ireland and their implications for communities in the present and the future.