Ireland

This course explores the ways in which music operates as a means of challenging, disrupting, and resisting the social order. It encourages students to reflect on the relationship between art, power, and resistance by critically engaging with a wide range of "protest" songs. To this end, the course critically analyses specific pieces of music through the application of a wide range of conceptual tools drawn from critical, decolonial, race, and feminist theories. It intends to advance students’ sociological imagination by fostering the awareness of the value of the "aesthetic dimension" as a means of dissensus, with a particular emphasis on the theme of social change.
 

This course explores how memoir has developed as a literary form in Ireland. The claustrophobic relationship between the stories of the nation and the individual has been a commonplace since at least the 1920s, when the Blasket Island autobiographies were at once held up as a model for the new Free State while also recording a way of life that was to quickly vanish. Beginning with an introductory session which establishes how this relationship has developed since then, this course examines the form of the memoir as a way of negotiating the relationship between the individual and society in Ireland, north and south. It asks students to critically examine the forms and themes by which we are called to remember the past century, and to investigate the contexts in which Irish memoir has been written and received.

This course examines the practice of folk medicine in Ireland, in the past and in the present. Irish popular tradition includes a great richness of material on this subject, encompassing a wide range of healing agents and media, from botanical remedies to prescribed rituals and actions, and from specific locations to particular individuals who were credited with special powers. The importance of ritual behavior will be examined, as will the position of the healer in the community. The course looks at what we might learn about the dynamics of popular tradition, and the ways in which popular tradition functions, from an examination of folk healing practices. The remarkable resilience of many such practices is also explored. 

This course concentrates on literary culture and its production in Ireland and Scotland in the transitional period of c.1100-1600. Students review the literary corpus that existed in Ireland before the arrival of the Normans, looking at the structure, genres, and typical content of this literature. The 12th century in Ireland witnessed the changeover from monastic to secular schools, a new professionalization of poetry-making, and the perfecting of syllabic metres which had been in use for some 500 years. Students assess the function of the poet and the nature of his relationship with his patron. Irish-Scottish literary connections at this period are often over-looked and forgotten, but the same standard literary language stretched across the straits of Moyle from north east Ulster to Gaelic-speaking Scotland. 

This course examines Western perspectives on the Middle East and North Africa. What are the origins, presuppositions, and theoretical foundations of these? Having examined Western perspectives, students are given the opportunity to hear the views of undergraduates in universities throughout MENA region. How do Western interventions and perspectives look from their point of view? Students critically examine Western perspectives on MENA and learn to assess the societal impact of Western interventions, beginning in the 18th century up until the present. Students explore the themes of refugee crises; war and genocide; law and human rights; gender; and national, religious, and ethnic identities of the region. 

The course equips students with an understanding of (1) the marketing concept, (2) important strategic marketing decisions for business, (3) emerging trends in marketing, and (4) the relationships and tensions that exist between marketing practice and society. Students are first introduced to important concepts underpinning marketing practice; consumer behavior, segmentation & targeting, branding, marketing communications in a digitalized world, and the marketing mix.

The course focuses on the variety of ways in which, since the mid-1800s, women writers from the United States have made use of non-realist genres and modes within short fiction as a means of both protesting and celebrating women’s positioning in what was still a self-consciously new and ostensibly utopian nation. It introduces students to the imaginative and discursive breadth displayed in texts produced by female writers prior to the 1970s. In doing so, the course explores the developments and continuities in fantastic fiction by women writers from the American Civil War, though the fin-de-siècle period, and into Modernism and its immediate aftermath. In this way, the course problematizes rigid periodization, in particular by highlighting the formal innovation and conceptual range of writers who employ a range of fantastical genres to explore issues from racism and oppression to infidelity and financial ruin, from science and the senses to the very nature of reality itself.

Hundreds of myths and sagas survive from medieval Ireland. Many of these display intricate narrative techniques and structures, and their contents often reflect contemporary ideologies as well as inherited mythological motifs. In this course, students focus on one specific long narrative from the early Middle Ages and conduct a thorough and critical analysis of the text. No knowledge of Old Irish is required, as students read the story in full in English translation, but throughout the course key Irish terms and concepts are examined and their significance explained. 

This course offers the opportunity to learn the basics of Gaeilge (Irish, or “Irish Gaelic”), Ireland’s first official language. In addition to acquiring core skills, students also explore cultural topics in their linguistic context.