Ireland

This course introduces students to the environmental humanities, a multidisciplinary formation that brings the visual arts, literature, theatre, history, music, languages, philosophy, politics, law, film, media/cultural studies, anthropology, and cultural geography, into relation with the sciences in response to the environmental crisis. The course focuses on how history/history of art and architecture have responded to the challenge described by Chakrabarty and how these disciplines now contribute to the project of the environmental humanities by rewriting histories and reimagining futures. Students will learn about the climate crisis as a product of modern histories, including histories of science, extractive economies, technology, and media. The course also critically appraises concepts that feature prominently in public and academic debates about the climate crisis, such as Sustainable Development, the Anthropocene, and Planetary Boundaries. 

This course is an introductory survey of the major schools of Chinese Philosophy.  Students begin their exploration of Chinese thought with a reading of Confucius’ Analects where they focus on central concepts such as “filial piety”, “ritual propriety”, “rectification of names”, “mandate of heaven”, and “benevolence”.  Students also explore the two main Daoist classics, the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, considering such concepts as “non-action”, “non-speaking”, “emptiness/absence” and theories of relativism, perspectivism and non-attachment. This course is also dedicated to introducing the four main schools of Chinese Buddhism; Chan, Huayen, T'ian Tai, and Mind-Only and their contrasting ideas of enlightenment, emptiness, truth, and co-dependent origination.

This course equips students with basic research and analytical skills that are needed to understand and respond to social policy problems. Its main focus is on statistical data available in online databases that are widely used to describe such problems and design policy solutions to them. Students learn about major relevant databases for Ireland and the EU and receive guidance and hands-on experience on how to access those databases, search through them for data on specific social policy topics, select and extract particular relevant indicators into Excel spreadsheets, present the data in graphs and tables, and write brief descriptive commentaries on what the data reveal. For illustrative purposes, the course focuses on unemployment as a representative social problem and concentrates on analyzing that problem and policy responses to it in Ireland and in the EU. A special focus is on the impact of Covid-19 on the labor market and its effects on employment and unemployment among younger cohorts in particular.

This course introduces students to the critical potential of "everyday lived experience" as a radically different approach to psychological research and practice that provides a link between psychology and social theory. Introduction to psychology of everyday lived experience; concepts such as lived experience, voice, values, subject position, participation; ethnography of lived experience as researching with the other; case studies such as children living in a debt economy, the everyday experience of being a migrant, digital technology and the transformation of everyday living, everyday caring, etc. Case studies vary from year to year.

This course introduces students to the history of Hindu Mythology from 1000BCE to 1000 CE through Sanskrit sources in English translation. The course surveys the history of Hindu Mythology from its inception in the Vedic period (1000 BCE) to its height in epics and Purāṇas (1000 CE). Students explore how premodern Hindu writers used mythology to navigate key religious questions regarding the problem of evil; the ontology of God; gender and salvation; and the creation of the universe.

The course focuses on W.B. Yeats as a playwright and as a theorist of the theatre, combining an intensive focus on Yeats’s own work in the first half of the course with a more expansive consideration of the ways in which Yeats provides us with a way of reading subsequent Irish theatre in relation to recent work in the second half. Hence, the course combines the study of Yeats’s theatre and dramaturgy with consideration of recent work in the Irish theatre, including productions of plays currently running at the time of the module. It considers both the work of Yeats, and of more recent dramatists, not only as literary texts, but as performance pieces.

This course explores modern Middle East and North Africa and the societies and cultures through regionally and historically focused investigations. It continues with an exploration of historical and contemporary European and Western interventions and perspectives on the Middle East, and how these have impacted the region.

This course is an introduction to the rich history of medieval manuscripts with a particular emphasis on Irish codices. Themes include medieval manuscript culture and codex production; insular scripts and scribal techniques; Late Medieval and humanist scripts; the Corpus of Medieval Irish manuscripts; Modern Irish manuscript tradition; digital technology and manuscript research.

This course is for engineering students intending to focus in the area of environmental engineering. The course lays a foundation for more intensive courses in later stages by introducing concepts about, among other things, environmental ethics, engineering calculations, and the fundamental biological, chemical, and physical processes used in environmental engineering. Applications of these concepts to developing engineering solutions for several contemporary environmental problems are also examined.

In this course, students review the major groups of invertebrates which, apart from arthropods, account for most of the animal species on the planet. The course provides the tools for describing and understanding biodiversity and many of the species discussed play key ecological and economic roles. Students review classification of invertebrates into major groups and examine some of the extraordinary solutions they have developed to movement, feeding, sensing, and reproduction. Practical sessions illustrate the variety of invertebrate life and include a field trip to search for specimens on the shore. Key skills include scientific drawing and dissection and, above all, the skill of species identification, including classification, use of keys and guidebooks and taxonomic conventions.