Ireland

This course concerns the status, roles, and representation of women in medieval Irish and Welsh society. The student is introduced to primary material which can inform us about the socio-legal position of women in these societies as contrasted with that of men, including legal tracts, literary texts, historical texts and didactic writings, the originals of which were written in Irish, Welsh, and Latin (but read in English translation). The importance of marriage and other kinds of union in the lives of women is examined, and the impact these unions had on women’s social status will be assessed. Various literary texts are read, with a view to considering how femininities and masculinities are constructed in them, and the characters of prominent literary women are examined and analyzed. The question of women’s agency in society, especially in the area of learning, as well as the factors that wrought change on women’s social position, is also addressed.

In this course, students look closely at one point in the very distant past and at the early origins of Western civilization, at Homer and the Greeks, at ancient Greek language and culture, at its strange and yet (as we shall see!) familiar words, its structure and its thought. Homer and the ancient Greeks are part of our world, our language, our thought, and our lives. If you are studying chemistry or English, history, economics, or maths, and want to know why the past, Greek, and the Greek culture matter, this Trinity Elective is the course for you.

A century of politeness and Enlightenment, but also one of revolution and filth, the 18th century was a period of excitement and change. The literature of the time both reflects and shapes this perception, and the Irish literary scene is particularly striking for the variety and richness of its literary productions. Many of the 18th century’s greatest writers attended Trinity College Dublin – Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Jonathan Swift – while many also attended the city’s brothels and taverns, as well as frequenting Smock Alley Theatre or visiting Marsh’s Library. Different urban and rural venues provide the setting, the stage, or the inspiration for a variety of literature across genres, including poetry, plays, life writing and novels. Many of the male and female writers on this course also had cosmopolitan aspirations, and several moved to London to pursue careers there. The course will highlight these connections between Ireland and England, and indeed France, investigating the realities of authorship and readership across the 18th century. As well as familiarizing students with the literary developments taking place in Ireland, and Dublin in particular, the course also engages with issues such as gender, sexuality, and the commodification of the female body; performance and the self; and politics and national identity. It also draws on the wonderful richness of built literary heritage from eighteenth-century Dublin, and includes a research visit to Marsh's Library. 

This course surveys Irish labor history. It examines the character of rural and urban social protest movements representing the working poor, the development of trade unionism throughout the island of Ireland, the impact of radical ideologies, the competition from nationalist and unionist politics, and the reasons for the stunted political development of Irish labor. It considers how trade unionism became part of the "social furniture" in the mid-20th century, and examines the ideological and practical challenges faced by the movement in the closing decades of the century.

In this course, students examine a selection of key theater texts by contemporary Spanish dramatists from the early 18th century to the present. Students analyze how the selected plays are representative of trends and innovations in the contemporary Spanish stage. Throughout the course, students work not only with the dramatic texts but also with documents illustrative of their performance histories, such as filmic or journalistic records, in order to contextualize the dialogue between writing and performance from a historical, cultural and theatrical perspective. Special attention is paid to the ways in which theater is disseminated and how commercial and/or political considerations can affect the trajectory of a dramatic text, from page to stage.

This course introduces students to the Earth, to its environmental systems, and to the ways in which these systems operate and change both spatially and temporally, producing distinctive physical geographies. Topics include: the history of physical geography; the theory of plate tectonics and the rock cycle; and the atmosphere, the hydrological cycle, glacial, fluvial, and coastal systems.
 

As critics including Eric Hayot have pointed out, it can be difficult to analyze and write about contemporary culture because we lack the critical distance to gain perspective on works that depict our own historical moment. This course provides some of that critical distance, or "leverage" as Hayot describes it. Through its comparative approach, the course explores how socio-political topics that are of pressing concern to writers, artists, and thinkers now were also examined in earlier periods. The course illustrates how studying the ways in which these themes and issues were represented and understood in the past enables us to enrich our engagement with the contemporary iteration of those topics today. The course considers a different socio-political topic each week, examining how it has been explored in a pair of texts. The course covers a range of creative works, critical concepts and cultural theories from the 20th and 21st centuries. The genres covered by the course include novels, films, essays, autofiction, memoir, a play, TV episode, and photo-text book. 

Burial mounds, megalithic tombs, enigmatic earthworks, ringforts, ancient churches, medieval castles, and shipwrecks these are just some of the vast array of archaeological monuments in the Irish landscape. This course teaches you how to recognize and date these various sites and monuments, how to access and use various online resources that contain detailed map-based information about all known Irish archaeological sites, and finally, how archaeologists progress from this abundance of "raw" data to interpreting and presenting archaeological monuments and landscapes to the public.

This course traces the blues from its birth in the late 19th century to the present day. Sweeping through America in the early 1910s, the genre was a pervasive influence on the popular mainstream until the 1970s and continues to be played and heard today. The course draws on social history, cultural studies, and musicology. Topics include the blues’ musical characteristics, its verbal lexicon, its performance standards, its ties with African-American culture, and its intersection with other popular music genres. Alongside a historical approach, lectures also consider some of the blues’ regional variants (Chicago, Mississippi, Memphis), along with its most significant artists, such as pre-eminent pre-war performers like Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith, stars of the electric era like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and the genre’s most notable acolytes in the 60s and beyond.

The course examines the development of rationalism from Descartes to Leibniz. Special attention is paid to the historical context of the rationalist attempt to give a systematic account of knowledge and reality. Students examine the relation between empirical science and metaphysics in the 18th-century period of Enlightenment, with particular emphasis on the philosophies of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.