Ireland

This course introduces students to contemporary feminist ideas and key feminist debates, specifically feminist legal theory. The course illustrates the ideas by focusing on specific campaigns that relate to women and girls’ human rights and gender justice in both Irish national and global arenas. The course focuses on some important areas of contention, debate, and power struggles to see how feminist approaches to legal issues are deployed in important campaigns relating to: reproductive justice; prostitution/sex work; lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) issues; and redress and restorative justice for survivors of trauma and abuse relating to gender violence. Through case studies the course offers an introduction to feminist concepts and to international conventions relevant to gender justice such as the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), United Nations Conventions on Human Rights and relevant Security Council Resolutions as well the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the Yogyarkarta Principles. The case studies are also used to introduce and illustrate key concepts of feminist legal theorists such as Martha Fineman, Catharine MacKinnon, Suan Moller Okin, Martha Nussbaum, and Janet Halley.

This course gives students an understanding of practical aspects of data analysis, handling, and visualization for datasets related to geo and environmental sciences.

This course provides an introduction to the study of biogeography. Bridging the fields of ecology and geography, biogeography is the study of the spatial patterns of biological diversity and its causes. Students identify how historical, physical, and biological factors affect present and past distributions of individuals, species, populations, communities, and ecosystems. The actions of humans are a critical force impacting other species, and the human influence on past, present and future species distributions is a central topic in this module.

Students are introduced to environmental sociology with a focus on the interactions between human societies and the natural environment. By focusing on this two-way interaction, the course examines key theoretical perspectives, debates, and issues within environmental sociology. The course considers interdisciplinary perspectives examining a range of topics such as environmental inequality, sustainability, public attitudes towards climate change, renewable energy, consumption, pollution, environmental social movements, climate-induced migration, green crime and transformation to "green societies."  These issues are examined at multiple levels, including rural and urban, local, and global, and from different perspectives of key stakeholders. 

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.