Ireland

This course introduces students to Wilkie Collins's THE WOMAN IN WHITE (1859‐60), widely considered to be the first and best Victorian sensation novel. Using online resources, the class reads Collins's novel in instalments, as Victorian readers would have done. Students read 40 instalments over 10 weeks, reading four instalments per week. This relatively small amount of primary text reading per week is guided by specific questions about theme and genre and supplemented with contextual reading from ALL THE YEAR ROUND magazine, other historical sources, and secondary reading on periodical theory. Students examine issues such as women's property and inheritance rights, the marriage market, emerging proto‐feminism, alongside themes of madness, criminality, class, and national identity.  This slow and detailed method of reading and studying the novel not only allows for deep examination of the novel's many plots and subplots, themes, motifs, and generic influences, but also allows students to experience the thrill of the novel's many twists and cliffhangers in the same way as contemporary Victorian readers would have done. 

This course investigates some of the events and processes which have led to a more integrated world order between the mid-19th century and the later 20th century. For most of that period much of the world was carved up between a number of inter-continental empires centered in Europe. How those empires grew, exerted control and in due course retreated will be the particular focus of the course. But other processes, too, are considered, as are the evolution of such ideologies as imperialism or communism and whether such ideologies impacted upon changing global power relationships.

This course provides students with both a thorough introduction and an experiential immersion in the music of Ireland, and encompasses all its richness and variety. No previous knowledge of Irish musical history is required and neither is it necessary to be able to read musical notation. The course engages with the music of Ireland from the medieval period to the present day and encompasses three principal types of music – traditional, classical, and popular. The music of Ireland is examined in its historical context and is situated within the wider international context. The music's historical, social, cultural, and political dimensions are discussed.

This course offers students the opportunity to consider the ways in which the arts, and specifically music, can play a part in relation to the challenges we face in contemporary society, including climate change, mass migration, civil unrest, social exclusion, and navigating power relations. Students explore ways in which citizens can engage in the arts to engender social change. They question whether artists have an obligation to serve communities and how they might do this. Students are guided from engagement with theoretical concepts, multidisciplinary literature, and real-world examples (in the lectures), through action, creation and communication (the in-person music creation sessions and the group assignment), to reflection (the individual assignment).

This course is designed to guide students through a fascinating and fast journey from Middle Ages to current times to show and let them understand the extraordinary peculiarity of a language which was born many centuries before the effective geopolitical birth of the Italian nation in 1861. The focus of this course it to show through a selection of short popular Italian texts how all this affected the current use of written and oral Italian. 

This course is an exploration of Italian art – painting and sculpture - from c.1300 to c.1700 in the major centers of Florence, Rome, Venice, Naples, and Milan. The era is distinguished by a revived interest in Italy’s classical past and the emergence of humanist philosophies. The evolution of religious subject matter is analyzed via a number of different typologies – the fresco cycle, the altarpiece, the sculpted figure. The emergence and development of secular themes, including representations of classical mythology, are considered. The course examines evolving stylistic debates around the values of naturalism and classicism over time, and the ways in which artists reflected on the very concept of the “Renaissance” in different artistic centers. The role of patronage, both civic and private, and the rising status of the artist feature prominently, and particular attention is paid to artistic processes and means of production. The “long” of the title of the course touches on the idea of the iteration and reiteration of the themes summarized here over an extended timeline.

This course focuses on the Roman Empire from the first to early third centuries AD. In this period the hegemony of the city of Rome grew, spreading over almost two million square miles: a vast territory encompassing almost all of modern Europe and also North Africa, Egypt, and the Near East. This course traces the evolution of this political unit and explores the consequences for those who lived under its control. In what ways did the inhabitants of the empire become "Roman"? What were the benefits and drawbacks of inclusion? How did the systems of governance work? What held things together, both practically and ideologically? Students also discuss shifts in modern approaches, from the glorification of the Roman state to more critical post-colonial approaches to imperial rule.

This course provides an introduction to the mythology and religious beliefs and customs of the ancient and medieval Celts, on the continent and in the Isles, and to the later reflexes of these beliefs in modern folklore. It examines evidence for the religious beliefs of the pre-Christian Celts and explore some of the essential elements of Celtic mythology. Material and archaeological evidence from Continental Europe, Britain, and Ireland are consulted, as well as written evidence, from classical writers of the late centuries BC to the Christian writers of the middle ages in Ireland. This section of the course includes study of some major Irish mythological texts (read in English translation) and consideration of the place and function of mythology in early Irish society. Students are also introduced to folk-beliefs and customs of Ireland, including traditions and stories concerning the fairies, saints, and holy wells; death customs and rituals; and traditions concerning the calendar and seasons. 
 

Students develop their understanding of many dimensions of the relationship between gender and social policy. In the first section of the course, students become familiar with the fundamental concepts necessary for gender policy analysis, including how gender operates as a social structure and its intersectional relationship to other social structures such as race, class, and disability. Students develop their understanding of the concept of patriarchy in both its familial and non-familial meanings and ideas about post-patriarchal welfare states. Students learn about prevailing approaches to measuring gender inequalities, including indicators. Next, students focus on gendered typologies of welfare states and the importance of varieties of capitalism to gender inequalities in work, organizations, and families. In the final part of the course, students focus on how the concept of care is becoming increasingly significant for policymakers and private sector employers.

What made Ireland the country it is today? The course addresses that question by examining Irish history, culture, and society in an interdisciplinary and interactive manner. Students are introduced to key themes, debates, personalities, influences, and events that help to provide a greater understanding of how Ireland evolved into the country it is today. From the arrival of Christianity to post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, attention is focused throughout on fundamental issues related to religion, gender, sexuality, language, literature, politics, society, music, sport, film, and material culture. The course is structured around key topics which address a series of relevant issues relating to Ireland. Each topic is addressed in an associated lecture by an expert in that particular field.