Ireland

This course examines the impacts of disease and disaster on individuals and societies in the Middle East from Medieval times to the 20th century. It uses primary and secondary sources to analyze how the Middle East conceptualized disease and crises, and how they dealt with their effects when they struck. This course trains students in the interpretation of Mesopotamian (Babylonian, Assyrian, and Sumerian) literature in translation. It equips them with both questions and methods, and pays detailed attention to the examination of primary sources.

The course involves an exploration of early historic and medieval Ireland in its European context. Topics include an examination of Roman influences, the archaeology of the Christian church, the exciting developments associated with the Viking Age in Scandinavia and the North Atlantic, the impact of the Norse on Ireland, and the transforming influence of the Anglo-Normans in castle building, town development, and rural villages in the Irish landscape.

The focus of this course is a selection of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. The critical tools used in class include structuralist, post-colonial, and gender studies. Through this course, the students appraise each text individually and look at the global issues pervading the Sherlock Holmes corpus. The proposed method of study is comparative analysis.

The content of the course is a cultural history of popular music from 1900 to modern times. This course examines the social and political conditions that influenced the development of genres in popular music by evaluating key releases from influential artists. Students analyze the growth of popular music from the turn of the 20th century onwards. They study the development of successive genres from delta blues and early jazz onwards, exploring the dynamic relationship between popular music, popular culture, and social change. The course also provides an introduction to critical approaches to culture and popular music such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism, and Marxian analysis.

Efforts to support child health, including those made by health professionals and services, humanitarian organizations, interventions, and policymakers, are often hindered by common sense or ageist assumptions about who children are and should be. This course unpacks and contrasts those assumptions with evidence from actual children in their lived contexts. Questions will include: Can and should children be responsible for their health, health management, or medications? How do children cope with and care for illness? Who should decide whether a child receives medical treatment? What do and should children know about issues like sexuality, death, and bodily functions? Should we tell a child if they are dying? What happens when health interventions forget children are people? How can health policy perpetuate or address child health inequities? What’s wrong with saying “children are resilient”? Students learn how to think about child health from four perspectives: constructionist, child-centered, critical (structural), and biosocial.

The course explores in theory and practice the interactions of theatre and performative practices with cognate art forms and/or new media. The course is taught by specialist Theatre and Performative Practices staff or visiting staff with appropriate expertise. The precise specialization may vary from year to year but examples of such interactions would include theater and music, theater and voice/vocality, theater and dance, theater and somatic practices, theater and new media, theater and visual arts, theater and performance, and live art.

This course enhances students' understanding of "The Forgotten Irish" by addressing various sectors of society which have often been cast aside from the stereotypical view of what it means to be Irish. Topics such as religion, colonial connections, gender, and sexuality, traveler culture, and the role of "New Irish" immigrant communities are explored in a multi-modal context including literature, print, film, art, music, and original source documents.

This course considers key themes, topics, debates, and controversies in Irish culture, focusing particularly on the representation of Irish-ness and Irish culture in literature, film, drama, and art history. Key issues explored include cultural nationalism; the literary revival; the myth of the West; Dublin in cultural representation; gender and nation; commemoration and memory; institutional abuse scandals; race and immigration; and class prosperity, recession, and austerity.
 

In this course, students translate passages of Old English poetry using the resources of a modern edition; comment in detail on the language and poetic form of Beowulf; discuss the Beowulf manuscript; and analyze the thematic content of the poem, relating it to appropriate historical and literary contexts.

The course explores the nature, extent, and social impact of corporate crime around the world, and assesses the forms of social and legal regulation of corporate malfeasance.