Ireland

This course provides an introduction to ocean properties and processes. Topics include processes that exchange energy and water within the Earth system; main sources, sinks, and pathways of material; temperature, salinity, and density structure; temperature-salinity diagram; waves and tide generation; Eulerian and Lagrangian co-ordinate systems; hydrothermal circulation; biogeochemical cycling of oxygen, carbon dioxide and nutrients; biogenic sediments; volume transport and fluxes of material; and instrumentation used in oceanography.

This course focuses on key concepts in evolutionary biology including the mechanisms operating on molecules, on populations and those involved in the formation of new species. It will also include topics on macroevolution, such as the role of mass extinctions, ​radiations, and biological constraints and biases in shaping evolutionary patterns.

This course provides an introduction to 20th Century Irish literature in English and the Irish language (in translation). It considers how writers have participated in the negotiation of modern and contemporary Irish identities. Through a close critical reading of key selected texts, it investigates the ways in which writers have imagined and reimagined Ireland and Irishness from the literary and cultural revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries through to the new millennium. Issues to be addressed include Ireland’s transition from a traditional to a modern society, language, gender, and the connections between literary production and the imagined "nation." Knowledge of Irish is not necessary for this course, as all Irish language texts are studied in English translation.

This team-taught course introduces students to a broad range of texts, authors, and issues in Irish writing. Students work across genres and forms, encountering canonical and less often studied works. This comparative course proposes various ways of thinking about Irish literary texts, while at the same time providing a sound knowledge of the social, cultural, and political conditions in which these texts were written, produced and read.

This course focuses on the operations of narrative in modern Irish literature and drama from the 19th century to the present. Of particular importance are the roles of writers in the construction of powerful narratives of national identity at key moments in Irish history, and the subsequent interrogation of them by later generations of Irish writers. The preoccupation with the act of storytelling itself within Irish writing is also explored. Students are encouraged to engage in detail with the primary texts and to explore a range of theoretical issues in relation to narrative, postcoloniality, feminism, and cultural materialism. 

This course introduces fundamental structures and principles of education with the aim of broadening students’ ideas and knowledge about education systems and policy. Students are shown a diversity of approaches by highlighting European and international developments which involve an emphasis on creative pedagogical thinking and they analyze how Ireland fits into this framework. There is also an examination of the socio-cultural aims and requirements of education focusing on pedagogy but also addressing key areas of policy and practice as they relate to social justice, for example, social inclusion, race and ethnicity, gender, and belief systems.

This course is to deepen students’ understanding not only of the substance of Irish politics, north and south, but also of the academic research that aims to interpret and understand it. The course covers the Irish governmental system, and politics in Northern Ireland.
 

The goal of this course is to understand the relationship between policies, institutions, and economic growth and development. Topics include the analysis of Irish economic growth, economic models of growth, determinants of Irish economic growth, and importance of institutions and geography for the development of modern economies.

The "hero" is one of the central, if particularly diverse and changeable concepts that define and structure private identities and public patterns of authority in the ancient Greco-Roman world and beyond, right up to the present. In this course, students examine and interrogate the idea of the hero through the lens of ancient epic, exploring Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as well as Virgil’s Aeneid in search of what heroism might mean, then and now.