Ireland

This course examines modern and contemporary US wring in a variety of genres, interrogating the changing ideas of national literature and exploring the emergence of a variety of voices laying claim to being American. Texts are drawn from the main genres of prose fiction and nonfiction, drama, and poetry. The course starting with the Harlem Renaissance is both a historical marker and a cultural statement, taking Langston Hughes’s  ‘I, too, sing America’ as one of its core themes.

The course provides a foundation to the study of law. Before any in-depth analysis of any type of law subject, one needs to have a fundamental understanding of how the legal system works and of the basic legal vocabulary involved. This first part of this course provides students with this knowledge, paying particular attention to five topics:
the constitution, the legislation, EU law, the Irish courts system, and access to the courts.

In this course, students examine a selection of six notable North American novels: OF MICE AND MEN by John Steinbeck; ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST by Ken Kesey; IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote; Julie Otsuka's WHEN THE EMPEROR WAS DIVINE, THE BLUEST EYE by Toni Morrison; and Octavia E. Butler’s KINDRED. Students explore the relationship between social history and the aesthetic and generic development of North American writing with an emphasis on the way in which these novels reflect key cultural concerns including madness, murder, incarceration, isolation, The American Dream, identity, prejudice, and resilience.

This course provides a platform for multiple disciplines to learn about and collaborate on projects that address our societal challenges using the established framework of Design Thinking. These challenges may include climate change, food security, migration, and conflict. Design thinking has its roots in industrial design and engineering but borrows from a variety of disciplines, including ethnography, computer science, psychology, organizational learning, and business. Students who participate in this course look at problems from these alternative perspectives, how they might impact their own discipline, and how their discipline might inform the solution. To achieve this, students work within multidisciplinary teams on projects that are not necessarily aligned to their area of expertise. Students are encouraged to reflect on this experience to better understand their own preferred learning environment and behaviors.