Ireland

This course offers students the opportunity for an extensive study of one of the most important writers of the 20th century: George Orwell. Students study the representative sample of Orwell’s writing across a variety of forms and subjects, looking at Orwell as a novelist, a journalist, a memoirist, a social theorist, a political thinker and writer, and an essayist and cultural critic. 

This course introduces students to global mental health from a critical perspective, with a particular focus on contextual constructions of mental illness, mental health programming in low resource and humanitarian settings, and for marginalized populations. The course covers global differences in definitions and incidence of psychiatric disorders, the validity and effectiveness of mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) interventions, and the wider role of power and inequity in shaping national mental health policies and international guidelines. 

The course introduces rings, subrings, homomorphisms, ideals, quotients, and isomorphism theorems. It includes integral domains, unique factorization domains, principal ideal domains, Euclidean domains, Gauss' lemma and Eisenstein's criterion. Fields, field of quotients, field extensions, the tower law, ruler and compass constructions, construction of finite fields.  Students state the definitions of concepts and prove their main properties, describe fields and rings and perform computations in them. Students discuss the theoretical results covered in the course and outline their proofs. They perform and apply the Euclidean algorithm in a Euclidean domain, giving examples of sets for which some of the defining properties of fields. They focus on proving the tower law, and use it to prove the impossibility of some classical ruler and compass geometric constructions. Students learn to identify concepts as particular cases of fields, rings, and modules (e.g. functions on the real line as a ring, abelian groups, and vector space).

The course situates Chaucer’s exceptionally diverse canon within the literary and historical contexts that produced them, while also considering how archival discoveries and fresh theoretical approaches make possible new understandings (or at times misunderstandings) of the medieval author and his works. Given the increasingly diverse and global readership of Chaucer’s work in 21st centuries, it is unsurprising that these works elicit such varied and often contradictory responses. As readers of Chaucer in the 21st century, students are encouraged and supported to develop their own voice and critical skills, and it is not expected that they have extensive previous experience with medieval literature. 

This course charts the evolution of modern Ireland from the height of colonial expansion in the 17th Century, through the era of the landlords to the Act of Union, and through the Great Famine to the revolutionary period of the War of Independence and the creation of the Irish Free State. This course examines the historical geography of Ireland through the prisms of colonialism and decolonialism and challenges the notion of Ireland as a 19th Century colony raising questions about this island's position within the British Empire. The course focuses on both urban and rural areas and discuss the importance of historical geography in understanding the contemporary Irish landscape. Course includes a compulsory one-day fieldtrip.

This course addresses the history of economic thought, which is done in two sections. The first section traces the elaboration of basic economic principles by classical, socialist, and neoclassical thinkers. The second section splits up 20th century economic thought into its constituent disciplines. The course provides insight into the historical and ideological context in which different economic systems and policies arose. Students interested in interdisciplinary work focus on subjects as diverse as economics, political science, sociology, history, and philosophy.  

Students are introduced to the Medieval art and architecture from 4th to 15th century AD and to an understanding of the principles, the technological developments, and innovations of cultural diversity and assimilation. The lectures examine material histories of objects and works of art of this period, which reflect the varied connections of European Art of the Middle Ages. Themes to be explored include the heritage of the post Classical world of ancient Greece and Rome; identity and diversity in the post Roman world; aspects of continuity and transformation in the arts of the Byzantine world in the east and the development of monasticism and the formation of the Early Medieval Monastery in the west, with reference to the Carolingian and Ottonian period including the specific contribution of Irish monasticism to Medieval art; and the impact of the pilgrimage tradition on art and architecture during the Romanesque and Gothic periods. The course also examines characteristics of the Gothic style as it emerges at the end of the 12th century, and the late medieval period is examined through reflections in urban and secular architectural developments. 

This course offers an introduction to qualitative research methods in social sciences. Students learn about the advantages and limitations of qualitative research methods and how apply the knowledge to small scale research studies.

This course explores ethical issues in the design and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). It examines ethical theories and practices from historical, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural perspectives relating to current and emerging ICTs. Students  study the major ethical frameworks such as consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics etc. They look at how they are applied to issues around privacy, security, social media interactions, access, health, game design, and so on. And they explore how the design of technological systems and structures can support ethical principles.

This course explores key concepts and debates in environmental and technology ethics: the commitments and values operative in models of sustainable development (theories of justice, capability, and agency); questions of human populations (demographics, food production, and food security); sustainable transport; values at work in approaches to biodiversity conservation (wild, agricultural, urban); and conflicts and convergences in aiming for smart and sustainable cities. Students focus on the instrumental versus intrinsic value; demographics and consumption; food security and related aspects of animal agriculture; justice and sustainable development; environmental citizenship; and the future of work. The course examines key ethics responses rooted in hermeneutics, in philosophical, and religious traditions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Daoism) and characterizes the role of the ethicist in "expert" cultures and in policy development in Ireland, the EU, and internationally.