Ireland

This course charts the history of Northern Ireland from its foundation through state building, war, civil rights, sectarian conflict, and the peace process. Relative to its size, Northern Ireland is arguably the most studied and analyzed place on earth in the 20th century. Partition is by no means a phenomenon unique to Ireland. Germany, India, Korea, and Sudan are among the most prominent examples of a phenomenon that has been a major component of the 20th century world. The Northern Irish troubles witnessed the deaths of 3,636 people between 1966 and 1999. The conflict has been a defining moment in the modern histories of Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Britain. In being a resolved conflict, the solution arrived at in 1998 has become a template for peace processes the world over. 1998 initiated a peace process rather than concluding a peace settlement. That peace has been at times unstable, fragile, and imperfect. This course progresses past the Good Friday Agreement, examining the history of near contemporary Northern Ireland to examine how power sharing, decommissioning, and cultural demobilization have shaped a new polity, asking what changed and what stayed the same.

This course examines the development of Rationalism from Descartes to Kant. Special attention is paid to the rationalist attempt to give a systematic account of both human and non-human reality. The course analyzes the relation between empirical science and metaphysics in the 18th-century period of Enlightenment, with particular emphasis on the philosophies of Hume and Kant.

Style in film for its own sake has little value. The real merit of film style is its ability to bring a film story to life in a distinctive audio visual manner. This course is an exploration of motion picture production and technique. Specifically, it addresses the core crafts of editing, cinematography, sound, production design, and directing. The course explores how these core crafts collaborate to shape what has become the most popular art form of our time.

In this course, students learn about key issues in defining political participation and recent trends in different forms of political participation across the world; micro, meso, and macro level factors influencing participation in elections and protests; current issues in political participation research; and how to assess the relative influences of stable and temporal factors in voting choice.

This course looks at the discovery of the Celtic family of languages by the early comparativists of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, focusing especially on the ground-breaking work of Edward Lhuyd in establishing a scientific foundation for the linguistic classification. Together with the work of James Macpherson, the influence of ideas about the Celts on the Romantic movement is considered, and their subsequent integration into the mature comparative linguistics of the 19th and 20th centuries. The strange forms the interest in the ancient Celts took in the 18th and 19th centuries is considered, with particular emphasis on the obsession with the Druids. Finally, various modern-day conceptions and misconceptions about the Celts, ancient and modern, are examined.

This course examines debates around a number of contemporary issues in Irish politics. These primarily center on institutional and behavioral issues, such as the constitution, the parliament, political culture, and elections. These debates are placed in a comparative context, using the experience of other countries to assess the Irish political system.

This course explores key aspects of 20th- and 21st-century literature and critical debate in Irish. The course covers the following aspects of the transmission and wider context of Early Irish documents: periods of Early Irish up to the beginning of Modern Irish (c. 1200 AD); development of the Irish script; Irish manuscripts and their dating; Irish glosses explaining Latin texts; other (more personal) Irish notes in manuscripts; Irish as a Celtic language and a brief comparison with Gaulish; Ogam inscriptions; and early Irish metrics and poetry.

The first part of this course provides an introduction to philosophical reflection on religious belief and practice. Students focus on three questions: what is the relationship between faith and reason?; can belief in God be rational?; and what is the nature of religious practice? The second part of the course considers some central concepts and debates in the philosophy of mind. Students focus on the mind-body problem. This problem concerns the relationship between mental states (e.g. sensations, thoughts, beliefs, desires) and physical states (e.g. neural patterns), and how the two might interact in order to cause our behavior. Are our minds distinct from our brains, or are our sensations, thoughts, beliefs, and desires only particular patterns of neural activity? The course considers various theories that seek to solve the mind-body problem, including dualism, behaviorism, identity theory, and functionalism. Each of these theories differs in how they conceive the nature and role of mental states. An understanding of the problem allows students to consider related topics in the philosophy of mind, such as consciousness, intentionality, and personal identity.