Ireland

In this course, students study themes of medieval Welsh stories, techniques of the medieval Welsh storyteller, social and historical contexts of medieval Welsh stories, and the application of critical analysis to medieval Welsh texts.

This seminar explores a selection of the writings of Jane Austen (1775-1817). Austen’s current status as one of the best-loved and most critically-admired novelists in English literature can obscure the formative influences and cultural contexts of her work. This course begins with some of Austen’s earliest work, tracing a transition in narrative voice from parody to satire to a distinctive ironic mode. It then traces the refinement of this mode into a powerful tool of ethical commentary through examining two of Austen’s most complex and often-misunderstood mature novels. Students also examine the present-day cultural production of Austen as author through 20th-century cinematic adaptations and literary pastiches.

The history of climate and environment are rapidly evolving fields of study that aim to reconstruct environmental and climate conditions over past centuries and millennia, and to understand how societies perceived and responded to changing environmental conditions and events such as natural disasters and extreme weather. These aims can be best achieved by combining evidence from both natural and human archives. In this course, students examine how natural archives such as tree-rings and sediment cores can be used to reveal climate and environmental variations in the past. They examine how this information can be combined with evidence from human archives, including written and archaeological records, to understand the social impacts of environmental change. In doing so, they draw upon case studies from the ancient, medieval, and early modern eras. The case studies range from ancient Egypt and Babylonia to the ancient American Southwest, and from there to Medieval Ireland, and into the oceanic realm. In these places students examine the role of pre-modern societies in transforming the face of the earth, and how humans perceived and coped with a changing environment.

This course provides an overview of the development of a culture of coercive confinement in Post-Independence Ireland. It examines a range of institutions other than prisons utilized to confine those deemed to be deviant.

This course explores the various ways that artists—male, female, and genderqueer—have used their work to examine, question, and criticize the relationships between gender and society. The course involves sustained visual analysis, as well as a critical engagement with both primary and secondary texts.