Ireland

This course examines the popular experience of life in 20th-century Ireland. Rather than seeing Irish culture in terms of elite experiences, this course explores life as it was lived by the majority of Irish people. To do this, the course broadly traces key experiences from birth to death, examining each experience from as many viewpoints as possible. Certain key themes run throughout the course such as the social and cultural effects of economic, political and demographic change, the evolving role of the state and legislation as it affected daily life, the process of secularization, changes in public and private morality, an increasing openness to international influence and the conflicts, and tensions that these various developments unleashed. The course examines the interpretative challenges of social and cultural history in an Irish context, and examines some of the new certainties that seem to be emerging in the growing literature on various aspects of Irish experience.

The course is an introduction to the study of comparative politics and provides an overview of some of the key theoretical frameworks, concepts, and analytical methods of this field of study, as applied to the developing world. We particularly examine non-democratic forms of politics, asking why authoritarian regimes persist and whether corruption undermines democracy. Other topics covered include the causes of civil war, the clash of civilizations, and ethnic violence.

The course examines authors’ use and adaptation of folkloric and mythological material in their works. The course examines a variety of early modernist and contemporary texts alongside earlier materials alluded to or explored by those texts. Straddling the perceived divide between popular fiction and classic literary works, the course considers the writing of W. B. Yeats and other authors of the Irish Revival as well as J.R.R. Tolkien, James Joyce, John Updike, and Kazuo Ishiguro. The course enables students to query the nature of literary production and reception across different time periods. It allows them to explore why authors choose to underpin their works by references to well-known narratives, and, conversely, why authors choose to revive forgotten legends.

The Frankish super-state pieced together by bloody conquest in the reign of Charlemagne (768-814) comprised much of modern-day France, Germany, Italy, Catalonia, and the Low Countries. It remains popularly seen today as at once a restoration of the western Roman Empire, and as a precursor to modern European unity.

By consulting first-hand the remarkable variety of contemporary literature produced at the courts and monasteries of this age, together with the boom in modern scholarship on the subject published in recent decades, we will seek to deconstruct both these notions, and uncover instead a ‘Carolingian Renaissance’ on its own, eighth- and ninth-century terms: one of ritual, theocracy, and prophetic visions; of brutal violence, learned polemic, and carefully balanced consensus. Above all, the course asks: how were such extraordinary political and territorial ambitions achieved and legitimized in a world of such rudimentary resources? And why, once accomplished, could it not last?