Irish Studies (IRISH-UA)

This course introduces students to the rudiments of the Irish language, including phonemes and pronunciation, syntactical structure, and verbal conjugations. In addition, a history of the language is provided, as well as a general introduction to Irish culture, including discussions of family and place names. Students are encouraged to begin speaking with basic sentence structures.

This course builds on the grammatical lessons of Elementary Irish I and expands into more complex verbal conjugations while concentrating on idiomatic expressions. The accumulation of vocabulary is stressed and students are introduced to basic literature in Irish while developing beginning conversational fluency.

For the more advanced student of Irish, this course focuses on improving conversational fluency and on expanding vocabulary through reading more complex literature in Irish.

The focus of this course is on conversational fluency, reading complex literature in Irish, and writing in the Irish language, further encouraging students to strengthen their pronunciation and command of spoken Irish.

Focuses on the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, the Mediterranean, Europe's Atlantic coast, and the Baltic Sea. The 17th and 18th centuries saw long-distance commerce move to the center of state policy, and in the 19th century bred exploitive colonial systems buoyed by trade. Global war traumatized international trade in the 20th century but ultimately gave rise to our world of supertankers, giant container ships, global air freight, and monetary transfers at the speed of light.

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the traditional and contemporary music of the Celtic areas of Western Europe, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, and Galicia. Recordings and live performances present the extraordinary range of singing styles and the musical instruments employed in each culture, including harps, bagpipes, and a variety of other wind, free reed, keyboard, and stringed instruments. Forms and musical styles are explored in depth along with a study of their origin, evolution, and cultural links.

Particular attention to the movements of Irish on the European continent and in Britain; the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean; Australia and New Zealand; and South America. The consequences of emigration for Ireland and for the receiving nations, as well as Ireland’s transformation in the late twentieth century from emigrant nursery to emigrant destination. Consideration of some of the most prominent Irish diasporic communities.

This course will explore the roots of the global Irish presence. There were well established communities of Irish expatriates on the European continent by the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, and Irish mariners, merchants, settlers, and servants took part in the formation of the Atlantic World during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Important chapters in this story involve the American and French Revolutions and the creation of the new America nation.

This course examines the history of Ireland (including Northern Ireland), the United States, and significantly Irish America, as they intersect or diverge over the course of the twentieth century. When Northern Ireland was created in 1920 and the Irish Free State in 1922, there were 2.3 million Irish-born living in America, nearly half the population of the entire island. A new phase in Irish-American relations began during which diplomacy, economics, education, immigration, nationalism, tourism, culture, philanthropy and the circulatory movement of capital emerged as major arenas for interaction. Through readings, films, oral history and discussions that highlight the comparative element of this course, students will examine key themes that connect Ireland and the United States in this period as well as interrogating an emerging historiography.

Explores the symbiotic relationship between New York City and the Irish from the 18th through the 20th centuries, as well as the impact of political, social, and cultural changes in Ireland and America on a transnational population. Factors beyond race and language, which help define and preserve ethnic group identity, as well as the city's role in the creation of a pseudo-Irish identity that is disseminated on both sides of the Atlantic, are also explored. Readings are broadly drawn from immigration, urban, and social history. Primary documents, literature, and film are also used as texts.

Emphasis varies by semester; designed to allow flexibility in course offerings from visiting scholars and specialists in particular fields. Past examinations have included imagery and ideology of Irish nationalism, Irish American popular folk culture, and the Irish in America. Recently, focus has concentrated on the oral history of the Irish in America with course instruction in conducting oral history interviews, writing an archival finding aid, and in editorial decision making for public history projects.

Examines the English conquest of Ireland from the reign of Elizabeth I to the last meeting of the Irish Parliament. Key themes include the plantation of Ireland with settlers from England, Scotland, and Wales; the decline of the Gaelic political order and culture; the religious reformation and Counter-Reformation; Ireland as a site of English and European wars; the imposition of a penal code; and the vain attempt to rebel against British rule in the late 18th century, resulting in the Act of Union, which disestablished the Irish Parliament in Dublin.

Examines the period from the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland to the achievement of partial independence in 1922. Topics covered include the Union and its aftermath; the growth of nationalism in 19th-century Ireland; the Great Famine of 1845-1851 and its long-term economic, social, and political consequences; the shaping of modern Ireland; Fenianism and the Land War; the Irish cultural revival; the policy of Home Rule and Unionist reaction; the 1916 Rising; and the War of Independence.

Intensive examination of specific areas of Irish history with an emphasis on critical reading and individual research projects. Past themes include the development and modernization of the Republic of Ireland with particular consideration of the economy; the Great Famine of 1845-1851, which was an immediate and long-term catastrophe for the Irish people but which was also the catalyst for substantial changes?positive and negative in Irish society and culture; and the cinematic representations of Irish Americans.

From the seventeenth century to the present, Irish people have been crossing the Atlantic to North America. They are one of the most significant ethnic groups to ever migrate from Europe to the United States. Their impact has been disproportional to their numbers but this only partially explains our contemporary understanding of “Irish America.” Ethnicity is an imprint and defining feature of American life yet the Irish experience with it over the past four centuries is a story complicated by multiple generations, diversity of class, continuing immigration, and rapid changes in both the homeland and the receiving country. This course will consider the factors affecting emigration from Ireland; examine the impact of the Irish on the development of the United States since the colonial period, particularly on its cities; study the changing Irish image in American popular culture; and consider what the Irish can teach us about the evolution of ethnic identity. The ultimate goal of this course is to learn to think historically.

Just as the United States received more immigrants than any other country, Ireland and Italy are among the classic nations of emigrants. Why did so many people leave Ireland and Italy? What were the economic, political, religious, and personal motivations? How were people able to leave in such large numbers, given their poverty? Where did they go? How did they travel? And what effect did they have on the societies where they settled, especially the United States, which attracted more than five million Irish immigrants and more than five million Italian immigrants?

From Roman claims of human sacrifice to tales of shape-shifting goddesses and from heroes that live for hundreds of years to journeys to Otherworlds and magical creatures, the world of Celtic myth and its interpretation presents us with a rich panorama. This class explores what we know about non-Christian religions in the Celtic regions, drawing on archaeological evidence and examining literary sources for medieval perceptions of paganism. In the first part of the class we will define what we can really know about the ‘religious’ beliefs of the wider Celtic world before and during the Roman conquests before turning to the literary tales that survive from the Middle Ages that are set in the non-Christian past of Ireland and Wales. We will question what can be defined as ‘myth’ and how stories of pagan gods and heroes are treated in a medieval Christian world. This course will take a critical approach to the material and continue to question how much we can know about these early belief systems and what our surviving literary texts meant to their various audiences.

Spain’s political and economic power in the early sixteenth century bred waves of French, English, Irish, and Dutch contraband slave traders, seaborne raiders, freebooters, and privateers eager to thwart her hegemony and expropriate her wealth. Their success was not suppressed until the early eighteenth century. The response of the early modern world to piracy is embedded in the “Law of Nations” and the “Law of the Sea,” progenitors of modern international law.

This course explores a salient feature of the history of early modern Ireland: political violence. Beginning in 1534 — with the rebellion of Lord Thomas Fitzgerald (“Silken Thomas”) against the authority of the English king, Henry VIII — and running through the bloody Rising of 1798 — when Irishmen inspired by the French Revolution sought to establish an Irish republic — the history of Ireland can be read as a succession of clashes across cultural, sectarian, economic, and social boundaries. Among the actors in these conflicts were honorable men and women with lofty visions of a better Ireland. There were, as well, scoundrels and opportunists who fed off political instability and the vulnerability of those caught in the vortex of a turbulent period in Irish history. “Rebels and Rogues” will focus on decisive moments in sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenthcentury Irish history when both the best and worst aspects of human nature were on full display.

Eighteenth century Ireland remained calm under a repressive penal code that deprived the Roman Catholic majority access to political power. By the 1720s, the seeds of Irish nationalism had been planted by the ruling Anglo-Irish minority as it challenged British economic and political dominance over Ireland. Emboldened by political rhetoric imported from America in the 1760s and 1770s, Ireland was convulsed, leading to a new constitutional relationship with Great Britain, but there was little change in the status of Irish Catholics. News of the French Revolution gave rise to a radical movement in Ireland that would settle for nothing less than full civil rights for Catholics and the establishment of an Irish Republic. The government’s bloody suppression of the United Irishmen in 1798, passage of the Act of Union in 1800, and the legacy of Robert Emmet’s abortive rising in 1803 colored Ireland’s political agenda for more than a century.

Covers the tumultuous period from the fall of Charles Stuart Parnell, through the Easter Rising in 1916, and into the early years of national government in the 1930s. Readings in various genres (poetry, short story, novel, drama). Writers may include Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O’Brien.

Although this seminar will trace Irish poetry beginning in the 1930s with the influence of W.B. Yeats, the emphasis will be on later twentieth-century poets (including Seamus Heaney, Louis MacNeice and Alan Gillis) and poetry by women (like Eavan Boland, Colette Bryce, Ailbhe Darcy, Vona Groarke, Leontia Flynn and Sinead Morrissey). We will discover new writers publishing poems and books in contemporary magazines and poetry journals and dip into contemporary Irish language poetry (read in translation). Reading these poets will allow us to grapple with some of the most pressing issues facing poetry criticism in the Irish Studies field and beyond: the struggle with Yeats’s commanding example; the relation of poetry to national partition and the civil crisis in Northern Ireland; the confining and liberating aspects of lyric tradition; the use of translation as a means of finding voice; the agency of poetry in forcing change within a conservative cultural climate; the arrival of prosperity in Ireland and the consequent need to revise our conceptions of Irish culture.

See description under English (ENGL-UA).

Irish women writers have historically been marginalized and excluded from the literary canon. This class seeks to historicize and respond to these concerns by foregrounding Irish women writers and arguing for a “tradition” of women’s writing. We focus primarily on work from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, after beginning with Maria Edgeworth’s groundbreaking novel Castle Rackrent (1800). We will read novels, drama, poetry, and short stories and ask questions about aesthetics, historical context, gender, sexuality, race, class, and religion. To complicate and challenge our own views of these texts, we will also supplement our readings with academic scholarship, including postcolonial theory, Irish feminist theory, and other relevant literary and cultural criticism. This course is designed to help you develop your critical skills as writers and thinkers, as well as your ability to engage with scholarship in literary theory, criticism, and interpretation.

A study of the rich dramatic tradition of Ireland since the days of William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and the fledgling Abbey Theatre. Playwrights covered include John Millington Synge, Sean O' Casey, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Frank McGuinness, and Anne Devlin. Issues of Irish identity, history, and postcoloniality are engaged alongside an appreciation of the emotional texture, poetic achievements, and theatrical innovations that characterize this body of dramatic work.

Emphasis varies by semester; designed to allow flexibility in course offerings from visiting scholars and specialists in particular fields. Past examinations have included contemporary Irish fiction and poetry, Irish women writers, and Northern Irish poetry.

Discusses the legend of the famous king as a hero in medieval Wales and Ireland and depictions of Arthur ranging from villain to tragic hero. Explores how the Celtic Arthur compares with the continental Romances; the legend’s interpretation of Christianity and the pagan past; the depiction of “magic” and “miracles” within the texts; and the role of gender in medieval writing.

Explores how Patrick, a man taken to Ireland as a slave in Late Antique Britain, became the saint celebrated annually around the world on March 17. Includes how he portrayed himself in his own writings, how seventh-century political machinations promoted a cult that made him the chief saint of Ireland, how medieval writers depicted him as saving epic heroes from hell, and how he eventually became an enduring secular symbol of Ireland itself. Students read a variety of primary and secondary sources to think critically about the changing legacy of one man over a millennium and a half..

Topics vary by semester.

Topics vary by semester.

Prerequisite: permission of the director of undergraduate studies. 2 or 4 points per term. Independent study with an Irish studies faculty member.

No previous language experience required. This course aims for students to achieve fundamental proficiency in Gaelic, as it is spoken in the Donegal Gaeltacht. Beginning with basic vocabulary and grammar, students master conversational phrases and traditional songs, and are able to practice language skills throughout the program.

This course analyzes the traditional patterns embedded in folklore, popular culture, language, and religious, cultural and sporting institutions. The objective is to discover how such structures transformed from their past existence and to examine the changing patterns and values of contemporary life in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

The course begins in the era of revolution and war that gave rise to a divided Ireland. Students examine the following decades of state-building, including the impact of the Second World War; Irish cultural identity; religion; emigration; modernization; the reemergence of the "troubles" and the subsequent "war" in Northern Ireland; and the recent moves toward peace.

Enormous changes have occurred in Ireland in the last decade, especially the social and cultural implications of the economic boom known as the "Celtic Tiger" that have transformed the country in so many ways. What happens to the social life of a nation that leapfrogs from being an agricultural economy to a technologically-advanced postindustrial one? This course will examine the changes that Ireland has undergone that extend to all areas of public and private life: the (uneven) rise in levels of personal wealth; the decline of the Catholic church, both as a means of social organization and as a mode of private, personal understanding of the world; the change from being a population defined by emigration to one now experiencing much higher levels of immigration; and the attendant challenges of our transformation into a more dramatically multicultural society.

Topics vary by semester.