IRST 10101:01
MWF 9:35-10:25
Tara MacLeod
Beginning Irish I
No prior knowledge of the Irish language required. This course provides an enjoyable introduction to modern Irish. Energetic teachers in small classes teach basic language skills and prepare students to conduct conversations and read authentic texts. Extensive use is made of role-play and interactive teaching methods. Irish 10101 is a superb opportunity to learn a new language, explore Irish/Celtic culture, and investigate the linguistic politics of the only minority language offered at Notre Dame. In addition to satisfying the language requirement of the College of Arts and Letters and the College of Science, Irish satisfies the popular Irish Studies minor’s requirements, and selected students will have an opportunity to study in Dublin, Ireland.

IRST 10101:02
MWF 10:40-11:30
Mary O’Callaghan
Beginning Irish I
No prior knowledge of the Irish language required. This course provides an enjoyable introduction to modern Irish. Energetic teachers in small classes teach basic language skills and prepare students to conduct conversations and read authentic texts. Extensive use is made of role-play and interactive teaching methods. Irish 10101 is a superb opportunity to learn a new language, explore Irish/Celtic culture, and investigate the linguistic politics of the only minority language offered at Notre Dame. In addition to satisfying the language requirement of the College of Arts and Letters and the College of Science, Irish satisfies the popular Irish Studies minor’s requirements, and selected students will have an opportunity to study in Dublin, Ireland.

IRST 10101:03
MWF 1:55-2:45
Mary O’Callaghan
Beginning Irish I
No prior knowledge of the Irish language required. This course provides an enjoyable introduction to modern Irish. Energetic teachers in small classes teach basic language skills and prepare students to conduct conversations and read authentic texts. Extensive use is made of role-play and interactive teaching methods. Irish 10101 is a superb opportunity to learn a new language, explore Irish/Celtic culture, and investigate the linguistic politics of the only minority language offered at Notre Dame. In addition to satisfying the language requirement of the College of Arts and Letters and the College of Science, Irish satisfies the popular Irish Studies minor’s requirements, and selected students will have an opportunity to study in Dublin, Ireland.

IRST 10102:01
MWF 11:45-12:35
Mary O’Callaghan
Beginning Irish II
Second semester of instruction in the Irish Language. More emphasis will be placed on reading simple texts in Irish.

IRST 10102:02
MWF 9:35-10:25
Ronan Doherty
Beginning Irish II
Second semester of instruction in the Irish Language. More emphasis will be placed on reading simple texts in Irish.

IRST 20103:01
MWF 12:50-1:40
Tara MacLeod
Intermediate Irish
Continuation of the study of the Irish Language with increased emphasis on the ability to read 20th-century literary work in the original Irish.

IRST 20159:01
TR 3:30-4:45
Jacquilyn Weeks
Harry Potter and Artemis Fowl: Trends in British and Irish Young Adult Literature This is a brief survey of male heroism in five key British and Irish novels that have made a huge impact on global Young Adult literature:  J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Anthonoy Horowitz’s Stormbreaker, Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian, Diana Wynne Jones’ The Pinhoe Egg, and Kate Thompson’s The Last Policeman.  We will be talking about how these novels do (and do not) represent trends in current YA literature, how they have impacted a broader cultural representation and understanding of masculinity.  And we will be asking about whether or not the Irishness and Britishness of the authors alters the depiction (and our interpretation) of masculinity.  Please note that some of these novels are later novels in a series; they can be read independently, but if you needed an excuse to read all the Harry Potter novels over the winter break, this is it.

IRST 20160:01
MW 1:30-2:45
James Hamrick
Romantic Ireland
In 1913, W.B. Yeats famously declared that “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,” but the idea of Romantic Ireland was still very much alive and persists even to our own day. In this course, we will look at the role played by Ireland and by Irish writers in the development of British Romanticism. At the same time, we will examine the undying notion of Ireland as somehow inherently Romantic. While Romantic England passed from the scene sometime in the 19th century, we will consider the long arc of Irish Romanticism c. 1800-1940. The work of Sydney Owenson, Thomas Moore, W.B. Yeats and other Irish writers will take us from metropolitan Dublin to wild Connemara to the rocky, windswept shores of the Aran Islands, and back again. Along the way, we will look at novels, poetry, a documentary film and a play or two.

IRST 20203:01
TR 9:30-10:45
Peter McQuillan
Advanced Readings in Irish Culture
An advanced course focusing on reading and translating a variety of texts in the Irish language. We concentrate on further development of reading, interpretive, and technical skills mastered in previous language courses (IRLL 10101, IRLL 10102, IRLL 20103). Texts from various authors and historical periods allow students to taste different writing styles: contemporary fiction, journalism, literary criticism, historical and cultural texts. Emphasis will be on sentence structure, stylistics and syntax. Students are required to have earned a high grade in IRLL 20103 in order to take this class. At the conclusion of this course, students will be able to conduct independent research with Irish texts.

IRST 20223:01
TR 9:30-10:45
Diarmuid Ó Giolláin
Introduction to Irish Folklore
This course will discuss the 19th century concept of folklore and its application in Ireland. ‘Irish Folklore’ is usually understood in terms of three main and related domains: ‘folk narrative’ (or oral literature), ‘folk belief’ (or popular religion) and ‘material folk culture’. These will be examined with special emphasis placed on narrative. Representative oral narrative texts from the Gaelic tradition will be studied in translation

IRST 30115:01
TR 12:30-1:45
Diarmuid Ó Giolláin
Oral Traditions and Irish History
This course will examine notions of history in oral cultures with special reference to Ireland. Who were those who transmitted oral traditions about historical events? Which genres shaped oral historical traditions? In which contexts were these traditions transmitted? What was the nature of the traditions? What was their content? What relationship did they have to the written record, to counter-hegemonic histories and to official histories? To what extent, if any, can they be said to articulate a national perspective? These are some of the questions that will be addressed, and case studies that illuminate special aspects of the subject such as oral traditions of the Vikings, of 1798, of the Famine and of landlords will be discussed in detail.

IRST 30310:01
TR 11:00-12:15
Sarah McKibben
The Irish Comic Tradition
Fantasy. Humor. Ribaldry. The Macabre. The Grotesque. Wit. Word play. Satire. Parody. This course will read diverse examples of the long and fertile comic tradition in Irish literature (in Irish and in English), from medieval to modern, in order to enjoy a good laugh, get an alternative take on the Irish literary tradition, and think about the politics of humor. Authors will include unknown acerbic medieval scribes, satiric bardic poets, Swift, Merriman, Sheridan, Wilde, and Flann O’Brien. No knowledge of Irish is assumed or necessary.

IRST 30371:01
MW 10:40-11:30
Sean O’Brien
Introduction to Irish Writers
As the visit to campus of the most recent Irish winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature suggests, this small island has produced a disproportionate number of great writers. Designed as a general literature course, the class will introduce the student to a broad range of Irish writers in English from the eighteenth century to the present. Writers will include Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Brian Friel, and John McGahern. We will also look at recent film versions of several of these writers’ works, including Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest. Themes to be explored include representations of “national character” and the relationships between religion and national identity, gender and nationalism, Ireland and England, and “Irishness”and “Englishness.” Students can expect a midterm, a paper (5-6 pages typed) and a final.

IRST 30411:01
TR 2:00-3:15
Rory Rapple
Tudor England: Politics and Honors
England underwent profound changes between the death of King Henry VIII and the death of Elizabeth I, including its establishment as an international economic force and an empire in the making. Social consequences included assertiveness mixed with anxiety, desires for change tinged by fears of disorder, and a new sense of freedom haunted by fears of isolation. Such anxieties found public expression through two contradictory issues: (1) England’s role of principal defender of the Protestant Reformation in a Europe increasingly under the influence of an ascendant Counter-Reformation, and in a world now dominated by Hapsburg Spain; and (2) the accident of England’s rule by a female monarch, Elizabeth, who dominated domestic and foreign politics, asserting her right as a true king and Supreme Governor of the English church while refusing either to produce an heir through marriage or to name a successor. In this turmoil, great literary and artistic flowering took place. This course aims to set the work of the great figures of the “Elizabethan Renaissance”--Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney--in their larger cultural and intellectual context, such as political commentaries, social polemics, historical works, crime writing, religious exhortations, ballads, engravings, and maps, which made up the Elizabethans’ attempts to comprehend and control their perilously changing world.

IRST 30535:01
MW 11:45-1:00
Abigail Palko
Transatlantic Odysseys/Postcolonial Masculinities: Reading Joyce and Walcott
This course begins with the premise that the twentieth-century situations of Ireland and the Caribbean bore more than a passing resemblance to each other. In a 1979 interview, Derek Walcott (the first Caribbean writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature) claimed affinity with Irish writers on the grounds of a shared colonial background: “I’ve always found some kind of intimacy with the Irish poets because one realised that they were also colonials with the same kind of problem that existed in the Caribbean - Now, with all of that, to have those astounding achievements of genius, whether by Joyce, or Yeats, or Beckett, illustrated that one could come out of a depressed, deprived, oppressed situation, and be defiant and creative at the same time.” To explore this assertion, we will read selected writings of James Joyce (Irish novelist, short story writer, and essayist) and Derek Walcott (St. Lucian poet, playwright, and essayist). This comparative reading will highlight their common themes of ethnicity, postcolonial constructions of masculinity, cultural chauvinism, and political inequality. Both work within and against the traditional Western canon, and so our primary focus on their epics, Ulysses and Omeros (we will read selections from each), will consider the ways that Joyce and Walcott are writing back to the imperial center/rewriting the imperial canon, employing its literary techniques and traditions in their works. Both writers thematically investigate the dichotomy between colonizer and colonized, the interplay between their own culture and Western civilization writ large, and the influence of island geography on their societies. Their writing exposes the lasting wounds-personal, cultural, and political-inflicted by British colonialism in their native lands and the ways that anxieties of masculinity were exacerbated by and contributed to this domination. Our readings of Joyce’s and Walcott’s texts will be guided throughout by the theoretical lens of masculinity studies. This course is open to students interested in exploring the ways that masculinity studies serves as a useful lens for reading Joyce and Walcott and for analyzing the political and cultural ties between their homes (as well as their problematic relationships to those homes); no prior knowledge is assumed.

IRST 33910:01
TBA
Sean O’Brien
Digital Education in Northern Ireland
Students will travel to Northern Ireland to work with both Protestant and Catholic high school students to create a web-based multimedia project during spring break, 2012. The class will facilitate the design and construction of a site telling the stories of the ancient fort on the grounds of Lismore Comprehensive School that gives the institution its name--an lios mór or great fort. Because of the broad focus of the project, students from all academic backgrounds and technology skill levels will have something to contribute to the project. Prior to travelling to County Armagh, students will meet to learn about the history of County Armagh-both in ancient times and in relation to the recently ended Troubles, plan and design new media approaches to the project, and discuss how we can best prepare as a team to meet the unique challenges and opportunities of teaching in what may be the first de-segregated classroom many of the high school students have ever been in. Students will develop individual grant applications for funding to support their travel through on-campus organizations the Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement (cuse.nd.edu), the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (isla.nd.edu) Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies (nanovic.nd.edu), as well as the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies (irishstudies.nd.edu).

IRST 40143:01
TR 3:30-4:45
Susan Harris
Queer Plots: Narrative and Sexuality in 20th and 21st Century Fiction
How do you tell a story that is supposed to be unspeakable? In this course, we will investigate the ways in which gay, bisexual, and lesbian writers have transformed narrative conventions as they explore their experiences and their identities through fiction. Beginning with the short fiction of Oscar Wilde at the end of the 19th century and continuing through the modern and postwar eras into the contemporary period, we will look at gay, bisexual and lesbian British, Irish and American writers whose work engaged with or dramatically departed from the dominant conventions that typically shaped fictions of identity formation, of love and marriage, of sexual experience, of political protest, and of death and loss. We will also investigate the public responses to some of these fictions, and the changing discourses about gender identity, homosexuality, and sexual orientation that have shaped both the realities and the fictions of gay, bisexual, and lesbian writers over the past century. Students will write three papers and be responsible for one in-class presentation.