I took this Germanics course with Professor Jeanne Riou in Dublin. The theme was ‘Radical Thinkers,’ and over the course of the semester we read texts by (mostly) German theorists in translation. The course texts included material by Hannah Arendt, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marx and Engels, Immanuel Kant and Georg Büchner. In class we were examined on our familiarity of these texts, as well as asked to contemplate their historical and contemporary relevance.

In this course taught by Professor Martha Shearer, I was introduced to film studies as a discipline, developing my understanding of the specialized vocabulary and historical context that is necessary in critically discussing cinema. The theme of the course was women’s authorship in American cinema, and throughout the class we learned how to apply various critical perspectives to the films that were screened. At the end of the term, I had composed my own short sequence analysis, as well as an academic research essay exploring the femme fatale trope in the 1946 film noir Gilda.

In this broad survey course taught by Professor Porscha Fermanis, I studied English literature from the Romanic period, using historical context to understand what shaped and characterized this literary movement. During the term, we read a wide range of poetry including William Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, P.B. Shelley and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, as well as prose by Jane Austin, Mary Shelley, Olaudah Equiano and Ann Radcliffe. I became knowledgeable about a number of Romantic tropes, such as Gothic horror and the Sublime, and learned how to identify and discuss them in the works we read. I also became acquainted with the significant concerns of this time period, ranging from abolition to the French Revolution and rapid industrialization.

This class introduced me to a wide range of 21st century Irish writers, giving me an inside look into the current happenings in Ireland’s literary scene. While our main facilitator was Professor Margaret Kelleher, much of the course was taught by guest lecturers, many of whom either wrote the books we read or worked for the house that published them. Over the course of the semester, I was able to attend lectures by a number of prominent Irish writers from diverse socio-political backgrounds, including Kevin Barry, Oein DeBhairduin and Anne Enright. I was also able to listen to a Q&A with Skein Press, the independent house that published Melatu Uche Okorie’s debut short story collection This Hostel Life in which she draws from her experience as an African migrant woman living in direct provision hostels in Ireland. Throughout the term, I practiced skills in close reading and peer review, producing three short essays on the course texts.

This seminar-style class was facilitated by Professor Catriona Clutterbuck, structured around weekly class sessions in which we discussed a particular Irish poetry collection from 2019 or earlier. Over the course of the term, we read works by Leontia Flynn, Victoria Kennefick, Moya Cannon, Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin and Kerrie Hardie. We identified various thematic preoccupations in each of these works, while also contextualizing them within recent Irish history. Each week for the first half of the term, we would write short responses to the material, identifying arguments that we could develop later on in the course. In the second half of the term, we started a comparative analysis of the poets we had read, arranged around five themes: the situated body and religion, history and progress, interpersonal relationships, nature and mortality as well as language and creativity. At the end of the term, we turned in a fully developed academic essay of about 3000 words, expressing a point about two or more of the poets we encountered in class. In my essay, I wrote about motherhood and the tension between self-sacrifice and co-creation in Leontia Flynn and Victoria Kennefick’s poetry.

In this course I studied contemporary literature—mostly outside of Western tradition—establishing environment issues as a key concern. The course was facilitated by Professor Treasa De Loughry and the course texts included poetry and prose from Western countries including the US, Australia and Scotland, but a majority of our focus was on writings from the global South. Throughout the term, we covered a series of major themes, starting with settler colonial imaginaries and resource extraction, then moving onto climate change and interconnectedness between humans and their environment, and finally postcolonial disaster and climate emergency. This course allowed me to explore the interdisciplinary possibilities of literary studies, while expanding my reading beyond the Western canon.

In this course taught by Nerys Williams, I became familiarized with the predominant concerns of American literature from the Modernist era. Over the course of the term, we studied a wide range of topics, reading Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Anzia Yezierska, William Faulkner, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, Louis Zukofsky, Wallace Stevens and Lorine Niedecker. By the end of the course, I had completed several works of analysis, charting their adherence and sometimes departure from certain modernist conventions.