Featured Courses
For complete information, please visit the Irish Studies Catalog page.
LIT 246L: Irish Ghost Stories
This course will explore the rich and abiding tradition of the Irish ghost story. Ireland’s magical (and magically imbued) landscape – with its many ring forts, isolated hermitages, sacred caves, Neolithic portal tombs, and supposed meeting places of the faeries – seem to ensure that the supernatural and the spiritual remain part of daily existence for the Irish. We will consider how the currents of Irish folklore, the echoes and continuing resonance of its pre-Christian past, and, in particular, the appearance of ghosts (understood broadly) reveal something about the way the Irish view the world. The important part of our inquiry will be to uncover the cultural, psychological, and the socio-political implications of the presence of the supernatural, the unknown, the uncanny, and we will likely spend much time considering the spectral hauntings of Ireland as it responds to its various historical traumas (English occupation, the Great Famine, the War of Independence, the Northern Irish Troubles, etc.). Course texts may include Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Stoker’s Dracula, Joyce’s “The Dead,” Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, Trevor’s Fools of Fortune, McPherson’s The Weir, O’Connor’s Star of the Sea, Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Neville’s Ghosts of Belfast, poetry by Heaney, Boland, and others, and assorted folk tales, as well as a full-length film and various visual art.
This course is open to students of all academic majors. Meets Irish Studies minor literature requirement.
IRSH 382: Rockin' Rebels: Popular Irish Music from Traditional to Punk
Satisfies Intermedia Writing General Education Requirement
Do you like music? Are you curious about how music informs cultural identity? Do you need to satisfy your Intermediate Writing requirement for General Education? If you said yes to any of these questions IRSH 382 is the course of your dreams!
In IRSH 382 we will explore the concept of “Irishness” through generative works of music by artists such as Seán Ó Riada, The Wolf Tones, The Pogues, Sinéad O’Connor, U2, The Cranberries, Méav Ní Mhaolchatha, and Soulé (not an exhaustive list). We will examine traditional Irish music as a cultural form. Next, we will move through genres and decades charting political and cultural shifts as represented in folk, rebel, rock, punk, and pop music. We will explore concerns of authenticity and hybridity in Irish popular music and apply theoretical ways of understanding the reproduction and marketing of “Irishness” in a global context.
Please contact Dr. Erin Costello Wecker with questions: erin.wecker@umontana.edu
DANC 108A.08: Dance Forms - Irish
