The Making of Modern Dublin 1770-Present

Catalog description

This graduate seminar offers an urban history of Ireland through the prism of its capital city, Dublin, embracing wider themes subtending the Irish experience from colonial and post-colonial transformation to urban modernity, capitalism and globalization. Drawing on key concepts from the field of urban history, the course interrogates the fundamental question of how power was expressed, experienced and resisted in and through the urban environment from the elite precincts of Georgian Dublin to the slums of the Victorian era. This exploration of Dublin’s built environment is thus framed by critical dimensions of the city’s social and political history, from imperial state-building emanating from the heart of British authority in Ireland at Dublin Castle, to nationalist, republican and socialist challenges to such urban sites of power from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The course goes on to explore Dublin as a metropolitan capital through the lens of postcolonial urbanism, from the blend of modernizing and conservative ideologies of post-independence technocracy to the city’s recent growth into one of the most globalized cities in the world and a model of neoliberal urbanism in the wake of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom of the 1990s and 2000s. Encompassing three open-air site trips, the central aim of the course is to help students to interrogate the complex character of Irish modernity – imperial, post-colonial, metropolitan and global – through the environment of its capital city.