Assoc ProfessorNeil Carlin

Through my teaching, I build knowledge and inspire questions about the present by exploring material-centered stories about relationships between humans and other-than-humans in the past. My teaching employs active-learning techniques that engage, enable and empower students to learn together to make their own judgements. I believe in the transformative power of critical thinking and I encourage students to achieve their own potential by developing the transferable critical, social and personal skills required to live good lives in an ever-changing world.

I coordinate and teach into a range of undergraduate modules centering around the Neolithic, Bronze Age, archaeological theory, and the archaeology of Ireland. Currently I am coordinating the following:

Stage One module - ARCH10050 Intro to the Archaeology of Ireland which explores how Ireland's rich and diverse archaeological record of monuments, landscapes and objects tells the stories of those people (and their ways of life) who have inhabited this island for at least 10,000 years from early hunter-gatherer times to the present.

Stage Two module - ARCH20520 How Archaeologists Think which explores the development of archaeological theory from the nineteenth century to the present. This module examines the ways in which archaeologists make sense of the past: the kinds of questions we ask, how we answer them, and why we ask these sorts of questions.

I contribute to teaching in other modules 'People in Prehistory', ' Making the Irish Landscape', 'The Human Past', 'Cultural Heritage' and others