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Past Events | 2024

Date: Wednesday, 20th November 2024
Venue: HI Seminar Room H204

Join UCD Press executive editor Noelle Moran, editorial assistant Ellen Murray, Professor Hugh Campbell (author and Vice Chair of the UCD Press editorial committee) and Dr. Bianca Rita Cataldi (UCD Humanities Institute Research Lead and Routledge author) for an in-depth workshop on crafting successful book proposals for academic publishers and on the process from proposal to publication.

This event offers a unique opportunity to learn directly from publishing insiders and authors about what academic presses look for, how to structure a proposal, and tips for navigating the review process. Ideal for early-career researchers and seasoned academics alike, this session will guide you in refining your pitch and aligning it with the expectations of an academic press.

Date: Friday, 15th November 2024
Venue: NUI, 49 Merrion Square, Dublin 2

The event seeks to embrace a wide range of perspectives around marginal experiences of domestic architectures, and the renovation, occupation and domestication of textual and material spaces. Contributions include those of established and early-career scholars working across media, culture studies, languages and literatures, and geography.

The day's proceedings will be bookended by Keynote papers from Professor Mary Gilmartin (Maynooth) and Professor Victoria Rosner (New York University). In between, one panel of papers will explore "Material Homes: Objects, Art, and Architecture", while the afternoon session will be devoted to "New Research Directions in Domestic Architecture and Dwelling", including presentations and a round-table discussion spotlighting early-career researchers.

Date: Thursday, 14th November 2024
Venue: Humanities Institute (H204 / top floor)

In a time of noise and multi-tasking activities, it has become particularly difficult to sit down with a book and focus on our reading. This might be a problem, considering that reading is such a fundamental part of our career as graduate students, early-career academics, and academics. For this reason, every two months, on a Thursday from 2.30 to 4 pm, the UCD Humanities Institute offers a safe and quiet space to read together… in silence! The aim is to share our love for reading and for our research without feeling the pressure to talk about it. There is only one rule: bring your book or e-book along (it doesn’t matter which one) and enjoy with your fellow readers!

Date: Thursday, 31st October & Friday, 1st November 2
Venue: Humanities Institute (H204 / top floor) 

This interdisciplinary symposium aims to forge connections between trans theory internationally and Irish iterations thereof. Ireland occupies a particular space in the context of transness. While Ireland has meaningful gender recognition legislation based on the principle of self-declaration, Ireland also has the most inaccessible gender-affirming healthcare in Europe, with waitlists of over 10 years for adults and no service provision for young people and children. In response, many Irish trans people DIY their healthcare and foster vital, generative, and even exciting community responses to the deeply political gatekeeping organised by the Irish State. Additionally, Ireland’s gender and sexual politics exist in the aftermath of British colonial rule and have been shaped by the enmeshment between the Irish State and the Catholic Church. Moreover, like many trans people throughout the world, Irish trans people continue to attempt to negotiate their lifeworlds in response to an increasingly hostile socio-political landscape defined by apathy and neoliberalism. 

Keynote speaker:
Professor Hil Malatino, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University

Date: Friday, 18th October 2024
Venue: Humanities Institute (H204 / top floor) 

Gaëlle Bélem’s There’s a Monster Behind the Door (published October 2024) is a picaresque, brutal, and mordantly funny tale of one little girl’s attempt to escape her sadistic parents’ reign of terror in Réunion in the 1980s. It is the first of two novels by the Réunionese author to be published by the Sligo-based Bullaun Press, the first Irish publisher to take literature in translation as its focus. 

In this event, Bélem will appear in conversation with her translators Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert as well as publisher Bridget Farrell (Bullaun Press) to discuss the novel itself (originally published by Gallimard as Un monstre est là, derrière la porte, in 2020), the story of its translation, and how it came to be published in Ireland. 

The conversation will be chaired by(opens in a new window) Prof. Mary Gallagher (School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics) and Dr. Tim Groenland (School of English, Drama and Film & HI resident scholar). 

Date: Monday, 14th October 2024  
Venue: Humanities Institute, H204

Applying for funding applications is one of the crucial aspects of any academic career, both in the Humanities and in STEM. This workshop aims to tackle the most difficult tasks of this process, while recounting stories and experiences of both successful and unsuccessful applications at different career stages, all the while showing what we can learn from both success and rejection. 

Confirmed speakers:

Event organiser: Dr Bianca Cataldi (UCD Humanities Institute TNH Research Project Lead) 

Date:Thursday, 5th September 2024
Venue:Humanities Institute, H204

Abstract:The paper proposes the idea of a shadow migration in the global bird trade that escalated during the nineteenth century. Examining natural history texts alongside nineteenth-century poetry, the paper excavates correlations between poetry and natural history in their relations with birds. It argues that natural history contributed to the popular public consumption of birds as objects without agency, dissecting their bodies and presenting them as fixed and available for the human gaze, shifting from a more Romantic mode of experiencing birds as fleeting glimpses of colour or sound in the wild. 

See'Extractivist Landscapes'for further details about the project, or contact:
(opens in a new window)Megan Kuster and (opens in a new window)Sarah Comyn

Image credit: ‘Goldmine: Germiston’, Natalie Fuller c.1928, with watercolour additions by S. Comyn. Used with kind permission by the owner D. R. Comyn

Date: Thursday, 25th July & Friday, 26th July 2024
Venue: Humanities Institute, H204

The purpose of the symposium was to think broadly and collectively about lesbians and lesbian studies in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in the context of art, literature, history, community, affect, sex, post- and decoloniality, and East/West connections and their inherent problems. While there is, of course, lesbian scholarship in existence across the region, it seems we have rarely spoken collectively, in dialogic form, or transnationally. In short, “lesbian studies” as a discipline has not yet been outlined or conceptualised in the region, unlike the more established investigations of gay masculinities and queerness.

This event was a methodologies-oriented workshop, discussing the current state of the field, different approaches to the subject, and opportunities and concerns of working with the knowledge we have thus far, as well as the obvious archival absences and gaps. I hope this symposium will serve us to look for connections, common methodologies and theorisations, and consider collective approaches to “lesbian” in the region and their challenges and shortcomings.

Event organiser: Dr Aleksandra Gajowy (UCD School of Art History & Cultural Policy, and HI member)

This symposium was generously supported by the National University of Ireland Early Career Research Grant, the UCD Humanities Institute Research Grant, the UCD Research Seed Fund Award, and the UCD EDI Committee Grant. Special thanks for support to Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty and Dr Sean Leatherbury, UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy.

Date: Friday, 12th July & Saturday, 13th July 2024
Venue: Humanities Institute (H204 / top floor) & Goethe Institut (Film screening)

2021 saw numerous events take place across Germany to mark the 60th anniversary of the Anwerbeabkommen [bilateral recruitment agreement] between the Federal Republic of Germany and Turkey, signalling its importance within Germany’s post-war history. As historians such as Rita Chin (2007) have shown, however, it was the Anwerbestopp, the German government’s decision to unilaterally end its guest worker programmes on 23rd November 1973, that paradoxically led to greater pressure on individual foreign workers and their families to settle in West Germany. Despite restrictive citizenship laws, this resulted in longer term diasporic residency, which has significantly shaped and been shaped by the FRG today.

This two-day conference marks the 50th Anniversary of this turning point by exploring the cultural political implications of ‘residency’. Residency as a legal status can both precede and preclude citizenship. Its ambivalent relationship to twentieth-century assumptions of a singular national identity invites alternative ideas about what it means to be at home in and to access the state in transnational times. Its temporal aspect calls teleologies of integration and assimilation into question. These ambivalences are reflected not only in artistic work which situates itself in relation to experiences and practices of residency in Germany, but also in the use of artistic residencies within the cultural sector (programmes in which artists have the opportunity to work in a different institutional environment for a time limited period).

This two-day event includes a public screening of the film(opens in a new window)(opens in a new window)Liebe, D-Mark und Tod(2022) by Cem Kaya,and a keynote by Prof. Onur Suzan Nobrega.

We are grateful to the UCD Humanities Institute, the UCD College of Arts and Humanities, the Goethe Institut, and King's College London for their support.

Conference organisers: Maria Roca Lizarazu, Leila Mukhida, Lizzie Stewart, Joseph Twist

Date:Wednesday, 26th June & Thursday, 27th June 2024
Venue:Royal Society of Antiquaries, Merrion Square, Dublin

June 2023 marked the 50th publication anniversary of Awakenings (1973), a medical bestseller where Oliver Sacks documented the predicaments of forgotten survivors of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic as they emerged, with L-Dopa's chemical assistance, from decades of sleep. It is also with Awakenings that Sacks discovered himself as a "Romantic" scientist and found the writerly voice that has since earned him the title of the “Poet Laureate of Medicine”.

One of the first academic conferences devoted Oliver Sacks's clinical and authorial practice, Awakenings at 50 charts the debts and legacies -- both clinical and cultural -- of this epoch-making book. Programme below.

This two-day symposium was aimed at clinicians; persons with lived experience of Parkinson’s or other neurological conditions; researchers in medical humanities; new and longstanding readers of Oliver Sacks's work; and anyone fascinated by the entanglements of medicine literature, and science and art.

Organised by Dr Jivitesh Vashisht (UCD School of English, Drama & Film, and HI Resident Scholar).

Date: Wednesday, 26th June & Thursday, 27th June 2024
Venue: Humanities Institute (H204 / top floor)

This conference analyzed attempts to survey the edges of the Russian Empire, from the Baltic and Black seas to the Bering Strait. Historians and geographers have used “survey science” to study global enterprises of astronomy and physics in the early nineteenth century, focusing on their coordination across the British Empire. Measuring Eurasia reorients this field of research to develop new histories of science and surveillance in the Russian imperial world. It emphasizes diverse surveys carried out across disparate borderlands—ethnographic as well as geodetic surveys, expeditions of land and sea, and sciences of ice, plants, and peat.

Recent research points to an emerging study of Eurasian survey sciences not as self-evident acts of expansion and modernization, but as social and cultural endeavors that need to be explained. The production of space is complex terrain: surveillance projects often enrolled diverse artists, brokers, and servitors. Maps might therefore be used to negotiate or subvert indigenous claims to land, nation, or dynasty. Contest over survey technique and nomenclature could similarly magnify questions of social and political (dis)order.

KEYNOTE LECTURE | 26 June 2024 | Humanities Institute H204

Professor Adeeb Khalid (Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies and History, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota): "Getting to Know Central Asia: The Production of Imperial Knowledge and its Discontents”





Conference organiser: (opens in a new window)Dr Patrick Anthony(IRC Postdoc Fellow, UCD School of History & Hi Resident Scholar) | Contact email: (opens in a new window)patrick.anthony@ucd.ie

This conference is supported by the IRC, UCD Humanities Institute, UCD College of Arts & Humanities (CAH), UCD Earth Institute, and CAHEnvironmental Humanities Thematic Research Strand.

'Extractivist Landscapes: Humanities, Artistic and Activist Responses'Workshop Series

Date:Thursday, 20th June 2024
Venue:Humanities Institute, H204

Workshop 3:
Professor Maeve Cooke(School of Philosophy, UCD):"Engaged Theorising”
Dublin artistConor Nolan:“Wish You Were Here”


Image credit: ‘Goldmine: Germiston’, Natalie Fuller c.1928, with watercolour additions by S. Comyn. Used with kind permission by the owner D. R. Comyn

Date: Wednesday, 12th June 2024
Venue: Humanities Institute, H204

This event comprised a reading group followed by a seminar where three of the most celebrated and emerging Tibetan female writers- Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Tenzin Dickie and Tsering Yangzom Lama, in their capacities as writers, editors, translators, came together to introduce, inform and critically discuss their work as well as the future of Tibetan literature in English from the perspective of many combinatory concepts like exile and diaspora studies, neo-colonialism, resistance writing, among others. This gathering aimed to put Contemporary Tibetan Women’s Writing on the World Literary map by providing a platform to such writers who are working on a burgeoning field of literature.

Event organiser: Thinley Chodon (UCD School of English, Drama & Film and HI Resident Scholar)

5-6 June 2024 | Energy Transitions: Culture, Pedagogy, Degrowth | Energy Transitions: National and Institutional - Irish Energy Transitions: A Roundtable & The Degrowth University: A Workshop (Day 1) | Cultures of Energy Transition: A Symposium (Day 2)

Time:11am (5th June | Day 1) & 9am (6th June | Day 2)
Venue:HI Seminar Room (H204)

DAY 1 | 5th June | Energy Transitions: National and Institutional

Irish Energy Transitions - A Roundtable: The roundtable will briefly give an overview of the major frictions, historical legacies, and promised future outcomes of  energy transitions in Ireland.

The Degrowth University: A Workshop:The workshop, curated by colleagues affiliated with Warwick University’s (UK) Critical Environments research cluster, is an invitation to model ways of degrowing the research university.  Participants will work together to produce degrowth syllabi and curricula, write degrowth job descriptions, imagine degrowth governance and administration, model degrowth recruitment and admissions policies, and sketch out degrowth research agendas.









DAY 2 | 6th June | Cultures of Energy Transition: A Symposiumv2 resized

The symposium will examine how creative and critical works, and global historical case studies, from sites as varied as Canada, Ireland, Japan, Russia, the UK, US, and Western Sahara, offer us ways into interrogating the desires, affects and community formations generated by carbon-based societies, while imagining alternative nature-society relations.  Papers will examine cultural responses to the utopian promises and contested enclosures emerging from the transition to renewable energy, including analyses of historical energy transitions as vehicles for liberatory anti-colonial narratives of resource sovereignty; contemporary cultural resistance to top-down energy infrastructural development; and the role of speculative utopian imaginaries in narrating anticipated energy futures.

Speakers include keynotes Sheena Wilson (University of Alberta) and Rhys Williams (University of Glasgow), and poets Jonathan Skinner (University of Warwick) and Lucy Burnett (Lancaster University).



See further event details here:
(opens in a new window)Energy Transitions: Culture, Pedagogy, Degrowth

'Extractivist Landscapes: Humanities, Artistic and Activist Responses' Workshop Series

Date:Thursday, 23rd May 2024
Venue:Humanities Institute, H204

Workshop 2:
Dr Conor Sweeney (School of Mathematics and Statistics, UCD): "Visualising Climate Modelling”
Dublin artist Sarah Bracken Soper: "Making Impressions”

Image credit: ‘Goldmine: Germiston’, Natalie Fuller c.1928, with watercolour additions by S. Comyn. Used with kind permission by the owner D. R. Comyn

Date: Tuesday, 21st May 2024
Venue: Agnes McGuire Social Work Building, C001 (ground floor)

This workshop will focus on the various definitions of multilingualism and on notions of displacement, with particular reference to exile and nostalgia from a transnational perspective. The event, co-organised by Dr. Bianca Cataldi (UCD Humanities Institute TNH Research Project Lead) and Dr. Till Greite (UCD Humanities Institute Visiting Fellow) will be divided into two parts: a panel with 15-20 min presentations for each speaker and, after a coffee break, a roundtable with discussion.

The speakers will be experts from different fields of Modern Languages, History and Linguistics, including Prof. Michael Cronin (TCD), Prof. Esther Kilchmann (Universität Hamburg) and Prof. Steffan Davies (University of Bristol).

Following the event, participants are invited to visit our HI exhibition: “Landings: Art after Extractivism” | UCD Humanities Institute Seminar Room (H204)

Date: Monday, 20th May 2024
Venue: HI Seminar Room (H204)


Opening remarks by Professor Kate Robson Brown, Vice President for Research, Innovation and Impact (VPRII), followed by Professor Regina Uí Chollatáin, Principal/College of Arts and Humanities.

The artworks in this exhibit were produced in response to the (opens in a new window)2022/23 CHCI Global Humanities Institute 'Post-extractivist legacies and landscapes: Humanities, artistic and activist responses’ which was led by the UCD Humanities Institute. This exhibition marked the end of the Andrew W. Mellon funded transnational research project which has resulted in a rich international network and many diverse  outputs, spanning academic publications, blogs, an online syllabus and artistic works.


Image artworks by:
Judy Carroll Deeley | Sarah Comyn | Helen Doherty | Katherine Fama

Date:Friday, 17th May 2024
Venue:Science Hub, Room H2.20

This workshop, organised by Dr Julia C. Schneider (University College Cork)and (opens in a new window)Dr Jennifer Keating(UCD), developed international collaboration on zones of contact between the Russian Empire (1721-1917) and the Qing Empire (1636/1644-1912). These zones are, on the one hand, geographically defined borderlands in Central, Inner, and East Asia, and, on the other hand, cultural, intellectual, political, and economic spaces wherein people from these two empires (and beyond) met and interacted. As recent work on the history of the Qing-Russian border, on borderlands of both empires, and on cross-border flows of information, people, and things has so clearly and excitingly demonstrated, there is much to be gained both by situating the two empires in direct comparative analysis and by conceptualising alternative spatial histories of Eurasia that acknowledge the existence of, but are not defined by, the political border. Some of the key research questions in this dynamic area of scholarship refer to the ways in which imperial borders were created, shaped, and transgressed by a variety of state officials, intellectuals, traders, and pastoral communities across the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries, and the degree to which the ‘border’ or ‘frontier’ is better conceived of as a highly fluid zone of contact and exchange, both spatially and intellectually.

The workshop sought to generate conversation about local and regional entanglements, networks, and exchanges across these vast Eurasian territories. While conventional histories of the two empires have treated them as two separate political entities, the workshop aims to adopt transregional and transnational approaches to overcome the narrow and traditional idea of territory – and in doing so, to propose alternative spatial, economic, and cultural histories of the region that contribute to attempts to de-nationalise and de-territorialise the historiography.

 Confirmed speakers:

Yuexin Rachel Lin (Leeds)
Eric Schluessel (George Washington)
Sören Urbansky (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
Meng Zhang (Vanderbilt)

Date:Thursday, 16th May (online) &Friday, 17th May 2024
Time:TBC
Venue:Science Hub, Room 1.51

The Nonhuman Animals in the Age of Extinction and Mass Production conference will critically examine the paradoxical situation of nonhuman animal life in the age of mass extinction and mass production. The conference theme addresses one of the most urgent challenges facing humanity and other animals in the context of the climate crisis and the global capitalist system: the destruction of habitats and exploitation of animals that drives both extinction and consumption. It will explore how literature and other cultural productions criticise and rethink the ethical, ecological and social implications of this scenario, fostering a dialogue between Animal Studies and Environmental Humanities, two interdisciplinary fields that share concerns but also have tensions and are rarely in direct conversation with each other.

Keynote speakers:

Conference website: (opens in a new window)Animal Studies
For further information, please contact: (opens in a new window)animalstudiesucd@gmail.com

    Partial funding support for this event is provided by the UCD Humanities Institute and the UCD College of Arts & Humanities.

Date: Tuesday, 14th May 2024 
Venue: Humanities Institute (H204 / top floor)

This one-day conference on 'Adaptation, Translation, Identity in Québec and Irish Theatre' was organised by Prof. Jane Koustas, a previous HI Visiting Fellow, and academics from the UCD School of English, Drama and Film.

"Designing kind educational practices" Workshop with Dr (opens in a new window)Wajeehah Aayeshah

Date: Thursday, 9th May 2024
Time:1pm
Venue:HI Seminar Room (H204)

This workshop explored and developed our understanding of the shape of kindness in educational settings. Students, as fellow educators, were required to reflect on their experiences and practices of kindness. This reflection will contribute to a discussion about pragmatically embedding kindness in everyday educational life. A ‘Framework of kindness’ is going to be used for this.

Grounded in pedagogy of kindness (Denial 2019), this framework takes the immersive practices of ‘decolonisation of education’ (Brown, Kelada, & Jones 2020) and the idea of ‘Restorative Practice’ (Morisson 2015) and applies it to all relationships within the academia, and not just that of teachers and students. In the framework of Kindness, ‘decolonised restorative practice’ needs to be implemented in the whole academic eco-system. 

The ‘Framework of Kindness’ is based on real-life examples of students and staff in higher educational settings. Dr Aayeshah is  calling these settings, ‘pockets of healing’. To offer an education which is ‘inclusive’, ‘recognises prior knowledge’, ‘cultural capital’, and considers different needs of participants, and partners, we need to create eco-systems within academia that are kind. The Framework of Kindness in academia is a step to do so.  It does this by acknowledging the challenging aspects of our eco-system and identifying ‘pockets of healing’ where positive change is gradually happening. Dr Aayeshah hopes that this workshop itself would be considered as a ‘pocket of healing’ as well. 

This workshop was a part of an on-going collaborative research. Dr Aayeshah would ideally like to use the insights and stories as research data. However, this will only be done if participants are comfortable with it and give her explicit permission to do so. 

"Investigating Emotions in Migration: The Experiences of Italian Women from the 1960s to Contemporary Times"

Date: Wednesday, 1st May 2024
Time: 1pm
Venue: Humanities Institute, H204

Today, scholars increasingly recognize that emotional expressions are critical to understanding social, cultural, and political change and provide an important correction to the historically dominant approaches in migration studies. Yet, despite the growing significance of emotions in migration studies, less attention has been dedicated to the emotional impact of emigration on solitary migrants, particularly women, who decide to leave alone, without family or a husband.  Leaving alone entails having to provide for oneself in a different country, presenting a significant emotional challenge that requires substantial preparation compared to those who decide to emigrate with their families. The purpose of my presentation has two main objectives. Firstly, it aims to explore the emotional impact that migration evokes in Italian women who choose to immigrate to Norway alone. Secondly, the study introduces a temporal perspective by comparing the emotional consequences of migration experienced by Italian women who immigrated during the 1960s and 1970s with those who immigrated after 2008. This comparative analysis of two different time periods facilitates an examination of how emotions and feelings can change over time and in response to the environment. Additionally, it allows us to evaluate how social factors, environments, and societal perceptions of a phenomenon can influence people's emotions.

Organiser: Dr Bianca Cataldi (UCD Humanities Institute TNH Research Project Lead)

Date:Monday, 29th April 2024
Time:7pm
Venue:Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI)

Watch a recording of the event on YouTube (opens in a new window)HERE

An evening of entertainment and conversation to celebrate two of the world's greatest storytellers, D.O. Fágúnwà (1903-1963) and Peig Sayers (1873-1958). Dagogo Hart and Samuel Yakura of WeAreGriot will perform a selection of English translations of stories from Fágúnwà and Sayers. This will be accompanied by a Q&A with Diipo Fágúnwà, Fágúnwà's son, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, writer and scholar. 

All attendees are invited to continue exchanging tales and making new connections at the reception afterwards.

This event is kindly supported by the Transnationalising the Humanities Research Strand, led by the UCD Humanities Institute.

Organiser: Clare Ní Cheallaigh (Ad Astra PhD candidate, School of English, Drama & Film, and HI Resident Scholar)

Keynote Speakers: Dr Michelle Bastian and Dr Sam Solnick

Date: Thursday, 11th April 2024
Time: 9am - 5pm
Venue: Humanities Institute, H204 & online

How can the environmental humanities expand to consider ‘research environment’ as a form of environment? How do factors such as location, networking, and working conditions matter to the environmental critic? Through a day of discussions, presentations, and provocations, this event advances the environmental humanities in new place-based and politically engaged directions. 

Includes a showing of the film essay Making Dust (Arts Council of Ireland, Aemi, 2023) about the demolition of Ireland's second largest Catholic Church, the Church of the Annunciation in Finglas West, Dublin.

A collaboration between MARBEFES (Ashley Cahillane) and Cultural Imaginaries of Just Transitions (Treasa DeLoughry). Funded by the UCD Humanities Institute, the UCD Earth Institute, and the UCD College of Arts and Humanities.

Email (opens in a new window)ashley.cahillane@ucd.ie for more details.

Keynote Speaker: Natasha A. Kelly (Universität der Künste, Berlin)

Date: Monday, 25th and Tuesday, 26th March 2024
Time: 9am - 6pm
Venue: Humanities Institute, H204

The conference explores contemporary activist cultural production, including literature, film, visual media, and performance, across national and political contexts to shed new light on the ways in which cultural practitioners use their art to communicate political ideas both with fellow activists and to wider audiences beyond their movements.

Email enquiries: (opens in a new window)transnationalactivisms@gmail.com
Conference organisers: Katherine Calvert (UCD) and Erika Teichert (University of Bristol)

Generously funded by UCD Humanities Institute and UCD College of Arts and Humanities.

'Extractivist Landscapes: Humanities, Artistic and Activist Responses'Workshop Series

Date: Monday, 26th February 2024
Venue: Humanities Institute, H204

Workshop 1:
Professor David Higgins (School of English, University of Leeds): "Creative Public Engagement and Post-Extractivist Landscapes”
V’cenza Cirefice (Department of Geography, University of Galway): "Counter-mapping as resistance to extractivism”

Image credit: ‘Goldmine: Germiston’, Natalie Fuller c.1928, with watercolour additions by S. Comyn. Used with kind permission by the owner D. R. Comyn


(opens in a new window)Prof. Kieran Keohane(UCC, Department of Sociology & Criminology):
“Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization: Diagnoses and Therapies”

Date: Friday, 16th February 2024
Time: 1pm
Venue: Humanities Institute, H204

Kieran Keohane is a Professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminology at University College Cork. He teaches also in Anthropology and in Planning & Sustainable Development. He is a founder member of the Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization network, and the Society, Economy & Culture research centre, and an associate researcher with Deep Institutional Innovation for Sustainability & Human Development research group; the Radical Humanities Laboratory, and Collective Social Futures.

Past Events | 2023

Date: Friday, 8th & Saturday, 9th December 2023
Time: 9am-5.30pm (8th Dec) / 10am-5pm (9th Dec)
Venue: D301 & D201, Newman Building


In the final decades of the century, diaries were written in an individualistic and expressivist society which increasingly blurred the boundaries between reality and fiction. They could thus become the chosen medium for postmodernist literary experimentation and invite a form of self-construction which is a precursor of (but remains very different from) the instantly public self-accounts of present-dayblogs and vlogs.

This two-day conference aims to observe these and other evolutions of the twentieth-century diary, exploring their interplay with traditional assumptions about the diary as a repository of memories, an outlet for feelings, as an embodiment of the self, and a concrete means for its preservation.



Date: 7th December 2023
Time: 1 pm
Venue: HI Seminar Room, H204

This roundtable offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the topic of women and labour in emerging scholarship. It involves UCD Postdoctoral fellows from different schools in the College of Arts & Humanities who are researching an aspect of the topic from different disciplines and with a transnational approach. 

Confirmed speakers:
Dr. Carlie Collier (UCD School of History), Dr. Katherine Calvert (UCD School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics), and Dr. Dervla MacManus (UCD School of Philosophy). 

Chair: Dr Bianca Cataldi (TNH Research Lead, UCD HI)

 
Date: 23rd November 2023
Time: 1pm
Venue: HI Seminar Room (H204 / top floor)


Applying for funding applications is one of the crucial aspects of any academic career, both in the Humanities and in STEM. This workshop, jointly organised by the UCD Humanities Institute and the UCD Earth Institute, aims to tackle the most difficult tasks of this process, while recounting stories and experiences of both successful and unsuccessful applications at different career stages, all the while showing what we can learn from both success and rejection. 

Confirmed speakers:
Dr James Little | MSCA postdoctoral fellow, School of English, Drama & Film, and HI Resident Scholar
(opens in a new window)Dr Tomas Buitendijk | Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UCD iCRAG ('Taking Stock' project) and associate member of UCD Earth Institute
Poulomi Choudhury | IRC postgraduate scholar, School of English, Drama & Film, and HI Resident Scholar

What significance has Italy – and Italians – to the history and culture of early modern Ireland? What perspectives on Ireland and its inhabitants are offered by soldiers such as Alessandro Bertone, or Anglicized Italians such as Lodowick Bryskett? What does it change of our understanding of early modern Ireland to know that one of the earliest fortified houses constructed in the period was built to an Italian design (as Jane Fenlon has contended), or that Italians drew several of the most popular published maps of Ireland?

This symposium was an exploratory one, aiming to bring together and build on what we know of early modern Italians in Ireland, both people and texts. All are welcome, particularly early career scholars! 

Kindly supported by the College of Arts and Humanities seed funding, and Transnationalising the Humanities (Humanities Institute, UCD) seed funding

Event organiser: Prof. Jane Grogan (UCD School of English, Drama and Film)

Professor Anders Olsson, Chair of the Nobel Committee, The Swedish Academy, will explore the universal aims of the Nobel Prize in Literature in his upcoming lecture in the RIA Discourse Series.

Professor Anne Fuchs, MRIA, FBA, Director of the UCD Humanities Institute, is the respondent.

The Nobel Prize is and has always been considered a universal prize. This is perhaps its unique, prestigious and everywhere acknowledged property. In The World Republic of Letters Pascale Casanova even writes: “There is no better measure of the unification of the international literary field than the effectively universal respect commanded by this prize.” How effective the prize is to unify the literary world is open to debate.

Professor Olsson's lecture will try to clarify the different and changing meanings of the universal in the history of the Prize, characterized by conflicting interpretations of the donor’s will of 1895. He will stress the importance of critical self-examination and show the slow and gradual transition of the Prize from a European to a global horizon during the 20th century. But his lecture will also show how the Prize in this development becomes more in tune with the developments of modern literature. Professor Olsson's lecture will finally touch upon the possible conflict between the autonomy of aesthetic judgement and the widely spread questioning of universal values in the public debate today.

Anders Olsson is a literary historian and author. His own works include seven collections of poetry, and he earned his doctorate with a dissertation about the works of Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf. Anders is professor emeritus in literature at Stockholm University, and his research has examined fundamental elements in the development of modern literature. He has written some fifteen books on poetry and the history of literature and is also active as a critic. In 2008 he was elected to the Swedish Academy, and he served as its Permanent Secretary during 2018-2019.

Venue: RIA Dawson Street, Dublin 2

Organiser: Dr Stephen Lucek (UCD School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, and HI member)

The Linguistics department at the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics is honoured to host the first Multilingualism in Ireland conference, September 7th–8th 2023. The conference will be held in person with the opening roundtable and closing multilingual poetry reading broadcast live on YouTube. Between these two key events, there will be a series of presentations on aspects of multilingualism in Ireland, including acquisition, policy and communities.

This conference will focus on the many languages of Ireland, be they national languages Irish, English and Irish Sign Language or the many migrant languages used every day. Linguistic diversity in Ireland has been documented over the years, but a dedicated event and subsequent publication has been lacking in the recent past. As Ireland has once again become a net-immigration state (CSO 2022), we must think of how we support language users in multilingual communities. This conference will bring together leading names in academia, youth organisations, the arts and advocacy to consider Ireland through a multilingual lens. The conference will thus further our understanding of how and when different languages are used in Ireland, but also highlight the immediate application of our knowledge to the concrete usage contexts in various multilingual communities.

Sponsors: UCD Humanities Institute | UCD College of Arts & Humanities

Venues: HI Seminar Room (H204 / top floor) and Newman D301

This series focuses on the variety of sources and approaches that constitute French studies. While sources are our point of departure for interpretations and debates, their nature, their origins, their languages, and their trajectories constitute main challenges and limits that researchers have to grapple with. The sources we decide to work with determine the methodologies and the theoretical background that frames our research and our contributions.

How do we choose our sources and what do we ask from them? What theories do we choose, and how do we draw on them? Talks on challenges, limitations and approaches to a diverse range of sources. Broadly dealing with French Studies, but open to all!Queries can be sent to (opens in a new window)asmcfpostgradrep@gmail.com or (opens in a new window)adeffipostgrad@gmail.com

Cécile Guigui (ASMCF PG Rep.) and Maika Nguyen (ADEFFI PG Rep.)

Keynote speaker: (opens in a new window)Prof. Suzanne Cusick (New York University)

 "'Coito', Music, and the Erotic before the Law: A Case from Florence, 1621"


Venue: HI Seminar Room (H204 / top floor)

Overview

Today, scholars interested in expanding and diversifying the way we think music and sex together are faced with a rift between intellectual and political landscapes. On the one hand, such inquiry has been legitimized by more than thirty years of scholarship that has celebrated music’s capacity to represent myriad sexual experiences and identities, as well as its ability to engender radical, destabilizing forms of sonic pleasure. On the other, recent successful political and legal efforts to curtail sexual rights in the name of moral or religious objection are unwinding gains made from identity-based political action. To better navigate this climate, we seek to step back from the traditional focus on how musicians or musical works represent specific sexual desires and identities to interrogate the larger institutional, administrative, and discursive forces that conterminously shape the history of music and sexuality.

Intentionally returning to Foucault’s interest in the emergence and productivity of disciplinary practices, this conference aims to examine moments where music and pleasure have been brought together before the law or, more generally, any authoritative discourse which purports to regulate human behavior. Inviting scholars to share diverse historical and cultural situations, we intend to collectively and investigate the following questions:  To what extent have legal or doctrinal discourses considered music and sexuality as analogous issues? What are the shared tactics used to regulate or manage musical and sexual behaviors? What actions have been taken by marginalized individuals or groups to undercut, evade, or reform discourses that limited musical and sexual freedom? What methodological, theoretical, or conceptual resources are needed to tackle such issues? Responding to these questions, we hope to consider how our reactions to contemporary sexual politics can draw from those who have previously encountered the varied, but historically persistent forces that attempt to bring order to the unruly world of sexual and musical experience.

Conference programme available here

Please contact the organisers ((opens in a new window)music.pleasure.law@gmail.com) if you have any questions.

The Ends of Growth Research Group Inaugural Symposium

Venue: HI Seminar Room (H204 / top floor)

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Dr Matthias Schmelzer (University of Jena)
Dr Andrea Vetter (Braunschweig University of Art)
Dr Jack Copley (Durham University)

Symposium poster

Delving into all aspects and orientations at work in the writings of Jean-Luc Marion, this international conference proposes to question the intricate and complex relations between the events of “givenness” and “revelation” in the history of philosophy and theology. 

Through a thoughtful re-reading of the history of philosophy as well as an active commitment in the phenomenological tradition, Jean-Luc Marion has incessantly brought the dynamic of these questions, their suppositions and their consequences, to the forefront of  contemporary philosophy and theology. This international conference will bring together at University College Dublin (Ireland) philosophers to discuss all aspects of Jean-Luc Marion’s philosophical writing whilst engaging with our author a sustained hermeneutical as well as critical dialogue.

The conference is open to all. Please email (opens in a new window)joseph.cohen@ucd.ie for the full programme and any enquiries about the event.

Venue: HI Seminar Room (H204 / top floor)

UCD Humanities Institute

University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.
T: +353 1 716 4690 | E: humanities@ucd.ie |