AUTUMN TRIMESTER
Wednesday, 11th September 2024
(opens in a new window)Dr Martin O’Donoghue | Chair: George Francis-Kelly
Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Legal History & Legal Theory, Frankfurt & HI Visiting Scholar
'More than a Redmondite tradition? The Irish Parliamentary Party and Its Successors'
- Abstract: With some notable exceptions, politicians have not always rushed to claim succession from John Redmond or the Irish Parliamentary Party. Yet, despite this, the Irish Party provided models of organisation and tactics for achieving political aims, even if successors which utilised them had to do so in very different contexts. This paper examines the persistence of Irish Party organisation in the Free State and Northern Ireland as well as drawing comparison with parties elsewhere. It is in considering these contexts, this paper argues that the IPP’s successes, failures, and collapse provide lessons for any party negotiating periods of political, social or economic change.
Tuesday, 24th September 2024
(opens in a new window)Dr Serena Laiena | Chair: Teddy Power
Ad Astra Fellow, UCD School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics
‘The Training of Professional Actresses in Early Modern Italy’
- Abstract: Around the 1560s, Italian private and public stages began to be trodden by extremely talented women. The first professional actresses in modern history swiftly monopolised the attention of sixteenth-century spectators. Historical sources attest to their exceptional rhetorical skills, their ability to interpret and embody a wide range of often contrasting emotions, and their talent for dancing, singing, and playing musical instruments. But how did they acquire these skills? How much do we know about their training? This talk will retrace the hypotheses advanced so far in relation to actresses’ training. It will then consider how the correspondence by and about professional actresses can enrich this picture, leading to postulating the existence of an original educational system, hybrid in nature, specific to actresses, and organically linked to their liminal status, on the threshold between high cultural circles and the piazza.
Thursday, 10th October 2024
Dr Matt Prout | Chair: Mathieu Bokestael
IRC Postdoctoral Fellow, UCD School of English, Drama & Film, and HI Resident Scholar
‘The Project of Autoliterature’: Beyond the Theory and Practice of Life
- Abstract: From St Augustine to Audre Lorde, autobiographical writing has been a place where authors have explored and explained the relationship between their thought and their life. Contemporary autofiction and autotheory makes this relationship an explicit thematic and formal focus by situating the writing of the text within a larger ‘project’ that the author is committed to. This project cannot be understood in terms of a rigid boundary between theory (or thought) and practice (or life). Rather the project entails a form of ‘praxis’ that is both intellectual and practical – it encompasses the writing of the text itself as much as the events in the life that the text represents.
Tuesday, 22nd October 2024
(opens in a new window)Dr Aidan O’Malley | Chair: Tim Groenland
University of Rijeka, Croatia and HI Visiting Scholar
Against Respectability: Reading Hubert Butler’s Essays on Croatia
- Abstract: Hubert Butler has been largely overlooked in discussions about the transnational dimensions of Irish Studies. Having said that, this minor and peripheral role may well be apposite for a writer who worked in what might be considered a ‘minor’ literary genre—the essay—and whose focus was on peripheries and minorities. This talk will concentrate on the essays that emerged from his experiences in Croatia and Yugoslavia in the 1930s and ’40s, and will examine how his time there informed, in particular, his perception of nationalism and the relationship between the church and the state. Butler brought these insights to bear on his understanding of Ireland and, in exploring how he did this, it will be argued that scholarship on Butler has tended to obscure the central ethical thrust of his work by framing it in overly sectarian terms.
Tuesday, 12th November 2024
Dr Carline Klijnman | Chair: Matt Prout
UCD School of Philosophy and HI Resident Scholar
“Who Knows? The Procedural Character of the Epistemic Crisis”
- Abstract: In this talk I will summarize my broad research agenda, going over some of the main insights generated so far and anticipate further directions of research. Recently, both academic and public debate have shown increased concern for the so-called ‘epistemic crisis’, characterized by the rise of post-truth politics, conspiracy theories, misinformation, etc. Prominent in this literature is a focus on the epistemic pollution (the nature and spread of misinformation, fake news, alternative facts, etc.), resulting problematic individual epistemic attitudes (e.g. increasing levels of false beliefs or ignorance) and their effects on the quality of political outcomes (e.g. misinformation is said to have played a major role in the Brexit-vote and the 2016 US presidential election). Often proposed remedies include fact-checking, making credible information better accessible and improving media literacy.
My research shifts the focus in this debate to features of our epistemic environment that affect norms of information-exchange, the social mechanisms that influences our credibility appraisals of information sources, and the way these factors affect the procedural fairness of political decision-making. I utilize tools from the ethics and epistemology of testimony to offer a new perspective on the nature of the epistemic crisis and its impact on democratic legitimacy and offer a different approach to improving epistemic structures and individual epistemic capacities.
Thursday, 14th November 2024
(opens in a new window)Prof. Andy Carolin | Chair: Bianca Cataldi
Department of English at the University of Johannesburg and Research Fellow, Maynooth University
"It's Wall-to-Wall Lesbians Out There": Locating Peripheral Sexualities in Historical Fiction from Northern Ireland
- Abstract: This paper explores a newly emergent narrative positioning for minor or secondary queer characters whose sexuality is incidental, rather than thematic, and who exist at the edges of a text. Peripheral sexualities differ from earlier dominant modes of queer representation. These earlier modes consist of texts that feature either essentialist queer sidekick characters, on the one hand, or auto/ethnographic narratives that explicitly centre queer lives, communities, and cultures, on the other. In this paper, I trace how this new narrative positioning is being deployed in recent historical fiction that centres on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, focusing especially on Anna Burns’s award-winning novel Milkman (2018) and Lisa McGee’s teen drama Derry Girls (2018-2022).
Andy Carolin (PhD) is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Post-Apartheid Same-Sex Sexualities: Restless Identities in Literary and Visual Culture (Routledge 2021).
***Please note date change***
Monday, 18th November 2024
Maika Nguyen | Chair: Clare Ní Cheallaigh
IRC Postgrad, UCD School of Languages, Cultures & Linguistics, and HI Resident Scholar
The Returnee as Tourist (Guide) in the Autofiction of Dany Laferrière and Anna Moï
- Abstract: The perpetuation of the colonial gaze in the international tourism industry has already been brought to light, with tourism having been described as the “hedonistic face of neo-colonialism”. More recent research stresses that changes in migration, increased mobility and the effects of globalisation have consequently also changed both tourism and postcolonial discourse. This paper draws on that research to examine the narratives of two contemporary francophone migrant writers who have experienced displacement and then written autofictional accounts of their return: Dany Laferrière, from Haiti, and Anna Moï, from Vietnam. I argue that, in these texts, the diasporic returnee moves between categories – such as ‘local’, ‘tourist’, ‘other’. As they continuously negotiate their relationship with the homeland, they invite reconsiderations of the relationship between diaspora and ‘home’, in which return is tied not just to nostalgia or identity, but also to consumption and exploitation.
SPRING TRIMESTER
Tuesday, 11th February 2025
Lucas Dijker| Chair: Carline Klijnman
UCD School of Philosophy and HI Resident Scholar
'The Four Dimensions of Epistemic Populism’
- Abstract: The rise of populism has sparked widespread concern about the backlash against (scientific) experts. A frequently cited example is that of Michael Gove’s remark during an interview that “the people in this country have had enough of experts”. Similarly, Donald Trump asserted that his gut instinct held greater authority than scientific evidence for managing the COVID-19 pandemic. The academic literature often characterises populism’s relationship with experts and expertise through two central claims: (i) populists have a general suspicion of experts of all kinds and (ii) populism attempts to present alternatives to the established understanding of methods of science. But how plausible are these depictions of populism? I argue that although these two claims are correct, they do not exhaust the epistemic dimensions of populism. The literature’s characterisation of populism’s relationship with (scientific) experts and expertise is often vague about the kinds of expertise to which it refers and unjustifiably broad in its generalisations. Instead, by drawing on illustrative examples, I suggest that populist actors and rhetoric frequently appeal to various kinds of experts and expertise.
Tuesday, 25th February 2025
Teddy Power| Chair: Thinley Chodon
UCD School of English, Drama & Film and HI Resident Scholar
‘Queering Fantasy’
- Abstract: This paper maps the emergence of a new genre of queer fantasy in the 2020s, focusing on an emergent narrative positioning of queerness and queer characters in 2020s telefantasy adaptations. Series such as The Wheel of Time (Amazon Prime Video; 2021-), The Witcher (Netflix; 2019-) and House of the Dragon(HBO; 2022-), are not shying away from bringing queer characters to the forefront of their narratives. Adaptation as process and product can produce normative texts that shore up cultural binaries, but it also contains the potential for radical rewritings and rereadings. These series enable a diverse range of queer readings in which to examine the opportunities offered by fantasy to engage and play with sexuality, to challenge and disrupt the commonly heteronormative nature of fantasy as a genre.
Thursday, 6th March 2025
Dr Hironao Kobayashi| Chair: Professor Anne Fogarty
Toyo Gakuen University, Tokyo, Japan, and HI Visiting Academic
‘How James Joyce Has Changed the Implied Meaning of Hospitality: FromDublinerstoUlysses’
- Abstract: It is often said that hospitality is one of the biggest themes in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), which depicts the symbolic father-son relationship between the young alter ego of the author, Stephen Dedalus aged 22, and the middle-aged Jewish-Irish, Leopold Bloom aged 38. But the significance of hospitality is implied in Joyce’s de facto debut work, Dubliners (1914). In this workshop, I would like to present my tentative hypothesis that the change of Joyce’s usage of the hospitality-related words would be concerned not only with his days in Trieste from 1905 to 1915, but also with his unhappy and poverty-stricken days in Rome from July 1906 to March 1907, when his ideas about “The Dead” began their gestation.
Tuesday, 25th March 2025
Dr Verity Burke | Chair: Silvia Ivani
UCD School of English, Drama & Film, and HI Resident Scholar
‘Extinction in the Museum: Re-Membering Absent Animals’
- Abstract:Our natural history museums are populated by representations of animals. When we think about the animal artefacts we encounter in the museum space, the objects that jump to mind might include taxidermy mounts in convincingly lifelike poses, articulated skeletons revealing an animal’s anatomical structure, or spirit specimens, the liquid-filled jars in which ghostly bodies float. But in these museums, with their emphasis on the material specimen, how do we remember animals to whose remains we no longer have access, and what stories do we tell about and with them?
This is a more common problem than might be expected during the sixth mass extinction, when non-human life is disappearing at an unprecedented rate. Yet this is not a new issue. Dodos and dinosaurs, for example, are both icons of extinction. We have few material remains for these animals, and have never ourselves witnessed them in life; yet objects representing these animals play a central role in natural history museum narratives about extinction. This paper investigates the re-membering of the absent non-human body in heritage space, and argues that analysing the objects which do not contain the remains of the animal depicted can lend us new insight into stories surrounding extinction, authenticity and remembering in the museum.
Verity Burkeis an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of literary analysis, the environmental humanities, and the museum sector. She currently holds the John Pollard Newman Fellowship in Climate Change and the Arts at University College Dublin, which investigates the representation of polycrises such as biodiversity loss and anthropogenic environmental damage in our heritage institutions.
Monday, 31st March 2025
(opens in a new window)Dr Brady Ryan| Chair: Megan Kuster
Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, University of Connecticut
‘Sufism in the Arabic Historical Novel: Ethics, Politics, and Specters’
- Abstract:Brady Ryan presents his research on post-Arab Spring historical novels to show how prominent 19th-century anticolonial Sufi figures such as the Sudanese Mahdi and the Algerian Emir Abdelkader appear in contemporary literature. He argues that these Sufi figures simultaneously reframe modern and colonial histories and make ethical and political demands upon the present. In doing so, they inaugurate a new critical horizon for the Arabic historical novel.
Asst. Prof. Brady Ryan is currently writing a book on post-Arab Spring historical novels. His scholarship and literary translations have appeared in Middle Eastern Literatures, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Migrating Minds: Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism, Encyclopedia of Islam, Words Without Borders, and The Los Angeles Review. - This event forms part of a staff mobility funded by the Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility Programme. Find out more at Erasmus+ ICM at UCD.
Tuesday, 8th April 2025 ***This seminar will start @ 1pm sharp***
Dr Tapasya Narang| Chair: Dr Jivanta Schottli (Director of Ireland India institute, DCU)
UCD School of English, Drama & Film, and HI Resident Scholar
‘Transnational Modernism: Comparing Small Press Productions from Dublin and Bombay (1960s-70s)’
- Abstract: In Death of a Discipline, Spivak insists that Comparative Literature transcends postcolonialism’s preoccupations with nationalism; instead she envisions ‘heterogeneous continentalism but also […] an internationalism that can, today, shelter planetarity.’ Spivak’s concept of planetarity advocates for a move away from study of mere literary responses to colonialism and imperialism: ‘from the politics of hostility toward a politics of friendship’. Seeking inspiration from Spivak’s concept of planetarity, Susan Stanford Friedman moves beyond Eurocentric conceptions of modernism and perceives its settings away from the early twentieth century responses to capitalism. In defining modernism, she looks for ‘aesthetic movements or specific instances that innovatively engage with the specific modernities of their space/time/culture, particularly for those whose forms as well as content push against or reinvent inherited conventions.
The interactive seminar will reflect upon Spivak’s and Friedman’s calls to study transnational literary movements that transcend Eurocentric literary periodicity as well as postcolonialism’s preoccupations with nationalism. Following a discussion on the scope and appeal of transnational comparisons, I will reflect on my comparative lens to study 1960s and 70s small press productions from Dublin and Bombay. The parallel study of Irish and Indian literary output draws attention to common aesthetic visions that shaped in response to the transitional and modernizing contexts in post-independence India as well as Ireland. As Eve Patten explains, in mid-century, Ireland was involved in ‘maintaining through its writers a constant vigilance over its own social and ideological constituencies.’ In India, the authors grappled with Congress party’s emphasis on modernisation and expansion of the industrial base. I will provide insights into my research that highlights how Irish and Indian authors in the 1960s and 70s adopted modernist tactics, such as ironizing, formal innovations, bricolage, juxtapositions, and above all heightened self-reflexivity, in response to post-independence modernities in their respective countries.
Monday, 14th April 2025
Prof. Raymond Blake | Chair: Alexander Kroll
Professor of History, University of Regina, Canadaand HI Visiting Academic
‘Donald Trump, Canada and the Shaping of a National Identity’
- Abstract:Creating solidarity in any nation through a shared national identity and national stories is a highly political phenomenon. Drawing heavily on his recent book, Prime Minister and the Shaping of a National Identity in Canada, Raymond Blake shows how, since Canada’s founding in 1867, the priority of each prime was to construct a national narrative and national identity through their speeches and rhetoric to create a sense of community that would hold the diverse and regionalized nation together. It worked for more than 150 years but beginning in 2016 Canada became increasingly polarized and less willing to work together as the pride citizens expressed in being Canadian declined dramatically. That was … until President Donald J. Trump announced he wanted Canada as the 51st state and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau could be its governor.
This seminar is co-sponsored by the UCD Centre for Canadian Studies
Wednesday, 23rd April 2025
Dr Francesco Milella | Chair: Tapasya Narang
UCD School of Music and HI Resident Scholar
‘Navigating turbulent waters: Italian opera and the trauma of modernity at the end of the Spanish empire (1800-1830)’
- Abstract:This paper explores the operatic landscape of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Spain and its empire through the careers of two key composers of the time Stefano Cristiani (1770-1825) and Manuel García (1775-1832). Against the backdrop of Spain’s imperial decline and the post-Napoleonic transformation of the Atlantic world, the study examines how operatic practices navigated tensions between local traditions and transnational networks. Drawing on literary and musical sources of the time, it interrogates prevailing European Enlightenment narratives that framed Spain as culturally stagnant, while foregrounding the dynamic interplay of vernacular and foreign repertoires.
This paper argues that Spanish music theatre, often criticised for its lack of coherence and prestige, functioned as a critical space for negotiating cultural identity and modernity. By situating Spanish opera within a global framework, the paper challenges its marginalisation in traditional music historiography and positions it as a vibrant, transatlantic phenomenon that mediated the anxieties of a crumbling empire and emerging nation-states. Through this lens, the careers of Cristiani and García shed light on opera’s role in shaping the cultural and political imaginaries of the Spanish-speaking world at a crucial time in its history.
Thursday, 24th April 2025
Bryony Smith | Chair: Assoc. Prof. Philip Cottrell
Visiting HI Scholar (Turing Scheme Scholar)
‘UK museums and colonialism: how not to curate an exhibition’
- Abstract: In our collective consciousness, museums are open, inclusive spaces which strive to engender better and more progressive cultural understanding and societal harmony. So why do they constantly come under fire in the debate around the legacies of colonialism?
Rarely a week goes by without new commentary addressing the restitution of cultural heritage collected in colonial contexts. Meanwhile decisive action concerning contested objects is slow-moving.
This talk will argue that rather than incidental elements in colonial expansion, the collecting and display of cultural heritage acquired in conflict was integral to the imperial system. Taking a fresh look at objects at the heart of this debate, we will chart the different ways collections have been displayed and interpreted as Britain’s view of its imperial past has shifted over time. An understanding and acceptance of their role within evolving paradigms may be the only way museums can move forward in the post-colonial era.
- Bryony Smith is a visiting scholar at the Humanities Institute, University College Dublin, supported by funding from the Turing Scheme. Bryony has degrees in art history and museum curating from the universities of Edinburgh and Sussex and is currently a postgraduate student at the Warburg Institute, University of London. She has worked in several museums in the UK including the V&A, National Gallery, British Museum and National Portrait Gallery.