Explore UCD

UCD Home >

Research Events

2024/25 Research Events

Matthew Hilborn (UCD), Thursday, 6th March at 3 pm, D301

“It doesn’t move me like you move me”: Romance, Dating Apps, and Hybrid Intimacies in Spanish Romantic Comedies on Netflix

This paper examines the interplay of physical and digital intimacies in contemporary Spanish romantic comedies on Netflix, focusing predominantly on the LGBTQ+ series Smiley (2022–) and the heterosexual love story I Love You, Stupid (Laura Mañá, 2020). Situating their portrayals of app-mediated dating within broader debates on the platformisation of both affect (Van Dijck et al. 2018) and romcom itself -- following the romantic comedy’s global “renaissance” (Wilkinson 2023, Idle 2024) on streaming platforms - it explores how these works navigate onscreen tensions between somatic and cyber-mediated romance.

Through split-screen editing, parallel narration, and diegetic emoji use, both works visualise the barriers and resolutions in modern relationships, portraying new “hybrid ecologies” of dating (Licoppe et al. 2016). However, rather than affirming data-driven, algorithmic matching as a “digital fix” for romantic "messiness" (Bandinelli & Gandini 2022), these romcoms critique the online marketisation and quantification of relationships, which reframe partners as self-optimising entrepreneurs.

While these narratives reflect broader “post-romantic” shifts in screen media (San Filippo 2021) and the erosion of “couple confidence” (Harrod, Leonard & Negra 2021), this paper argues that they ultimately reaffirm conventional ideals of monogamy, stability, and long-term commitment as the (only) “good life” (Ahmed 2006, 2010). Their simultaneous embrace of digital "relationshopping" (Heino et al. 2018) and ambivalence toward casual, non-exclusive encounters reveals a complex negotiation between contemporary dating cultures and enduring romcom tropes, illuminating the ambivalent dimensions of Netflix's reinvention of the genre. 

Katherine Brown (UCD), Tuesday 1st April at 3 pm, D301

Architecture and Madness in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote

The eponymous protagonist of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605 and 1615) is perhaps most well-known for his madness-induced exploits on the open road. While critics have largely interpreted architectural spaces in the novel as antidotes to Don Quixote’s insanity, placing physical limits on his imagination and ability to impose the codes of chivalric fiction onto his reality, I argue that architecture in fact serves as one of the most potent representations of Don Quixote’s madness in the novel. I suggest that Cervantes subverts classical and Renaissance-era understandings of architecture as both a symbol of rationality and a discipline that imposes logical organisation onto physical spaces. He instead attributes metaphorical architectural features (doors, rooms, and attics) to Don Quixote’s insanity itself and inscribes those features onto several of the novel’s physical spaces, thus extending the mechanisms of madness beyond Don Quixote’s own experience and perception of reality. Through an examination of a selection of these metaphorical and literal architectures, I conclude that Cervantes repurposes architectural language to accommodate the unconventional worldview of his protagonist and to probe the effects of Don Quixote’s madness on the supposedly “rational” world around him.

Nicholas Fairbank (Canadian musician, UCD Adjunct), Tuesday 8th April at 3 pm, D301

The Myth of the Mad Organist in 19th-century French Literature (and beyond)

The myth of the “mad” organist illustrated by, amongst others, Jules Verne in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and Gaston Leroux in The Phantom of the Opera, grew out of a change in the social and religious roles of the pipe organ in 19th-century France.  In a study of 35 works of French literature written between 1830 and 1910 it has been interesting to analyze this development in the context of the technical modifications realized by organ builders such as Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811-99) that enabled the organ to rival the symphony orchestra and to become a truly Romantic instrument. Looking forward to the present day, we see this same myth illustrated in contemporary popular film, computer games and anime, and a revival of the pipe organ's use outside the sacred context.

Lindsay Thistle (Wilfrid Laurier University/Craig Dobbin Fellow), Tuesday 22nd April at2 pm, D301

Violence, Victims, and Heroes: Early Canadian and Irish Plays about World War II

Plays about WWII, as cultural representations of violence, weave their way deeply into society. They shape how we see the events, identify with them, and make sense of them. Furthermore, narratives of war change and transform in relation to shifting cultural, political, economic, historical, and national priorities of the moment. Theatre, both ephemeral and live, is especially pertinent when interrogating memories of and societal connections to WWII. Through play recovery, analysis, and historicization, I will investigate how WWII was dramatized in the decades immediately following the end of the conflict. Plays about WWII in its aftermath received little attention, especially when they diverged from the heroic, Manichean narratives of good and evil that dominated politically and in the media. I will begin to unveil these overlooked texts and consider how they rehabilitate our understanding of cultural and societal formulations of WWII. What stories are told/silenced/forgotten? How are key events depicted? How are “heroes,” “victims,” and “enemies” portrayed and mythologized? Plays are “as much a comment on the playwright’s own times as on the periods about which they are ostensibly written” (Lindenberger, 1975, 5). Therefore, how do these plays represent discourses of the post-war period? How do they interact with WWII historiography? Important themes for analysis include survival and/vs. devastation; representations of national, cultural, and political ideologies; individual and/vs. collective memory and identity; and violence, trauma, and loss.

Research Events 2023-24

SLCL Research Series
15 October, 4.30 pm (D101)
ChristophNeuenschwander,  Language and identity in Hawai‘i: Pidgin as a marker of community and differentiation
 
6 November, 1 pm(D301)
Mary Gallagher, Reading Colette Fellous in Ireland's Global University
 
14 November, 4.30 pm  (D101)
Alessandro Benati, Rethinking Grammar Instruction: The case for structured input
28th November 2023, D301
"'Morgentrank' and Malt Extract: Sweets and Pastries in a WWI Manuscript Cookery Book"
Dr Helga Müllneritsch (SLCL German)
14th November 2023, D301
"Modernist Diaries 1915-1919: Research Surprises and a Case Study"
Dr Valeria Taddei (SLCL Italian)
3rd October 2023, D301
"Relational Responses to Trauma in Twenty-First-Century Spanish and French Women’s Writing"
Dr Hannie Lawlor (SLCL Spanish)
21st September 2023, D301
‘The Rim of Creole Language in the Poetry of Gilbert Gratiant.‘
Dr Malik Noël-Ferdinand of the Université des Antilles (Martinique)
Dr Noël-Ferdinand is in UCD this month on two-week teaching and  research exchange visit under the auspices of Erasmus+. His  seminar (in English) will consider the work of twentieth-century Martiniquais poet Gilbert Gratiant.

Research Events 2022-23

25th April @ 5.30pm in D301
Actresses in Early Modern Italy: Managers, Mediators, Mothers
Dr Serena Laiena (SLCL Postdoctoral Research Fellow)
Chair: Dr Síofra Pierse
14th November @ 3pm in D301
Constructing Transnational and Transgenerational Communities: Activism and Wellbeing in Natasha A. Kelly's  Sisters and Souls Series.
Katherine Calvert (UCD SLCL, PostDoc in German)
22th November @ 3pm ONLINE
Bourgeois Nights: Nocturnal Paris in Cultural Productions of the July Monarchy (1830-1848)
Charlotte Berkery (UCD SLCL, French)
18th October @ 5pm ONLINE

Cinematic Writing: Theories and Approaches
Dr Marco Bellardi (UCD SLCL Italian), the seminar will be chaired by Assoc Prof Douglas Smith (UCD SLCL French)

Crossing Cultures 2022/23

26 April @ 5:30pm ONLINE
Literature, ethics and the law: a literary trial in early-twentieth-century Italy
Cristina Savettieri, University of Pisa

"In my talk, I shall discuss the trial against Filippo Tommaso Marinetti that took place in Milan in 1910. The writer was accused of obscenity for his book Mafarka il futurista [Mafarka the Futurist] published in France in 1909 and then translated into Italian in 1910. The trial is a touchstone in the process of emergence of an autonomous literary field in Italy: for the first time a book was defended in court as an artistic object that could not be subjected to the law and public morality. By analyzing the documents of the trial against the backdrop of the social, juridical and cultural context of the time, I aim to reflect on the features of the Avantgarde in early twentieth-century Italy and, more broadly, on the conflict between art and the law."

30th March @ 6pm ONLINE
Cultural Production as Political Activism: Creative Potentials and Precarities

We are delighted to present the following two papers, which will be followed by questions and discussion chaired by Dr Katherine Calvert (School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, UCD)

Another (Art) World Is Possible: Writing and Rehearsing against Precarisation

Dr Carlos Garrido Castellano (University College Cork)

This presentation focuses on contemporary literature concerned with reinventing and rearticulating creative eco/systems. It argues that the recent interest in the art world by contemporary writers at a global scale has to do with the need to r eimagine the economy of cultural production beyo nd neoliberal and neo-colonial prerogatives. If neoliberalisation can be related with “artistic capitalism”, then our current, Capitalocenic times urge for a redefinition of issues of value, privilege and individuation that could help imagining and materialising liveable futures beyond systemic (yet selective) precarisation. This paper will examine recent activist actions concerning artworks and artistic institutions side by side a body of speculative literary fiction that is investing in a critical reconsideration of the social relevance of creative processes.

Carlos Garrido Castellano works at University College Cork, where he co ordinates a BA programme on Portuguese Studies and the MA in Global Languages and Cultures. He is the author of Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art (2019), Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future (2021) and Literary Fictions of the Contemporary Art System (2022). He has recently edited two special issues on anticolonial and decolonial aesthetics (one in Third Text in 2020 and another in Interventions Journal in 2022) as well as a volume on contemporary museums and coloniality in the Iberian context (2022). He is currently working on three projects: a volume on cultural labour and creative paradigms in contemporary literatures in Portuguese; another on the genealogies of mode rnism in the Caribbean, and a new monograph on ecological crisis, alt-right politics and the subversive potential of the carnivalesque. He is also a research associate at the University of Johannesburg.

Between “Too Trans” and “Not Trans Enough” – The Politics of Programming, Funding, and Identity at the Film Festivals TranScreen (Amsterdam) and Transforming Cinema (Sheffield)

Dr Cyd Sturgess (Utrecht University)

This paper examines the potential of transgender film festivals to serve as sites for the construction and contestation of identities and communi ties. Taking TranScreen (Amsterdam) and Transforming Cinema (Sheffield) as the springboard for this discussion, this paper draws on ethnographic research and insights from the fields of post-humanism and festival studies to outline the opportunities, risks and precarities involved in creating film festivals for transgender, non-binary and gender non-conforming people. Focusing on the definition, articulation and curation of transness at these two festivals – as well as the socio-economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on so-called minority festivals more broadly – this paper situates activist strategies within two specific cultural contexts, before exploring the transnational confluences that emerge through their collective claims for equality.

Cyd Sturgess is a Leverhulme pos tdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University. Their research project examines themes of precarity, identity, and community in relation to transgender film festivals. As well as directing a documentary based on this research, Cyd is currently exploring the ethnographic possibilities of cruising for the archive and has recently published their first monograph Different from the Others: German and Dutch Discourses of Queer Femininity and Female Desire 1918-1940 (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2023).

2nd March @ 6pm ONLINE
A pen of one’s own: The legacy of Women Letter-Writers in 17th-century France
Dr. Nathalie Freidel (Wilfrid Laurier University) and Emma Gauthier-Mamaril (Université de Montréal), followed by a Q &A conversation moderated by Dr. Janée Allsman (University College Dublin)

8th December @ 6pm ONLINE
Arts, Genre and Gender: Intersections in the Italian Baroque
Roundtable with Jessica Goethals (University of Alabama) and Marianna Liguori (University of Padua)

24th November @ 7pm ONLINE
Mediating & Translating Taboo in Contemporary France and Italy 
Roundtable with Erica Bellia (University of Cambridge) and Nadine Gassie (Literary translator)

10th November @ 6pm ONLINE
Revolutionary Women in a Revolutionary Country. Gender and Class during the Portuguese Estado Novo and the Carnation Revolution
A talk with Giulia Strippoli (Nova University of Lisbon)

Organised by: Janée Allsman, Katherine Calvert, Sara Delmedico, Serena Laiena, Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, Valeria Taddei

7th April 2022, 5pm

Conversation with the Quebec author Fanie Demeule
Hosted by: Prof Michael Brophy

Zoom link: (opens in a new window)https://ucd-ie.zoom.us/j/68162131412?pwd=Vm1RQVdVOFllaFJwTXFyUFhmb255QT09

25th November 2021, 5pm 

'Turning Back to the Mystics: W. B. Yeats and Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Religious Modernism' - Dr Nuria de Cos Lara

ABSTRACT: In his lectures in the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Juan Ramón Jiménez contended that literary modernism was born out of theological modernism, a Catholic, European movement that sought to revise traditional Catholic teachings in the light of modern-day cultural advancements. While the efforts of theological modernism were short lived within the Catholic Church, they had an impact that can be perceived in the works of Juan Ramón Jiménez, amongst other writers of the period. While there have not been many attempts to outline a clear field of Modernism and Christianity studies, this has started to change in recent years. This paper examines the poetry of W. B. Yeats and Juan Ramón Jiménez to find that they turn back to the Spanish Mystic tradition to creatively support their unorthodox religious position within Modernism. It claims that the Neo-Mysticism of both writers is one of intense individualization to achieve contact with divinity.

11th November 2021, 5pm 

Video Essay: ‘Hunks in Habits: Muscular Christianity and Spanish National Television' - Dr Mary Farrelly

ABSTRACT: While Catholic schoolgirls have long been fans of photographer Piero Pazzi’s annual Calendario Romano (better known as the Hot Priest Calendar), the rest of the world has now also been awakened to the cinematic potential of hunks in habits through Andrew Scott’s portrayal of The Hot Priest in Fleabag Season 2. The character has renewed reflections around the cultural potency of the celibate male religious figure, raising questions that also need to be answered in the context of contemporary Spanish hagiographies where the rugged masculinity of clergy is often asserted as the linchpin of their Christian values. This paper will discuss the fetishization of athleticism and virility as moral virtues in and the RTVE hagiographies Tarancón, el Quinto Mandamiento (2011), Descalzo sobre la tierra roja (2013), and Vicente Ferrer (2013). 

21st October 2021, 5pm 

'Elevating the honour of the screen from its degraded depths’: The distribution and exhibition of European religious films in 1950s Ireland' - Dr Sarah Culhane

2020/21 - Trimester 2

25th February 2021, 5pm
‘Ensuring a fair hearing: the challenges of collecting earwitness testimony’
Dr Sarah Kelly

4th March 2021, 5pm
‘Édouard Glissant Is Asking You to Think Otherwise: on Glissant's Attempts to Create a Caribbean Philosophy’
Dr Michael Wiedorn

25th March 2021, 5pm

‘“Contrabando y Traición”: A Border Ballad and its Heroine’
Dr Pascale Baker

2020/21 - Trimester 1

5.15pm, Thursday 22 October 
Dr Douglas Smith
‘Magic Roundabout or Vicious Circle? The Paris Ringroad as Cultural Chronotope’

5pm, Thursday 12 November 
Dr Sabine Strumper-Krobb
‘Women and the transmission of Scandinavian literature, c. 1900’

5pm, Thursday 26 November
Dr Francesco Lucioli
‘Transmutations of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso’

2019/20 - Semester 2

  • Thursday, 27 February, 5pm, D301, Newman Building
    Dr Stephen Lucek (UCD)
    ‘Linguistic Discrimination and the Dublin Secondary School’
  • Thursday, 5 March, 4pm, D301, Newman Building
    Dr Philip Johnston (UCD)
    ‘Form, Frenzy, Folly and... Falsehood(?) in Lorca's Romancero gitano’
  • Friday, 27 March, 9am - 5pm, D301, Newman Building
    SLCL Graduate Conference
    Talks by Graduate Taught and Research Students
  • Thursday 2 April, 4pm, D301, Newman Building
    Natasha Kanapé Fontaine
    Interview and Q&A session
    In conjunction with the Franco-Irish Literary Festival
  • Wednesday 8 April, 5.15pm, D301 Newman Building
    Professor Suzan van Dijk (Huygens Institute for Dutch History, Amsterdam)
    'Digitising the Humanities: online publication of Dutch-Swiss Isabelle de Charrière (1740-1805) correspondence'
  • Thursday 16 April, 4pm, D301, Newman Building
    ‘The transmission of Scandinavian literature around 1900’ (UCD)
    Dr Sabine Strumper-Krobb
  • Saturday 18th April, 10 a.m. – 5pm, D301, Newman Building
    ADEFFI Postgraduate symposium
    (Association des études françaises et francophones d’Irlande)

2019/20 - Semester 1

  • Author and poet Gabrielle Alioth presenting her new poetry collection The Poet’s Coat, with translator Fred Kurer, Thursday 10 October 2019, 4pm, D301
  • ‘Bodies, Identities and Languages on the threshold of local and global: Elena Ferrante in a Global Context’, Prof. Ursula Fanning, Dr Enrica Ferrara, Emanuela Caffè (UCD), Thursday 24 October 2019, 5pm D301
  • ‘Hitler's French Literary Afterlives,1945-2017’, Dr Manu Braganca, UCD, Talk and book launch, Thursday 7 November 2019, 5pm D301
  • 'On the Ruins of Empire: Reading the Vestiges of the Colonial Past', Prof Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool), Friday 15 November, 2pm, Humanities Institute
  • 'James Joyce as an Italian-Irish intellectual', Dr Antonio Bibbo' (University of Trento), Thursday 21 November 2019, 5pm, D301
Foundation for Italian Studies events:
  • 'Beyond Dante: Finding Feminine Voices in Medieval Italy', Dr David Bowe (UCC), Wednesday 2 October, 6.30 pm, Th. 1 Newman
  • ‘All Irish in the eyes of Mussolini: Irish theatre in Italy in the WWII years’, Dr Antonio Bibbo' (University of Trento), Wednesday 20 November, 6.30 pm Th. 1 Newman
2019/20 - Semester 2
  • Thursday, 27 February, 5pm, D301, Newman Building
    Dr Stephen Lucek (UCD)
    ‘Linguistic Discrimination and the Dublin Secondary School’
  • Thursday, 5 March, 4pm, D301, Newman Building
    Dr Philip Johnston (UCD)
    ‘Form, Frenzy, Folly and... Falsehood(?) in Lorca's Romancero gitano’
  • Friday, 27 March, 9am - 5pm, D301, Newman Building
    SLCL Graduate Conference
    Talks by Graduate Taught and Research Students
  • Thursday 2 April, 4pm, D301, Newman Building
    Natasha Kanapé Fontaine
    Interview and Q&A session
    In conjunction with the Franco-Irish Literary Festival
  • Wednesday 8 April, 5.15pm, D301 Newman Building
    Professor Suzan van Dijk (Huygens Institute for Dutch History, Amsterdam)
    'Digitising the Humanities: online publication of Dutch-Swiss Isabelle de Charrière (1740-1805) correspondence'
  • Thursday 16 April, 4pm, D301, Newman Building
    ‘The transmission of Scandinavian literature around 1900’ (UCD)
    Dr Sabine Strumper-Krobb
  • Saturday 18th April, 10 a.m. – 5pm, D301, Newman Building
    ADEFFI Postgraduate symposium
    (Association des études françaises et francophones d’Irlande)

2018/19 - Semester 1

  • ‘Turmoil / Dans la Tourmente: Instability and Insecurity in 18th-century France’, International Conference, organised by Dr Siofra Pierse and postgraduates Emma Dunne and Edward O’Sullivan, 7-8th September, Humanities Institute
  • ‘New Formations of the Italian Self: stories of subjectivity across boundaries in recent Italian migration narratives’, Professor Jennifer Burns, University of Warwick, 20th September, 6pm Theatre R, Newman (organised by the Italian Foundation)
  • ‘Ethnography as transnationalizing practice in contemporary fictions in Italian’, Professor Jennifer Burns, University of Warwick, 21st September, 2pm J104, Newman (organised by the Italian Foundation)
  • ‘The Global Turn: Post-War Modernism and its Regimes of Circulation’, Professor Tom Avermaete,
    co-organised by Dr Douglas Smith and Dr Kathleen James-Chakraborty (School of Art History and Cultural Policy), 8th October, 6pm
  • ‘Architects of amnesia: Spain’s Memory Wars: Irresponsible Folly or Assertion of Human Right to Remember?’, Paddy Woodworth, 18th October, 1pm, L-024 SUTH
  • ‘États présents, états futurs: French and Francophone Studies in the 21st century’, annual conference of ADEFF, l’Association des études françaises et francophones d’Irlande, co-organised by Dr Manu Braganca and Dr James Hanrahan (Trinity College Dublin), 19-20th October, D101 / 107, Newman Building
  • ‘Remembering childhood in artistic practice’, Artist Susanne Wawra, organised by Dr Gillian Pye, 5th November, 9 a.m., A 105
  • Round Table: ‘Posthumanism’, organised by Dr Enrica Ferrara with Dr Gillian Pye, Dr Jeanne Riou, Dr Douglas Smyth, Dr Tara Plunkett, 15th November, 4-6pm, D301
  • ‘Violence and Gender on the US/Mexico border’, Professor Nuala Finnegan, UCC, Thursday 15th November, 1pm, L-024 SUTH
  • ‘Conflict, Crisis and Culture’:Annual Conference of the German Studies Association of Ireland, co-organised by Dr Gillian Pye, Dr Sabine Strumper-Krobb & Dr Joseph Twist, 16-17th November (16th Nov: Goethe Institute; 17th Nov: Humanities Institute, UCD)
  • ‘Dancing between East and West: Destabilising the Subject in Feridun Zaimoglu’s Short Stories’, Dr Joseph Twist, 22nd November 4pm, D301
  • ‘Austrian Foreign Affairs: From the Viennese Congress to the Presidency of the EU-Council in 2018’; workshop organised by Anneliese Rieger, 22nd-23rd November, D301 Newman Building
  • ‘Una foschia sanguigna. Corpo e destino femminile nella narrativa delle donne in Italia da Lettera all'Editore (1945) di Gianna Manzini a Dalla parte di lei (1949) di Alba De Céspedes’, Dr Margherita Ghilardi (Florence), 29th November, Newman Th. R, 6.30pm
  • ‘Remembering Perec: forty years after La Vie mode d’emploi and Je me souviens‘, Symposium, organised by Dr Emer O’Beirne, 5th December, NUI Merrion Square
  • Introduction to Corpus Linguistics: Applied Workshop, organised by Dr Sandrine Peraldi, 6th December, 4-6pm, D301
2018/19 - Semester 2

School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics

University College Dublin Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.
T: +353 1 716 8302