AUTUMN TRIMESTER
Wednesday, 11th September 2024
(opens in a new window)(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)(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)(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)(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.