Exploring Thresholds of Knowledge

This project sets out to interrogate questions of spatiality, textuality and the aesthetics of encounter. It comprises four distinct but interrelated approaches, led by teams of colleagues from across the College:

1. Reading Spaces (led by Porscha Fermanis and Sarah Comyn),

2. Fictional Spaces (led by Katherine Fama and Emer O'Beirne),

3. Textual Spaces (led by Derval Conroy and Niamh Pattwell),

and

4. Spaces of Encounter (led by Jeanne Riou and Michael Brophy).

Each strand features a symposium and public lecture, as well as a practical workshop for early career researchers. We welcome expressions of interest from colleagues in particular strands.

This project builds on the spatial turn in the humanities to investigate the spatial conditions of knowledge, culture and society across the centuries. It does so through four distinct but interrelated frameworks and approaches:

1. Reading Spaces (led by Porscha Fermanis and Sarah Comyn)

This strand engages disciplinary spaces of reading, both academic / pedagogic or more geographical (libraries, prisons, schools, mother and baby homes, and other regulatory spaces where reading takes place), asking questions both of the undisciplining of reading spaces and spatializing of reading disciplines.

15th & 16th September 2023 | 'Un/Disciplining Reading' Symposium
Keynote speaker: Prof. Christina Lupton (University of Warwick / University of Copenhagen): ‘When Your Job is to Read After Work: Novels and their Critics since 1800’

Time: 9.30am-5pm & 10am-3pm
Venues: RIA & Kilmainham Gaol

This symposium on ‘Un/Disciplining Reading’ invites colleagues working on any century, language, or cultural space to think about reading as a practice with both disciplinary modes and ways of encouraging the possibility of radical change.

Call for Papers: Un/Disciplining Reading
This symposium on ‘Un/Disciplining Reading’ invites colleagues working on any century, language, or cultural space to think about reading as a practice with both disciplinary modes and ways of encouraging the possibility of radical change.

CfP now closed | Full CfP details available here
Symposium dates: 15th-16th September 2023

2. Fictional Spaces (led by Katherine Fama and Emer O'Beirne)

This strand enquires into the construction of female spaces – architectural, social, political - in French, American and Caribbean fiction. Urban and domestic spaces, and the cultural and technical work of fictional narrative in shaping and sustaining these spaces are the key focus.

15 November 2024 | TOK Fictional Spaces Symposium | Alternative Domesticities: Reading Living Space in Geography, Text, and Media

Date: Friday, 15th November 2024
Time: 9.45am-4.45pm
Venue: NUI, 49 Merrion Square, Dublin 2

Please note: The event is free but registration is essential; please see here for registration details

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.

3. Textual Spaces (led by Derval Conroy and Niamh Pattwell)

This strand has a strong medieval and early modern focus on the notion of space as it emerges in manuscript, text, paratext and fragment and the transformative insights – and new archives - they create. Particular attention will be paid to the work of women writers and patrons, in an ongoing effort to recuperate lost voices, and to examine the interplay between gender and text.

The Textual Spaces event, Thresholds : fragment, text and paratext, will take place on May 12 - 13 2023.

Guest speakers:

Prof. Margaret Connolly (St Andrews)
Dr Carrie Griffin (University of Limerick)
Dr James Sargan University of Limerick)
Dr Hannah Ryley (University of Oxford)
Prof Lise Michel (Université de Lausanne)
Dr Dominique Jeannerod (Queen's University Belfast)
Dr Serena Laiena (University College Dublin)

This will be followed by ECR workshops on Saturday, focussing on manuscripts and digital humanities, and will include a demonstration and training by Dr Janée Allsman (UCD) in Marsh's Library on the EU-funded AI tool Transkribus ((opens in a new window)https://readcoop.eu/transkribus/).

Full programme available here
Download poster here

4. Spaces of Encounter (led by Jeanne Riou and Michael Brophy)

This strand will examine the aesthetic and ontological in framing critical discourses of encounter, both geographical and temporal (past/present).

Viral Imaginaries: Workshops with Dr Ilios Willemars | 4th-5th May | School of English, Drama and Film & Humanities Institute

Full event programme available HERE | Event poster

We are delighted to present a series of workshops with Dr Ilios Willemars ((opens in a new window)Centre for the Arts in Society, Leiden University) on May 4th and 5th (2 pm-4 pm in C218) at UCD. This series of talks was generously funded by the College of Arts and Humanities’ Thresholds of Knowledge research strand, the Humanities Institute and the School of English, Drama and Film at UCD.

In these workshops with Dr Willemars, we will explore the ways in which viral imaginaries structure political and medical life. The workshops will examine metaphors of virality and contagion in artistic, theoretical and scientific responses to disease, stigma and grief. They will examine art, literature and theory through the lens of virality on the one hand, and viral metaphors through artistic, theoretical and scientific objects on the other. The workshops understand the languages of contagion and virality as infecting art, literature and theory indiscriminately, thereby troubling the epistemic thresholds between these discourses.

In addition, Dr Willemars will deliver a masterclass (4th May @ 4.30pm, H204 HI Seminar Room) on his own research on performative protection against contagion in the International Association for Suicide Prevention's guidelines to the media.

Refreshments will be served after the workshops, and a wine reception will follow Dr Willemars' presentation.

Event organisers: Phoebe O'Leary and Mathieu Bokestael

Crossing Trans Thresholds: Negotiating the distance between trans theory and praxis in the Irish academy
Roundtable discussion | 9 May 2023, 3-5pm | Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI)

Event poster

The experience of being transgender in contemporary Ireland has not been adequately configured in Irish academia. Our event will confront this absence, by organising an interdisciplinary roundtable between individuals working and living as trans academics in Ireland. This roundtable will further seek to understand the impact transness can have on one’s work within the Irish academy, especially by including early career researchers.

We’re delighted to be joined by El Reid-Buckley (UL), Matt Kennedy (UCD), Cameron Keighron (UofG), and Dee Steve (UCD) for this discussion. The event will end with a wine reception, where the Small Trans Library will host a pop-up library table for the community.

Roundtable organised by Taylor Follett (UCD) and Caleb O’Connor (UCD) in collaboration with the UCD Humanities Institute & the Thresholds of Knowledge research strand.

Each strand features a symposium and public lecture, as well as a practical workshop for early career researchers.

We welcome expressions of interest from colleagues in particular strands, and hope to engage as many College colleagues as possible through the duration of the project from 2022-24.