Irish Studies Session 1 - Contemporary Ireland

Paper 1: 'Immigration and the Politics of Irish Identity' by Prof Bryan Fanning (UCD School of Applied Social Science).

Paper 2: 'Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church: Why Gender, Power and Organisational Culture Matter' by Dr Marie Keenan (UCD School of Applied Social Science).

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The Book: history and practice workshop

The presentations at The book: history and practice workshop, which took place on March 12 2012 at the UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland, were recorded and are available to watch on the workshop playlist on youtube.

 

The workshop was a unique venture in knowledge transfer between historians of the book and design and typographical experts. The workshop was designed to facilitate a dynamic exhange of expertise between humanities scholars and design experts to enhance the skills capacity and professional practice of both cohorts.

The workshop enabled a formal interchange of knowledge and expertise between historians of the book and design professionals by means of a structured discussion centring on topics of mutual professional interest in book history, book design and typography. Among those who made presentations at the workshop were:

Mary Ann Bolger (DIT); Dermot McGuinne (DIT); Jason McElligott (Marsh’s Library); David Smith (IADT); Clare Bell (DIT); Hilary Kenna (IADT); Philip Maddock (Rhode Island); Anne Brady (Vermillion Design); Elizabethanne Boran (Worth Library); Peter Maybury; Phil Baines (Central St Martins). The workshop was directed by Dr Marc Caball in collaboration with Dr Mick Wilson, Director, Graduate School in Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM).

The full workshop programme is available here - http://bit.ly/GNaruy

This event was made possible through the award of an IRCHSS New Ideas Award to Dr Marc Caball.

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Bracha L. Ettinger

Title: 'Beauty in the Human: Uncanny Compassion, Uncanny Awe'.
Introduced by Rob Weatherill.

Bracha L. Ettinger is an internationally-renowned artist, working mainly in oil painting, drawing, photography and notebooks. She has exhibited her work in a large number of places around the world, including Barcelona, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Turku, London, Paris, Berlin and New York. She is also a philosopher, psychoanalyst and senior clinical psychologist. She works between Paris and Tel Aviv. This lecture provides an opportunity to see samples of her art and hear her speak about her art practice and how it both informs and is influenced by her psychoanalytic work.

‘Bracha Ettinger invites us to consider aspects of subjectivity as encounter occurring at shared borderspaces between several partial-subjects, never entirely fused nor totally lost, but sharing and processing, within difference, elements of each unknown other. This is to be stressed: the encounter is between unknown elements. Here we might find ways to think not only subjectivity in this abstracted theoretical form, but aesthetic encounters of viewers and art works, and also ethical and political relations between strange, foreign, irreducible elements of otherness in our encounters with human and even non-human events in the world’ (Griselda Pollock, ‘Thinking the Feminine: Aesthetic Practice as Introduction to Bracha Ettinger and the Concepts of Matrix and Metramorphosis’ in Theory, Culture & Society 21.5 (2004): 7.

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Professor Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen)

Title: Towards an Ecology of Materials

Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, and a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Following 25 years at the University of Manchester, where he was appointed Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology in 1995, Ingold moved in 1999 to Aberdeen, where he went on to establish the UK’s newest Department of Anthropology. Ingold has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written extensively on comparative questions of environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, as well as on the role of animals in human society, on issues in human ecology, and on evolutionary theory in anthropology, biology and history. More recently, he has been exploring the links between environmental perception and skilled practice, with a view to replacing traditional models of genetic cultural transmission with a relational approach focusing on the growth of embodied skills of perception and action within social and environmental contexts of development. These ideas are presented in his book The Perception of the Environment (2000), a collection of 23 essays written over the previous decade on the themes of livelihood dwelling and skill. Ingold’s latest research pursues three lines of inquiry that emerged from his earlier work, concerning the dynamics of pedestrian movement, the creativity of practice, and the linearity of writing. These all came together in an ESRC-funded project (2005-08), entitled ‘Explorations in the comparative anthropology of the line’. His book Lines: A Brief History was published in 2007, along with three edited collections – Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (with Elizabeth Hallam, 2007), Ways of Walking (with Jo Lee Vergunst, 2008) and Redrawing Anthropology (2011). Ingold is currently writing and teaching on issues on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His latest book, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description was published by Routledge in April 2011.

About the lecture: Both material culture studies and ecological anthropology are concerned with the material conditions of social and cultural life. Yet despite advances in each of these fields which have eroded traditional divisions between humanistic and science-based approaches, their respective practitioners continue to talk past one another in largely incommensurate theoretical languages. Through a review of recent trends in the study of material culture, the reasons for this are found to lie in: (1) a conception of the material world and the nonhuman that leaves no space for living organisms; (2) an emphasis on materiality that prioritises finished artefacts over the properties of materials, and (3) a conflation of things with objects that stops up the flows of energy and circulations of materials on which life depends. To overcome these limitations, an ecology of materials is proposed that focuses on their enrolment in form-making processes. The paper concludes with some observations on materials, mind and time.

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Professor Clair Wills (Queen Mary, University of London)

Title: ‘Sacrificed to Plot’: Naturalism and Entrapment in Post-War Irish Writing

Clair Wills’s research focuses on twentieth-century Irish literature and culture, and contemporary English, Irish and American poetry. Her most recent book, That Neutral Island, is a social and cultural history of Ireland during the Second World War, published by Faber and Harvard University Press in 2007. She edited the Contemporary Writing section of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volumes IV and V (Cork University Press, 2002). In addition to her books on Irish poetry (Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (1993), and Reading Paul Muldoon (1998)) she has published articles on poets such as Roy Fisher, Denise Riley, and Fanny Howe. She regularly reviews contemporary poetry for the Times Literary Supplement. Her current research, for which she has been awarded a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship, looks at cultural relations between Britain and Ireland in the 1950s. In collaboration with Dr Ian McBride of Kings College London Clair Wills runs the interdisciplinary London Irish Studies Seminar at the Institute of English Studies, Senate House.

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Professor John Coffey (University of Leicester)

Title: Scripture and Toleration between Reformation and Enlightenment

John Coffey is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leicester, where he has taught since 1999. He works on religion, politics and ideas in early modern Britain and America. He has published intellectual biographies of the Scottish Covenanter Samuel Rutherford and of the English Independent John Goodwin, and is the author of Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1588-1689 (2000). He has recently co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (2008) and Seeing Things their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (2009).

This event was organised in connection with the research project ‘Protestants, print and Gaelic culture in Ireland, 1567-1722’ (PI: Dr Marc Caball), which is funded by the IRCHSS and the Department of the Taoiseach.

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Professor Alec Ryrie (Durham University)

Title: From Polemic to Devotion: Tolerance and Piety in Early Modern Britain

Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University. His books include The Gospel and Henry VIII (2003), The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (2006), The Sorcerer’s Tale (2008) and The Age of Reformation (2009). He is currently working on a history of pious practice and emotion in Anglo-Scottish Protestantism during the Reformation era. His other research interests include the fluid nature of Catholicism in the mid-sixteenth century and the legacy of the Reformation period for Protestantism.

This event was organised in connection with the research project ‘Protestants, print and Gaelic culture in Ireland, 1567-1722’ (PI: Dr Marc Caball), which is funded by the IRCHSS and the Department of the Taoiseach.

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Professor Heinz Schilling (Humboldt University, Berlin)

Title: Religion and migration in early modern Europe – the Calvinist and the Sephardic experience

Professor Heinz Schilling can rightly be considered the doyen of Early Modern Historians now living. Born in Bergneustadt, he studied at the University of Cologne and took his doctorate at the University of Freiburg. After a period in the faculty of the University of Bielefeld, he held chairs at the Universities of Osnabrück and then later at Giessen. In 1992 he was appointed as first professor of Early Modern European History in the Institute of Historical Studies (Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften) at Humboldt University, Berlin. Among a very wide array of prestigious ancillary positions, Professor Schilling has served as chair of the Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, the German branch of the Society for Reformation Research, and is a corresponding member of the British Academy and a member of Academia Europaea.  Professor Schilling is the founding father of the theory of religious confessionalization, which has become one of the conceptual building blocks for historians working in the field of Early Modern History.  He is the author of a plethora of extraordinarily influential publications, including over twenty books beginning with his Niederländische Exulanten im 16. Jahrhundert in 1972, and including the seminal works on confessionalization such as Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung (1981) and  Konfessionalisierung und Staatsinteressen (2007). To many of us he is most familiar through the English language versions of his ideas such as his Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society published by Brill in 1992, the 1991 volume of essays Civic Calvinism in Northwestern Germany and the Netherlands, also published by Brill, and the 2008 volume from the 2006 Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures, Early modern European Civilisation and its political and cultural dynamics.

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Dr Ian Ker (University of Oxford)

Title: Newman's idea of a university: some misunderstandings

Ian Ker has taught both English literature and theology in universities in both the United States and Britain, where he is now Senior Research Fellow at St Benet's Hall, Oxford where he teaches in the theology faculty.  He is the author and editor of more than 20 books on Newman, including the Oxford critical edition of The Idea of a University and the standard biography, which has recently been reissued in both hardback and paperback by Oxford University Press.  He is also the author of The Catholic Revival in English Literature 1845-1961 and Mere Catholicism.  His intellectual and literary life of G. K. Chesterton was published by Oxford University Press in April.

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Dr Jeffers Engelhardt (Amherst College)

Title: The Secular Enchantments of Ethnomusicology

This talk examines the relationship of secular epistemologies and forms of modern religious practice in the cultural study of music. Drawing on fieldwork with Orthodox Christians and Pentecostals in Estonia and Kenya, Engelhardt explores ways in which secularity and the enchantments of worship and piety are deeply interdependent. Ultimately, Engelhardt suggests how the disciplinary and epistemological limits of ethnomusicology might contribute to the critical rethinking of secular critique and the project of secularism.

This event is a joint initiative of the UCD Humanities Institute and the UCD School of Music.

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Dr Patrick Geoghegan

Title: Judging Dan: the fall and rise of the reputation of Daniel O’Connell

Dr Patrick Geoghegan is Associate Dean of Research at Trinity College Dublin. He teaches in the School of Histories and Humanities and has published widely on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including books on Robert Emmet and Daniel O'Connell. He presents the award-winning 'Talking History' every Sunday night on Newstalk radio.

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Professor Robert Hohlfelder (Distinguished Guest Lecture Series)

Title: Poseidon’s deepest secrets: Deepwater Archaeology in the Mediterranean

Robert L. Hohlfelder is Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has published many articles and chapters on ancient seafaring and maritime archaeology and is the author of King Herod’s Dream: Caesarea on the Sea (with Kenneth Holum, Norton 1988) He has edited several volumes including The Maritime World of Ancient Rome (University of Michigan Press 2008). He has participated in numerous archaeological excavations, both terrestrial and maritime, including, as Senior Marine Archaeologist, the Persian War Shipwreck Survey, 2003-6 and DANAOS – Deepwater Archaeological Survey off Southern Crete, 2007-8. He has received research grants and awards from the National Geographic Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society and the University of Colorado.

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The new scientists in Ireland - a tribute to the Loebers

Rolf Loeber - 'Before and after the Guide to Irish Fiction'.

Friday, 18 March 2011

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Redrawing Dublin: interdisciplinarity and interrogation

Redrawing Dublin: Part 1
 
Redrawing Dublin: Part 2

Monday, 14 March 2011