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HII Visiting Fellowships

HII visiting fellowships are aimed at tenured humanities academics from universities outside Ireland interested in spending research leave at UCD. Fellowships will be hosted by the UCD Humanities Institute in conjunction with a host school relevant to the visiting fellow’s disciplinary affiliation and interests. The visiting fellow will be expected to maintain a presence at UCD and to deliver a public lecture, master class or graduate workshop at the HII during the course of the fellowship. Decisions on the award of fellowships will be taken by the HII Management Committee in consultation with the relevant Head of School.

HII Visiting Fellows 2012-13

Professor Guoqi Xu

History, University of Hong Kong

September - December 2012

Guoqi Xu is currently Professor of History at the University of Hong Kong, China. He received his Ph.D from Harvard University and is one of the world’s most prominent scholars in the fields of modern China and international history. Professor Xu was a fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2008-09 and taught from 1999-2009 at Kalamazoo College (USA) as the Wen Chao Chen Chair of History and East Asian Affairs.

He is the author of Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese laborers in France during the Great War and their role in China’s search for Internationalization (Harvard University Press, 2011, Chinese edition will be forthcoming from Shanghai People’s Press); Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008 (Harvard University Press, 2008, chosen to be the best book of 2008 by International Society of Olympic Historians in 2009); China and the Great War: China’s Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005 and 2011; Chinese edition by Sanlian Shudian, Shanghai, 2008 in its prestigious series of classics in humanities); Wenming de jiao rong: diyi ci shijie dazhan qijian de za fa huagong (Chinese Laborers in France during the First World War) (in Chinese and French editions) (Beijing: Intercontinental Press, 2007); and Meiguo waijiao zhengce shi (History of American Foreign Policy, 1775-1989) (in Chinese, co-author) (Beijing: The People’s Press, 1991).

Professor Xu is currently working on two projects: Chinese and Americans: a shared history (under contract for Harvard University Press) and Asia and the Great War (under contract for Oxford University Press). Besides academic writings, Professor Xu has also written for main media in the world and his articles have appeared in places such as the New York Times and Washington Post. He has been often interviewed by world media in China, Canada, UK, India, USA and elsewhere.

Professor Gregory Castle

English, Arizona State University

August - October 2012

Gregory Castle's research interests are primarily in Irish studies, with emphases in the Irish revival, nationalism, education and literary and cultural history, though his work on the Bildungsroman concerns English as well as Irish writers. Another primary interest is transnational Modernism. His theoretical interests are broad, but he favors historicist approaches (especially Frankfurt school critical theory), postcolonial studies and psychoanalysis.

Castle's first book, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge University Press, 2001), was the “runner-up” for the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature, sponsored by the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) in 2002. In this book, he explores the textual means by which anthropology and ethnography contributed to the formation of Irish culture. The “ethnographic imagination” of Revivalists like W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Joyce contributed a great deal to the creation of the Irish “subject”; it had a profound impact on both the ideology of the Free State (1922) and on literary Modernism.

Castle has also published an anthology of postcolonial theory, Postcolonial Discourses: A Reader (Blackwell, 2001), organized by region (India, Australia/New Zealand, Africa, Caribbean, Ireland) and prefaced by general essays by leading figures like Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said and others. His latest book, Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman (University Press of Florida, 2006), is the first full-length study of British and Irish Modernist Bildungsromane and features analyses of works by Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno’s theory of “negative dialectics,” Castle argues that the Modernist Bildungsroman witnesses the failure of its own narrative telos (the dialectical harmony of social responsibility and personal desire) – a failure that does not prevent the Modernist hero from perfecting (or trying to perfect) what Johann von Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt called “inner culture” (Bildung). The instauration (to use Adorno’s term) of Bildung exemplifies the radical conservatism of Modernism, a position that paradoxically serves the progressive ends of finding alternatives to socially pragmatic educational systems and the vision of the subject that they aspire to produce.

The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory was published February 2007. It consists of an introduction, a history of twentieth-century literary theory, discussions of sixteen major theories, short biographies of influential theorists and sample readings of literature from a variety of theoretical perspectives. It includes a timeline and a substantial glossary. The volume is designed for undergraduates and new graduate students (as well as instructors with no background in theory).

Castle's current research project (working title: Inventing Souls: Pedagogies of Irish Revivalism) focuses on the pedagogical methods and educational theory of nationalist and Revivalist groups. In this new work he argues that projects of “political education” had a significant impact on a broad spectrum of Revivalist and nationalist groups, including the physical-force Republicans who fought in the Easter Rebellion in 1916 and in the wars that led up to the Free State in 1922. The study will include chapters on Daniel O’Connell and the Repeal and Emancipation movements; Charles Gavan Duffy, editor of the Nation and, later, eminence grise of cultural nationalism; “Fenian Unionist” Standish James O’Grady, the historian Yeats considered the “father of the Revival”; Bram Stoker, whose Dracula can be read as a parable of Anglo-Irish history; Padraic Pearse, teacher and educational theorist, leader of the 1916 Rebellion and one of the signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic; and of course W. B. Yeats, and his cohorts in the Literary Revival.

Castle's teaching areas are late-nineteenth and twentieth-century British and Irish literature, with an emphasis on modernism and the Irish Literary Revival. Many of his undergraduate courses focus on Irish studies, though he also teaches courses on British modernism and postmodernism, the Bildungsroman, postcolonial studies and literary theory. Recent courses have focused on Irish poetry, the “sense of the past” in modernist literature, nationalism and identity in the Irish novel, and “the subject at risk” in postcolonial fiction. In recent courses on Irish literature and Modernism, he has been incorporating film, painting and mural art. Recent graduate seminars have focused on Yeats and the Celtic Revival, the Irish Gothic, Quare Joyce, and Joyce and Psychoanalysis. Castle regularly teach a graduate course on Critical Theory.

Professor Cara Delay, Fulbright Scholar

History, Charleston College

September 2012 - August 2013

Cara Delay received her Ph.D. in Comparative History from Brandeis University. Her research focuses on Irish women, religion, and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

She has been awarded a year-long research Fulbright and will spend the 2012-2013 at The University College Dublin Humanities Institute, Ireland, conducting research on her project, Desolate Journeys: Reproduction and Motherhood in Ireland, 1950-2000. This project investigates women’s experiences of reproduction, contraception, abortion, and motherhood in late twentieth-century Ireland. It also explores the ways in which late twentieth-century Irish society perceived and represented reproduction and motherhood. I will complete archival research in Dublin and Belfast and also conduct oral histories with women in order to demonstrate that women’s bodies were and are central to debates about Ireland’s place within Europe, as well as to definitions of Irishness itself.

She is currently completing her book manuscript on lay Catholic women in modern Ireland. Her work has been or will be published in Eire-Ireland, New Hibernia Review, US Catholic Historian, and Feminist Studies, and her essays "Churchings and Changelings Childbirth in Modern Irish History" and "'Ever So Holy':Girls, Mothers, and Catholicism in Irish Women’s Life-Writings, 1850-1950" are forthcoming in volumes published by Irish Academic Press and Four Courts Press. She has received grants and awards from the American Association of University Women and the American Conference for Irish Studies.

HII Visiting Fellows 2011 – 2012

Dr Keith W. Kintigh

Archaeology, Arizona State University
September 2011 - January 2012

UCD College of Arts and Celtic Studies and UCD Humanities Institute are pleased to announce the award of a Fulbright Visiting Fellowship at UCD to Professor Keith Kintigh, Arizona State University

Keith W. Kintigh is professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. An archaeologist, his career-long commitment to understanding political organization in middle-range societies has focused on the Cíbola area along the Arizona-New Mexico border near Zuni Pueblo. This constitutes most of the independent field work he has undertaken (with graduate students) in his 21 years at Arizona State University and continues to be a major focus of his independent research effort. In addition to extensive excavation, Kintigh and his team have surveyed on the order of 100km² and recorded more than 900 archaeological sites in the area. In years past, he also engaged in extended fieldwork in Morocco and Peru.

Dr Kintigh's other major research focus has been on the development and application of quantitative methods in archaeology. Recent efforts are largely devoted to the topics of diversity and spatial analysis. Through this work he was invited to be a member, secretary and vice president of Commission 4 (Data Management and Mathematical Methods in Archaeology) of the Union Internationale des Sciences Préhistoriques et Protohistoriques.

Dr Kintigh will be based in UCD as a Fulbright Professor from September 2011 to January 2012. He will hold his Fulbright Fellowship at UCD Humanities Institute. He will teach a level 5 module (HII 50010 – ‘Digital Humanities’ 5 credits – semester 1) on digital humanities. This module will focus on eliciting and unpacking the diverse research needs entailed by interdisciplinary research in the humanities. It will take the form of reading and discussion of overview reports on digital humanities, cultural heritage, and cyberinfrastructure and discussion of case studies of extant digital humanities projects. The core of the teaching will revolve around graduate student research interests. This module will also draw on the resources of the Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA) – a joint UCD Library and UCD Humanities Institute project in digital humanities funded by the HEA under PRTLI Cycle 3 (http://ivrla.ucd.ie).

Professor Kintigh’s work at UCD will build on the teaching of Professor Michael Shanks, visiting professor in digital humanities at UCD Humanities Institute and UCD John Hume Institute. Michael Shanks, director of the Stanford Humanities Lab, will next visit UCD in November 2011 to deliver a workshop on the humanities, design and creativity.

For further information on Dr Kintigh’s fellowship at UCD please contact: Dr Marc Caball, Director, UCD Humanities Institute marc.caball@ucd.ie

HII Visiting Fellows 2010 – 2011

Dr Margaret MacNamidhe

Art History
October – November 2010

Art historian Margaret MacNamidhe’s autumn-semester fellowship is an opportunity for her to complete a book on Picasso’s early work. His under-valued canvases of 1907—the radical Demoiselles d’Avignon painted just a year later would eclipse them—are a special focus. Previous work was on French Romantic painting; a forthcoming book, Delacroix Alone (Penn. State Press), is based on her dissertation (2001; Johns Hopkins University) and was supported by an IRCHSS post-doctoral fellowship. Before Johns Hopkins, a Fulbright post-graduate scholarship brought her to the School of the Art Institute to Chicago while the National College of Art and Design in Dublin was where she went as an undergraduate (Fine Art, Painting).

Professor Robert Hohlfelder

History, University of Colorado
April – May 2010

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.