Visiting Fellows

Marta Ramón García is a lecturer at the Department of English, French and German Philology at the University of Oviedo, in Spain. Between 2004 and 2009 she was attached to NUI Maynooth, first as an IRCHSS Government of Ireland postdoctoral fellow, and subsequently as a tutor and junior lecturer. 

Her primary field of expertise is the history of nineteenth-century Irish nationalism, especially Young Ireland and the Fenian movement. Her main publications in this field are the monograph A Provisional Dictator: James Stephens and the Fenian Movement (UCD Press, 2007), and the annotated editions The Birth of the Fenian Movement: James Stephens’s American Diary, Brooklyn, 1859 (UCD Press, 2009) and The Faith of a Felon and Other Writings, by James Fintan Lalor (UCD Press, 2012).

She is currently a full-time member of the R+D research project “Illness in the Age of Extinction: Anglophone Narratives of Personal and Planetary Degradation (2000-2020)” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and the international research group (opens in a new window)Health, Environment, Arts and Literature (HEAL) at the University of Oviedo. As a member of this group, her research interests are focused on the themes of alcohol, rational recreation and the democratisation of Irish society during the Victorian era. Her main related publication is ‘“A Local Habitation and a Name”: The Dublin Mechanics’ Institute and the Evolution of Dublin’s Public Sphere, 1824–1904”, Irish Economic and Social History, 46(1):22–45 (2019). At present she is looking into representations of alcoholism in Irish public discourse.

Dr Máximo Aláez is a lecturer at the Department of English, French and German Philology in the University of Oviedo. He holds a BA in English Philology (University of Oviedo, 1996), and in Fine Arts (University of Seville, 2001), as well as an MA in Gender and Diversity (University of Oviedo, 2008). He got his PhD degree in 2013 with the Thesis Dissertation titled “Masquerade and Performativity: Theoretical and Practical Strategies in Contemporary Visual Representation of the Female Body”, tutored by Dr. Luz Mar González Arias, for which he obtained the highest mark “cum laude”. At present his research is focused on the representation of the female body as well as the study of illness (physical and mental) as a main topic in contemporary short fiction in English by women writers, within the interdisciplinary theory framework of the Medical Humanities. He is a full-time member of the Research Team HEAL: Health, Environment, Arts, and Literature, de la Universidad de Oviedo, and of the Research Project I+D+i “END: Illness in the Age of Extinction. Anglophone Narratives of Personal and Planetary Degradation” (University of Oviedo).

Areas of research: 

Representations of the female body in contemporary literary and artistic works by women in Angloamerican culture; Representation of violence against women in contemporary art/literature in English; Analysis of illness and physical/mental decay as thematic focus in contemporary literature in English.

(opens in a new window)Jerry White is Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan (Canada).  He is the author of four books about cinema, including The Radio Eye: Cinema in the North Atlantic, 1958–1988 (Wilfried Laurier University Press, 2009), about half of which is about the Gaeltacht.  He is also the editor of two anthologies of essays on Canadian cinema.  Recent articles have appeared in Studia Hibernia, European Review, Comparative Literature, and Aboriginal Policy Studies; his most recent chapters have appeared in the anthologies Deirdre Madden: New Critical Perspectives (Manchester UP, 2022) and Comparative Literature in Canada (Lexington Books, 2019).  He has participated in a number of broadcasts about European politics on CBC Radio and Radio-Canada, and has also published opinion pieces and book reviews in the Irish Times and Le Devoir (Montreal).

During his time at the Humanities Institute he worked on a project about “non-separatist separatism” in Europe: the Gaeltacht movement, the Swiss movement for a Francophone canton of Jura, and the movement to defend the rights of Catalan speakers in France.  At UCD he was especially focused on working his way through the newspaper An t-Éireannach, which is held at the James Joyce Special Collections.

Jane Koustas is a Professor Emerita in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Brock University, St. Catherines, Ontario where she also directed Canadian Studies. She served as the Craig Dobbin Professor of Canadian Studies at UCD. Professor Koustas’ research interests include English-Canadian literature in translation, translation theory and practice, translation history in Canada, Quebec theatre and theatre translation. Her current research project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by the Ireland Canada University Foundation, focuses on a comparison of contemporary Quebec and Irish theatre.

Professor Koustas has served on the jury of the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Quebec Writers’ Federation Translation Award, and the International Impac Dublin Literary Award. In 2017, she was awarded the James A. Flaherty Visiting Professorship to pursue a comparative study of Quebec and Irish theatre.As of July 1, she will be the President of the International Council for Canadian Studies. In 2022, Professor Koustas was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Canadian Studies. Her association with the Humanities Institute provides the opportunity to meet and interact with playwrights and scholars engaged in theatre research and to participate on the very active theatre scene.

Sean Williams is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Flinders University (South Australia). He is a bestselling, multi-award-winning author over sixty books and one hundred and twenty short stories for readers of all ages. His latest novels Impossible Music and Her Perilous Mansion were nominated for the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature and the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature respectively. Both are Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable Books. He is a recipient of the Australian Antarctica Division’s Art Fellowship and also composes experimental ambient music (as “theadelaidean”). His latest releases are (opens in a new window)Honour Among Ghosts (fiction) and (opens in a new window)In the Key of Sleep (music).

Much of Sean’s recent work is in the field of counterfactual fiction / creative histories. During his visiting fellowship at the Humanities Institute he is researching a novel that employs Irish touchstones to create a politically charged landscape that introduces young readers to concepts of social justice.

Amanda Nettelbeck FASSA FAHA is a Professor of History at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University. Her research centres on the history and memory of colonial violence, the legal and extralegal cultures of settler colonialism, and the legal governance of Indigenous peoples. She is author, co-author or co-editor of numerous books, including most recently Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood (Cambridge 2019), Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony (co-edited with Penelope Edmonds, Palgrave 2018), Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World (co-edited with Philip Dwyer, Palgrave 2017), and Fragile Settlements (co-authored with Russell Smandych et al, UBC Press 2016). Her latest chapter is 'Protection Regimes' in The Cambridge Legal History of Australia (Cambridge 2022). 

During her visiting fellowship at the Humanities Institute she is working on a book project, arising from a collaborative Australian Research Council funded project, that explores how the forces of race and multiracial mobility informed emerged ideas of colonial citizenship in the British settler empire after the abolition of slavery.

Michael J. Geary is Professor of Modern History in the Department of Historical and Classical Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Concurrently, he is a Global Fellow with the Global Europe Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. A native of Cork in Ireland, Michael graduated from Maynooth University with a B.A. in English and History and a M.Litt. (Research) in Modern European History. He gained his M.Res. and Ph.D. degrees from the European University Institute, Florence. Michael is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has held academic positions at Maastricht University (the Netherlands), the Europainstitut/University of Basel (Switzerland), the College of Europe (Natolin campus) and was Ireland’s first recipient of a Fulbright-Schuman Award in EU-US relations where he was professor at the Catholic University of America (Washington, D.C.). His research focuses on post-war Europe, the process of European integration and contemporary Irish history. He is the author of An Inconvenient Wait: Ireland's Quest for Membership of the EEC, 1957–73 (2009) and Enlarging the European Union: The Commission Seeking Influence, 1961-1973 (2013).

At UCD, he is a Visiting Professor of History at the School of History and Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Institute where he is working on a monograph that explores the first two decades of Ireland’s membership of the European Union.

Linda Mbeki is interested in the bioarchaeology of marginalised communities. Her work focuses on  migration and diet of enslaved persons at the colonial Cape, and workers’ migration to the gold and diamond mines during South Africa’s mineral revolution. She applies isotope geochemistry to skeletal material and interrogates written records to elucidate individual life histories. By studying labour migration and diet over 170 years (1750-1920) of South Africa’s history, Dr. Mbeki wishes to assess whether and to what extent the migrant labour system is part of a continuum that began in 1658. is part of the same continuum as slavery.

Dr Mbeki applies bioarchaeological techniques to the study of marginalised people. She trained as a synthetic organic chemist at the University of Cape Town. Since attaining her PhD in bioarchaeology from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, she has joined the anatomy department at the University of Pretoria as a postdoctoral fellow. She is also an assistant curator in the archaeology department of Iziko Museums of South Africa.

After specialising in the bioarchaeology and history of enslaved people at the colonial Cape and beginning her research into the effects South Africa’s industrialisation had on complex African societies, she came to the realisation that there was a similar pattern of dispossession. Dr Mbeki is also exploring the connection between the three forms of labour that have supplied South Africa’s labour-intensive economy – enslaved, indentured, and “migrant” labour. Recently Dr Mbeki has begun engaging with different methods to interpret her scientific findings, particularly embodiment and life course theories.

Dr Mbeki's Visiting Fellowship at UCD is co-funded by the Discovery and Humanities Institutes.

Hilary Hinds is Professor of Literary Culture in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, UK, where she was also previously Head of Department (2018-20). She has published extensively in the field of early modern radical religious writing. Her principal publications in this area include the monographs God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Women’s Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester University Press, 1996) and George Fox and Early Quaker Culture (Manchester University Press, 2011), and scholarly editions of two works by the prophet Anna Trapnel: The Cry of a Stone (MRTS, 2001) and Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea (Iter, 2016). She also has a longstanding interest in twentieth-century women’s writing, from which developed the research that led to her most recent monograph, A Cultural History of Twin Beds (Bloomsbury, 2019).

During her time as a Research Fellow at the Humanities Institute at UCD in April 2022, she is returning to her study of early Quaker culture to work on an article examining the representation of time and memory in the Journal of the founder of Quakerism, George Fox. Building on her previous work on early Quaker conceptions of temporality, the article will analyse the significance of memory in the structure, narrative and rhetoric of Fox’s Journal, and consider in particular the place ascribed to memory in the insistent atemporality of Quaker theology and writing.

Stephen Kelly is Professor of Modern Irish History and Head of the Department of History, Politics and International Relations, Liverpool Hope University. He has published extensively in the field of modern Irish history and British-Irish relations, including Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Party and the Northern Ireland conflict, 1975-1990 (2021); ‘A failed political entity’: Charles J. Haughey and the Northern Ireland question, 1945-1992 (2016); and Fianna Fáil, partition and Northern Ireland, 1926-1971 (2013).

Stephen is currently working on a biography of Gerald Boland (1885-1973). As a founding father of Fianna Fáil and an Irish government minister for almost twenty years, Boland played a central role during the formative years of the emerging Independent Irish state. However, to date, Boland’s prominent – and occasionally controversial – period in the public limelight has been generally ignored. Stephen's new biography addresses this historical anomaly offering a unique insight into a forgotten figure in recent Irish history.

Stephanie Kapusta is currently assistant professor in the philosophy department at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. She previously completed a PhD in theoretical physics at Imperial College, London, and also has a doctorate in theology from Hochschule St. Georgen, Frankfurt. Her research in philosophy began in 2010 in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario, where she completed her PhD in 2015.

Dr. Kapusta’s philosophical interests lie at the intersection of feminist social and political philosophy, with an emphasis on trans studies. Her previous publications in theology and philosophy include Articulating Creation, Articulating Kerygma: A Theological Interpretation of Evangelisation and Genesis Narrative in the Writings of Saint Augustine of Hippo (Peter Lang: Frankfurt, 2005); “Darwinism from Humani Generis to the Present” (in Darwin and Catholicism, ed. Luis Caruana; New York: T&T Clark, 2009); “Misgendering and Its Moral Contestability” (Hypatia, 2016) as well as various articles in journals such as Topoi (2015), Atlantis (2018), Australasian Philosophical Review (2019) and Feminist Philosophy Quarterly (2021). She has also contributed an entry entitled “Transgender Rights” in the International Encyclopedia of Ethics (ed. Hugh LaFolette, Wiley 2019) and has penned several contributions to anthologies (“Philosophical Tales of the Unexpected” in Transgender Narratives: Scholarly and Creative Works on Transgender Experience, eds. Kristi Carter and James Brunton, 2021; “Replicating Gender” in Trans Philosophy: Meaning and Mattering, eds. Talia Bettcher, Andrea Pitts, and Perry Zurn, forthcoming;  “Gender Autonomy” in The Routledge Handbook of Autonomy, ed. Ben Colburn, forthcoming).

Having completed a visiting fellowship position at the Centre de Recherche en Éthique in Montreal (September 2021 to January 2022), Dr Kapusta will now take up a visiting fellowship at the Humanities Institute, UCD as a continuation of her sabbatical research leave from Dalhousie. Her work here will focus on a project she has been working on over the last year, namely, developing a trans-inclusive philosophical account of gender identity.

Jane Koustas is a Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario where she also directed Canadian Studies. She served as the Craig Dobbin Professor of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin. 

Professor Koustas’ research interests include English-Canadian literature in translation, translation theory and practice, translation history in Canada, Quebec theatre and theatre translation. Her current research project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by the Ireland Canada University Foundation, focuses on a comparison of contemporary Quebec and Irish theatre.

She is the co-editor of: Landscapes and Landmarks of Canada: Real, Imagined, (Re)viewed with Conrick, Maeve; Eagles, Munroe and NiChasaide, Caitriona; Plurilinguisme et pluriculturalisme : Des modèles officiels dans le monde. Collectif with Lane-Mercier, Gillian and Merkle, Denise; Canadian Studies: Past, Present, Praxis with Christl Verduyn, Translating from the Margins: Traduire depuis les marges with Denise Merkle et. al., Robert Lepage: Théàtre sans frontières: essays on the dramatic universe of Robert Lepage with Joe Donohoe and Vision/Division: l’oeuvre de Nancy Huston with Marta Dvorak. Professor Koustas published Les belles étrangères: Canadians in Paris, 2008 and Robert Lepage on the Toronto Stage: Language, Identity, Nation, 2016. She has published in journals such as The University of Toronto Quarterly, Quebec Studies, Theatre Research in Canada, Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction and Annuaire théâtral .  Professor Koustas has served on the jury of the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Quebec Writers’ Federation Translation Award, and the International Impac Dublin Literary Award. In 2017, she was awarded the James A. Flaherty Visiting Professorship to pursue a comparative study of Quebec and Irish theatre.

Her association with the Humanities Institute provides the opportunity to meet and interact with playwrights and scholars engaged in theatre research and to participate on the very active theatre scene.

Yann Calbérac is a Lecturer (Maître de conferences) in Geography at the University of Reims (France) (since 2013) and a Junior Fellow of the Institut universitaire de France (2019-2024). He is also an alumnus of the École normale supérieure de Lyon (2001) and of the University of Lyon where he was awarded his PhD (2010). He was both a Visiting Professor in the Universities of Erfurt in Germany (6 months in 2016) and of Montreal in Canada (5 months in 2020).

His work falls within the field of the history and epistemology of geography. In his PhD, he questioned the way French geographers (from the end of 19th century till today) represented their research activities by exploring the different meanings they attached to the terms field and fieldwork, and especially their place in heuristic processes and in the scientific imaginary. This thesis also let him to implement an interdisciplinary approach: he borrows methods Bruno Latour’s science studies, particularly his actor network theory.

Since then, he has continued to deconstruct geography, drawing on the contributions of the cultural turn. He is also interested in the relationship between arts and spaces, notably by studying theatre and the performing arts.

Since 2019, he has broadened his thematic scope and narrowed its chronological focus by analysing the spatial turn of the Humanities and social sciences. He seeks to understand how space has become a central concept in the Humanities, allowing interdisciplinary projects to flourish. His hypothesis is to study the spatial turn as a narrative and to mobilise the spatial metaphor to decipher it.

During his fellowship at Humanities Institute, Dr Calbérac will deepen his research on the spatial turn. He will give a talk in the HI seminar series: “How to think spatially the spatial turn?” and a workshop for post-docs and PhD students: “Spatial turn: an interdisciplinary project for Humanities”.

Marek Tamm is professor of cultural history at the School of Humanities in Tallinn University. Graduated in history and semiotics at the University of Tartu (1998), he earned his master degree in medieval studies from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1999) and his doctorate degree in medieval history from Tallinn University (2009). His primary research fields are cultural history of medieval Europe, theory and history of historiography, and cultural memory studies. He is the edior-in-chief of Acta Historica Tallinnensia and editor of the Estonian cultural monthly Vikerkaar and of the Journal of the Philosophy of History. He has recently published as editor A Cultural History of Memory in the Early Modern Age (with Alessandro Arcangeli, Bloomsbury, 2020) Making Livonia: Actors and Networks of the Medieval and Early Modern Baltic Sea Region (with Anu Mänd, Routledge, 2020), Juri Lotman – Culture, Memory and History: Essays in Cultural Semiotics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism (with Laurent Olivier, Bloomsbury, 2019), Debating New Approaches to History (with Peter Burke, Bloomsbury, 2018), Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and numerous articles in various anthologies and journals. His last book project was to edit together with Peeter Torop The Companion to Juri Lotman: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (forthcoming in January 2022).

At the UCD Humanities Institute Marek Tamm was working on a new book project (a joint project together with Zoltán Boldizsár Simon from the University of Bielefeld), titled The New Historical Condition. The book aims to offer a much-needed account on the transformation of what we mean by history in the age of unparalleled technological capacities and the simultaneous natural-social crises of the Anthropocene.

Kristina Varade earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Italian Specialization and Concentration in Irish Studies) from The Graduate Center, CUNY, her M.A. from New York University, and her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College. Dr. Varade has published several articles on Irish and Italian Comparative Literature from a variety of time periods. She has published in New Hibernia Review, Annali D’Italianistica, Forum italicum and Irish Literary Studies, among others. She recently published a book chapter on Irish writer Pat McCabe in “Pat McCabe’s Ireland” (Jennifer Keating, Ed.; Brill/Rodopi 2019) and will soon publish a book chapter on the posthuman and the cellphone in the Italian fiction of Nove, De Carlo and Ammaniti. Dr. Varade is currently preparing a book manuscript on the Anglo-Irish author, consular representative and journalist Charles Lever, and she recently completed a book chapter on happiness and money in the writing of Lever and Maria Edgeworth to be published with Liverpool University Press.

In addition to her work in Irish/Italian Comparative Studies, Dr. Varade has co-organized two international multi-day conferences with Dance Research Forum Ireland (Fóram Taighde Rince na hÉireann). The first, “Uprising,” was held in 2016 at New York University; the second, “Power, Politics and the Dancing Body,” was held in 2018 at Limerick Institute of Technology.

She has been awarded “Associate” fellowships with Notre Dame’s Global Gateway in Rome (2017) and Oxford (2019). She was awarded a fellowship with the Frank McCourt Creative Writing School at Glucksman House, NYU and in tandem with University of Limerick in 2016. She has been granted several internal and external awards for her interdisciplinary research. Finally, as an avid student of the Irish language, Dr. Varade was awarded a scholarship to study in the Waterford Gaeltacht in the summer of 2017.

Most recently, Dr. Varade was awarded two major sabbatical fellowships. The first, a fellowship with the Long Room Hub at Trinity College, Dublin, will take place in Spring, 2020. The second, at University College Dublin’s Humanities Institute, will be completed later that spring and throughout Summer, 2020.

Dr. Varade is currently investigating the work of Charles Lever (1806-1872), an Anglo-Irish novelist, journalist, and consular representative whose written contributions are deserving of reconsideration and new analysis. She is particularly interested in how Lever’s critical literary eye disrupts the conventional travel narrative and challenges a personal awareness of identity.

Her new project will examine the historical and literary contributions of the ‘Irlandiani,’ or Italian residents of Ireland, to the country. This group of Irish residents has historically been overlooked, yet their contributions to Ireland have been invaluable throughout several of the last centuries.

During her fellowship at Trinity College, Dr. Varade will complete book manuscript work on Lever and will initiate research on classical literary connections between nineteenth century Italian and Irish literature. This research will continue in her second fellowship later that spring at UCD Humanities Institute at which time she will focus on the Irlandiani as delineated above.

Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos is a Faculty Member at the Postgraduate Programme in English at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, and Production Director with Cia Ludens, a Brazilian theatre company dedicated to researching, translating, publishing and staging Irish material.

Her most recent publications, as editor and co-editor, include the bilingual series Ireland on Film: Screenplays and Critical Contexts (2011-present), with Lance Pettitt; Coleção Brian Friel (Hedra, 2013), with Dominos Nunez; Coleção Tom Murphy (Iluminuras, 2019), also with Domingos Nunez; Ilha do Desterro 73.2 – The Irish Theatrical Diaspora (2020), with Patrick Lonergan; and Contemporary Irish Documentary Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2020), with Shaun Richards.    

One of her most recent research projects culminated in the curation and production of the 5th Cycle of Staged of Cia Ludens – “Cia Ludens and Irish Documentary Theatre”, the production of the play “The Two Deaths of Roger Casement”, written and directed by Domingos Nunez, and the publication of the collection of documentary theatre with Bloomsbury.  

The aim of her research project at UCD, mentored by Professor Emilie Pine – “Physical Disability in Irish Theatre: Translation and Performance in Brazil” – is to map and study twentieth-century and contemporary Irish drama and theatre portraying and engaging with physical disabilities, in order to work on the curation and production of the 6th Cycle of Staged Readings of Cia Ludens, with a selection of Irish plays translated into Brazilian Portuguese, to take place in São Paulo in 2022. 

Carl Bouchard is Associate Professor of History at Université de Montréal. His research focuses on the history of international relations, peace movements and peace ideas in the twentieth century. His latest book, Cher Monsieur le Président. Quand les Français écrivaient à Woodrow Wilson (1918-1919) (Champ Vallon, 2015) examined thousands of letters sent by French citizens to US President Woodrow Wilson in the aftermath of the First World War. He is currently editing, in collaboration with Norman Ingram (Concordia University), a collection of essays entitled Beyond the Great War: Making Peace in a Disordered World (U. of Toronto Press).

At UCD I work on a new research project on pacifist ideas and activism in Québec and Ireland after the Great War. My goal is to track down the “peace sentiment” in nations that participated in the First World War but where pacifism has not flourished as it did in neighbouring nations (English Canada, United States, France, Great Britain). The different constitutional positions of Québec and Ireland offer an excellent point of departure for analysing how these two nations negotiated the relationship between pacifism and nation, empire, and internationalism over a period of profound domestic and international political change.

Tá Pádraig Ó Siadhail ina Ollamh le Léann na hÉireann in Ollscoil Mhuire Naofa i Halifax na hAlban Nua. Ar na leabhair atá foilsithe aige, tá Stair Dhrámaíocht na Gaeilge, 1900-1970 (1993) agus an dá bheathaisnéis fhada, An Béaslaíoch (2007) agus Katherine Hughes: A Life and a Journey (2014). Le blianta beaga anuas, tá a chuid taighde dírithe ar ghnéithe den trasnáisiúnachas: cuir i gcás, cuntais ar bhundúchasaigh Mheiriceá Thuaidh i litríocht na Gaeilge agus suirbhé ar litríocht na Gaeilge i gCeanada agus faoi Cheanada. Le linn dó a bheith lonnaithe in Institiúid na nDaonnachtaí ag an Choláiste Ollscoile, leanfaidh Ó Siadhail de dhá thionscnamh taighde atá idir lámha aige: cíoradh ar cholún seachtainiúil Earnáin de Blaghd (‘Beann Mhadagáin’) in Inniu, 1948-1968; agus scagadh ar Sheán Breanach (1891-1967), iar-Reachtaire de chuid an Chumainn Ghaelaigh sa Choláiste Ollscoile, a d’imigh chun na hAfraice Theas ag tús na 1920idí agus ar díol suime a chuid altanna Gaeilge faoin Afraic Theas aimsir na cinedheighilte.

Pádraig Ó Siadhail is a Professor in Irish Studies and holder of the D’Arcy McGee Chair of Irish Studies at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. His publications include a history of Irish-language theatre and critical full-length biographies of Piaras Béaslaí (1881-1965), the Liverpool-born journalist and Irish Revolution-era activist, and Katherine Hughes (1876-1925), the Canadian-born writer and Irish Republican organiser and propagandist in the post-1916 period. In recent years, Ó Siadhail’s scholarly work has focused on aspects of transnationalism, including representations of, and encounters with, North America’s Indigenous Peoples in Irish-language writing and a survey of Irish-language literature from and about Canada. While at UCD's Humanities Institute, Ó Siadhail will continue research on two projects: Ernest Blythe's column (1948-1968) in the Irish-language weekly, Inniu, and the life and career of Seán Breanach (1891-1967), former Reachtaire of UCD's An Cumann Gaelach, that took him from Ireland and the Irish-language revival to apartheid-era South Africa. 

(opens in a new window)Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Centre for Studies in Memory and Literature at the University of Iceland. She holds a PhD from the University of London and her main research interests are in the field of life writing and memory studies. She has written widely on those issues, including her two books, Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing (Rodopi 2003) and Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction (Palgrave 2017). She is currently Visiting Professor at the School of English, Drama, and Film where she is working on an edited volume on Icelandic and Irish transnational memory cultures. She is a member of the Memory Studies Association, British Comparative Literature Association and International Auto/Biography Association (Europe).

Email: (opens in a new window)gunnth@hi.is

(opens in a new window)http://memory.hi.is/
(opens in a new window)https://hi.academia.edu/Gunn%C3%BE%C3%B3runnGu%C3%B0mundsd%C3%B3ttir

I am a scholar of early modern Spain. I am particularly interested in the ways that cultural phenomena reflect and respond to historical circumstances and see the inauguration of literary genres as a key site for understanding this dynamic relationship. My first book, The Moor and the Novel: Narrating Absence in Early Modern Spain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) engages both literature and history to uncover fundamental connections between nationalist violence, religious identity, and the birth of the novel. (http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137299925 .)

My current book project centers on a comparison of the empire-wide celebrations (literary, theatrical, and musical) surrounding the birth of the Hapsburg prince, Felipe Próspero (1657), for which the first zarzuela was written. I have also published articles on an array of topics, including Cervantes’s Don Quijote, Ginés Pérez de Hita, and the vihuela music of early modern Spain. In my teaching, I endeavor to create connections between the early modern world and our own, placing special emphasis on topics such as race, religion, gender, and nationalism as seen in early modern texts. I have twice taught for the University of New Mexico’s study abroad program, Conexiones, in Cáceres, Spain, and encourage all students to consider making study abroad a part of their college education.

Research Interests

• 16th- and 17th- century Spanish literature, especially the novel and Cervantes
• Cultural and interdisciplinary studies
• Secular music, in particular the vihuela repertoire and early zarzuela
• Festival culture of the Hapsburg Empire

Email: (opens in a new window)mbquinn@unm.edu

Federico Luisetti is Associate Professor of Italian Culture and Society at the University of St. Gallen. Until 2017 he has been a Professor of Italian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
 
Federico Luisetti is the author of books and essays on critical theory, literature, and visual studies, including The Anomie of the Earth: Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas (with John Pickles and Wilson Kaiser, eds., Duke University Press, 2015).

At the UCD Humanities Institute he is writing a cross-disciplinary monograph on the states of nature of late capitalism. Expanding on Michel Foucault's notion of biopower, the book addresses the Earth politics and aesthetics of "geopower", the forms of subjection and expression emerging from contemporary planetary paradigms.

See also: (opens in a new window)https://unc.academia.edu/FedericoLuisetti
Email: (opens in a new window)federico.luisetti@unisg.ch

Dymphna Lonergan is a faculty member of the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Flinders, Adelaide, Australia. 

Dr Lonergan has pioneered much of the research on the historical and sociolinguistic context of Irish Language in Australia. The purpose of the fellowship is to further her research in this context in three areas

1. improving her Irish language skills and knowledge of sources;
2. further her research into the Irish language entries in the 1911 census;
3. bringing all the linguistic strands together with regard to the use of the contested word 'shiela'. Having found a reference to St. Shela's Day in an 1832 Sydney newspaper it would appear that there are Irish language links. This day has only been referred to in the geographical context of St Shela's day in Newfoundland so this new discovery is relevant to the theories of Oz 'sheila', which she has examined at length in her monograph Sounds Irish.

In collaboration with the Head of School it is proposed that Dr Lonergan will provide lectures on the Irish Studies BA and MA programmes during her visit while also giving a seminar on her research.

Email: (opens in a new window)dymphna.lonergan@flinders.edu.au

Kylie Thomas is a Research Associate at the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State, South Africa and a Visiting Fellow at the UCD Humanities Institute. She completed her PhD at the University of Cape Town in 2007 and her MA at the University of British Columbia in 1999. She is a transdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on political violence; feminist, queer and anti-racist activism and art; and the history and theory of photography, with a particular focus on South Africa during and after apartheid. She is the author of Impossible Mourning: HIV/AIDS and Visuality after apartheid (Bucknell UP & Wits UP: 2014) and co-editor of Photography in and Out of Africa: Iterations with Difference (Routledge: 2016). She currently holds a European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam where she is working on a book project on women photographers and resistance to repressive regimes.

Dr Thomas will give a lecture on Monday 27 March at 2pm entitled:

Re-turning History: Photography against Forgetting in post-apartheid South Africa

In this lecture, Kylie Thomas will share some of her current work on photography and traumatic histories. She will argue that the capacity of photographs to re-turn history does not only lead to the melancholic state brought about by the realization that we are too late to intervene in the disasters that have preceded us, but can serve as a galvanizing force for resistance. She will focus on the work of the Burning Museum Collective and their visual interventions that make use of photographs of the past to interrupt the amnesia of the present. 

Contact: (opens in a new window)kyliethomas.south@gmail.com

Jewel L. Spangler is Associate Professor of History at the University of Calgary in western Canada, and specializes in the early United States.  Her 2008 monograph, Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century, examined the origins of the American Bible belt.  She is currently completing a manuscript titled “The Richmond Theatre Fire of 1811 in History and Memory.” The fire, which was the worst urban disaster in U.S. history to that point, provides an access point for analyzing how Americans conceptualized the workings of their society and the meanings of their nationhood on the eve of their second war with Britain. 

(opens in a new window)https://hist.ucalgary.ca/profiles/jewel-l-spangler

Marguerite Helmers is Rosebush Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Her book Harry Clarke’s War: Ireland’s Memorial Records, 1914-1918 was published by the Irish Academic Press in December 2015. She is the co-author of Defining Visual Rhetorics (2004), several edited works on visual culture and travel writing, and is the series editor of the Visual Rhetoric Series at Parlor Press. Her recent publications include articles on the First World War in the Journal of War and Culture Studies, The Space Between, and a forthcoming book titled Languages and the First World War: Memory and Representation (Palgrave, 2015). A past fellow at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW Madison, in 2015 she was a fellow at the Humanities Institute, University College Dublin. While in Dublin, she researched issues of conflict and crisis: the Irish involvement in the First World War and the internment of republican prisoners between 1916 and 1923.

(opens in a new window)http://uwosh.academia.edu/MargueriteHelmers

Jason Hemingway is a lecturer in Anatomy and Anthropology the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa and worked with Professor Ron Pinhasi in UCD Archaeology during his time in UCD.

Fintan Walsh is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at Birkbeck, University of London and Co-Director of the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre.
 
While a Visiting Research Fellow in summer 2014 he worked on his monograph Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). The book examines queer performance produced across Ireland since the first stirrings of the Celtic Tiger in the mid-1990s, up to the passing of the Marriage Equality referendum in the Republic in 2015. While unprecedented economic expansion stimulated the growth of certain aspects of LGBTQ culture during this time, the book charts how a great deal of queer performance illuminated the darker social consequences of frenzied capitalism, systemic state failings and pernicious cultural crises.
 
Tracking scenes of dissent and disorientation across diverse sites and contexts, the book foregrounds performance that animates interactions between gender and sexuality, and issues relating to migration, religion, place, age, economics and class, ethnicity and national identity. It considers how performance engaged with same-sex partnership and marriage debates, but perhaps queerer still, offered some remarkably nuanced perspectives on interpersonal intimacy, social support, public participation and cultural belonging, with the capacity to inspire and provoke beyond an Irish or LGBTQ context.
 
 
(opens in a new window)http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-staff/full-time-academic-staff/fintan-walsh
 
(opens in a new window)http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137534491

Marije van Hattum was awarded a research grant for her project on the language of the poor in nineteenth-century Dublin. She used her time in Dublin to visit the UCD James Joyce Library and the Diocesan Archives to further her research. She also obtained funding to recruit a research assistant to assist with the transcription of famine relief letters for the 19th Century Irish Dialect IrEPL project which was aimed at the collection of materials and transcriptions for the intent of constructing a digital corpus dedicated, as the title indicates, to the 19th Century Irish dialect, especially the less affluent rural areas.

Jody Allen Randolph was a visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Gender, Culture and Identities at the Humanities Institute for a two year period. Previously she lectured in the graduate program in the School of English, Drama & Film at University College Dublin, and served as Assistant Dean of the British Studies at Oxford Programme at St. John’s College, Oxford. During her graduate studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara she held research fellowships from the Andrew Mellon/Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and University of California Regents. Jody’s research and teaching specialties are Irish literature and culture and Anglophone literatures.

Dr Allen Randolph is among the most esteemed international scholars in the field of poetry criticism, and her work has been particularly groundbreaking and important in the area of poetry by women in Ireland. One of the first scholars to write extensively on the work of contemporary Irish women poets, beginning this work in the 1980s, Dr Allen Randolph's work has been of vital importance to subsequent development not just of feminist scholarship in the field, but also to the visibility and critical recognition of the work of women writers in Ireland and internationally.

Her most recent books are A Poet’s Dublin, co-edited with Paula Meehan (Carcanet 2014), Eavan Boland (Cork University Press, 2014), and Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland (Carcanet 2010).

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.

(opens in a new window)http://history.cofc.edu/about/faculty-and-staff/delay-cara.php

Guoqi Xu is 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.

(opens in a new window)http://www.history.hku.hk/people/staff-xu-guoqi.html

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.

(opens in a new window)https://webapp4.asu.edu/directory/person/29039

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 at the UCD Humanities Institute as a Fulbright Professor from September 2011 to January 2012. 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 ((opens in a new window)http://digital.ucd.ie/view/ivrla:1).

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.

(opens in a new window)http://www.public.asu.edu/~kintigh/

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).

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.

(opens in a new window)http://www.colorado.edu/history/robert-l-hohlfelder