Research Events 2022-23
Dr Serena Laiena (SLCL Postdoctoral Research Fellow)
Constructing Transnational and Transgenerational Communities: Activism and Wellbeing in Natasha A. Kelly's Sisters and Souls Series.
Katherine Calvert (UCD SLCL, PostDoc in German)
Cinematic Writing: Theories and Approaches
Dr Marco Bellardi (UCD SLCL Italian), the seminar will be chaired by Assoc Prof Douglas Smith (UCD SLCL French)
Crossing Cultures 2022/23
26 April @ 5:30pm ONLINE
Literature, ethics and the law: a literary trial in early-twentieth-century Italy
Cristina Savettieri, University of Pisa
"In my talk, I shall discuss the trial against Filippo Tommaso Marinetti that took place in Milan in 1910. The writer was accused of obscenity for his book Mafarka il futurista [Mafarka the Futurist] published in France in 1909 and then translated into Italian in 1910. The trial is a touchstone in the process of emergence of an autonomous literary field in Italy: for the first time a book was defended in court as an artistic object that could not be subjected to the law and public morality. By analyzing the documents of the trial against the backdrop of the social, juridical and cultural context of the time, I aim to reflect on the features of the Avantgarde in early twentieth-century Italy and, more broadly, on the conflict between art and the law."
30th March @ 6pm ONLINE
Cultural Production as Political Activism: Creative Potentials and Precarities
We are delighted to present the following two papers, which will be followed by questions and discussion chaired by Dr Katherine Calvert (School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, UCD)
Another (Art) World Is Possible: Writing and Rehearsing against Precarisation
Dr Carlos Garrido Castellano (University College Cork)
This presentation focuses on contemporary literature concerned with reinventing and rearticulating creative eco/systems. It argues that the recent interest in the art world by contemporary writers at a global scale has to do with the need to r eimagine the economy of cultural production beyo nd neoliberal and neo-colonial prerogatives. If neoliberalisation can be related with “artistic capitalism”, then our current, Capitalocenic times urge for a redefinition of issues of value, privilege and individuation that could help imagining and materialising liveable futures beyond systemic (yet selective) precarisation. This paper will examine recent activist actions concerning artworks and artistic institutions side by side a body of speculative literary fiction that is investing in a critical reconsideration of the social relevance of creative processes.
Carlos Garrido Castellano works at University College Cork, where he co ordinates a BA programme on Portuguese Studies and the MA in Global Languages and Cultures. He is the author of Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art (2019), Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future (2021) and Literary Fictions of the Contemporary Art System (2022). He has recently edited two special issues on anticolonial and decolonial aesthetics (one in Third Text in 2020 and another in Interventions Journal in 2022) as well as a volume on contemporary museums and coloniality in the Iberian context (2022). He is currently working on three projects: a volume on cultural labour and creative paradigms in contemporary literatures in Portuguese; another on the genealogies of mode rnism in the Caribbean, and a new monograph on ecological crisis, alt-right politics and the subversive potential of the carnivalesque. He is also a research associate at the University of Johannesburg.
Between “Too Trans” and “Not Trans Enough” – The Politics of Programming, Funding, and Identity at the Film Festivals TranScreen (
Dr Cyd Sturgess (Utrecht University)
This paper examines the potential of transgender film festivals to serve as sites for the construction and contestation of identities and communi ties. Taking TranScreen (Amsterdam) and Transforming Cinema (Sheffield) as the springboard for this discussion, this paper draws on ethnographic research and insights from the fields of post-humanism and festival studies to outline the opportunities, risks and precarities involved in creating film festivals for transgender, non-binary and gender non-conforming people. Focusing on the definition, articulation and curation of transness at these two festivals – as well as the socio-economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on so-called minority festivals more broadly – this paper situates activist strategies within two specific cultural contexts, before exploring the transnational confluences that emerge through their collective claims for equality.
Cyd Sturgess is a Leverhulme pos tdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University. Their research project examines themes of precarity, identity, and community in relation to transgender film festivals. As well as directing a documentary based on this research, Cyd is currently exploring the ethnographic possibilities of cruising for the archive and has recently published their first monograph Different from the Others: German and Dutch Discourses of Queer Femininity and Female Desire 1918-1940 (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2023).
2nd March @ 6pm ONLINE
A pen of one’s own: The legacy of Women Letter-Writers in 17th-century France
Dr. Nathalie Freidel (Wilfrid Laurier University) and Emma Gauthier-Mamaril (Université de Montréal), followed by a Q &A conversation moderated by Dr. Janée Allsman (University College Dublin)
8th December @ 6pm ONLINE
Arts, Genre and Gender: Intersections in the Italian Baroque
Roundtable with Jessica Goethals (University of Alabama) and Marianna Liguori (University of Padua)
24th November @ 7pm ONLINE
Mediating & Translating Taboo in Contemporary France and Italy
Roundtable with Erica Bellia (University of Cambridge) and Nadine Gassie (Literary translator)
10th November @ 6pm ONLINE
Revolutionary Women in a Revolutionary Country. Gender and Class during the Portuguese Estado Novo and the Carnation Revolution
A talk with Giulia Strippoli (Nova University of Lisbon)
Organised by: Janée Allsman, Katherine Calvert, Sara Delmedico, Serena Laiena, Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, Valeria Taddei