The Irish Centre for Transnational Studies (ICTS) is a research centre focused on bringing together academic staff and postgraduate students at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, and establish strong links to other national and international networks and centres of research. Drawing on the expertise in the departments of German Studies, French Studies, History and Philosophy, our aim is to provide a unifying framework for the research outputs of staff with interests in the area of Transnational Studies across the departments at Mary Immaculate College and Plassey Campus, University of Limerick, and to enhance inter-institutional links with researchers in Ireland and abroad. We will publish research, thus acting as a nodal point for future research collaboration and inter-institutional co-operation to improve teaching and learning in this field, and in the teaching at postgraduate and undergraduate level. Our goal is hence to put in place a unifying intellectual milieu for research interests across different departments and to inform teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level by laying a foundation for interdisciplinary exchange and transdisciplinary research collaboration. Internationally speaking, we aim to foster inter-institutional links across Ireland, Europe and on a wider international scale and to attract external funding on a national and international level.
The ICTS hopes to contribute to the exploration of processes of exchange, mutuality and influence between individuals, communities and nations in the past and present. This includes questions of identity, migration and diasporic formations across intra- and transnational contexts. In particular, we aim to foster openness towards questions of the transitional nature of cultural identity and communication across cultures in thought and written, visual and musical expressions of culture, and the conceptual spaces that open up between traditionally defined cultural systems. The formation of these spaces, from an ethical, aesthetic and historical point of view, is of special interest to the ICTS.
