Irish Centre for Transnational Studies

The question of whether there is such a thing as female writing or reading has been a recurrent topic in literary studies. Research shows that canonical literature is defined in masculine terms and that these are passed on through our reading habits and educational systems. The same applies to contemporary book markets. My lecture discusses the perspectives of two female literary scholars on the issue: Ruth Klüger, who looks at how literatures are being read, and Nicole Seifert, whose book FrauenLiteratur, published in 2021, is currently a bestseller in the German-speaking countries. In it Seifert not only rediscovers ‚forgotten‘ women writers and exposes structures in the literary industry that still put female authors at a disadvantage, but also challenges the term ‚forgotten‘ in this context. Furthermore, I will look at the way Seifert is using social media and her blog to raise awareness for international women writers.

Sandra Binnert is working on a PhD on “Unterdrückte Narrative – zu Leben und Werk Karl Gerbers“ (Suppressed Narratives – on the Life and Work of Karl Gerber) at the Centre for Holocaustliteratur of the Justus Liebig University of Gießen (JLG). She teaches on programmes for international students at the JLG’s Department of English and is currently visiting the Department of German Studies at MIC as part of an ERASMUS+ staff exchange.

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The ICTS Spring series of lunchtime webinars focusing on “Digital Spaces and Transnational Femininities” is presented in association with the Institute of Irish Studies, MIC, and the Irish Women’s Writing Network.

For many demographics, online visibility has become a non-negotiable aspect of selfhood in the digital age. On platforms like Instagram, there is a distinct emphasis on certain modes of feminine visibility while others are side-lined or rendered invisible. On platforms like Twitter, women’s visibility is both generative in terms of self-expression and political organising, and restrictive when such activities are met with digitised sexism that goes unchallenged. This landscape is characterised by what I call the visibility trap, a neoliberal conception of agency-through-visibility where one is at once ‘free’ to be visible but also held responsible for the unpredictable outcomes of ‘choosing’ visibility. This talk will explore the punitive and deeply gendered effects of the visibility trap, exploring how platforms and their ideological underpinnings enable and encourage visibility (and happily profit from it) while constraining and policing its potential, producing outcomes that are often regressive rather than progressive.

Dr Mary McGill is a Media Studies lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Technology, Carlow. She is a former Hardiman Scholar at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her doctoral research explores issues of homosocial surveillance, digital visibility and representation in young women’s selfiepractises. She is a regular contributor to RTÉ Radio One’s nightly arts show Arena and the Irish Independent. You find her book at New Island here and at O’Mahony’s.

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The ICTS Spring series of lunchtime webinars focusing on “Digital Spaces and Transnational Femininities” is presented in association with the Institute of Irish Studies, MIC, and the Irish Women’s Writing Network.

This paper gives a partial overview of  a recent project on the experiences of transnational families between Ireland and Britain during the period of Covid-related restrictions on international travel. My collaborators on this project were Dr Sara Hannafin (now of the Dept of Geography at UL), and Dr Niamh McNamara (Dept of Psychology, Nottingham Trent University). Previous research has highlighted the extent to which ease of movement is central to the identities and support networks of transnational migrants, which raises the question of the psychological consequences of such mobility no longer being possible. We designed an online qualitative survey, which explored participants’ accounts of the extent to which their mobility has been disrupted by the pandemic, and the effect this has had on their support networks and sense of identity and belonging. Through press releases and social media, we recruited Irish migrants in Britain and British migrants in Ireland as well as their close family members. The survey ran between November 2020 and January 2021 with 496 completed responses. In giving an account of participants’ responses to the survey, my focus on this paper will be on two aspects:

1. The high degree of alienation expressed by transnational migrants, with a previous sense of belonging in both countries, replaced by a sense of belonging in neither.

2. The underacknowledged networks of transnational care between Ireland and Britain, the specifically gendered nature of this care, and how these networks were disrupted by the pandemic.

Dr Marc Scully is a lecturer in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts at Mary Immaculate College. His research interests centre around discursive approaches to identity and authenticity, particularly in the context of migration, diaspora and transnationalism.

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The ICTS Spring series of lunchtime webinars focusing on “Digital Spaces and Transnational Femininities” is presented in association with the Institute of Irish Studies, MIC, and the Irish Women’s Writing Network.

We are delighted to welcome local historian Sharon Slater and two international performative artists, Angie Smalis and Colin Gee. Their current projects are opening new perspectives on a Limerick woman, born in 1868, who embarked on an exceptional career but has been largely forgotten about.

Sharon Slater: How much does a plaque actually tell us? The bust of Margaret Moloney, Glin.

The plaque beneath the bust of Margaret Moloney, in Glin, contains thirteen words spread over five lines. These mere thirteen words set out to inform the public of the life of an extraordinary woman, but how much does this plaque tell us, and just as importantly, what is missing. This talk will explore the importance of public monuments in local communities and how the information on plaques guides the perception of the individual immortalised by it.

Colin Gee & Angie Smalis: “Moloney” – A Video Installation

“Moloney” is a video installation of a script-based dance work about Margaret Moloney (1868-1952), Glin’s final harbour master and the only known woman in this role. The installation shows how its female protagonist “Barbara” contemplates on Moloney as a woman in a position of power, managing the flow of maritime traffic. Reflecting on the latter and on the perspectives of men that Moloney encountered, Barbara explores ways of learning both from nature and history, especially how to navigate, and negotiate, between people. “Moloney” is part of the trilogy Persuasion in which Smalis and Gee explore historical and artistic perspectives through the use of storytelling techniques and place-based narrative for dance. The installation is touring the following venues between February and April 2022: Dance Limerick (What Next Dance Festival); Firkin Crane, Cork; Glor Theatre, Ennis; Irish Chamber Orchestra Studio; Nenagh Arts Centre; Dance Ireland, Dublin; Brandeis University Boston (Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts).

Sharon Slater is currently the Historian-in-Residence at Ormston House. Her most recent publication, 100 Women of Limerick, is due for release in March 2022. This publication details the lives of women who, for the most part, have been forgotten in their native county.

 Angie Smalis is a contemporary dance artist from Athens, artistic director of the Limerick Youth Theatre and Patterns Dance Collective. She has performed internationally with ensembles including the Vienna Volksoper and Daghda Dance Co. Colin Gee is a performing artist based in New York City. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and has performed internationally as a clown with Cirque du Soleil. In their work together they have been described by theNew York Times as “poetic in their efficiency”, “uncannily absorbing”, and ‘with their subtle physical shifts come emotional ones, in mercurial succession”.

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Meeting ID: 751 572 6874 Passcode: x2TZvr7!

The ICTS Spring series of lunchtime webinars focusing on “Digital Spaces and Transnational Femininities” is presented in association with the Institute of Irish Studies, MIC, and the Irish Women’s Writing Network.

In the 1980s, a group of Eastern European dissidents resuscitated the notion of “Mitteleuropa” or Central Europe, previously associated with Germanic cultural and economic eastward expansion, to protest against the disappearance of the Soviet occupied part of the continent from the cultural map of the West. Debates over whether this Central Europe was an imagined, nostalgically distorted space have continued to this day, gaining new relevance with the postSocialist rise of right-wing nationalism in the states of the so-called Visegrad group (Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary), while running counter to progressive ideas associated with the Central Europe imagined in the 1980s. Polish director Stanislaw Mucha, based in Germany, captures different myths and notions about Central Europe in his documentary, “Die Mitte” (The Center). The camera team visits locations in Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, all of which claim to be located at the center of Europe. Merging the genres of road trip and documentary, Mucha places sometimes humorous, sometimes somber interviews with residents between vistas of ‘eastern’ wilderness and dilapidated urban landscapes. These encounters with the residents of various Central European towns and villages and the stories they tell emphasize that “Mitteleuropa” is embodied and narrated through its people as much as in historically palimpsestic spaces. Filmed in several languages and released in 2004, the year of the EU ‘Osterweiterung,’ it highlights the ambivalent notions of center and periphery, development and backwardness, but also of mobility and belonging that are still associated with the European East

Yvonne Zivkovic is a Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Graz, where she is working on her second book on the representation of heritage by contemporary migrant authors in Germany and Austria. Her first book, The Literary Politics of Mitteleuropa – Reconfiguring Spatial Memory in Austrian and Yugoslav Literature after 1945 was published in February with Camden House. She received her Ph.D. in German and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, New York. Her research focuses on the relationship between German speaking lands and Eastern Europe, with particular interests in migration, memory, gender, affect, film and Jewish Studies.

To watch the complete film before or after the seminar, you should be able to access it here.

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Fáilte Roimh Chách 

Focusing on the autobiographical Freikorps novel Die Geächteten (1930) by Ernst von Salomon, Dr Hannelore Roth will investigate the relationship between territorial borders on the one hand and symbolic, corporal borders on the other. I argue that the vitalistic impetus of the national revolutionary discourse in the text implies a specific conception of borders, which is closely linked to the geopolitical works of Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer who popularised the term Lebensraum (living space). In accordance with Ratzel’s and Haushofer’s distinction between ‘abstract’, i.e. political borders and ‘real’ borders, which have their bellicose origin in the migration of the Germanic peoples, Salomon localizes the German nation not within juristic-cartographic state borders, but “at the frontier”; this frontier is not imagined as a clear ‘line’ but as a dynamic fighting zone. Like the skin of the biological body it can shrink or endlessly expand. In line with this anthropogeographical conception of borders, territorial and corporal borders merge into one another. This lecture examines how the national and individual subject constitute each other through the ambivalent dynamics of border crossing and re-stabilization. Of particular interest are representations of masculinity in this context. In Salomon’s book the German Freikorps is not only fighting at the frontier for a national regeneration but also for maintaining or restaging their male identity, which has become fragile after the lost World War.

Dr Hannelore Roth is a research scholar at the University of Leuven (Belgium), where she obtained her PhD on images of Prussia in 20^th and 21^st century German literature. In her current research project she investigates the literary and cultural afterlife of the Thirty Years War in 21^st century German culture. Her research interests include modern and contemporary German literature, politics and literature, gender, in particular men’s studies, and pop culture.

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There is increased emphasis on the need to reduce car dependency and to encourage more sustainable travel. While cycling rates have increased in many countries, including Ireland, women are often less likely to cycle than men and research shows that the differences can be seen from an early age. This research examines the modal choices of school-going students, and the attitudes of their parents/guardians to their modal choices. The results show multi-factorial barriers to cycling to school for girls compared to boys. Uniforms, traffic concerns, physical efforts of cycling, effects on personal appearance, and peer-influences were factors affecting girls more than boys. Fathers did not significantly differentiate by the gender of their children in relation to factors associated with cycling to school, unlike mothers who were found to be less supportive of their daughters than their sons. Further research must be carried out to determine how to shift the perceptions of the efforts associated with cycling, especially among girls, and how to encourage female parents/guardians to better support their daughters to cycle to school.

Ross Higgins lectures on the Civil Engineering programme in the University of Limerick. He is the Chair of the Irish Transport Research Network (www.itrn.ie) and his area of research is sustainable travel.

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Organised by the Departments of German Studies and Media and Communication Studies, MIC, in co-operation with the Irish Centre for Transnational Studies (ICTS), MIC, and the Centre for European Studies. UL. Free event. Participants may attend online or in person. Pre-register at icts@mic.ul.ie. Full programme below.

Co-organised by Dr Sabine Egger (German Studies, MIC) and Dr Marcus Free (Media and Communication Studies, MIC), the event includes panels on “Sport and Questions of Identity in European Film and TV”, “Dance, Media and Embodied Identities” and “Lola Montez: Spanish Dancer from Ireland, European Femme Fatale, 19th Century Media Celebrity?” Dr Seán Crosson (Huston School of Film, NUIG) will discuss representations of sport, the body and national identity in two recent European co-productions, The Racer (2020), which featured the commencement of the 1998 Tour de France in Ireland as its context; and The Keeper (2018), which dramatized the career of former German PoW, Bert Trautmann, as Manchester City goalkeeper. Papers by Prof. Rebeccah Dawson (University of Kentucky) and Dr Marcus Free (MIC) focus on football in early German cinema, and migration and ‘Irishness’ in television representations of Gaelic games. Former lead dancer and director of Riverdance, Dr Breandán de Gallai (IWAMD, UL), will speak on the (de)construction of images of ‘Irishness’ through Irish Dance, while papers by Dr Eoin Flannery (MIC) and Dr Gert Hofmann (UCC) will discuss dance and embodied identities in literature and philosophy. Prof. Marita Krauss, historian at the University of Augsburg, will present on Lola Montez, an international media celebrity of the time, born in Ireland in 1821. Montez’ performance on and off stage was regarded as scandalous, including her love affair with King Ludwig I of Bavaria, while her political impact was seen as a threat by church and secular authorities. Krauss’s fascinating book on Montez, based on new sources, came out in 2020 and has received enthusiastic reviews. Prof. Joachim Fischer (European Studies, UL) will take a closer look at fact and fiction surrounding the ‘Irish dimension’ of Lola Montez. The event will close with a screening of the recently restored film Lola Montez/Lola Montès (1955) by Max Ophüls, introduced by Dr Christiane Schönfeld (MIC).

The symposium will bring together national and international perspectives from different disciplines, including film and television studies, literary and cultural studies, sport science, performing arts and history. Panels will focus on the spheres of sport and dance as codified physical and popular cultural activities that have historically connected individuals and peoples across the continent of Europe but also – paradoxically – highlighted its internal divides, fractures and boundaries through their rituals (international competitions, performance practices) and representation in literature, film and media forms. Sporting events both reinforce national identities and geographical boundaries through their competitive structures and body images, and unite peoples through the spectacle of live broadcasting or the way athletes’ bodies are choreographed on screen. Focusing on the screening of bodies in motion and corporeal interactions, participants in the sports panel will discuss how the intersections and tensions between national, gender, ethnic and racial identities are represented in examples of European film and television featuring sporting events and athletes. Papers in the dance panels will discuss how (trans)national identities and gender images are reinforced and transgressed on stage, on screen, and in different cultural or historical contexts, and how such dynamics are adapted in literary texts and philosophical thought. The symposium will thus explore how visual and other media, literary and non-literary texts portray transnational imaginative investment in sport and other forms of corporeal movement as cultural codes, but also their contradictory aspects.

See full programme, abstracts and further information on speakers above. Free event. Open to the wider public. You will need to register in advance at icts@mic.ul.ie to receive the online event joining link or access to the building.

Organised by the UCD Humanities Institute, University College Dublin in collaboration with the Irish Centre for Transnational Studies (ICTS), Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. Supported by the Irish Research Council.

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Keynote:

“Diaspora Strikes Back” by Dr. Ipek Demir, University of Leeds, Leeds

Full programme available HERE.

Please register HERE.

Conference Organisers:

Dr. Britta C. Jung, UCD Humanities Institute, University College Dublin, Dublin

Dr. Mairéad Ní Bhriain, Dpt. of French Studies, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick

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In recent years, Europe has found itself in a state of seemingly unprecedented turmoil as it struggles to come to terms with an almost unrelenting contestation of the values upon which European identity, and indeed understandings of Western civilisation, rest. This struggle is manifested most notably in the string of terrorist attacks on European capitals such as London, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, and Brussels, but also – and equally – in the ongoing humanitarian crisis at Europe’s southern borders. Nowhere was the severity of the latter more prevalent than in the outcry provoked by the image of three-year old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi’s body which washed up on a Turkish beach on 2nd September 2015. In fact, current trends in migration have come to be seen as one of the major issues of our time as policy makers, scholars, the media and the general public seek to understand this complex process. However, despite its current status as a ‘hot topic’ within European political discourse and the public domain more broadly, migration and the movement of people across borders, between countries and cultures are certainly not a ‘new’ phenomenon.

The first strand of the conference thus seeks to place the current debate within the broader historical context of crises concerning migrant communities and identities across Europe. It aims to interrogate, for example, the impact of past colonial encounters and resulting power dynamics on various national communities, and specifically on the migrant journey. In what way do enduring colonial mentalities of dominance and subjugation, superiority and inferiority of peoples and cultures, impact on perceptions and experiences of migrants arriving in a receiving country? And in what way do they frame the perceptions and experiences of the local communities? Ultimately, in addressing these questions, we approach constructions of migrant identity not as an isolated phenomenon but as part of a dialogic progress.

Drawing on the research of Gurminder Bhambra on the link between migration and European colonial/post-colonial histories, the conference aims to place particular emphasis on processes of ‘othering’ and their role in ongoing (de)construction, articulation, and projection of identities – be they individual or collective, national or transnational. Within this context, the centrality of culture and education in identity formation, differentiation, and integration, will be of particular interest and will form the core of our second conference strand. This second strand seeks to address the (possible) futures of migrant communities and identities debating current/future attempts aimed at impacting positively on, or furthering general understanding of, migrant experiences. This may include, for example, projects, which aim to combat exclusion through celebrating multiculturalism and embracing transnational identities, thus facilitating processes of integration and the fostering of global citizenship. It is envisioned that this interrogation of migrant experiences and most specifically analyses of identity constructions will shed light upon what many perceive to be a current crisis of European identity and citizenship, as we enter a new post-Brexit iteration of the European project.

Acknowledgements:

The conference organisers would like to extend their sincere gratitude to the UCD Humanities Institute, the Irish Centre for Transnational Studies (MIC), and the Irish Research Council for their unwavering support for this event. Furthermore, they would like to express a heartfelt thank you to the delegates who graciously and patiently endured all postponements and changes caused by the pandemic.

The Irish Centre for Transnational Studies (ICTS) is delighted to invite you to our next webinar, taking place on Thursday, May 6^th 2021 @ 6pm.

In a country that is still reluctant to fully address its colonial past, as well as the forms of structural racism that still persist, the recent literary production of Portuguese writers of African descent has emerged as an important forum for the representation of racialized, migrant, and transnational experiences in an increasingly multicultural Lisbon. Focusing in particular on the works of two writers of African descent, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Esse cabelo [That Hair] and Kalaf Epalanga’s Os brancos também sabem dançar [The Whites Know How to Dance Too], this paper will examine how these literary works are redefining what constitutes being simultaneously Portuguese, Afro-Portuguese, and European in the XXI Century, while exposing the specific forms of post-imperial melancholia and racism that have contributed and continue to shape lives in postcolonial Portugal.

Fernando Beleza is a Lecturer in Portuguese Studies at Newcastle University. His research focuses on modern and contemporary literatures and cinemas of Portugal and Portuguese-speaking Africa. He has published articles and book chapters on: race, gender, and sexuality in Lusophone literatures; migration, transnational imaginaries and cosmopolitanism; the environmental humanities. Fernando Beleza is the co-editor of Mário de Sá-Carneiro, a Cosmopolitan Modernist (2018) and he is the Book Review Editor for the journal Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies.

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Fáilte Roimh Chách