Welcome to the Intersectional Humanities research community at the Institute for Arts and Humanities, Maynooth University.
We have started this semester with a range of high-profile and very engaging research seminars and a writing laboratory. In this welcome post we give you a broad overview of the activities to date. Our public seminar series began with Professor Avtar Brah, one of the most established feminist intersectional scholars in the UK. Avtar presented a talk titled Thinking Decolonially Through an Intersectional Lens in which she carefully mapped out relationships between postcolonial and decolonial theory.
The following week featured the work of Dr Marissa Willcox from Digital Media at the University of Amsterdam. She presented a paper titled Intersectionality as Practice: Anger and Eroticism in Feminist Instagram Art. You can watch Marissa’s talk on our YouTube channel which will be going live in early 2024.
Professor Ghassan Hage from the University of Melbourne presented the next seminar on Figures of a Bearable Life. Ghassan is a Lebanese-Australian academic serving as Future Generation Professor at the University of Melbourne and currently a visiting Professor at The Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany.
Our weekly writing intersectional humanities writing group began, it usually attracts between 6–8 scholars and is a dedicated space for writing about intersectional themes. You can read more about Dr Conrad Brunstrom’s experience of the sessions here: https://conradbrunstrom.wordpress.com/2023/10/18/wierdy-tomato-writing-my-first-pomodoro-writing-session/
The very popular weekly public seminars continued with Dr Tapasya Narang’s presentation on Reading Irish Women’s Small Press Publications (1970–1980). She is an Irish Research Council and National Library of Ireland funded postdoctoral researcher at the School of English and Drama, UCD.
Following Tapasya’s talk was a presentation by our visiting research fellow, Dr Melania Terrazas Gallego, who presented on Challenged Borders and Unmapped Intersections in Evelyn Conlon’s Moving About the Place.
The lead up to Reading Week was particularly busy, with Research Week on campus talks and activities. Writing group continued as usual, and we hosted Dr Patricia Kennon for our public seminar who presented on Queerness and Intersectional Identities in Contemporary Irish Children’s and Young Adult Literature. You can listen to her talk on our YouTube channel.
You can also read more about the project of thinking about intersectionality in Ireland here: https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2023/0922/1406579-intersectionality-ireland-history-definition/
Register for the next talk in our series on Eventbrite, here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/intersectional-humanities-seminar-series-tickets-706771872697?aff=oddtdtcreator
And do check out our conference Call for Papers which is live at the moment: https://intersectionalhuma.wixsite.com/newmaterialisms
