News & Events

The Centre for Resistance Studies to Launch with Keynote Lecture on Strongman Rule. Check out our news story here

The Centre for Resistance Studies was launched online on 9 March 2021. The event features the keynote lecture by Ruth Ben-Ghiat on strongman rule. Check out the video here

Members of the Centre participated in the panel discussion Women and Resistance organised by the Long Room Hub on 10 December 2020. Check out the video recording of the event here

The Centre co-organised an event on Gender and Academic Freedom with the Scholars at Risk network on 8 March 2021

Interview with Dr Jacqueline Hayden in the Cold War Conversations podcast series about her experience with the Solidarnosc movement in Gdansk in 1980

Professor Martha Fineman (Emory University) gave a public online lecture on "Resistance and Responsibility: A Vulnerability Analysis

In recent years, there has been a disturbing trend toward authoritarianism in the Global South. For this event, three panellists described the factors that led to its rise in Brazil, India, and the Philippines and assessed the forces of resistance in each country.

The panel discussion marked the start of a new multiannual discussion series ‘Literature and Resistance.’ In the first event in the Hub’s new signature series, four Trinity experts considered the ways that literature – and the act of writing itself – can function or be understood as resistance. Exploring what this means for writers, readers, and critics, they considered issues including freedom of expression, the circulation, censorship and survival of literary texts, and the aesthetics of protest, dissent, and opposition.

The lecture by Katrina Goldstone focused on the cultural and activist resistance espoused by writers Leslie Daiken and Michael Sayers, represented by a various kinds of writing, polemic, poetry and investigative journalism, reflecting on themes of writers social role in times of global crisis.

The discussion panel marked the launch of the exhibition on Hong Kong protest art organised by the School of Medicine, the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, and the School of Creative Arts, in association with the Trinity Long Room Hub and working in partnership with members of the Hong Kong community. The exhibition features the works from seven Hongkonger artists: Juarts, KokDamon, Lumli Lumlong, Mei Yuk Wong, Monkmonki, Ricker Choi, vawongsir. Through Hongkongers’ artworks the exhibition explores questions of trauma, resilience, solidarity, and resistance, and how these inform Hongkongers’ emerging identity as a distinct ethnic community.

The award-winning French Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga joined us for the first public event in the Long Room Hub’s new signature series on Literature and Resistance, at the International Literature Festival Dublin on 21 May.

The discussion panel marked the conclusion of the exhibition on Hong Kong protest art in the Long Room Hub. The panel included art historian Catherine Marshall and Jessica Ní Mhainín from Index on Censorship. The event was opened by Provost Linda Doyle.

The catalogue of the exhibition "We Persist, Therefore We Have Hope" is now available in digital format. Feel free to browse through the document here.

In the first event of the new academic year in the Literature and Resistance series, Ankhi Mukherjee, Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford discussed her book Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor with Ian Robertson. Professor Mukherjee’s ground-breaking research combines literary and cultural criticism with clinical case studies to examine the relationship between global cities, poverty, and psychoanalysis. Drawing on extensive, collaborative research in six global cities, and reading works of contemporary world literature which explore issues of identity, illness, and death at the intersections of class, race, globalisation, and migrancy, Unseen City speaks profoundly and urgently to the multifaceted theme of resistance.

In the first resistance research seminar of the academic year, Professor Malte Rolf presented his new research on critical discourses on Soviet modernity in the 1960s-1970s. Discussing the emergence of the Soviet preservationist movement, Professor Rolf showed how basic notions of progress, growth and modernity were reconsidered in the Soviet context

The Centre, in partnership with Poetry Ireland and the Trinity Long Room Hub hosted a poetry reading event as part of the Literature and Resistance series. Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe and Anthony Anaxagorou read from their work and discussed how ideas of resistance inform and emerge from their writing, and how such ideas have also shaped their work beyond poetry, in research, teaching, mentoring, and publishing. The evening was introduced and chaired by Seán Hewitt, award-winning author of Tongues of Fire (2020) and All Down Darkness Wide (2022), and Teaching Fellow in the School of English at Trinity.

In the autumn of 2022, Prof. Martha A. Fineman (Emory University) gave a four-part lecture series online on vulnerability theory to members of the Centre and to a broader scholarly audience. The recordings of the lecture could be viewed by clicking on the link.

The Centre hosted a research seminar by Dr. Julia Buyskykh, a socio-cultural anthropologist affiliated with the Institute of History of Ukraine, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and an NGO the Centre for Applied Anthropology in Kyiv. From 2015 to 2018 Dr Buyskykh conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the multiconfessional rural communities of the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands and also Ukrainian communities in North-West of Poland. Those communities were forged from Greek Catholics and Orthodox of various backgrounds and were forcibly resettled from their homeland in Subcarpathia. Since the late 1950s – early 1960s some Greek Catholics, and later their descendants, started to come back to their ancestral lands in Subcarpathia trying to settle in old family places or closer to them. In communist Poland, the Greek Catholic Church was officially prohibited and Greek Catholic clergy and believers were forced to convert to Orthodox Christianity or Roman Catholicism. Despite the prohibition, a number of priests and nuns continued to carry out their pastoral work underground. This quiet resistance against communist state-imposed Polish homogeneity and silence of the communist era, together with the memories about resettlement, religious rites, rituals and liturgy in their native language transmitted through family’s upbringing and sense of belonging, forged Ukrainian Greek Catholic minority in Poland with rather distinctive religious and ethnic identity. In her talk, Dr Buyskykh drew upon qualitative data from Przemyl and the surrounding rural area, also from Biay Bór and Cyganek to illustrate how local Ukrainian Greek Catholics were able to resist, to survive through communism, and to develop their communities through religion.

Egyptian comics artist Deena Mohamed discussed her graphic novel, Your Wish is My Commmand (Shubeik Lubeik) at the International Literature Festival Dublin. The event was organised jointly with ILFDublin, the Long Room Hub and the Centre.

The first podcast in the Literature and Resistance podcast series is the recording of an in-conversation event featuring Prof Rosie Lavan and comics artist Deena Mohamed. The topic of the conversation was the publication of the award-winning graphic novel Shubeik Lubeik - Your Wish is My Command - by Deena Mohamed.

Founding member of the Centre for Resistance Studies, Prof Jacqueline Hayden was awarded the Medal of Gratitude by the European Solidarity Center in Gdansk for donating her extensive collection of interviews with leading members of the Solidarity movement. Prof Hayden was the first foreign journalist to interview Lech Walesa in 1980 and she has interviewed numerous political figures in Poland since then. In 2023, she donated her rich collection of interviews to the European Solidarity Center where the files will be made available for future researchers.

The Centre hosted an in-conversation event with award-winning writer and poet, Carmen Bugan and Prof Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. The conversation touched upon the relationship between oppression and language, and the role of poetry and translation in articulating resistance. Watch the video recording here.

What does resistance mean? What motivates one person to spy on another? And how do we rescue language from the politics of oppression? In this podcast, acclaimed poet, memoirist and critic Carmen Bugan explores these questions in conversation with Balázs Apor and Rosie Lavan as part of the Trinity Centre for Resistance Studies Literature and Resistance series, drawing on her family’s extraordinary story of dissent, surveillance and exile from Ceaușescu’s Romania, and on her convictions as a writer and reader of poetry.

In his lecture Professor De Baets explored the various strategies historians have developed to resist attacks on - and abuses of - their profession. The talk provided an analysis of the repertoires of resistance historians adopted in dictatorships and reflected on the possibilities of safeguarding academic freedom in democracies.

As part of the Literature and Resistance series, the Centre hosted a poetry reading by acclaimed poets Éireann Lorsung, Majed Mujed, and Hua Xi. The event was co-organised by the Centre, Poetry Ireland and the Trinity Long Room Hub. As part of this special event, the poets explored the nature of resistance in poetry, and how it informs their relationships with language, form, and translation, and reflected on their broader experiences with writing and poetry, which encompass journalism, teaching, and publishing, in the US, Iraq, and Ireland.

In partnership with the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, the Centre hosted a research seminar with Dr Dilyana Kiryakova-Ryan about her work on Europeanization in Bulgaria. The paper discussed civic initiatives and democratic work in Bulgaria through the theoretical lense of Lacan’s ideas on desire.

In this latest event in the Literature and Resistance series, we explored the role comic books and graphic novels are playing in reflecting and critiquing some of the most pressing contemporary issues, and in fostering community and inspiring activism among their readers. From his perspective as a critic, Dr Dom Davies (City University, London) discussed comics that suggest ways of looking at war and displacement in the Middle East. The writer and artist Timothy Poisson discussed why comics were his medium of choice for storytelling and activism, reflecting on his work representing the LGBTQ+ community.

The Centre was delighted to host the 2024 annual lecture organised by Front Line Defenders. The lecture was given by Horia Mosadiq regarding the Taliban’s takeover in August 2021 which sparked a new period of prolonged and profound repression of human rights in Afghanistan. Horia Mosadiq’s lecture addressed human rights, particularly the situation for women’s rights under the Taliban and the struggle of Human Rights Defenders and Women Human Rights Defenders in this context.

The Centre hosted a public lecture by Dr Olesya Khromeychuk, Director of the Ukrainian Institute in London on 26 March 2024 in the Long Room Hub.

The International Literature Festival Dublin, in partnership with the Centre hosted a discussion with prize-winning author Sasha Salzmann about her book, Glorious People. Together with moderator Conor Daly (TCD), they discussed emigration, dislocation, and the search for cultural identity faced by many children whose parents made the decision to leave their homelands.

The symposium brought together scholars, activists and artists to explore the artistic and cultural development of the overseas Hong Kong diaspora. The symposium took place in the Hague from 23-24 May, 2024, with an accompanying exhibition from 17-26 May, 2024.

The international conference explored the legacies of cultural opposition in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism. The conference was organised jointly the Centre, the Long Room Hub and the Irish Association for Russian, Central and East European Studies and it featured a keynote lecture by Professor Karen Leeder from the University of Oxford.

The Centre, jointly with the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Dublin hosted award-winning author Clare Mulley for a public lecture exploring the story of resistance fighter Elżbieta Zawacka, aka Zo, the only woman to reach London as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command, and the only woman to parachute from Britain to Nazi-occupied Poland.

The Centre, together with the Centre for International History and the Dpartment of Russian and Slavonic Studies hosted Professor Stephen Kotkin (Stanford University) for a public lecture discussing the main geopolitical challenges facing democracies in the world today.

This research seminar by Mandy Lee from the School of Medicine and the Department of Sociology) focused on how members of the pro-democracy Hongkonger community co-construct their responses to repression through talk and art since the 2019 mass protests. The seminar highlighted three narrative practices that have become prominent features in Hongkongers communal expressions of trauma, resilience and resistance, including foul language, satire, and pointed silence.

This research seminar by Dr Katerina Pavlidi from UCD explored representations of history and time in contemporary Russian culture with a particular emphasis on street art. The seminar took place as a part of the School of Language, Literatures and Cultural Studies Seminar Series.

In this seminar talk, Dr Wcislik from the Polish Academy of Sciences, disentangled the history and the present of networked protest cultures in order to rethink lessons for the future. The talk offered a critical reading of the contemporary debate on cultures of networked protest, and its peculiar rendering of the dissident experience. The seminar argued that samizdat activism matters for that debate and examined the Polish case to conclude that media-driven horizontalism is essential for building a protest culture that is resilient.

The lecture series ran in the spring of 2025 and explored forms and patterns of resistance, opposition, non-compliance or protest in Europe’s East, both past and present. The lectures discussed manifestations of resistance in the region’s history, the long-term legacies of dissent, innovative forms of protest, and the role of culture in shaping critical views of politics and society. Follow the link to read more about the series or watch the recorded lectures.

This joint event with the International Literature Festival Dublin featured historian Serhii Plokhy, whose new book gives a gripping account of the chaos and disaster at Ukraine’s nuclear plant from the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The author was in conversation with Dr Conor Daly from TCD

This public lecture by Dr Jessica Zychowicz, director of Fulbright Ukraine, drew upon twenty years of research and work experience between North America, Eastern Europe and Ukraine. The self-determination of individuals through artistic and creative communities was in the focus of the discussion that explored how new platforms for artistic communication and co-creative practices shaped possibilities for a shared global ethics in concepts of "democracy" and "empathy," in Ukraine.