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.