Early Career Researcher Poster Showcase
Each year, the Trinity Long Room Hub hosts up to 50 of Trinity’s PhD students and early career researchers from across the Arts and Humanities. We are committed to showing how their research provides unique perspectives on societal challenges.
ECR Poster Presentation 2025
Early Career Researcher Poster Showcase 2025
Alan Armstrong | English | The Ethics of Wealth in Late Medieval Alliterative Verse | Research Ireland | armstral@tcd.ie
Alliterative Verse, a form of poetry which reappears in the 1400s after centuries of apparent absence, encompasses many of the most renowned late medieval poems in the English vernacular, from Alliterative Morte Arthur to Piers Plowman. My project aims to look at this form of poetry in a systematic, comprehensive fashion, focusing on how each poem speaks about wealth – who should have it, what should they do with it, and how should they try and get more?
My findings thus far have been that these poems combine a strong ethos of social conservatism – that the existing social order of late medieval England is natural, praiseworthy, and must be maintained – with a broad endorsement of the acquisition of wealth through violence as a remedy for social discord. The maintenance of social distinction through the conspicuous consumption of the nobility as a mechanism of social order and control is prized in poems such as Wynnere and Wastoure, and the foreign adventures of Alexander the Great or King Arthur, who pillage and sack cities on their grand conquests, are seen as not only acceptable but as a legitimate remedy for the problem of a lack of wealth flowing through the economy. It is offered as a remedy for economic and social discord in a century of famine, war, plague, and social unrest. Despite its sinful nature, as depicted here through five medieval images of the twin vices of Avarice and Covetousness, Alliterative Verse often provides a narrative around wealth quite different from what we might expect. In a disturbing resonance between the worlds of the fourteenth and twentieth (and, indeed, twenty-first) centuries, the excesses of these eras can be summed up in the mantra of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987): “Greed, for want of a better word, is Good. Greed is Right. Greed works.”
The medieval counterbalance to this narrative, one found throughout the poems in this study, is a consciousness of mortality. A conqueror, however successful, or a noble, however wealthy and worthy, must eventually die, and not only is wealth no help to them in the grave, but as the ‘grisly goost’ of Guinevere’s mother, or the walking corpses of the Three Dead Kings remind us, the very wealth which attracts such renown in life is a terrible, sinful burden for the dead. This reality is depicted here by the tearing of the manuscript to reveal an image of the Three Dead, a common motif in medieval art, staring back from the grave at the greed of their living counterparts who must one day join them. My poster aims to express this tension in the ethic of wealth by having one narrative tear through another – a fitting representative for these contradictory, sometimes chaotic, but always fascinating poems.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Alexander Cupples | Religion, Theology and Peace Studies | The Eucharistic liturgy in the 7th-Century Antiphonary of Bangor (including the world's oldest Communion hymn depicted in the poster) | Philanthropically funded via the Loyola Institute | cupplesj@tcd.ie
The thesis of this project is that the Antiphonary of Bangor, one of Ireland's oldest manuscripts, contains the world's oldest extra-Biblical hymn sung during Communion, 'Sancti venite', as depicted on the poster, as well as Ireland's most complete Eucharistic liturgy by far by the seventh century, and will therefore be a multi-disciplinary study of the theology and history underneath it.
Most of what we know about the early medieval Irish Eucharist thus far comes from sources influenced by the subsequent Carolingian Renaissance, which leads to significant change throughout Europe's liturgy. The researcher is currently investigating what may be the first known implication of a belief in universal salvation in early medieval Ireland in this manuscript.
He is motivated by the potential relevance of early Irish theology and history to the Northern Irish peace process, as well as other present-day issues, studying a manuscript written at an Irish church responsible for training St Columbanus, whom Benedict XVI credited the first use of the phrase 'totius Europae', and to whom Robert Schumann, one of the founders of the European Union, calls ‘the patron saint of all those who now seek to build a united Europe’.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Ginevra Sanvitale | Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies | Chickens, women, and other machines. A feminist history of industrial poultry production in 20th-century Italy | Horizon Europe | sanvitag@tcd.ie
My research, part of the interdisciplinary project MOZART, investigates the relationship between women’s labour and the industrialization of poultry production in Italy, combining methods and perspectives from the history of technology, feminist studies, and digital humanities. How did women’s labour produce or sustain techno-scientific innovation in the poultry sector? And what was the impact of this innovation on women’s political agency? Drawing from the analysis on gender, labour and reproduction by feminist researchers Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati, I work with a three-dimensional conceptualisation of labour: productive, reproductive, and intellectual. Women featured in great numbers among the poultry industry workforce, contributing to its growth with their productive labour. The intellectual labour of women researchers was key in the academic field of poultry science, which enabled techno-scientific advancements in the industry. Finally, the industry’s success depended upon housewives buying and cooking industrial chickens for the family, thus entering the dimension of reproductive labour.
In 20th century Italy, public and private initiatives for increasing poultry production were carried out under fascist, then social-democratic, then neo-liberal political systems, with different implications for women’s labour and political agency. The poster stems from the first stage of this history. It features a Leghorn, an Italian-originating poultry breed that was crucial for the development of the egg industry in the US, as well as for the “rationalisation” of rural poultry farming in fascist Italy, hence earning a special place in the regime’s propaganda. In recent times, eggs are again at the centre of political discourses, together with an alarming revival of anti-democratic sentiments. The poster thus points at the symbolic and material significance of chickens in the making –or breaking– of sociopolitical systems. The poster also plays with poultry symbolism, by depicting one bird with a fascist-era hat, and one with a feminine straw hat, exemplifying women’s agency. The graphic composition, together with the caption, wishes to remark on the incompatibility of authoritarian systems with the values of independent and inclusive scholarship, as the birds’ shapes resemble, respectively, a disapproving thumbs down (the one symbolising fascism) and an approving thumbs up (the one symbolising women’s agency).
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Gustav Parker Hibbett | English | Am I Making Sense?: Autoethnographic Essays on Race, Language, and Systemic Power | 1252 Scholarship | hibbettg@tcd.ie
My poster illustrates the relationship at the centre of this project: that between the Black body and the American and Western European structures of knowledge, which has historically been one of simultaneous extraction and exclusion (of but not by or for). With my edits to Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp and the background text from Thomas Jefferson’s 1787 Notes on the State of Virginia, I am referencing 19th-century dissections at the Anatomical Theatre at the University of Virginia and the common 18th- and 19th- century practice among med schools to grave-rob Black graveyards in order to acquire bodies for anatomy lessons. Jefferson, who spearheaded the creation of UVA and who drew up the plans for the Anatomical Theatre, was interested in anatomical dissections partially as a way to prove his white supremacist theories of Black inferiority, some of which are enumerated in his 1787 Notes. The Black body on the table (the only Black body in the room) is itself the table upon which knowledge of the human body is made, and this knowledge—made without the real input or agency of the Black body—is used to aid in delineating racist hierarchies of humanness that cast knowledge and reason as properties of whiteness (and are therefore also hierarchies of knowledge: whose perspective and sense of reason we can put more trust in).
We can find more examples of this extractive/exclusive relationship in medicine across the centuries—J. Marion Sims, Henrietta Lacks, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study—as well as in other knowledge-related areas. Toni Morrison argues, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, that Black people in American literature are often used to “ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them” (15). Or we can look to philosophy, where, as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues in Becoming Human, “Eurocentric humanism needs blackness as a prop in order to erect whiteness: to define its own limits and to designate humanity as an achievement as well as to give form to the category of ‘the animal’” (4). This pattern appears as well in psychology—consider the mid-20th century use of paranoid schizophrenia diagnoses to pathologise and delegitimise Black people who complained about civil rights abuses—and historiography, where we don’t need to look any further than the current book and teaching bans in the US that position Black perspectives on history as illegitimate, biased, and fanatical.
In a present informed by this history, what is my relationship to knowing and being known, to seeing and being seen? How do I explain myself when it feels like explanation itself works against me? Am I making sense?
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1787
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Hibah Aburwein | Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies | Navigating Identity: The Hijab and Everyday Realities for Muslim Women in Ireland | aburweih@tcd.ie
By treating the hijab not merely as a religious symbol but as a multifaceted practice shaped by Islamic theological interpretations, cultural traditions, and socio-political influences, the study underscores Muslim women's agency in defining both personal and collective identities. Semi-structured interviews with 25 Muslim women, guided by feminist standpoint theory, illuminate how participants negotiate stereotypes and assert agency within Ireland's predominantly Catholic milieu. This research contributes to broader debates on religious expression, gender, and identity by providing nuanced insights into Muslim women's lived experiences.
Additionally, it demonstrates how local contexts— including Ireland's historical struggle for religious freedom- inform understandings of the hijab. Drawing on the researcher's activism and collaboration with Muslim organisations, this project enriches academic discourse and advocates for more inclusive policies and public debates, ultimately stressing the importance of centring Muslim women's own voices in any exploration of veiling and identity.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Holly Ritchie | Histories and Humanities | Saviours and Enslavers: the Irish in the Catholic Atlantic in the Eighteenth Century | Provost Award | hritchie@tcd.ie
My research contributes to the growing scholarship exploring Irish Catholic complicity in colonial expansion and the exploitation of enslaved people from West and Central Africa in the eighteenth century. In comparison to the restrictions they experienced in Ireland, the Atlantic world offered Irish Catholic traders religious freedom and opportunities for social mobility. This project investigates the Irish Catholic community networks of Nantes, one of France’s leading commercial centres due to its early involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, and Saint Domingue, the pearl of the Antilles.
In their imperial operations, the Irish Catholic mercantile community resists generalised statements regarding their colonial conduct. They were adept at manoeuvring across empires because of the fluidity of their identity. They could lay claim to multiple identities without a sense of contradiction: considering themselves Irish when connecting with a particular region and culture while identifying as ‘other’ when considering empire, foreign policy, and monarchies. In the absence of their own empire, they were able to ‘piggyback’ on the imperial activities of other global authorities: the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Danish. The pockets of settlements that existed along the Atlantic littoral, from Europe to the Caribbean, demonstrate their awareness of colonial planning and their imperial ambition.
This poster is influenced by a question I am frequently asked: ‘If Catholic Ireland was colonised by the British, how could Irish Catholics be considered colonisers?’ The inclusion of two maps, powerful tools of empire, were purposefully selected to encourage the onlooker consider that both narratives – the colonised and the coloniser – are true.
‘The General Map of Ireland,’ on the left-hand side, is a product of the Irish Down Survey taken between 1656 and 1658 under the direction of Sir William Petty, surgeon-general of the English army. This was the first dedicated land survey conducted on a national scale, and it radically transformed landholding. The Down Survey represented the anglicisation of Ireland and the island's integration into the ‘English imperial system,’ as referenced by Jane Ohlmeyer.
On the right-hand side is a French cadastral map titled Plan de la ville des Cayes, Haiti et de ses faubourgs, designed by B. Picdepère in 1857. In this simple illustration, we see the outline of the O’Shiell plantation [habitation O’Shiell]. On this land, the O’Shiell family enslaved people from West and Central Africa and exploited their labour in the production of sugar and indigo. Following the Haitian Revolution, Bernard-Barnabé O’Shiell became an active voice in the anti-abolition movement.
‘L’oubli offense, et la mémoire, quand elle est partagée, abolit cette offense. Chacun de nous a besoin de la mémoire de l’autre, parce que…si nous voulions partager la beauté du monde, si nous voulons être solidaires de ses souffrances, nous devons apprendre à nous souvenir ensemble.’
---
‘Forgetting offends, and memory, when shared, abolishes this offense. Each of us needs the memory of the other because… if we want to share the beauty of the world, if we want to be in solidarity with its suffering, we must learn to remember together.’
Édouard Glissant, Une nouvelle region du monde, Gallimard, 2006.
Plan de la ville des Cayes, Haïti et de ses faubourgs par B. Picdepère (1857) available online: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8492199n/f1.item.zoom
Jane Ohlmeyer, Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism and the Early Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Finola O'Kane Crimmins and Ciaran O'Neill, Ireland, Slavery and the Caribbean; Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Studies in Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023).
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jaka Lombar | Creative Arts | Material Slippage: Virtual Reality, Embodiment and the Future of Spectatorial Sociality | Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland | lombarj@tcd.ie
This poster features Francisco Goya’s drawing of a peep show (also known as a raree show) device from circa 1820, far preceding technologies that the general public today commonly associates with virtual reality. The inclusion of the cutting mat and a colour chart is meant to evoke how heritage institutions digitise their artefacts, historicising the practice, while the immersive headset in the upper left corner gestures towards the possible futures of virtual images.
The name of the apparatus that Goya uses as the caption for the image, Tuti li mundi, translates to ‘the whole world,’ juxtaposing the textual message of supposed totality with the scene that deliberately depicts how delimited the experience offered by early optical devices is since the act of immersion on the part of the spectator also allows for distraction that results in the slippage of the trousers and the reveal of the spectator's buttocks. Similarly, my research investigates how embodiment, subjectivity and the gaze intersect at the nexus of extended reality technologies and film theory, particularly in the area of cinematic virtual reality.
VR headsets today are capable of providing panoramic vistas of the profilmic world and innumerable fictional spaces. Yet the viewers find themselves in a similarly vulnerable position, particularly in public VR settings, at the mercy of passersby and event facilitators during their virtual experiences. If television once promised the elimination of “annoying presence of the other spectators in the auditorium” as Erkki Huhtamo puts it, VR invokes similar promises, which are put into question by the visuals displayed here. Despite the satiric nature of the drawing, which could also invite considerations of embodiment in relation to queer theory, Goya presciently maps the tensions of fragmented and binocular human vision that film and media studies since the 1970s apparatus theories considered as resulting from the "the frenzy of the visible", according to Jean-Louis Comolli. The female character who is amused more by the buttocks than the visuals of the peep show and whose presence adds an additional layer to the schema of looking and being observed that arises in any work of art, also subverts the logics of the male gaze, which was theorised as a dominant spectatorial mode by feminist film theory, but is yet to be comprehensively considered in the medium of virtual reality.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Zhe Zhang | Law | Liability of Mutual Funds Under EU Competition Law for Article 102 Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union Infringements by Their Portfolio Unicorn Companies | zhzhang@tcd.ie
This research examines the phenomenon in private equity markets whereby large companies remain private for extended periods and reach unicorn status—defined as privately held firms with valuations exceeding $1 billion. Supported by various classes of investors, including mutual funds, these unicorns often acquire dominant market positions and engage in conduct that distorts competition. Such business models may fall within the scope of Article 102 TFEU due to their exclusionary or exploitative effects. However, under current jurisprudence, mutual funds and other minority shareholders are unlikely to be held liable for Article 102 infringements, as they typically lack active control rights. This study investigates legal frameworks for establishing cross-entity liability in competition law, assessing the applicability of alternative legal theories. The core focus lies in the tension between company law’s protection of separate legal personality and competition law’s willingness to look through corporate structures for competition law goals.
This poster presents the phenomenon in private markets where private equity investors provide financial backing and exert control over unicorn companies, symbolised by the image of a puppet master's hands. The unicorn is depicted as a Trojan horse: while it appears to offer lower-priced products and services, it ultimately generates harmful effects for various market participants. The phrase “my unicorn’s liability is not my liability,” adapted from the medieval maxim “my vassal’s vassal is not my vassal,” highlights the corporate shield that investors rely upon. The red downward line signifies that this reliance on limited liability, enabled by the principle of separate legal personality, is increasingly open to challenge.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jonathon Boylan | Law | If It May Please the Algorithm - Artificial Intelligence, Judicial Discretion and Satisfactory Sentencing | Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship // TCD Non-Foundation Scholarship | jboylan@tcd.ie
Although sporadic manifestation of sentencing guidelines through a combination of legislation and precedent has aimed to promote consistency and transparency, Irish judges retain considerable discretion when handing down criminal sentences. On the one hand, this discretion facilitates flexibility, enabling judges to respond empathetically and specifically to the case before them. However, some argue this flexibility has led to opaque, inconsistent sentencing practices. As far back as 1999, Ivana Bacik observed substantial public disquiet due to unaccounted for variations in sentences, for apparently homogenous crimes. Anger in this area reached a newfound zenith in 2023, when numerous national protests were held criticizing the provision of a string of what appeared to be lenient sentences to convicted assailants, particularly those found guilty of assaulting women.
Dissatisfaction with Irish sentencing practices continues to occupy public thought at a time where assisted decision-making aids are revolutionising sentencing procedures abroad. In State v Loomis, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the use of algorithmic recidivism assessment tools in the jurisdiction’s sentencing procedure. In the United Kingdom, recidivism assessment algorithm “Oasys” is consistently used to inform decisions around the suitability of certain rehabilitation programmes for certain offenders. It is also used to inform decisions around granting parole. On the face of it, these tools can complete computations inconceivable to humans, offering greater impartiality, consistency and more informed decisions. However, algorithmic justice in this context poses significant challenges of its own. Those include whether algorithms are inherently biased, whether they impermissibly interfere with the positive upshots of judicial discretion in sentencing, whether we are entitled to have our case substantively decided by a human, and whether algorithmic tools can be trusted to be procedurally fair.
My thesis engages with these questions by assessing not only whether the challenges of integrating assisted decision-making aids into the Irish sentencing procedure can be overcome, but by asking whether they should be overcome, in juxtaposition with growing discontent surrounding the current regime. At its core, the project asks whether Ireland should follow jurisdictions such as America by diluting judicial discretion through the integration of assisted decision-making aids in our sentencing regime. In doing so, the values and defects of judicial discretion in this area, as well as more generally, will be highlighted. A light will also be shone on the potential pitfalls of algorithmic justice, with each inquiry going towards one central question – should sentencing be left to the robots?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jungmi Hur | Education | Exploring the influence of drama-based pedagogy on the creative writing skills of Korean pupils studying English as a Second Language | hurj@tcd.ie
The research aims to investigate the influence of drama-based pedagogy on the creative writing of Korean students learning English. Particularly, this study considers the ‘post-process writing’ approach (Atkinson, 2003a) and its alignment with drama in a Sociocultural Theory framework. Post-process writing is an approach that focuses on the social and cultural aspects of writing that emerged in the 1990s in the US. Sociocultural theory (SCT) is rooted in Vygotsky's belief that cognitive development is shaped by social interaction and the cultural environment.
This research employs phenomenography, a qualitative methodology that emerged in the early 1980s in the field of teacher education (Hajar, 2021; Marton, 1986; Marton, 2004). The data collection spanned over a period of five months, from March to July 2023, with two-hour weekly drama-based lessons at a secondary school in South Korea, with 28 children aged 13. The research tools included 16 lesson plans, 32 hours of teaching, children’s written compositions (3x28 children), photographs and videos of selected key moments, researcher fieldnotes, and a focus group with nine participants.
Through this study, I aim to illuminate how drama-based pedagogy, situated within a post-process and sociocultural theoretical framework, can foster meaningful engagement with creative writing among Korean secondary school English learners. This will contribute to a deeper understanding of writing as a socially situated, affective, and dialogic practice.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Katarzyna Stepien | Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies | South American Mythologies in Contemporary Colombian Writing | Trinity Research Doctorate Awards 2023-2027 | stepienk@tcd.ie
The visual accompanying this project captures its essence: a woman dressed in traditional attire bearing the colours of Colombia sits still, expectant. Her stance evokes a quiet tension—waiting—symbolising the search for meaning in the absence of inherited mythologies.
Through literary analysis and cultural reflection, this study investigates how contemporary female authors reinterpret, resist, or reimagine myth to articulate a uniquely Colombian, gendered voice in the aftermath of its supposed disappearance.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Michael Mc Laughlin | Creative Arts | Resolving the Tension Between Social Inclusion and Musical Excellence in Community Choirs | mclaugmi@tcd.ie
In my research, I explore the unique and powerful role that community choirs play in people’s lives—where singing becomes a way to connect, heal, and grow. These choirs are more than musical groups; they are spaces of belonging, creativity, and shared purpose. Across Ireland and beyond, they make a meaningful contribution to community life. Yet, a quiet but ongoing challenge often arises: how can choirs remain open and welcoming to everyone while also pursuing high musical standards?
To understand how this balance is struck, I spent time listening to and learning from the people at the heart of these choirs. Through a mix of surveys, ethnographic observations, and in-depth interviews, I gathered insights into the everyday practices and decisions that shape choir life. Using these stories, voices, and performances, I aim to show how community choirs create spaces that are artistically vibrant and socially meaningful. They are places where people come together to make something beautiful, something that resonates well beyond the music itself.
My approach is guided by a framework that sees community music as a deeply social and participatory activity. I draw on Lee Higgins’ idea of community music as a deliberate and inclusive practice, designed to support both musical and personal development. Huib Schippers adds to this by describing community music as a response to specific cultural or social needs, reconnecting people with music in ways that matter to them. I also build on Sarah Jane Gibson’s important work, which brings attention to the tension between social inclusion and musical excellence, a tension that sits at the core of my own research. Doreen Rao reminds us that choral work is not just about technical achievement, but about transformation and meaning. Hilary Moss and Bridie-Leigh Bartleet contribute further by highlighting the role of context, well-being, and individual agency in shaping the choral experience.
A moment that captures this balance comes from a 2019 concert at Cadogan Hall, London. I conducted a hospice-based community choir that welcomed everyone, regardless of musical experience or background. We collaborated with another local community choir, West End soloists, and a professional band in the ‘100 Voices for Princess Alice Hospice’ fundraising concert. This moment is the inspiration for my research project, and as such, I have chosen to use a photograph taken by an audience member that evening. The performance was moving, polished, and powerful, proof that inclusion and artistic ambition can not only coexist but enhance one another. The text is written in hospice pink as a tribute to our achievements.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Miguel Ângelo Andriolo Mangini | Histories and Humanities | Studies in the style of Virgil's Georgics | Trinity Research Doctorate Award | andriolm@tcd.ie
In the year 29 BCE, Roman poet Virgil finished writing a poem after seven years in the making and read it aloud to Augustus, the Emperor of Rome. Its title, Georgics, translates as 'agricultural songs', which, in part, is what this four-book Latin text is. As if imparting practical knowledge to farmers, Virgil provides a didactic account of ploughing, planting trees, tending cattle, and beekeeping. The way in which he does it, however, forces one to halt and reread. All of the 2,000 lines of this poem are filled with comments on life and death, war and peace, human and nature, poetry, and all else. The poet, in singing about farming, elaborates thoughts such as 'there is no beauty superior to that of the cosmos' and 'must Rome wage war on the world when the battle between farmer and barren land is brutal enough?'. After two millennia of reading this poem, no one is convincingly sure of what it is about.
I chose style as my way into investigating the mystery of the Georgics. What are the linguistic choices that went into Virgil's poetic task, that is, what kinds of words does he choose, in what order does he dispose them and why, what is the rhythm and metre of each line? All of this is to say: how did his poem feel to a Roman's ears? As Augustus sat in his throne and listened to Virgil (apparently, when the Sage speaks, the Emperor listens), did the poem strike him as archaic in flavour or modernistic, was it grave and solemn or light and unassuming, did its rhythm feel like a Mozart or a Stravinsky, were some words common and some rare, or does none of this describe the language of the Georgics? Our predicament is that Latin is a dead language, therefore no one has natural insight into it.
When one reads "Thither take ye ploughs and swords" (James Mangan), some words are naturally assimilated as old-fashioned today, although current centuries ago; in "You might say, only a crocus, its bulbous head" (Eavan Boland), crocus and bulbous are highly descriptive and unusual; finally, anyone familiar with the Ulster accent will get the wordplay in Fodder: "Or, as we said / fother" (Seamus Heaney). But what does one do with non liquidi gregibus fontes, non gramina derunt (2.200)? Meaning ('flocks will lack nor flowing springs nor pasture') is not the problem. How would one have perceived the language of this verse?
This clay-dirt project is the representation of an ancient idea: 'writing poetry is like ploughing'. In Latin, the word uersus means 'a turn' and describes the serpentine movement of the plough on the field; by visual association, it came to mean 'line of poetry' (see English 'verse'). Here, the ridges of ploughed land display a famous passage from the poem: labor omnia uicit ('toil took over everything'). Finally, the syllables MA-VE-PV correspond to an acrostic in the Georgics with which the poet signs his name: MAro VErgilius PVblius.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Minyeong Ha| Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies | What is your level of cultural knowledge? | hami@tcd.ie
Culture is a mixture of language and ideas (Hartono et al., 2021), and language and culture are interdependent and influence each other. Clearly, a language depends on the needs of the broader culture it contributes to. Language is more than a tool for expressing culture; rather, it is an essential tool for cultural creation (Strathern & Stewart, 2020). Language and culture are deeply related in many fields, and ideas are expressed through language. Culture can be defined as the entire pattern of behaviour of a group of agents, embodied in thoughts, behaviours, and artefacts, from which knowledge can be learned and passed on to the next generation (Finkelstein, 2008).
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Nora Grimes | Creative Arts | Legacies of Resistance: Women Theatre-Makers and Transnational Feminist Genealogies in Ireland and the United States, 1900-1929 | Trinity Research Doctorate Award | nogrimes@tcd.ie
My use of the term “mythmaking” is a response to theatre scholar Shonagh Hill’s proposal that Irish women theatre-makers engaged mythmaking as “reiteration, reperformance, and re-inscription of myths on and through the body,” and that this “creative female corporeality” might be considered a throughline of feminist resistance to canon-formation (2019, 6;1). This paradigm inspires my own feminist historiographic structure to consider the transnational networks of women artists active across Ireland and the United States. Legendary Irish women were frequent subjects in early Irish drama. Performances of touring groups such as the Abbey’s Irish Players exposed American audiences to these plays and stories and expanded the influence of mythmaking into American creative contexts. I also query my own “creative corporeality” as a theatre historian. How, too, is this dissertation an act (or acts) of mythmaking? In what way might it, too, be embodied, or be the result of an embodied practice of feminist research?
My poster asks the viewer to consider the same question that drives my own research: how do women mythmake history? Not only is that question the question I ask of the women in my study, but one I ask of myself as a feminist theatre historian. How am I forming a historical narrative that (re)shapes the theatre histories of this period? American illustrator J.C. Leyendecker’s image “Queen Maeve,” (c. 1911) is a subtle nod to the transnational influence of Irish myths on American artists in the early 20th century. I remain struck by the power of her presence in the illustration, and the challenge in her gaze further emboldens the question I ask.
Hill, Shonagh. Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Leyendecker, Joseph Christian. “Black-and-white line-art version of Queen Maeve.” Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:J._C._Leyendecker,_Queen_Maev,_line-art_version,_1911.jpg
N.B. This image is in the public domain. The full-colour painting version was used for the cover of T.W. Rolleston, Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race (1911).
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Zoe Patterson | English | Yes We Will Yes: communal readership of James Joyce | 1252 Postgradate Studentship | pattersz@tcd.ie
James Joyce is considered by many to be a “difficult” writer. Some readers respond to this perceived difficulty by spending hours pouring over secondary texts with the hope of solving the puzzles presented by Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, while others choose not to become readers at all, eschewing Joyce’s work altogether. Some, however, opt to find readerly safety in numbers.
This research makes use of reader-response and reception theories in its methodology. It emphasizes the concept of the active reader (that is, a reader who takes on a creative and empowered role within the text) and its importance to Joyce’s work. It asserts that collaborative reading serves to amplify this practice of active readership.
All Joyce reading groups and communities are, of course, unique. They engage, however, in a number of common practices, such as resource and knowledge pooling, as well as reading aloud. These practices are encouraged by the encyclopedic nature and other stylistic aspects of Joyce’s works.
Part of this research has involved interviewing individual members of these reading groups and communities. The thesis aims to center their perspectives and amplify the voices of non-academic readers within literary reception studies.
While this research focuses on communities outside of academia, it does not entirely exclude readers affiliated with literary scholarship. Within these communities, there exists an overlap between non-academic and academic readers; sometimes, readers from both camps can be found in an individual group. This thesis considers the relationship between these two types of readers within the context of collaborative reading, with the aim of forging stronger and more productive connections between the two.
This poster, which features the opening passage of Finnegans Wake, aims to demonstrate the collaboration of different reader perspectives in the act of group reading. The different pen colors denote different readers contributing their knowledge and ideas. Most of the content from these annotations is drawn directly from the Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury, commonly known as Fweet. This online repository of annotations is collaborative in and of itself, its contents having been published by multiple contributors. Fweet is an incredibly popular resource among Joyce reading groups, making its use in this poster particularly fitting.
Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury, fweet.org.
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. Viking Press, 1958.