On March 23, an interdisciplinary panel which included Dr Harald Fredheim (University of York) Gareth Kennedy (National College of Art and Design) Dr Philip Lawton (TCD) Dr Katrina Maguire (Limerick School of Art and Design) Robert O’Bryne (Irish Georgian Society) Shane O’Driscoll (Ardú Cork) Dr Kathleen Stokes (DCU) discussed how ruination, the wilful destruction or deliberate abandonment of a building, intersects with aesthetics, identity, climate change, and Ireland’s housing crisis. This conversational workshop explored collaborative pathways through the issues that de-centre the authorised voice.

RUINation is led by Sarah Kerr, Sarah Bezan, Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn, Jesse Peterson and made possible, in part, by support from UCC Futures - Future Humanities Institute. 

Kylie Thomas, researcher at the Radical Humanities Laboratory and School of History and Art History has published an article in the Conversation. The article focuses on the work of Zanele Muholi, who was awarded the world's largest prize for photography, the Hasselblad Award, in 2026. South African visual activist Zanele Muholi’s celebrated work centres the lives and experiences of Black lesbians and trans people. For more than two decades Muholi has used photography to courageously open space for queer representation within and outside of art galleries in South Africa and across the world.

This project explores new directions in necro-ecologies, a field that interprets death as a set of active, vital, agential, and transformative inter-species interactions (Bezan 2015). 

Dr Stephen Roddy, and Colleagues at the Molecular Virology Diagnostic and Research Laboratory, APC Microbiome and the School of Medicine publish paper on the onification of virology data in Leonardo (MIT Press)

On Dec 2-3 an online symposium organised by Dr Jessica Wax Edwards, the Centre for Mexican Studies, University College Cork (Ireland) and the Centre Interlangues Texte, Image, Langage, Université Bourgogne Europe (France) in collaboration with The Populism Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association too place. Featuring keynote speakers: Benjamin Moffitt (Monash University, Australia) The Visual Politics of Populism: Reflections on the (Accidental) Creation of a Subfield María Esperanza Casullo (Universidad Nacional de Río Negro, Argentina) Baroque Bodies: Appearance and Performance in Latin American Populism.

Prof Claire Connolly (UCC School of English and Digital Humanities) and her co-editor Prof James Chandler (University of Chicago) are pleased to announce the publication Special Issue 56.2 of the journal New Literary History, on the topic of Irish Keywords.

Congratulations to Luigina Ciolfi who will be Visiting Professor in the SCIENCE Faculty at the University of Copenhagen, jointly hosted by DIKU (the Department of Computer Science) and SNM (the Natural History Museum Denmark) during March 2026.