The full programme for this year's Seminar Series is available to download here: Seminar Series 2012 - 13

Seminars are normally held at 4pm in O'Rahilly Building (ORB) 1.24 unless otherwise indicated

Wednesday April 10th: 8pm - West Wing 9

Helena Blejerman

"Living Abroad', or, 'Emotion in the Mother Tongue'"

When living far away from our homeland, some words provoke strong emotions of nostalgia, affection or closeness. Using psychological, philosophical and semantic concepts, this talk will focus on maternal language as and when spoken from abroad. Inspired by the project, "Our Language Garden", a collaborative radio project (Radio UNAM and BBC Sheffield) in which a series of Mexican and British guests brought one word and a personal story linked to that word, the objective of the talk is to reflect on the emotional quality of words in the native tongue when living abroad, and also to reveal the possibilities of their use through technologies like "skype". With a particular interest in exploring notions of home and distance, this talk will assess the way in which certain words trigger strong feelings of belonging, closing the emotional gap between the person abroad and their homeland. Helen Blejerman will reveal statistics, ask the audience questions and perhaps, if memory permits, tell stories.

Thursday 14th: 2pm - Cork City Library, Grand Parade 

Ilan Stavans (Amherst College, Massachusetts)

"One Hundred Years of Solitude: The 'Best Novel Ever Written'"

Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin-American and Latino culture at Amherst College, Massachusetts. He has worked on a wide range of aspects of contemporary Latin-American and Latino cultural studies, including Borges, Garía Márquez, Rubén Darío, Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz; Mexican and Latino popular culture; the sociolinguistic study of Spanglish; translations, translation and trans-languaging. As well as a wide range of scholarly studies, editions and critical conversations, he has published anthologies, translations, memoirs, fictional works, and more popular pieces, including a controversial version of the opening chapter of Don Quixote in Spanglish (2002) and Latino U.S.A: A Cartoon History (2000). His scholarly publications include The Hispanic Condition (1995), On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language (2001) Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language (2003), A Critic's Journey (2009) and The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2010) 

Friday 15th: 4pm - ORB 1.56

"The Sounds of Spanglish"

Spanish, present on the continent of America since the fifteenth century, when Iberian explorers sought to colonize territories in what are now Florida, New Mexico, Texas, and California, has become ubiquitous in the last few decades. With the release of the census figures in 2000, Latino America was anointed the future driving force of American culture. The emergence of Spanglish as a form of communication is one of the more influential markers of an America gone Latino. But Spanish north of the Rio Grande has not spread in its pure Iberian form. On the contrary, a signature of the brewing "Latin Fever" that has swept the United States since the mid-1980s is the astonishing creative linguistic amalgam of tongues used by people of Hispanic descent, not only in major cities but in rural areas as well -- neither Spanish nor English, but a hybrid, known only as Spanglish.

Friday 1st March - ORB 1.56 and Cork City Library, Grand Parade

Iberia in Translation Symposium

This symposium will provide a discussion of different aspects of literary translation in the Iberian context followed by multilingual poetry readings by Basque, Catalan and Galician poets.

A full schedule may be found here.

Friday 22nd February - 4.15 p.m. - ORB 1.24

Philip Johnston (University College Dublin)

'Quod elixum est ne assato: Antonio Machado and the Spanish Golden Age'

It is a truth not universally acknowledged that the poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939) by and large despised the literature and the entire aesthetic of the Spanish Golden Age. This paper will trace the development of this very negative reaction in his prose and, indeed, in his poetry.  Machado’s criticisms of certain Golden Age writers are expressed openly enough in a work such as Los complementarios (his 1912- 1926 private notebook), but, in terms of boisterous rejections, this is nothing compared to what he has to say in later writings when, for example, “ventriloquising” as Juan de Mairena, of whom it is observed that “En suma... no se chupa el dedo en su análisis del barroco español”, and who launches a scathing 7- point attack on the Spanish Baroque. Additionally, the paper will attempt to explain why Machado held such a poor opinion of the Baroque era, and, in doing so, will uncover some rather unpalatable truths about Machado himself.

Friday 15th February

Centre for Mexican Studies, UCC

The Violent Border: Research Symposium

This symposium will examine a range of recent cultural and popular responses to violence and insecurity in the U.S.-Mexico border region. The first two sessions will address questions of violence and cultural production as they are explored in manifestations of literature, photography and music from or about the U.S.-Mexico Border. The final session will analyse a range of popular strategies for justice in a recent case study from Hermosillo.

A full schedule may be found on the Centre for Mexican Studies site:  

Friday 1st February

Dr Ross Woods from Victoria University of Wellington

"Literary Maps as Literary Criticism: Reading Antonio Muñoz Molina's Los misterios de Madrid Cartographically"

In recent years, literary historian Franco Moretti has used maps to propose a paradigm shift in literary studies that embraces the quantitative research methods favoured in the social sciences, leading to renewed interest in the fields of literary cartography and literary geography. Ultimately, Moretti’s approach produces a macro-history of the novel that traces patterns in the development of this genre across broad historical periods and geographical expanses. In this attempt to create an inclusive, non-canonical history of literature, however, the text itself becomes of secondary importance. In contrast, in this seminar I argue that literary cartography need not be relegated to totalizing concepts of the novel’s historical and geographical evolution. After a discussion of the prevailing tendencies in literary geography this seminar briefly considers one of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s lesser-known novels, Los misterios de Madrid, and explores how literary maps may be used to not only enhance, but also produce, a critical reading of a text.

Friday 11th January:

Dr Kirsty Hooper

"Ríos, fontes, mares, océanos: Hydropoetics and the Galician Cultural Imagination"

This paper takes the case of Atlantic Galicia as a starting point to reflect on the implications of turning the gaze of Iberian cultural history outward towards the ocean. Exploring the watery presence in a selection of both canonical and forgotten cultural texts in circulation during the nineteenth century, this paper asks how an oceanic perspective might contribute to the reorganization and revalidation of Galicia’s contested geopoetic imaginary in the context of the nineteenth-century expansion of global maritime connections.

Friday 7th December: 3:30pm - ORB 1.45

María García- Liñeira from the University of Oxford

"Galician, Overpopulated Language"

‘Language’, claims the Russian intellectual Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘is populated —overpopulated— with the intentions of others’. The combination of these (often contradictory) intentions
transforms language into a currency of power that locates us in space and time but also on the ‘social ladder’ and into gender categories. In my talk, I will examine these intentions and the politics of language in the Galician community, both within Spain and in the Diaspora, during the first decades of Franco’s dictatorship. My aim is to elucidate the role that language has played in the creation of the Galician literary citizenship in order to reveal the double bind of the promotion of minority languages, which has become a tool of national preservation as well as exclusion.

Friday 30th November:

Donna Alexander and Rafael Jaime (UCC) - Postgraduate Seminar Presentations on Border Writing/Border Mapping.

Friday 23rd - Sunday 25th November:

Golden Age Research Symposium

The aim of the symposium is to bring together researchers whose work concerns the literature, history and visual arts of the Spanish Golden Age (1474-1681).

Friday 16th Nov:

Dr M. Cinta Ramblado-Minero from the University of Limerick 

"Women, Memory and Atrocity in the Hispanic World"

What does it mean to be women at war? How do women experience conflict and repression? How are their experiences portrayed? And who has the power and the legitimacy to represent them? All these questions inform this paper, where we will try to arrive at a flexible yet useful paradigm for the exploration of the dynamics of women’s representation of the past.

In order to do this, I will offer a brief overview of the different ways in which women re-interpret, represent and re-codify their own experiences of conflict, repression and political violence in two contexts: Spain and the Southern Cone, illustrating this by means of examples from different cultural media. My main argument is that the dynamics of gendered memory are essential in order to achieve a fuller understanding of the past, where the pillars of the traditional War Story are destabilised and women’s agency comes to the fore.

Monday 5th Nov:

Christopher Domínguez Michael

"Contemporary Mexican Literature"

Christopher Domínguez Michael (ciudad de México, 1962), historiador y ensayista, es uno de los más conocidos críticos literarios hispanoamericanos. Es autor de la Antología de la narrativa mexicana del siglo XX (1989 y 1991), La utopía de la hospitalidad (1993), La literatura mexicana del siglo XX (con José Luis Martínez, 1995), Tiros en el concierto. Literatura mexicana del siglo V (Premio Rousset Banda, 1997), Servidumbre y grandeza de la vida literaria (1998), Toda suerte de libros paganos (2001), La sabiduría sin promesa. Vidas y letras del siglo XX (Premio del Círculo de Críticos de Chile, 2009), El XIX en el XXI (2010), Para entender a Borges (2010) y Profetas del pasado. Quince voces sobre la historiografía de México (2011). Su Diccionario crítico de la literatura mexicana, 1955–2005 (2007, Critical Dictionary of Mexican Literature, 1955–2010, Dalkey Archive, Champaign/Dublin/London) fue traducido, actualizado, al inglés en 2012. En 1997 publicó una novela, William Pescador y en 2004 recibió el Premio Xavier Villaurrutia por Vida de fray Servando, biografía histórica. Es miembro del Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte desde 1993 y en 2006 recibió la beca Guggenheim. Actualmente es miembro del consejo editorial de Letras Libres y columnista cultural del periódico Reforma de la ciudad de México. Desde 2010 es investigador asociado de El Colegio de México.

Friday 26th Oct: 

Professor Nuala Finnegan from University College Cork

"Altars in the Desert: The Politics of Death in Narratives of the Ciudad Juárez femicides"

Since 1993, when the murders of young girls on the streets of Ciudad Juárez first began to figure in headlines in both Mexico and further afield, a set of dynamic cultural responses has been generated. Literature, feature film, song, art, documentary, theatre, photography and digital materials from around the world have sought to capture the horrors of the crimes and to question the systems of power that sustain and nurture their continuance.

This paper argues that many of the artistic responses to murders privilege two primary motifs through which to dramatize and perform the Juárez horrors: the altar (ofrenda, Day of the Dead) and the desert (as the situation, or place in which the horrors are located). Tracing the representational history of both elements in the Mexican context, I argue that these tropes are part of a dialectic about Mexican national identity that on the one hand seeks to contain the horrors of the killing in the border region historically conceived of as contaminated, insecure, lawless and barbaric and at the same time, subsume it into some kind of national narrative of mourning in the collective imagination.

Friday 19th Oct:

Karen Bennet from the University of Lisbon

"Translating Portuguese scholarly discourse: Is epistemicide inevitable?"

Karen Bennett is a member of the Centre for English Studies, University of Lisbon, where she researches in the area of Translation Studies. She has a PhD in Translation Studies and is also a practising translator, specializing in academic texts from Portuguese and French into English. She currently teaches English for Academic Purposes and Scientific Communication at the University of Coimbra.

In addition to numerous articles on many translation-related subjects, she has published two books: Academic Writing in Portugal I: Discourses in Conflict (Coimbra University Press, 2011) and Academic Discourse, Translation and Power: the Transfer of Knowledge in the Age of Globalization (Manchester: St Jerome Press, 2012). Her work on “epistemicide” has become very important and in contemporary Translation Studies.


Dr Bennett will also be offering a practical workshop on the translation of scholarly discourse on Monday 22nd October at 11am (ORB G20).

Friday 5th Oct

Henrique Costa de la Universidad de Vigo

"La importancia de la Dialectología en los estudios de gallego"

A partir de la realización del Atlas Lingüístico Galego (1973-1975) y de cientos de trabajos universitarios sobre Dialectología gallega en los últimos 30 años, hoy el conocimiento de esta realidad permite que los estudios dialectales sean un recurso constante y necesario para la estandarización léxica, para el estudio vivo de la historia de la lengua a través de la variación geolingüística, para la fijación onomástica y toponímica o para cualquier investigación en lingüística gallega. Posiblemente el gallego sea la lengua europea de la que poseemos un mejor conocimiento dialectal, aunque con lagunas en la lexicología dialectal y en el estudio de algunos dialectos exteriores.