Prizes for Spanish American Literature and the Changing Role of the Author in Society, Friday 11 February 2022 – Seminar Write-up

This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2021-2022.

On Friday 11^thFebruary, Dr Sarah Bowskill (Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies, QUB) delivered a seminar entitled ‘Prizes for Spanish American Literature and the Changing Role of the Author in Society’ at the 2021-2022 Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group Seminar Series. Dr Bowskill’s talk explored the link between power and literary prestige, focusing particularly on how politics underpins Spanish American literary prizes and award ceremonies, and the role of the author in society.

image: cover of Sarah Bowskill’s new monograph

The talk commenced with an overview of the intertwining of literature and politics in Latin America. Dr Bowskill drew on the work of Doris Sommer to explain that in the nineteenth century, post-independence Latin American nations were built by author statesmen, such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Bartolomé Mitre. Writing formed an important part of their political work, and the texts written by these author statesmen were taught in schools, and intended to inspire love for the nation. By the early twentieth century, national prizes for literature were used by the state to further connect literary and political fields. Dr Bowskill highlighted the motivation behind introducing such prizes, since Latin American countries looked to prizes for science and literature as a way to establish international status and national pride.

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Holy Bones, Palaeolithic Caves, and Jimi Hendrix’s Guitars: Dipping into Translationality, Friday 28 January 2022 – Seminar write-up

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2021-2022.

On the 28th of January, Dr Piotr Blumczynski (Translation and Interpreting, QUB) delved into the fascinating world of translation and highlighted the rich and sacred history the word bears. Beyond its textual realms, translation also describes the transfer of a dead body or relic to a new place of veneration, therefore bringing into conversation what translation does and how it is experienced. It is this experiential nature of translation that led Dr Blumczynski to introduce the term translationality. Drawing from three intriguing artefacts, Dr Blumczynski showed how holy relics, palaeolithic caves and the electric guitar of a famed artist can all evoke a translational experience. That is, allow the past to be powerfully felt in the present.

Dr Blumczynski began his talk by examining the medieval practice of translation whereby relics, often the sacred bones or clothing of a saint, were ceremonially transferred from one location to another. Examples of relics being translated include the bodies of two martyrs, Gervasius and Protasius, revealed to Saint Ambrose of Milan in a vision. Dr Blumczynski explained how the movement of the excavated remains of these ‘two men of marvellous stature’ (as Saint Ambrose termed them in one of his Letters) created a translational experience for witnesses. This experience included people dancing, feasting, and touching the bejewelled bones for their miraculous powers. Compared to textual translation, the translation of relics features the material transfer of objects through space. In this way, Dr Blumczynski stressed that we are not to think of translation of relics as metaphors of textual translation. Rather, the reverse is true, because ideas and meanings do not actually travel.

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Sewing Thoughts Together: Pandemic, Texts, and Textiles, 10 December 2021 – Seminar write-up

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2021-2022.

On Friday 10^th December 2021, Dr Fiona Clark (Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies at Queen’s University Belfast) delivered a seminar entitled ‘Sewing Thoughts Together: Pandemic, Texts, and Textiles’ at the 2021-2022 Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group Seminar Series. Dr Clark’s seminar analysed the interactions between art, environmental justice, health and wellbeing, reflecting on how Level 3 students in the Protecting Paradise cursillo (mini-module) have used their personal experiences as inspiration for creative work.

Image of a student arpillera — Anonymous student arpillera (2020) from collection held by Fiona Clark

Dr Clark opened up the seminar with an overview of the arpillera, a Chilean textile art form. The word arpillera is used for sackcloth in Spanish. This material was used to package coffee beans, potatoes and flour. From this humble background grew the arpillera textile art form used by Chilean women in the 1970s to capture their experiences of loved ones who were disappeared during the Pinochet dictatorship. Since many of these women were from the poorer end of the social classes in Chile, re-using sackcloth and other materials from around the home (such as school uniforms and old shirts) made this art form accessible and personal through the introduction of materials from the disappeared loved ones. The materials were arranged and sewn together to create an image. Many of these arpilleras reflect on a violent political regime, which Dr Clark later related to the idea of ‘craftivism’: using handcraft as a form of activism. Arpilleras also served as a way to keep alive the memories of loved ones. Dr Clark explained how women would gather together to sew and tell stories. In this way, textiles were used as a way to work through personal trauma and bring communities together.

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On the Trail of a Shadowy Sir Lançelot: Remembering the First Atlantic Slave Voyage, from Zurara to Cervantes, 22 October 2021 – Seminar write up

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2021-2022.

On the 22nd of October 2021, Professor Elizabeth Wright of the University of Georgia opened the 2021-2022 Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group Seminar Series with her talk entitled ‘On the Trail of a Shadowy Sir Lançelot: Remembering the First Atlantic Slave Voyage, from Zurara to Cervantes’.

Professor Wright launched into her talk by recounting Zurara’s chronicle, ‘Cronica da Guiné’ (ca. 1453), which detailed the journey of Lanzarote, a squire raised in Prince Henry’s household of the Aviz dynasty. Zurara records how this nobleman set sail from Lagos in the late spring of 1444 to the west coast of Africa with the sole purpose to enslave men and women. Zurara’s chronicle informs us that Lanzarote had been inspired by his predecessors, who had gained wealth and status after capturing and enslaving people encountered in a previous expedition. Here, Professor Wright introduced us to the relationship between the captor and the captured. The captor, Lanzarote, saw a vision of riches and prosperity upon capturing Africans, whilst the captured Africans tried to hide or flee this raid as revealed by Zurara’s chronicle. This unfair power dynamic would later be amplified in the coming history.

The King’s Fountain (Portuguese: Chafariz d’El-Rey). Anonymous, c.1570. Public domain image.

Turning her attention to the Iberian peninsula, Professor Wright next discussed how the enslaved were dehumanized upon their arrival in Portugal. Before dividing his lot, Lanzarote proudly presented his 235 captives to the Prince, who then rewarded him with knighthood. Professor Wright noted that this was the first explicitly recorded public ritual of mass enslavement of the Atlantic slave trade, which eerily anticipated what was to come in the next 400 years. This poignant and uncomfortable spectacle even made the chronicler himself reflective. Zurara was concerned for these ‘fellow children of Adam’ who in suffering wept and prayed to their gods for rescue. Here, we sense the conflict between the economic prosperity that will result from these slave transactions and the undeniable horror that this is.

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Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021: PhD Flashtalks

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

On the 25^th of June, six candidates from the current PhD cohort at Queen’s University Belfast shared a session entitled ‘PhD Flashtalks’ during the Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021. Dr Ricki O’Rawe participated as the chair.

Margaret Cunningham, who is a second year PhD candidate in French, began the session with a synopsis of her thesis project, which carries the working title ‘Narratives of Disaster in the French Caribbean’. Margaret believes that in the Caribbean context, the French departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique have been largely overlooked in studies of catastrophe. Thus, Margaret has made this silence the focus of her thesis, examining disaster narratives against the backdrop of a colonial and specifically slave past.

Next, Annie Jowett, a first-year Ph.D. student in Irish, discussed her thesis on ‘The Irish Dialect of South Leinster: The Onomastic Evidence’. Through her research, Annie aspires to address and contribute to the gap in linguistic knowledge about the Irish language and discover where the Irish spoken in South Leinster fits into the dialect continuum of the Irish language in Ireland. The Irish language has been obsolete in South Leinster since the turn of the twentieth century. In addition, the linguistic history of the region is complex in terms of language contact; Annie gave the example of the survival of an Old English dialect named Yola which survived in the South-East of the province until the late nineteenth century. Annie is employing placenames in the region as her primary source of dialect evidence, intending to focus on the distribution of stress patterning in local pronunciations.

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Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021: Critical Interactions panel

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

On the 25^th of June 2021, Dr Dominique Jeannerod (PhD supervisor in French at Queen’s University), Dr Ashley Harris (former PhD student and departmental colleague until end of June 2021) and Ciara Gorman (current PhD supervisee) delivered a session entitled ‘Critical Interactions’ at the Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021. The trio of speakers aimed to highlight how their different respective research objects share structural and methodological affinities translating into common lines of enquiries. The overarching title for their collaborative paper, a preview of a joint panel at the (then) upcoming Society for French Studies conference 2021, was ‘Crime on the Margins: Peripheries, Alienation and Criminalisation of Women’. Whilst each of the three researchers is investigating different time periods and corpuses of French crime fiction, film and media, their papers incorporate many cross-cutting themes. These parallels include marginalization as well as space, place and liminality.

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Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021: Child-centred Art at the Mexico-U.S. Border: Ethical Questions and Imaginative Possibilities

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

On the 25th of June, as keynote speaker of the Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group Research Showcase of 2021, Professor Nuala Finnegan of University College Cork gave a plenary lecture entitled ‘Child-centred Art at the Mexico-U.S. Border: Ethical Questions and Imaginative Possibilities’.

Professor Finnegan began her lecture by showing an image of Donald Trump on the cover of Time magazine in June 2018, in which Trump is depicted looking down on a distressed child crying. This is a reconfiguration of a now infamous image, wherein this child is watching her mother being searched at the U.S.-Mexico border. This brought us to the child separation process of April 2018 during the Trump administration, and the inhumanity of this.

Professor Finnegan identified three primary tropes of representation of children at the border: children as dead, distressed, or imprisoned. She criticised the lack of integrity shown within the fields of journalism and politics regarding such representations, as the migrant child and their trauma has often been used for political photo opportunities, or as disaster pornography in humanitarian campaigns. Professor Finnegan therefore covered the faces of children and migrants in the images she used throughout the lecture to respect their privacy and agency. She considered what happens when other representations of children enter the fray, asking: how does this disrupt the narrative?

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Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021: Lived Experiences Roundtable

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

While the importance of research has been placed centre stage during the current Coronavirus crisis, it is often still valorised solely based on quantifiable impact. The Modern Languages Research Showcase, held on Friday 25 June 2021, emphasized how research undertaken in the Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group goes beyond this reductive ideal to be informed by and interrogate real lived experiences, both that of researchers themselves and those of others. The Lived Experiences roundtable, chaired by Dr Rosalind Silvester and Dr. Steven Wilson, foregrounded this multi-directional focus through two PhD students’ work.

Kathryn Nelson defies research’s perceived narrow focus in her trans-disciplinary project examining the role of cultural intermediaries in distributing environmental artwork in Northern Ireland. A practising artist, informed by her MSc in Ecological Management and Conservation and by her childhood connection to nature in South Devon, she articulated her lived experience of its woods and coastline through video, an experience she fears will not be shared by children today. Her own installations have tackled what she called ‘regime shifts’ (Scheffer et. al. 2009), where the smallest details accumulate to form tipping points of irreversible damage, narrating the linear past, present and future life of our oceans, underlining how solutions to these problems are cultural. We must reimagine our culture/nature divide to forge a new eco-culture where all of us understand our unique place in the biome. This was brought to the forefront in the Tate Modern’s exposition of Damien Hirst’s In and Out of Love where curators culturally sanctioned the consumption of the lived experience of dying butterflies for aesthetic pleasure as ‘good art’ and led to our misunderstanding of the vital role these animals play. Far from art being for art’s sake, we depend on cultural intermediaries to influence our understanding of this new world through revaluations of the relationship between consumer and art.

Fig. 1 (left): Current Inshore Marine Life with Taxonomic Labels
Fig. 2 (right): Possible Future – Simplified Marine Life with No Labels… (Artwork by Kathryn and Roy Nelson)

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Postgraduate student interviews: Aislin Kearney (PhD)

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

On the 20^th of April I interviewed recent Queen’s PhD graduate Aislin Kearney to discuss her research. In February 2021, Aislin successfully passed her viva for a PhD in Spanish with a thesis entitled ‘’The Ambition of Melancholy: The Aesthetics of Heroism in the Lyric poetry of Juan Boscán and Fernando de Herrera’.

Aislin began her studies at Queen’s as a drama student, where she started a beginner’s course in Spanish. She enjoyed the course so much that she decided to change pathways, majoring in Spanish with a minor in Drama. In her final year she described how she was (begrudgingly) enrolled on a Renaissance module. Unexpectedly, however, the module caught her interest, and when she went on to an MA in Spanish at Queen’s, she devoted her Master’s dissertation, and later PhD, to further examining the poetry of the period.

Portada de *Las obras de Boscán y algunas de Garcilaso de la Vega repartidas en cuatro libros*, Barcelona, Carlos Amorós, 1543.

Her Master’s dissertation focused on the work of Spanish poet Juan Boscán, a lesser-known contemporary of Garcilaso de la Vega. Central to her study of Boscán’s poetry was the emerging idea of melancholic heroism, which Aislin explained was particularly interesting when considering the historical context in which the poetry was being written. During a period in which the country was rising to become somewhat of a superpower, much of its most prominent literature was characterized by lovesick, introspective, and melancholic figures.

Aislin described her PhD as a natural progression from her Master’s research, in which she further explored this melancholic aesthetic, and Spain’s attachment to it, by examining not only the work of Boscán but also his successor, Fernando de Herrera. Aislin explained that her choice in poets was influenced by a number of factors. First, the consecutive periods in which these poets were writing allowed for a better understanding of the historical trajectory of Spanish literature during this time. Second, these two lesser-known poets’ peripheral positions in relation to the extensively studied Garcilaso de le Vega allowed for a more expansive understanding of Spanish poetry of the period. Finally, the fact that both of these poets produced theoretical works alongside poetry, where they discussed their methods and approaches, made them interesting subjects on which to focus research.

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