Lecture Four ‘In the Streets: performing identity through parades, rituals and festivals in Ireland, 1750 – 2014’.

 For our final lecture of the series I'm delighted to announced that Dr Niamh NicGhabhann, the course director of the MA in Festive Arts at the Irish World Academy will be joining us to speak about performing idenity through parades, rituals and festivals. 

The talk takes place on April 14th (Monday) at 7pm in T1.16, Tara Building, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. 

All are welcome!

Abstract

This lecture reflects the path of the MA Festive Arts programme at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance. Beginning with the origins of festivals and their meanings in societies, it will trace the movement of festivals through parade, protest, ritual, carnival and riot. There will be an emphasis on festivity and ritual in Ireland in particular, from the uses of medieval sites as the locus of festival throughout the modern period, to the ritual processions and parades in the changing cultural context of late nineteenth-century Limerick. In examining the creation of meaningful space between the medieval cathedral of St. Mary and the new cathedral of St. John, ideas of place, space, movement, body and authority will be explored.

Bio:

Niamh NicGhabhann is the course director of the MA Festive Arts programme at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick. Prior to moving to Limerick, she was the doctoral fellow on the IRC-funded ‘Reconstructions of the Gothic Past’ project, based at TRIARC: the Irish Art Research Centre at Trinity College, and postdoctoral researcher on the ‘Monastic Ireland’ digital humanities project, based at UCD School of History and Archives and the Discovery Programme. She is a writer and curator, and a founding director of the NovaUCD campus company, Stair: an Irish Public History Company (http://stairpublichistory.wix.com/stair). With Dr. Maeve Houlihan at the Kemmy School of Business, she is also currently engaged in the ‘Innovation and the Humanities’ research project. Her monograph, Building on the Past: medieval buildings in Ireland 1789 – 1915, will be published by Four Courts Press in winter 2014.