Event From Date
Event End Date
Event Title
CHS organises 4th Indo Irish Leture by Dr Heather Laird
Event Details
Centre for Historical Studies
in collaboration with
Embassy of Ireland, New Delhi
&
University College Cork, Ireland
Invites you
to
4th Indo Irish Leture
on
“‘Remembering’ Past Futures: Ireland’s Decade of Centenaries and the Roads Untaken in History”
By
Dr Heather Laird
University College Cork
at
25th February 2019 at 11 am
Room 447, SSS III, JNU
Chair : Prof Himanshu Prabha Ray
Guest of Honour : HE Ambassador Brian McElduff, Embassy of Ireland
Abstract
A commemoration process that is shaped by critical/radical historical frameworks should consider not only what happened in the past, but what else might conceivably have happened. By acknowledging the existence of historical alternatives at a given moment, we can access that moment’s contingencies. These unrealised yet often fully realisable past futures are especially numerous during periods of potent possibility; points in time when the future seems particularly open to being shaped by those living in the present. In this lecture, Dr Heather Laird argues that the decade that Ireland is currently commemorating is an example of one such point in time, and proposes ways that we might ‘remember’ that decade’s untaken roads.
Dr Heather Laird teaches in the School of English, University College Cork, Ireland. Her research interests cross disciplinary boundaries and include theories and practices of resistance, particularly as they relate to land usage; Irish culture since the early nineteenth century; and critical/radical historical frameworks. She is the author ofSubversive Law in Ireland, 1879-1920 (2005) and Commemoration (2018).