ACIS Conference: De-Hibernicizing Irish Studies

Dr Zélie Asava

Dr Zélie Asava is a specialist in questions of race, gender, screen studies and visual culture. She is the author of The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television (Peter Lang, 2013) and Mixed Race Cinemas: Multiracial Dynamics in America and France (Bloomsbury, 2017), and co-editor of a Special Issue of the Journal of Scandinavian Cinema on black and ethnic minority representation (2022). She has held teaching and research positions at University College Dublin and Dundalk Institute of Technology (where she was Programme Director of the BA in Film Production and the BA in Creative Multimedia), as well as at Trinity College Dublin and Dún Laoghaire’s Institute of Art, Design and Technology. She sits on the Boards of Screen Ireland, the Irish Film Institute, the journal French Screen Studies, Catalyst International Film Festival and the arts magazine Unapologetic, works for the Irish Film Classification Office and is a member of the European Commission’s ‘Capital of Culture’ panel of experts.

Malcolm Sen

Malcolm Sen is associate professor in the Department of English. His work focuses on the role of non-STEM disciplines in confronting the multi-scalar challenges of the climate crisis. His research is especially focused on the changing nature of political governance, at local, national, and international levels because of climate pressures. He is also a scholar of race politics and is interested in the transforming landscape of violence, warfare, and migrancy in the twenty-first century.  He directs the Environmental Humanities Specialization in the Department of English and leads the Environmental Humanities Initiative at UMass Amherst. 

He is the editor (with Lucienne Loh) of Postcolonial Studies and Challenges of the New Millennium (Routledge, 2016). He is the editor of The History of Irish Literature and the Environment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022); and Race in Irish Literature and Culture (with Julie McCormick Weng) to be published by Cambridge University Press in January 2024. Sen’s monograph Unnatural Disasters: Irish Literature, Climate Change and Sovereignty is under review.

Recent articles include “An Ordinary Crisis: Covid-19 and Irish Studies” in Mike Cronin et al., Eds., A Handbook of Irish Studies (Routledge, 2021);“Sovereignty at the Margins: The Oceanic Future of the Subaltern,” in Barbara Haberkamp-Schmidt, Ed., Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World (Amsterdam: Brill, 2022); “Joyce and Race in the Twenty-First Century” in Catherine Flynn, Ed., The New Joyce Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Revisions (Cambridge University Press, 2022). 

His forthcoming essay “Climate Wars in the Anthropocene: Migrant Lives and Militarized Statehood,” will be published in Sharae Deckard, Kerstin Oloff, and Treasa DeLoughrey, Eds., Routledge Companion on Literature and the Environment (London and New York: Routledge, 2023).