About the presenter:

Dr. Claudia J. Ford is a professor of Environmental Studies at State University of New York, Potsdam, a Fellow of the Panel on Planetary Thinking at Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany, a Fulbright Scholar, a SUNY PRODiG Faculty, and a Research Professor at the University at Buffalo. Dr. Ford holds degrees in biology, medicine, business administration, fine arts, and a PhD in environmental studies. Claudia is sought after for public speaking and lectures, and she teaches and creates responsive mixed media and collage visual arts projects across the subjects of environmental humanities and literature, traditional ecological knowledge, spiritual ecology, entheogenic plant medicine, women’s reproductive health, and sustainable agriculture.

 

Abstract: 

Ethnobotany is the study of plants in relation to their medical and cultural uses – a discipline explored in history, anthropology, environmental studies, and literature. Medical information, botanical expertise, ecological knowledge, and racialized prejudices evolved rapidly and concurrently in American history, especially in the 18 through 20^th centuries. Examining the stories found in the ethnobotanical archives is a unique way to understand complex interactions across the racial and cultural borders of a rapidly transforming New World during these centuries of colonial settlement, Indigenous dispossession, and African enslavement.

This research has the goal of examining the stories and silences in the ethnobotanical archives and the ways in which these stories and silences impacted and were constructed around marginalized racial identities. This investigation discovered that pursuing the narratives of medicinal plants in this place and this period of time illuminates the multifaceted and fraught ways in which disparate peoples becoming Americanized were both transversing and maintaining the boundaries that separated them.

 

Date: Wednesday, 2 April 2025

Time: 11:45-13:15

Room: HS 3 and online

 

Contact:

To register for online participation, please email eva-maria [dot] trinkaus [at] aau [dot] at

 

ABSTRACT

Marina Carr, one of Ireland’s most significant contemporary dramatists, has won acclaim for her dramatic representations of disruptive female figures and this, to a great extent, has been popularly interpreted as an effort to ‘unsilence’ women’s voices on the stage. Her attention to narrative, her rich use of language and dialect, and her choice of rural settings seem to situate her as the contemporary heir to a Syngean legacy. Beyond this, her commitment to tragedy, myth, the supernatural and the exploration of extreme emotions are identifiable as central characteristics of her plays since The Mai. This lecture will present an overview of Carr’s work and her extended engagement with making and deconstructing mythic narratives. It will pay particular attention to Carr’s key works in the twenty-first century such as: On Raftery’s Hill, Woman and Scarecrow, Marble, Hecuba and Audrey, or Sorrow as a means of illuminating Carr’s provocative and often ambivalent interventions into Irish theatre.

 

Guest speaker: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Clare Wallace, PhD

                               Charles University, Prague

 

BIODATA

Clare Wallace is Associate Professor at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University in Prague. She writes on Irish literature and drama as well as on contemporary Anglophone theatre. She is author of The Theatre of David Greig (2013) and Suspect Cultures: Narrative, Identity and Citation in 1990s New Drama (2007) and Performing Crisis in Contemporary British Theatre edited with Clara Escoda, Enric Monforte and José Ramón Prado-Pérez (Bloomsbury 2022).

 

Date: March 27, 2025

Time: 13.30-15.00

Room: N.1.44 (Nordtrakt, Ebene 1)

Contact: Dr. Nursen Gömceli

Nursen [dot] goemceli [at] aau [dot] at

(Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik)