Research Projects

Proxectos de investigación

Aesthetics, Ethics and Strategics of the New Migratory Cartographies and Transcultural Identities in Twenty-First-Century Literature(s) in English

Funded by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (PID2019-109582GB-I00)

Principal Researcher (IP): José Manuel Estévez Saá

Period: 2020-2022

Link

Nuevas tipologías de (e/in)migración europea y su representación en la literatura en lengua inglesa del siglo XXI

Funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) (FFI2012-38790)

Principal Researcher (IP): José Manuel Estévez Saá

Period: 2013-2016

The Great Irish Famine and its Age-old Silence in Europe. A Literary-Anthropological Approach through its Cultural (Con)Texts.

Funded by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (FFI2009-12751).

Period: 2009-2012
Principal Researcher (IP): José Manuel Estévez Saá

The varied and numerous remains of texts and documents on “The Great Famine” (an Gorta Mór), that devastated and destroyed Ireland in mid-nineteenth-century (1845-1852), allow us to place the events within perspective as one of the greatest tragedies suffered by any country (then a British colony) in all human history. This “Great Calamity,” which has been alluded to with different names (“The Irish Holocaust,” “God’s Visitation,” “The Bad Times,” “The Great Starvation,” “The Irish Famine,” “The Great Hunger,” etc.) has also generated differences of interpretation, emphasis, and response throughout Europe based on varied and opposite ideologies which this research project aims at revealing, through attention to different literary texts that, despite their relevance, have not received enough critical attention. The causes (besides the one-hundred-and-fiftieth commemoration of “Black ’47”) that have motivated a renewed general interest in this episode in Irish History in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first century, as well as the hidden reasons for the critical and literary silence from the 1870s to the 1970s, will also be studied. ‘Literary Anthropology’ will favour a ‘culturalist’ approach based on the notions of ‘Historical Consciousness’ and ‘Collective Memory’, and will facilitate a comparative as well as contrastive analysis of both the obvious silenced years and the evident renewed interest in the last three decades. Besides, our approach will facilitate our contextualisation and will aim to look further than simply the classic ‘traditionalist’ approach based on ‘revisionist’, ‘nationalist’, and even ‘religious’ interpretations and arguments whose appropriateness will also be questioned.