The Charlotte Maxeke – Mary Robinson Research Chair emerges out of a longstanding collaboration between the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at UWC and the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute (TLRH) at Trinity College Dublin that has focused on colonialism, partition, postcoloniality and race. The Charlotte Maxeke-Mary Robinson Research Chair inaugurates, through the Humanities, a broader and reciprocal collaboration between Ireland and South Africa which engages our complex inheritance of colonialism, empire, partition and apartheid, and how to overcome this legacy. The CHR and TLRH’s work in aesthetics and politics has drawn attention across our social and institutional settings to the ways that cultural production can bring political thought, the arts, and research across disciplines into the public sphere. This shared understanding stems from a recognition of a history that marks both countries in relation to legacies of colonialism and partition, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the work of education and the arts to find unexplored modes of reconciliation to transcend these legacies.

Bio

Eoin McNamee was born in Kilkeel, Co Down, and is Director of the Oscar Wilde Centre in Trinity College Dublin. He has written seventeen novels including Resurrection Man, The Ultras, The Blue Trilogy and The Vogue. His new novel, The Bureau, will be published in 2024. He also writes for cinema and television.