Crossing Borders

The early twenty-first century is witnessing a paradigm shift across the humanities away from an obsession with language and towards an engagement with the way in which physical space is imagined. This book showcases the impact of that shift upon the work of diverse disciplines. Applying insights from architecture and geography, which have long addressed space, to disciplines that have traditionally focused upon images and language, the contributors demonstrate how integral space is to literary as well as artistic imagining and identity at the same time that they propose novel ways of capturing and documenting spatial experience. The thirteen contributors to the book, most of whom live and work in Ireland and are associated with a range of different disciplines in Irish universities, show how the construction and representation of space, both real and imagined, contributes to the exploration of contemporary concerns such as identity, belonging and memory. The result is a snapshot of the ways in which contemporary Irish academia is addressing one of the most important new directions in interdisciplinary research.

Kathleen James-Chakraborty is Professor of Art History at University College Dublin. After graduating with a BA from Yale University, she received an MA and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on modern architecture, especially in Germany and the United States.
Sabine Strumper-Krobb is Lecturer in German in the School of Languages and Literatures at University College Dublin. She received an MA and PhD from the University of Gottingen, Germany. Her research interests lie in the areas of German-Scandinavian literary relations, German literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and translation studies, with a particular focus on the fictional turn in translation studies.