The Nerve: An English and Arts Podcast

This episode of the podcast features the collaborative team of lecturers and students who are working on the project “Diversifying the Curriculum”. The project is funded by N-TUTORR, and aims to decolonise and diversify the third-year English module, The Literature of Family. The team presented at the recent national N-TUTORR showcase in Dublin and aims to change the teaching, learning and assessment focus of the module. Also in studio is the SETU N-TUTORR co-ordinator for Student Empowerment, Catriona McGrattan and Student Champion Sarah Daly, both of whom discuss the ways in which students can earn digital badges and what it means for students and educators to come together and work in partnership.

Members of the Diversifying the Curriculum team in studio were Dr Jenny O’Connor, Dr Christa de Brún, Chika Dike and Graeme Murphy. Also working on the project are students Emily Fleming and Mariya Lyash.

This is a very important and special episode of the podcast, in which Fadi Zmorrod, the recipient of the SEVN (South East Venue Network) bursary joins Jenny in studio to talk about his work with Doulab Circus and Dance. When Fadi was younger, he left the oppressive environment of occupied Palestine and went to study computing in the United States. Yet his heart was simply not in it: he was drawn back to the arts and to his home, where he met his Irish wife, Juliet, and where Doulab Circus and Dance was born. Across Palestine, Fadi and Juliet used dance and circus movement to offer children a space in which movement and intellectual curiosity could come together, and where trust and confidence could be built. The decision to leave Palestine was extremely difficult; Fadi speaks of what it was like to leave those children behind and what it is to cope with the conflicting emotions of relief and guilt that a new life of safety presents. Doulab Circus and Dance currently works with the residents of Direct Provision centres, members of the Travelling community and children with diverse and special needs.

Also in studio are Dr Kate McCarthy, who has galvanised SETU staff as part of a solidarity initiative called Gather for Palestine, and Sinead Bolger, an arts and migration facilitator who talks about meeting Fadi for the first time and offers some suggestions on readings by Palestinian authors that you can find below.

Book Recommendation List:

I saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti – non-fiction

Award-winning account of the human aspects of the Palestinian struggle.

Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco - Graphic Novel

Joe Sacco’s visual journalism about the massacre of 111 Palestinian refugees by Israeli soldiers in 1956.

The hundred years' war on Palestine : a history of settler colonial conquest and resistance by Rashid Khalidi– Non-fiction

A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history.

Palestine +100 : stories from a century after the Nakba, edited by Basma Ghalayini. – short stories

What might your home city look like in the year 2048 - exactly 100 years after Nakba, the displacement of more than 700,000 people after the Israeli War of Independence?

Enter ghost by Isabella Hammad - fiction

An actress returns to her home city of Haifa after many years in London and finds herself roped into a production of Hamlet in the West Bank.

Against the loveless world by Susan Abulhawa - fiction

Nahr, a resilient but exhausted woman, tells the story of her life from an Israeli solitary confinement cell.

Mornings in Jenin / Susan Abulhawa – fiction

A multi-generational story about a Palestinian family as they live through half a century of violent history.

Qissat : short stories by Palestinian women, edited by Jo Glanville - fiction

In a cross-generational compilation, editor Jo Glanville chronicles the varied lived experiences of Palestinian women, from domestic to diaspora.

A woman is no man by Etaf Rum

The debut novel by Palestinian-American Etaf Rum takes us inside the lives of a conservative Arab family living in America.

Salt houses / Hala Alyan

Salma is forced to leave Palestine and move to Kuwait City, but when Saddam Hussein invades, she must leave again.

They called me a lioness: a Palestinian girl’s fight for freedom by Ahed Tamimi – non-fiction

A Palestinian activist jailed at sixteen after a confrontation with Israeli soldiers illuminates the daily struggles of life under occupation in this moving, deeply personal memoir.

Out of place : a memoir / Edward Said.

An extraordinary story of exile and a celebration of an irrecoverable past.

The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist by Emile Habibi.

This award-winning novel-in-translation is clever tragicomedy that demonstrates the complex life of a Palestinian living in Israel.

As policies on EDI are rolled out in higher education institutes, increased efforts are being made to diversify and decolonise a wide range of curricula across the sector. With thanks to SATLE funding (Strategic Alignment of Teaching and Learning Enhancement) from the National Forum, Dr Ebun Joseph joined us at SETU for two seminars (one with students and another with staff) on understanding racial diversity and talking about race in the classroom. In this episode of the podcast, Jenny chatted to Ebun about her educational journey, setting up the Institute of Antiracism and Black Studies, and how Irish universities can improve their efforts at inclusion. Also in studio was the organiser of the event, Dr Christa de Brún, who discussed the importance of Ebun’s visit, and second year student, Chika Dike, who spoke about what she learned from attending the event.

This episode sees us welcome our very first spoken word poet to the podcast! Caoimhe Weakliam joined us to chat about the power of spoken word poetry after a talk with English students that was funded by the Strategic Alignment for Teaching and Learning Enhancement initiative from the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. In the past year, Caoimhe has performed as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival and Culture Night and has delivered two sets at Electric Picnic. She has also worked as a youth worker and creative practitioner, and her main aim is to create positive change in the world and to empower young people through spoken word methodologies. Also in studio is English lecturer and poet Dr Christa de Brún, and Sasha Terfous, a first year student (and herself a spoken word poet) who attended the event.

You can follow Caoimhe on Instagram @caoimheweakliam

This episode sees us welcome our very first spoken word poet to the podcast! Caoimhe Weakliam joined us to chat about the power of spoken word poetry after a talk with English students that was funded by the Strategic Alignment for Teaching and Learning Enhancement initiative from the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. In the past year, Caoimhe has performed as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival and Culture Night and has delivered two sets at Electric Picnic. She has also worked as a youth worker and creative practitioner, and her main aim is to create positive change in the world and to empower young people through spoken word methodologies. Also in studio is English lecturer and poet Dr Christa de Brún, and Sasha Terfous, a first year student (and herself a spoken word poet) who attended the event.

This first episode of 2024 for The Nerve features Daniel Mulhall, former Irish ambassador to the United Kingdom and the United States, who recently received an honorary doctorate from SETU. Born and raised in Waterford, Daniel’s diplomacy work has taken him all over the world, and in the podcast, he highlights how literature has played an important role in his job. He also discusses the process of writing a book on Ulysses during the pandemic, his various academic roles at NYU, Cambridge and Harvard, and his latest book Pilgrim Soul: WB Yeats and the Ireland of his time.

Ho, ho, ho, and happy Christmas! In this festive episode of the podcast, Jenny is joined by Aoife Hearne, dietician and lecturer in the Department of Health Sciences (and previous contributor to TV’s Operation Transformation), Dr John McNamara who lectures in Social Care, Social Science, and Sociology in the Departments of Social Care and Early Childhood, and the Department of Arts, and Dr David Scanlon, lecturer in Biology & Biopharmaceutical Science. Their Christmas recommendations range from books about the social change instigated by the printing press, the science behind disease and addictive behaviour, and novels about love and loss. They also discuss the events that signify Christmas to them and there’s a January recommendation to help get over the Christmas blues.

Joining Dr Jenny O’Connor in studio for this episode is the award-winning Canadian author Alexander MacLeod. A Professor of Creative Writing at St Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Alexander has been published in the prestigious New Yorker and Granta magazines and has won the Atlantic Book Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the O.Henry Award. His first collection Light Lifting was published in 2010 and his latest, Animal Person, was released in 2022. Both collections explore the fragile connections that define us, the collision of the mundane and the extraordinary and the invisible forces that drive people to behave in unexpected ways. Alexander also facilitated a creative writing masterclass at SETU thanks to support from the Canadian Embassy, the Centre for Newfoundland and Labrador Studies at SETU, and the Department of Arts at SETU, Waterford.

This episode of the podcast features a discussion with the facilitator of this semester’s English and Theatre Studies Day, Martin Tyrrell. Martin is the author of the forthcoming George Orwell: from Class War to Cold War and a contributing editor for the academic journal George Orwell Studies. His highly entertaining lecture on Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Orwell’s essays offered context and commentary on the social, political and personal influences in George Orwell’s work. After the lecture, Martin also ran a workshop in which he discussed approaches to creative writing. The podcast also features Dr Christa de Brún, who teaches Nineteen Eighty-Four to second year students on the Literature and Society module. Both contributors discuss the importance of Orwell’s work alongside the paradox of his own intolerance, the prevailing relevance of his ideas and his often-overlooked wife Eileen who is a fascinating figure in her own right.

In this episode, members of Waterford’s newest theatrical company, Shakespeare Squared, join Jenny in the studio to talk about the genesis of the organisation and their recent production of Twelfth Night, an open air promenade piece that used the backdrop of Waterford’s Viking Triangle to bring their interpretation to life. Along with theatre professional Eimear Cheasty, co-directors Joe Meagher and Deirdre Dwyer won the maximum available funding from the Arts Council’s Theatre Project Awards 2023 to stage the production and here, they discuss their creative approach to getting the project off the ground. Performer (and former graduate of English and Theatre Studies) Natasha Everitt tells us what it’s like to inhabit one of Shakespeare’s most mischievous Fools and English and Theatre Studies lecturer Dr Helena Walsh-Kiely joins us to give her thoughts on the show.