Wednesday 22 June 2016

Conditions for Palestinian Scholars in the West Bank and Israel - A Report Back by David Lloyd

David Lloyd has been mentioned several times on this blog.  He is one of Ireland's most innovative and powerful critics.   Scholar of James Clarence Mangan, aesthetic theorist, expert on postcolonialism and subaltern history, capable of ranging from the visceral politics of hungerstrike and famine to the rigours of Kant's Critiques, Lloyd has few peers amongst Irish intellectuals.

In recent years he has put this formidable critical capital in the service of the campaign for the academic boycott of Israeli universities.  He has been a crucial figure in the effort to get a resolution on boycott passed at the annual conventions of the huge and prestigious Modern Language Association, the major professional association of American literature academics.  As a professor at the University of California, he has been working at the very eye of the storm in this debate, to which he has committed himself with a combination of intellectual rigour and political steel very rare in contemporary academia. 

Professor Lloyd has just led a MLA group to Israel and the West Bank, to learn about conditions for Palestinian scholars there at first hand.  Next Tuesday, he will give a talk on his experiences there, and on the campaign more generally, at Trinity College Dublin.  The talk is entitled 'Conditions for Palestinian Scholars in Israel and the West Bank - A Report Back', and it's co-hosted by Academics for Palestine (the group of Irish academics formed in February 2014 to argue for the academic boycott) and the Irish School of Ecumenics.

Professor Lloyd's talk takes place on Tuesday June 28, at 7pm at the Irish School of Ecumenics. The ISE is part of TCD, and it's located at the southeastern end of the campus, next to the Zoology Building.  Here are some helpful directions: Please click here to view our Dublin location on google maps, this also allows you to get driving/walking directions.

Here is the campus map, with the ISE marked on it: https://www.tcd.ie/Maps/map.php

Here is a link to the Academics for Palestine notice about the talk, from the AfP website:

Everybody and anybody is welcome to come to this talk.  It's not for academics only!

Conor