IES Blog

On April 17, ​the Institute was pleased to welcome Matt Beech (​IES Senior Fellow, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for British Politics at the University of Hull) for an engaging talk that examined the recent challenges faced by the progressive wing of the British Labour Party. Asking "Why are Labour's Progressives Ineffective?"​ Beech took as his starting point the defeat of Labour in the 2010 general election​, bringing an end to the "New Labour" project that was once a dominant force in UK politics for over a decade (1997-2010)

On Monday, April 16, the Irish Studies Program was pleased to welcome Paige Reynolds (Professor of English at College of the Holy Cross), who delivered an engaging lecture titled “False Comfort: Sex, Prayer and Modernism in Eimear McBride’s ‘A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing’.” Reynolds, a scholar of modern and contemporary Irish literature who has published widely on the subjects of modernism, drama and performance, explored how the formal features of modernist writing combine with the language of prayer to represent adolescent sexual trauma in McBride’s 2013 debut novel.

John Peterson, Professor of International Politics at the University of Edinburgh, visited IES on April 11 to deliver a lecture focused on the volatility of EU-US relations since the election of Donald Trump. The 2016 election of Trump shocked the world political landscape, Peterson observed, and his violent rhetoric and America First vision has hurt the liberal international order and America's relations with its European allies. Thus, Peterson asks: are we witnessing the emergence of a “post-liberal”, “post-American”, “post-transatlantic” era?

On April 10th, 2018, Stephan Keukeleire, Jean Monnet Chair in European Foreign Policy and European Integration at KU Leuven University in Belgium, delivered a talk titled “Analyzing European Foreign Policy in a Post-Western World: Operationalizing the Decentring Agenda.” In order to understand EU foreign policy, Keukeleire argues, we must step away from a Eurocentric point of view and adopt a decentralized standpoint. Europeans often focus more on European benchmarks such as World War I and World War II, for instance, yet outside of Europe the benchmarks might be different, such as the history of decolonization.