We are delighted to announce that the poet Christodoulos Makris has been awarded the inaugural Joseph M. Hassett Creativity Bursary (Poetry) 2021-22.
Starting 1 September 2021, Christodoulos Makris will work with the RTÉ Radio Scripts Collection in the UCD Archives. He intends to work with ephemera held in the archive relating to historical programming on RTÉ Radio to compose poetic text(s) through juxtaposition (parataxis) as a response to communication motifs and other undercurrents in relations between public and private at the level of institution, and to propose extrapolations across time into our current moment.
Makris is the first recipient of the Joseph M. Hassett Creativity Bursary, which for 2021-22 is dedicated to poetry. Worth €5,000, it is funded by the College of Arts and Humanities Support Fund and named for College alumnus and Yeats scholar Dr Joseph M. Hassett. The bursary invites contemporary creative practitioners, across broad areas of creativity, to work on a project of their choice that links their practice with UCD’s cultural heritage.
Commenting on this bursary Makris said:
“I’m delighted and excited to be the recipient of the inaugural Joseph M. Hassett Creativity Bursary for poetry. It’s an incredible opportunity to work with the UCD Cultural Heritage Repositories towards a direct poetic response. Further, the multidisciplinary aspect of the overall five-year project promises to put my work in dialogue with others yet to come, and I wish to thank the College of Arts and Humanities for giving me the opportunity to kick off this series of creative contributions.”
Commenting on this announcement, Professor Sarah Prescott, College Principal, said:
“As College Principal of Arts and Humanities and Chair of the UCD Arts and Humanities Support Fund, it is my great pleasure to welcome the poet Christodoulos Makris as the inaugural Joseph M. Hassett Bursary holder for the academic year 2021-22. The bursaries are made possible by the generous support of donors to the College and are designed to encourage creative practitioners to engage directly with UCD’s rich heritage and scholarship and to bring new and exciting perspectives to the College’s research activities and archival collections. In the light of UCD’s world-leading reputation for literary studies, it is especially fitting that the first bursary is for a poetic response to the UCD Cultural Heritage Repositories. I very much look forward to welcoming Christodoulos to the College in September and wish him every success in developing his project at UCD.”
Associate Professor Lucy Collins added:
“Some very important creative work is being produced now in response to our material past, and this project promises to be at the forefront of that exciting development. Both in performance and on the page, Christodoulos is a poet of extraordinary vision and originality. We’re very much looking forward to hosting him here at UCD.”
About Christodoulos Makris
Christodoulos Makris is a poet and writer with a practice rooted in contemporary experimental, cross-disciplinary, documentary, hybrid and collaborative poetics. His work is concerned with language use, modes of communication, multiple/shifting identities, and the conflation of the public and the private enabled by digital technologies. He has published three books of poetry: Spitting Out the Mother Tongue (Dublin: Wurm Press, 2011); The Architecture of Chance (Dublin: Wurm Press, 2015) – a poetry book of the year for RTÉ Arena and 3:AM Magazine; and this is no longer entertainment (Manchester: Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019). He has also released several pamphlets, artists’ books and other poetry objects with presses in Ireland, the UK and North America. He has presented his work widely across media and borders, in the process representing Ireland at Guadalajara International Book Fair 2014, European Literature Festival 2016, and European Poetry Festival 2019, among others. He was Digital Poet in Residence at StAnza International Poetry Festival (Scotland) 2017, and in the same year he received a project commission from the Irish Museum of Modern Art. In 2018/19 he was Writer in Residence at Maynooth University, and was awarded a 2020/21 Literature Project Award from The Arts Council of Ireland. He is the poetry editor at gorse journal and associated imprint Gorse Editions, and has directed, programmed or produced numerous projects and events, independently or in association with festivals and other institutions.
About Joseph M. Hassett
Joseph M. Hassett is both a leading trial lawyer and an authoritative literary critic based in Washington, D.C. He has written extensively on Yeats, Joyce and other Irish writers. He holds a Ph.D. in Anglo-Irish Literature from University College Dublin and is a graduate of Harvard Law School. His books include W.B. Yeats and the Muses (Oxford University Press, 2010), The Ulysses Trials: Beauty and Truth Meet the Law (Lilliput, 2016) and Yeats Now: Echoing Into Life (Lilliput, 2020).
The bursary will continue for next four years as follows:
Year 2 (2022-23): Drama
Year 3 (2023-24): Visual Arts
Year 4 (2024-25): Musical Composition
Year 5 (2025-26): Film
Applications for Year 2 Joseph M. Hassett Creativity Bursary (Drama) 2022-23 will be announced on the UCD Arts and Humanities twitter feed, in January 2022
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