Perpetrator trauma can be experienced by individuals and groups struggling to comprehend and process violence they have been directly or indirectly responsible for. This symposium brings together contributors from the arts and academia to examine what can often be unacknowledged or unspoken experiences of perpetrator trauma. In doing so it will also explore a fuller account of the personal and societal impacts of violence and the place of perpetrators in memory and commemoration. Presentations may be of particular interest to those in the arts, civil war, conflict, memory, atrocity and trauma studies.

The symposium coincides with Dark Dark Mouth, a body of performance, drawing and installation work by Dominic Thorpe exploring perpetrator trauma and the Irish Civil War in Cork city. Dark Dark Mouth is one of six project awards commissioned as part of Building as Witness, a programme that focuses on the site of Crawford Art Gallery which was witness to fascinating histories of local, national, and international importance surrounding the Irish Civil War period.

SPEAKERS
Dr. Síobhra Aiken
Perpetrator Trauma and the Irish Civil War
Dr. Cara Levey
The Place of Perpetrators in the Commemoration of Atrocity in Latin America
Dr. Dominic Thorpe
Perpetrator Trauma and Contemporary Visual Art from Ireland

The event will conclude with a panel discussion chaired by renowned filmmaker and writer Peadar King.

Dr. Síobhra Aiken joined the Department of Irish and Celtic Studies at Queens University in 2021. She holds a BA in European Studies from Trinity College, an MA in Irish Studies from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Irish-language Translation and Editing from Maynooth University. She graduated with a PhD in 2020 from the Centre for Irish Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway. Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the Adele Dalsimer Prize in 2021. Her research interests include: modernist Irishlanguage poetry; twentieth-century Irish-language literature; the Gaelic Revival in the United States; ‘trauma’ and emigration during the Irish Revolution (1916–23); fictionalised testimony by veterans of the Irish Revolution; comparative studies of the Irish and Spanish Civil Wars; the poetry of Máirtín Ó Direáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi. Her first monograph, Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War, was published in April 2022 by Irish Academic Press, awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books in Language and Culture 2022 and the Whitfield prize from the Royal Historical Society 2023.

Dr. Cara Levey (MA University of London, PHD University of Leeds) is Senior Lecturer in Latin America Studies at University College Cork. Her work focuses on the politics of memory in and beyond the Southern Cone. She is the author of Fragile Memory, Shifting Impunity: Commemoration and Contestation in Post-dictatorship Argentina and Uruguay (Peter Lang, 2016), a study that goes beyond architectural readings of memorials to explore the underlying debates and controversies of memory-making in the aftermath of state terrorism. She has also undertaken research on the role of perpetrators in memory and justice processes and is a member of the Perpetrator Studies Network. Her current work considers the manifold ways in which the past is treated and “worked through” virtually and spatially by second-generation Southern Cone exiles in Europe and has been published in Bulletin of Latin American Research and in Bulletin of Spanish Studies and Clepsidra.

Dr. Dominic Thorpe is an Irish visual artist who works through performance art, video, photography, drawing, installation, collaborative and relational based processes. He has shown and performed extensively in Ireland and internationally including at the Tasmanian Museum and Gallery, Bangkok Cultural Centre, Ulster Museum Belfast and Galway Arts Centre. Much of his work addresses contemporary and historical violence, human rights and institutional abuses. In recent years his focus has expanded to include an exploration of individual and collective perpetrator trauma and in 2022 he received a PhD at Ulster University for research on Performance Art from Ireland and Perpetrator Trauma. He has completed several residencies, including at the Nordic Arts Centre, Fire Station Artist Studios and was the first artist-in-residence in Humanities at University College Dublin. In 2022 Thorpe was awarded the Bolay Residency at the Linenhall Arts Centre Castlebar and in 2023 was awarded the inaugural Crespo Foundation Residency at Uillinn: The West Cork Arts Centre. He has work in several public collections, including the collection of the Arts Council of Ireland.

Peadar King is an Irish documentary filmmaker and writer. For Irish television, he has presented, produced and occasionally directed the award-winning global affairs series What in the World? Hailed by The Irish Times as “terrific and moving, illuminating and insightful…King’s contribution to our understanding of global economic inequality has been impressive”. The series has filmed in over fifty countries across Africa, Asia and The Americas, providing a compelling critique of the current predatory model of neoliberalism. In recent years, it has turned attention to the way in which war has engulfed the lives of millions of people across the globe. Specifically, King has reported on conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Palestine/Israel, Somalis, South Sudan and Western Sahara. His reporting has also extended to the war on drugs (Mexico, Uruguay) and on war on people of colour (Brazil and the United States of America). King is the author of three books: The Politics of Drugs from production to consumption (2003), What in the World? Political Travels in Africa, Asia and The Americas (2013) and War, Suffering and the Struggle for Human Rights. Among those who have acknowledged King’s work are Noam Chomsky “this remarkable travelogue, inquiry and illuminating analysis”.