Between March 20 and March 22, the partners will gather at Queen’s University Belfast to review the work done during the first year of the project and plan future initiatives. The intense agenda includes a thorough discussion of each work package, as well as additional working groups focusing on specific activities such as the design of the DETECt mobile app and Learning Community, as well as research themes such as the representation of European history in crime fiction and the role of gender in European crime narrative.

On March 21, at 6:00PM, the first dissemination event will take place at the Peter Froggatt Centre at Queen’s University. Northern Irish crime writers Anthony Quinn and Brian McGilloway will converse with crime fiction scholar and writer Andrew Pepper about the theme: “Border? What Border?: Irish crime fiction and Brexit”. The centrality of Northern Ireland in the ongoing negotiations will be an opportunity to test the ability of crime fiction to become a vehicle for representing and understanding the dramatic challenges currently faced by the European Union.

On March 22, between 11AM and 1PM, a public research workshop will be hosted at the Film Studio at Queen’s University. The workshop will include presentations by Monica Dall’Asta (University of Bologna), Matthieu Letourneux (University of Paris-Nanterre) and Pierre-Carl Langlais (University of Montpellier) about the use of tools and methodologies from the Digital Humanities in their research on European popular crime narratives.

On March 22, at 6PM, this long series of activities will draw to a close with a second dissemination event taking place at Queen’s Film Theatre, the leading independent cinema in Northern Ireland. Sponsored by the Consulate of Italy in Belfast, the screening of the Italian neo-noir The Embalmer (Matteo Garrone, 2002) will be the opportunity to publicise DETECt’s goals and activities to the local film audience. The film itself is a perfect example of the combination of crime narratives and auteur aesthetics that is typical of many internationally successful works in this genre. A critically acclaimed film, The Embalmer perfectly proves the ability of European crime narratives to cross the boundaries between popular and art cinema as well as national and cultural borders.

Programme

March 20

9:00-13:30 – Mirror Room, 21 University Square
Project meeting (WP1-3)

14:30-17:45 – Film Studio, 21 University Square
Project meeting (WP4-5)

March 21

9:00-13:00 – Mirror Room, 21 University Square
Project Meeting (WP6-7)

14:30-17:00 – Queen’s University Belfast
Working groups:
– Designing research on the representation of history and gender in European crime fiction (WP6) – Mirror Room, 21 University Square.
– Designing the mobile app (WP3, WP4) – Room 0G/007, 69/71 University Street.

18:00 – Room 02/011, Peter Froggatt Center
Dissemination event – Border? What Border? Irish crime fiction and Brexit. Northern Irish authors Anthony Quinn and Brian McGilloway will discuss this theme with our colleague Andrew Pepper.

March 22

9:30-11:00 – Mirror Room, 21 University Square
Working group – Plenary discussion on the design and implementation the Learning Community to be hosted on the DETECt portal (WP4, 5, 6).

11:30-13:00 – Room 0G/074, The Lanyon Building

DETECt research workshop – Digital Tools and Methods to Study European Popular Culture:
– Monica Dall’Asta (University of Bologna), “An Ontological Approach to DETECt Semantic Domain”.
– Matthieu Letourneux University of Paris-Nanterre), Pierre-Carl Langlais (University of Montpellier), “Crime Fiction, Contextual Genericity and Corpus Analysis: Preliminary Reflections”.

18:00 – Queen’s Film Theatre, 20 University Street
Dissemination event – Screening of Matteo Garrone’s The Embalmer (Italy, 2002).

For more information please download the full programme.

Some pics from DETECt Project meeting & Research Workshop in Belfast