Public Lecture to Launch Research Group

On 12 December 2024, Professor Julia Laite will give a public lecture to launch the Research Group in Biography and Life-Writing at DCU. Her subject is ‘Sketches of a Life: Shanawdithit, Colonial Newfoundland, and Me’. The lecture will take place at the Heaney Theatre, St Patrick’s Campus at 6pm. All are welcome.

Professor Laite, who is based at Birkbeck, University of London, is a leading contemporary exponent of the craft of communicating history through biography. Laite is fascinated by the territory where ordinary lives or forgotten lives meet important themes, and of the stories we tell or might tell. Her book The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: a true story of sex, crime and the meaning of justice (Profile Books, 2022), which won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction, explored the lives of a series of protagonists, most importantly that of Lydia Harvey, to examine the ‘white slave trade’ in the early twentieth century.

In her new project, on Newfoundland and Shanawdithit, she engages with the history of her homeland, challenging ‘insidious narratives of indigenous erasure’ while seeking ‘to tell new, more critical, and inclusive stories about belonging’ and that island.