Katherine Fama - Craft as Research Method: Critical-Creative Practice in the Workshop and Classroom

Craft practice is emerging as an overlapping research and teaching method in the humanities. Processes of paper folding, gardening, printmaking, and bookbinding are all useful forms for literary and cultural analysis. I'll begin by sharing recent projects, workshops, and modules from University College Dublin's emerging Craft Research Network and conclude with a short bookmaking workshop. Flag books are handmade art books that move in multiple ways, allowing varied constellations of word, shape, and image. We will work together to create a book that represents research clusters in the department/ college. We will consider how this might help visualize the complex process of building a monograph, facilitate collaborative research, or serve as a useful classroom tool.

Katherine Fama is a faculty member in English, Drama, Film and Creative Writing at University College Dublin. She works on modern U.S. fiction through the intersection of domestic architecture and critical theories of aging, race, sexuality, and emotion. She has published in the JML, MELUS, Studies in American Naturalism, the Journal of Environmental Media, and Emotions: History, Society, Culture. She and Jorie Lagerwey coedited Single Lives: Modern Single Women in Literature, Culture, and Film (Rutgers UP, 2022). She is engaged in critical-creative practice, delivering campus and community workshops on craft-as-research and sustainable crafting. Her research has been supported by the NEH, Marie Curie Skłowdowska Actions, Volkswagen Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz, the Winterthur Museum, and the Huntington and Sophia Smith Libraries. She recently contributed to the Mellon-funded "Post-extractivist Legacies and Landscapes" and codirects a Wellcome grant to embed creative practice in research across the College of Arts and Humanities. She is the recipient of recent grants to establish an Irish Craft Research Network and Symposium.