Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe has been appointed as the 2023 Rooney Writer Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub.
During her tenure as the Rooney Writer Fellow, Nidhi will research a project titled ‘Honey and the Hare’, exploring the human relationship to the more-than-human across both ancient Celtic and Indian traditions, and ultimately how indigenous wisdom and practices recognising the interconnectedness of being can provide enduring responses to intersecting social and ecological crises. This transdisciplinary project draws inspiration from Joseph Beuys’s 1965 performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare and an anonymous Middle English poem ‘The Names of the Hare’, investigating the symbolism of the Hare linking to Vedic, Buddhist, Celtic and Gaelic deities, alchemy, the moon and the feminine while also exploring connections in folklore, mythology and deep ecology.
Professor Eve Patten, Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub, welcomed Nidhi as the new Rooney Writer Fellow and said that her fascinating research project would “illuminate unchartered aspects of the human relationship with other entities and species, while also furthering research links between Irish and Indian literary traditions.”
Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe said, “I am deeply grateful to Dr Peter Rooney and the leadership at Trinity Long Room Hub for this extraordinary opportunity to work with a vibrant research community in an institute at the forefront of cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural research. It’s a rare gift to be able to contribute to this uniquely transformative endeavour of shared discovery. The chance to invite the voices of older, embodied wisdom traditions into conversation with advances in contemporary intellectual discourse and scholarship lives like a bright thing inside me.”