Celebrating 13 Years of GCAS · 2013–2026 · September Newsletter
Fall Commencement & Orientation
Required for everyone in the College
01Commencement & Orientation▼
Sunday 6 September, 5pm Dublin / 12pm New York
Doors open ten minutes early, so please arrive on time. The Zoom link is on the Student-Researchers’ Platform.
Prof. Azfar Hussain, GCAS’s Honorary Vice-President, will speak on Beyond Knowledge: Education, Compassion, and a Sense of Justice.
This is expected to be the largest GCAS gathering since our founding more than thirteen years ago.
We invested heavily over the summer in upgrading support for our student and faculty researchers. Once you register on the website you’ll have access to the Support portal, JSTOR, your degree tracker, the Community Forum, the academic calendar with all course links, and the process for filing for ownership stock shares in GCAS upon graduation.
02A change to gcas.ie email▼
When we issued gcas.ie mailboxes, the idea was to give every researcher a scholarly address of their own. In practice it has caused confusion rather than clarity. You sign in to Woolf, Canvas and the Community Forum with your personal address, which has left the Proton mailboxes redundant — the great majority have never been opened, and they are expensive. From November we are closing them and putting the money towards keeping tuition low and towards research resources you actually use, such as JSTOR and the databases we are working to add.
Sorting out your mailbox takes about a minute. Go to gcas.ie/my-gcas-email, signing in if asked, or use the Set Up Your gcas.ie Email card on your dashboard. You’ll be offered two options:
- Forwarding, free. Mail sent to [email protected] arrives in your personal inbox, so you keep the gcas.ie address for your CV, conference papers and research profile.
- A full Proton mailbox, €84 a year — what it costs us to provide. Choose this if you actively send from your gcas.ie address or keep an archive there.
If you don’t yet have a gcas.ie account, or you have trouble signing in, write to our Communications Director, Jessica, at [email protected] and she will sort it for you.
Please choose by 1 October. If we haven’t heard from you by then and you hold a Proton mailbox, it will be closed.
03Auditing courses▼
Our Zoom rooms are open to the GCAS community, in the way a lecture hall is open. If you want to sit in on a course without taking it for credit, you don’t need to be added to anything — just join at the scheduled time using the link on the academic calendar in your GCAS account. Links for the year go live shortly before courses begin in September.
We ask one thing of everyone auditing. Our courses are intimate research and learning spaces, and seminar time belongs first to the researchers enrolled for credit, whose assessed work depends on the discussion. So let enrolled researchers put their questions first, keep your contributions proportionate, use the chat when the discussion is already full, and follow the Professor’s direction on when auditors take part.
Canvas is separate. Adding and administering an auditor account is manual work, so if you are not enrolled for credit in the programme a course belongs to, Canvas access for that course costs €5 — charged once per course, not per term. Request it through the support portal in your GCAS account.
For a weekend class, submit the request by Friday 12:00 noon New York time; after that, materials reach you the following Monday.
Auditing carries no credit, no grade, no feedback on written work, no transcript entry and no certificate.
04New on the blog▼
Dr. Pearl Brock: Writing Towards What Cannot Yet Be Said
Pearl’s journey has taken her from PhD student to GCAS lecturer, commencement speaker and cherished member of our community. Her research was recently celebrated at a major international conference.
Ritika Singh: “Psychoanalytic theory requires translation, revision and, at times, conceptual disobedience”
Ritika introduces her research, The Illegible Daughter: On Psychic Survival and Maternal Refusal in Contemporary India, and discusses how scholars can be more than representatives of their countries, helping instead to create a shared intellectual world.
GCAS Against the Commodification of Scholarship
As authoritarianism gains ground, public trust in academic research depends on the public actually being able to reach it. Read how GCAS is keeping knowledge open.
05GCAS publications▼
We’re proud of the research our community is producing.
Jamie Davies, “Exhaustion Beyond Being,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (Routledge/Taylor & Francis).
Andy Cheung (Yiu Ming), “Specters of Lost Causes: Caputo’s Theology through the Žižekian Lens of Fidelity and Haunting,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.
Irina Malinina, “The Ice Palace: Enhancing Migrant Children’s Feeling of Belonging Through Winter Outdoor Practices in Russian Schools,” Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning (Routledge/Taylor & Francis).