General Notices

The UWI St. Augustine Campus presents the Professorial Inaugural Lecture by Professor Paula Morgan on the topic, Healing the Hurts of my People Slightly: Discourses of Societal Violence and Trauma.

The lecture takes place November 16 at 6pm at the School of Education Auditorium. To RSVP, please email uwistaevents@sta.uwi.edu or call 662-2002 ext. 83635.

About the Professorial Inaugural Lecture

Is there a connection between historical traumas and present day acts of violence?

Are we still hurting from our histories? We are creative and have enormous potential, but how much of that is being stifled by the traumas that still seem to haunt our Caribbean landscapes and mindscapes?

Professor of West Indian Literature and Culture, Paula Morgan, delivers her Inaugural Professorial Lecture on this subject. She explores fiction, media and popular discourses to examine the impact of historical brutality on the violence and violations that have become a way of life.

Professor Morgan will draw examples from representations of the Laventille community in support of her argument that place can become a symbolic collector for communal trauma. This, in turn, can encourage us to distance ourselves from submerged societal disease. Avoidance and scapegoating shuts us off from dealing with root of social suffering and seeking broad based therapeutic interventions.

About Professor Morgan

Paula Morgan is a Professor of West Indian Literature and Culture, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine. Her primary focus of over three decades of teaching, research and publication has been gender issues in Caribbean Literature and Culture. Dr. Morgan has published numerous scholarly articles on the domestic violence, the interface of ethnic and gender relations, the construction of Caribbean masculinities, and pedagogical approaches to literary and popular discourses.

In addition, she has written, edited and /or collaborated on seven book length publications including The Terror and the Time: Banal Violence and Trauma in Caribbean Discourse (UWI Press 2014); Writing Rage: Unmasking Violence in Caribbean Discourse - with Valerie Youssef (UWI Press Award 2008);  edited collections The Arc Memory in the Aftermath of Trauma (Interdisciplinary Press UK); Reassembling the Fragments: Voice and Identity in Caribbean Discourse (UWI Press, co-edited with Valerie Youssef);  The Culture of Violence: A Trinidad and Tobago Case Study, co-edited with Valerie Youssef (The Caribbean Review of Gender); In a Fine Castle: Childhood in Caribbean Imagi/Nations (2010) an online collection with a focus on the impact of violence on children, published in Tout Moun Cultural Studies Journal.

Professor Morgan has served in numerous administrative positions including Head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies; Head of Department of Liberal Arts; Deputy Dean of Distance and Outreach, Humanities and Education; and Coordinator of the Literatures in English Graduate and Undergraduate Programmes and the Cultural Studies Graduate Programme. Paula Morgan is the holder of a Guardian Life Premium Teaching Award.