Relational Forms: Medial and Textual Transits in Ireland and Britain

The Relational Forms research area engages with medial and textual transits in Ireland and Britain, favouring views from literature and the arts on community and cultural memory, in light of recent historical developments such as Brexit and the ethical liberalisation of Irish society.
The priority given to Ireland in the area’s name is a foundational trait in which Relational Forms takes pride. Indeed, our focus on Irish texts and cultural forms makes us the only structured research venture in Portugal with a sustained and continuous Irish dimension since 2004.
However, our inquiry extends to the textual dynamics that mark other cultures in the British Isles, considered from a doubly exogenous perspective – our Portuguese vantage point, and the critical perspective gained through the Irish bias.

Our goals largely coincide with the following areas of academic inquiry:

• Texts in transit 1, translations, appropriations, rewritings: the area’s research team understands translation as referring to more processes than mere interlingual transit, extending its conceptual and operative range to exchanges that operate across cultures, geographies and times.
• Texts in transit 2, intermedial transfer: the team holds a special interest in dialogues between literature and other arts and media. Indeed, it favours a broad perception that literary and artistic creation under modernity and postmodernity has tended to be relational, rather than monomedial.
• Text in transit 3, interdisciplinary approaches: the team’s concerns include the many encounters of literature and literary studies with other fields of knowledge and research such as cultural studies, historiography, geography, philosophy, etc., to preserve and enhance cultural memory.

The Relational Forms research area hosts an annual conference. The tenth event in the series took place in December 2025, at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto (FLUP), under the title Relational Forms X – 1925, 2025: Which Twenties? Empathy and Estrangement Across Time in Literature and the Arts. In previous years, and in line with the research area’s goals, it had already addressed other relevant themes as the dialogue between literature and science; literature, the arts and modern finance; or literature and the concept of nation.