LLL Departmental Lecture Series

We are pleased to announce our next talk in the WLL Department Lecture Series by Dr. Joseph Greenwood, titled Songs and the Performance of Kurdish Identity. Abstract: Dr. Joseph Matthew Greenwood was awarded his PhD in Irish Theatre from Queen’s University, Belfast, in 2014.

His PhD thesis, which explored how Irish playwrights in the mid-20 th century exploited the social memory accreted within traditional song-forms, later became a published monograph, “Hear My Song”: Irish Theatre and Popular Song in the 1950s and 1960s (Peter Lang Publishers, 2018). From 2018 to 2025, Dr. Greenwood was an Assistant Professor in English Literature at the University of Kurdistan, Hewler, in Iraqi Kurdistan.

During this time period, he was part of a research project, which recognised the importance of traditional song-forms, in the “construction” of a Kurdish cultural identity, especially in relation to the Kurdish desire for independence. In this presentation, Dr. Greenwood will briefly discuss the results of 7 focus-group conducted with university students (with ages between 18 and 29 years old), from the governorates of Sulimaini, Erbil, and Dohuk; and a selection of the subsequent interviews. Themes that will be explored, include the perceived significance of Kurdish songs: for feelings of Kurdish identity; whencompared to the significance of foreign songs; and in terms of generational change.