National University of Ireland, Galway Centre for Irish Studies Third Galway Conference of Irish Studies 2019 “What is it to dwell?”: Home(s) in Irish Studies 7-8 June 2019 Book of Abstracts

Panel 1: Room G010 Notes from Abroad and Soundscapes of Home Chair: Dr. Méabh Ní Fhuartháin

Waifs, Strays, and Straw Turkeys: Musical Ruminations on ‘Home’ in Irish-American Chicago Dr. Aileen Dillane (University of Limerick)

Abstract: Chicago-born fiddler Liz Carroll (1956-), a first-generation Irish-American, recalls coming ‘home’ to Ireland as a child to play traditional music and how, on one occasion, she was encouraged to play ‘Turkey in the Straw’ as it was deemed more representative of where it was she actually dwelt (Dillane 2009). Many years on, Carroll would come to appreciate that ‘home’ could indeed be found in this tune; a musical rendering of her multi-ethnic America, belonging to a genre that inspired new ways of composing and rendering the self (Carroll 2000; 2002). But the tune could also become meaningful because it was found in Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melodies (Chicago 1922), the final music collection by Cork-born emigrant, Francis (Chief) O’Neill, a key figure in Irish music who exerted considerable influence on Carroll. In contrast to O’Neill’s highly celebrated Music of Ireland (1903) and 1001 Melodies (1907), both of which sought to capture the rich repertoire of Ireland/home, largely collected from Irish emigrants in Chicago (Carolan 1997), Waifs and Strays suggests a different agenda. Homing in on “Turkey in the Straw” and O’Neill’s rationale for its inclusion, this paper traces the ways in which the melody traverses space, time, and traditions, morphing and changing, shedding old and accruing new meanings, and in that process revealing a fragile and contingent notion of home. How music dwells in us, configures home in the diasporic sphere, and brings with it home truths about identity and belonging is explored in this particular ‘coon air’.

Biography: Dr. Aileen Dillane is an ethnomusicologist and course director of the MA in Irish Music Studies at the Irish World Academy, University of Limerick. She teaches and publishes on Irish traditional and popular musics. Aileen is co-editor of Songs of Social Protest (2018) and Public and Political Discourses of Migration: International Perspectives (2016), along with three other music essay collections (2011, 2015, 2018). She is a series editor for Popular Musics Matter: Social, Cultural and Political Interventions (Rowman & Littlefield) and deputy editor of Ethnomusicology Ireland. Aileen is currently completing a monograph on Irish/Irish-American music making in Chicago. She plays flute and piano with the All-Ireland winning Templeglantine Ceilí Band.

1 | P a g e

A woman’s place is in the home: music-making and the domestic space Dr. Verena Commins (National University of Ireland, Galway)

Abstract: The Willie Clancy Summer School experienced extraordinary growth in the number of attending students during the 1980s and 1990s. This expansion rapidly outstripped the supply of conventional teaching spaces in the small rural town of Miltown Malbay, Co Clare. A unique response to this development was the utilisation of domestic houses for Irish traditional music classes as local people rose to the occasion by making available places and spaces for transmission in their homes. Reconceptualising this as a process of re-traditionalisation, Irish traditional music is effectively returned to the domestic setting from which it is first imagined to emerge. The domestic space, a space in which women are conceptually embedded by the constitution, is also a space inhabited by women in the marginalia of Irish traditional music transmission narratives. References such as ‘learned from his mother’ or ‘learned a share of his music from his concertina-playing mother and grandmother’, infer domesticity as they interject the narrative biographies of musicians. This paper interrogates concepts of ‘home’ at the Willie Clancy Summer School, reflecting on the extent to which its enactment, and re-traditionalising use of domestic space, disrupts and/or confirms established gender narratives in Irish traditional music transmission and practice.

Biography: Dr Verena Commins is Lecturer in Irish Music Studies at the Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway. She has an interdisciplinary background spanning rural studies, ethnomusicology and an Irish Studies PhD entitled ‘Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy: Transmission, Performance and Commemoration of Irish Traditional Music, 1973-2012’ Her teaching and research centre on concepts of re-traditionalisation, festival, commemoration and authenticity in the appraisal of Irish traditional music contexts in Ireland and the diaspora. She is currently Academic Coordinator of customised Irish Studies programmes at NUI Galway and co-founder of Comhrá Ceoil, an Irish music and dance studies research cluster, at NUI Galway which convened the 2019 Symposium on Women and Traditional / Folk Music. She is co-editor of the special issue journal Éire-Ireland Notaí/Notes: Music and Ireland. 54:1 Spring/Summer 2019.

“That man … has made LPs”: Music and Performing “Home” in the Novel and Film of Brooklyn Chris McCann (National University of Ireland, Galway)

Abstract: The concept of diaspora stresses the links between emigrant communities and home place(s). This is complicated by the “volumetric void” (Casey 2008) of space, which physically enforces displacement. In Irish diaspora cultural production, music aptly addresses these ideas in complex sonic, spatial, and metaphysical terms. This is achieved by “revers[ing] the passage of ordinary time” (Ó Laoire 2005) and by creating “trajectories … across space” (Stokes 1997) through music. This paper explores the relative stability and instability of tropes and representations of “home” in Irish music, literature, and film. It assesses the extent to which music can truly recover a sense of “home” disrupted by emigration, especially where familiar performance space and audience is vital to musical embodiment of place. It also looks at the

2 | P a g e way emigrants utilise place as symbolism in Irish folk song and sean-nós, which carries “inordinate burdens” of both regional and wider cultural identity (Williams & Ó Laoire 2011). Framed by comparative examples from contemporary Irish music and fiction, the paper focuses on Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín (2009) and its subsequent film version. In both novel and film, a sean-nós performance situates Irish emigrants in a state of flux between home and away, presence and absence. The crucial stylistic differences between the novel and film illuminate how the transmission and consumption of music in the diaspora is affected by conceptualisations of space. The presentation incorporates film, recorded and live music to demonstrate how both present and absent places affects music’s ability to (re)create and perform “home”.

Biography: Chris is a Doctoral candidate in English at the National University of Ireland Galway. His research analyses the role of music as a device for the creation of social hierarchy within Irish prose literature of the twentieth century. This also ties into his interest in the role of place and space in Irish musical and literary production. His research interests are in word and music studies, and the coalescence of visual and aural art forms in prose literature. Chris’s MA thesis, entitled Singing Exile: Music in Irish Emigration Literature, was completed at The University of Notre Dame Fremantle in Western Australia in early 2017.

Panel 2: Room G010 Inscribing Homes through History Chair: Patrick Mahoney

“The loveliest flower that blooms amid our country’s ruins:” the Family and National Regeneration in the Irish People. Patrick Bethel (Marquette University)

Abstract: This paper examines the role of the family and of the home in the rhetoric of the Irish People newspaper, published from 1864-1866 as an ideological mouthpiece for the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The editors of the newspaper portrayed the Irish family as an idyllic space that produced strong men and virtuous women, and central to this vision was the home, generally portrayed as that of a small tenant farmer, which allowed the family a self-sufficient living and enabled their moral uplift. In the Irish People, the editors advanced two arguments regarding the Irish family and the Irish home. The first of these was that both were in the process of being destroyed by the forces of English colonial rule at the time of writing. The result of English rule was portrayed as the economically motivated destruction of both homes and families, which resulted in the personal degradation of Irish individuals and the broader degradation of the Irish nation. The second argument advanced was that a specific category of Irishmen deserved much of the blame for these degradations; those individuals dedicated to constitutional politics. According to the Irish People, constitutional politics were doomed to fail due to the innately unjust nature of British rule. Furthermore, they were held to have the further negative impact of convincing Irish men to not act in a masculine fashion in the furtherance of nationalist

3 | P a g e ambitions, but rather to submit to British rule, an act portrayed as innately feminine in nature. Only through the embrace of physical force as the mechanism for the achievement of Irish independence, according to these authors, could Irish men re-discover their lost manhood, and redeem first their nation, then their homes, and finally their families.

Biography: Patrick Bethel is a third year PhD student in History at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His dissertation research focuses on how racial and gendered concerns shaped the formation of Irish nationalisms in the mid- nineteenth century.

Anglo-Irish Estate identity through images from the Clonbrock Photograph Collection Úna Kavanagh (National University of Ireland, Galway)

Abstract: Taking as their subjects the domestic surroundings of their homes and the social life of the Anglo-Irish ascendency, the turn towards domesticity functioned as a symbolic counter- narrative of the primitive, conflicted world outside the private demense of the Big House. (Carville, 2011, p.33)

The Clonbrock Photographic Collection (CPC) consists of over 2,000 glass plate slides, lantern slides and some albums currently housed at the NLI and many are accessible through its website. The CPC extends over three generations of the Dillon family of Clonbrock estate, Ahascragh, Co. Galway dating from 1860s to 1930s. Lady Clonbrock, Augusta Dillon neé Crofton (1839-1928) is a principal contributor to the collection and the main focus of my current PhD research. This paper will demonstrate through the use of critically selected photographs from 1863- 1873 how the Dillon family used the medium of photography to articulate their Anglo-Irish identity. Images of their home, ‘the Big House’ on the Clonbrock demesne, play a vital role in establishing the Dillon family’s Anglo-Irish identity situated in East County Galway. Photographs of flags and decorations used for celebrations at their home in two separate decades of the collection shows a modification of this identity over time. Through photography and the images it provides, it is possible to see how the Dillon family used their home and its surroundings to promote the family as being progressive, modern, intellectually and scientifically inquisitive and benevolent landlords. An argument can be made that a change in power relations and a shift in identity politics can be observed through the photographs from both time periods.

Biography: Úna Kavanagh is researching Augusta Dillon, Lady Clonbrock (1839-1928) towards her PhD at the Centre for Irish Studies, NUI, Galway. In 2018, she completed a History Masters at NUI, Galway. She was awarded the Full P. J. Masters and a NUI Galway Humanities MA Scholarships for this. Her MA dissertation topic focuses on autograph book contributions of anti-Treaty internees at Tintown in the Curragh during 1923. Úna completed a BA Connect with Irish Studies at NUI, Galway in 2017. She was awarded an International Study Scholarship (Non- Erasmus) from NUI, Galway in 2015. In 2014, Úna was awarded the Irish Studies Fellowship to attend Yeats Summer School.

4 | P a g e

‘The apprehension of death’: Elizabeth Bowen and the personalization of dying and dead Anglo-Irish Big Houses. Dr. Ian d’Alton (Trinity College Dublin)

Abstract: The Big Houses – their homes - were central to what the Anglo-Irish gentry imagined themselves to be. Humanizing the home placed it firmly as a sort of a permanent member of the family. Thus, it was born, it lived – and it died, especially in the traumatic Irish revolutionary period. Writing of the firing of the fictional Danielstown [1929] in the Irish War of Independence (1919-21), Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen speaks of the house’s destroyers as its ‘executioners’. For Bowen, this ‘death of the hearth’ resonates with the ‘death’ of her peoplehood. Her own house, Bowen’s Court in north Cork is, variously, the mother she lost when young; the child she never had; a burdensome invalid aunt; a sentry in hostile territory. Its ‘death’ and demolition in 1960 ultimately defined what it had been - and, in many respects, her. Like grieving a human, she refused to accept that ‘the space is empty’. Through Elizabeth Bowen’s eyes, how the Big House took on the burden of dying and death for the Anglo-Irish is the subject of this interpretive paper. Readings of her Irish novels The Last September (1929) and A World of Love (1955), and her family history Bowen’s Court (1942), as well as some of her short stories, illustrate how she utilized this trope and asks why, and how – in the context of the particular circumstances of the remnants of the Anglo-Irish gentry after Irish independence in 1922 – it was an evocative way to sign the end of her tribe.

Biography: Ian d’Alton, MA (Nat. Univ. Ire.), PhD (Cantab.), FRHistS, is a historian, primarily of southern Irish Protestantism. A collection of essays (co-editor, Dr Ida Milne) Protestant and Irish: the minority’s search for place in independent Ireland, will be published by Cork University Press in early 2019. Recent publications include ‘Prisoners of war? Evoking an Anglo-Irish perception of the conflict of 1914-19’, in the Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 17 (2017); ‘Journeying into a wider world? The development of the histories of the Church of Ireland since 1950’, in M. Empey, A. Ford and M. Moffitt (eds), The Church of Ireland and its past: history, interpretation and identity (Dublin, 2017); ‘From Bandon to...Bandon: sectarian violence in nineteenth century Cork’, in K. Hughes & D. MacRaild (eds), Crime, violence, and the Irish in the nineteenth century (Liverpool University Press, 2017); and ‘Constructing citizenships: the Protestant search for place and loyalty in post-independence Ireland’, in S. Ellis (ed.), Enfranchising Ireland? Identity, citizenship and state (Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, 2018). A former Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Liverpool (Institute of Irish Studies), 2011-12 and a Visiting Fellow, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and Senior Research Associate, Peterhouse, Cambridge (both 2014), Ian is currently a Visiting Research Fellow, Centre for Contemporary Irish History, Trinity College, Dublin.

5 | P a g e

Panel 3: The Bridge Room Literary Imaginings of Home: Trauma, Nostalgia, Translation Chair: John Singleton

The Mermaids and their Past: Representations of Trauma, Disremembering and Postmemory in Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s The Fifty Minute Mermaid Fanni Fekete-Nagy (Eötvös Loránd University)

Abstract: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s nearly forty-piece poem sequence on mermaids, which first appeared as the last section of her 1998 Cead Aighnis and was later translated by Paul Muldoon to be published as the bilingual 2007 volume called The Fifty Minute Mermaid, has been subject to a wide range of criticism. In the poet’s own words, these poems are about “any kind of loss, the loss caused by forced emigration, by cineghlanadh, or ethnic cleansing, by trauma in general.” Significant losses which often occur as a result of such traumatic events are the loss of home, of language, customs and cultural heritage. My analysis would like to shed light on the collection’s depictions of people’s relationship to their own past by using ideas from memory studies, including Bessel A. van der Kolk’s work on trauma, postmemory as described by Marianne Hirsch, and Guy Beiner’s theories on forgetting and disremembering. With the help of these concepts, I will analyse the emotional impact that leaving behind their home in the sea together with their cultural heritage had on the mythically inspired merpeople in Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems. Furthermore, I will investigate how the experience of exile and displacement influences remembering, forgetting or denying the memories of the past in The Fifty Minute Mermaid. Finally, I will argue that through powerful depictions of the painful consequences of a failure to deal with the past, the poems in this volume warn against the repression and denial of memories and proclaim the necessity of remembering one’s heritage and history even in the face of a traumatic past.

Biography: My name is Fanni Fekete-Nagy and I have earned my MA in Postcolonial literatures and cultures at Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest, Hungary. During ma BA, I have spent an Erasmus semester at the University of Limerick, Ireland which has strongly influenced my later academic interests. At the moment, I am a first year PhD student at ELTE, my research topic is contemporary Irish poetry, more specifically the works of Medbh McGuckian, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. My further interests include literary translation and learning the Irish language.

The mapping of Ballybeg by the Ordnance Survey: Territory and Place-names in Friel´s Translations José Luis Llamas Álvarez (University of León)

Abstract: In Translations the image of the English army mapping Ballybeg and translating the Irish place-names into English is a central issue. The play´s use of the making of the 1833 Ordnance Survey of Ireland is open enough to allow variant readings; it also gives Friel the opportunity for historical, cultural and linguistic retrospection. Changing the symbols within the language will necessarily involve important structural changes in the culture itself. To change names is to replace the cultural and symbolic elements attached to them and, in the case of Ballybeg, to speak of

6 | P a g e it not only in terms of hills and streams but also in terms of control (law, taxation). Friel's use of the Ordnance Survey is above all a dramatic convenience: it provided him with a powerful symbol to portray this process of linguistic and cultural dispossession. The play uses the Ordnance Survey as a symbol of English colonialism in Ireland: the historical accuracy or otherwise of Friel's presentation of the Survey has been the subject of much debate. This is a point which I would like to explore in this paper.

Biography: Formatted as submitted. University

- Bachelor of Education (University of León, Spain) - Bachelor of Arts in Spanish (University of León, Spain) - Master of Arts in Irish Studies (Queen´s University Belfast, N. Ireland) - Advanced Studies Diploma – DEA (University of Salamanca, Spain)

Employment / Work

1984 - 1985 Spanish Language Assistant, N. Ireland

1985 - 1990 Primary and Secondary School Teacher in several schools in and around León, Spain

1990 - 1996 Spanish Education Officer Spanish Embassy Education Office in London, UK (on secondment to the British Council in Belfast)

1996 - 1999 Lecturer and Academic Coordinator Spanish Cultural Institute (Instituto Cervantes) in Manchester, UK

2000 - 2011 ELE Lecturer and Head of Academic Programmes University of León Language Centre, Spain

2011 - 2016 Officer for International Cooperation and Mobility University of León Internacional Relations Office, Spain.

2016 - present ELE Lecturer and Academic Coordinator

7 | P a g e

University of León Language Centre, Spain

Panel 4: Room G010 The disappearing house: inventing, recording, remembering the ‘Irish Home’ Chair: Anna Falkenau

‘Home Charms’: unpacking the diasporic home through speculative design Molly-Claire Gillett (Concordia University, Montréal)

Abstract: Maeve Brennan’s 1953 short story, “The Bride,” draws attention to the agential capacity of the house and its things, and raises difficult questions about the nature of ‘home’ in the Irish diaspora. As part of a larger project triangulating literary and historical sources with design thinking, my presentation will discuss a research creation project which uses Brennan’s short story as a prompt for a design intervention into the material and performative nuances of immigration. This method, deriving from design theory and the “spatial turn” in the humanities, is known as speculative design. I will use this object that I designed and manufactured—a set of digitally modelled and 3D printed ‘Home Charms’—as both an illustration and methodology to investigate the sensations associated with remembering tangible aspects of the world left behind, sensations that help clarify what it meant to resettle not only in a new land, but in a new domestic space—that most intimate of built environments. I will demonstrate how looking at the central issue in a short story as a design problemhas shifted my perspective on the role of material culture in immigration. Ultimately, I will argue that through making and tactile engagement, we can gain insight into the disintegration and refashioning of the ‘Irish home’ that occurred as a result of migration; a process enacted with and through the things of the Irish and American domestic spaces in which immigrant women lived and worked. *See photos in Appendix A

Biography: Molly-Claire Gillett is a candidate in the interdisciplinary Individualized PhD Program at Concordia University, in Montréal, Quebec, working under the supervision of faculty members in the School of Irish Studies, the Department of Art History, and the Department of Design and Computation Arts. Her doctoral work focuses on Irish lace, both at the peak of its production in the late 19thcentury and in contemporary lace making circles, combining creative practice and historical research. Her speculative design for ‘Home Charms’ was featured in the introduction to the food- themed volume of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, launched at the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium in May 2018, and received the 2018 Donald E. Jordan, Jr. – Willard C. Potts, Jr. Award for work by an emerging scholar at the American Conference for Irish Studies Western Region.

Sale Agreed: Unpacking a Generational Home Shaney Herrmann (Concordia University, Montréal)

Abstract: I am the youngest of my generation and I grew up away from my maternal and paternal families. Because of this age and spatial distance, I have mostly experienced my family history through photographs. Growing up away has

8 | P a g e taught me to engage with photography as a tool to remember and to commemorate. But it also led me to experience my grandparents’ home in Dublin (a cherished and communal space) through a unique lens. After my maternal grandmother passed away in April 2018, the family home was in limbo. Despite not being born in Ireland, I was the last person from my family to live in that house before the decisions was made to put it on the market. Sale Agreed is a photographic series thataims to untangle my nuanced and emotional relationship to a place that marked me and that I equally hope I marked. How will my relationship to this place change now that I don’t have the concreteness of a family home to return to? How does this process help me understand and hold on to a piece of home? How has growing up away from this home contributed to person that I am today?

Sale Agreed creates a conversation between the real estate agent’s photographs used to sell the house and images that I have taken over the accumulated months that I spent living in that house. *See photos in Appendix B

Biography: Shaney Marie Herrmann is photographer and visual artist from Montreal. She is currently a Master of Design candidate in the Department of Design and Computation Arts, and is affiliated with the School of Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Concordia and received a commercial photography degree from Dawson College. Currently, Shaney’s research is focused on an exploration of the emotional and physical relationships between people and place. In the spring of 2018, Shaney was one of the selected artists to participate in How to Flatten a Mountain,a residency at Cow House Studios in County Wexford. The residency culminated in an exhibition at Rathfarnam Castle in Dublin as part of the annual PhotoIreland festival. Shaney has practised as a professional photographer, a photography instructor, and artist in Montreal and Toronto. She was the appointed official photographer for Taoiseach Leo Varadkar during his visit to the Montreal Pride Parade in August 2017. www.shaneyherrmann.com

‘Unearthing Irish Cuisine: Hidden Irish identities in the documentation of Irish culinary history’ Alexandra Kenefick (Concordia University, Montréal)

Abstract: "Unearthing Irish Cuisine" discusses the author's process of researching and writing an entry for Wikipedia focused on prehistoric Irish cuisine as a revealing look into the ambiguous roots of Irish culinary identity and its absented histories. A not-for-profit organization, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia whose articles can be started, edited, and collaborated on by anyone. Though it may seem the perfect environment for fake news and personal promotion, an army of moderators, strict citation rules and keen restrictions on copyrighted material manages to foster a community of contributors supportive of non-partisan, well-written articles who respect the rules and each other. Though contributors may freely choose a topic to submit or edit, since Wikipedia makes the first place many thousands of people—notably young students—begin their research journeys to satisfy school projects and general curiosity, the encyclopedia is largely a library of entries driven by popular supply and demand. Consequently, well-known topics such as dogs and cats quickly develop into lengthy articles authored by multiple contributors, and become heated pages of daily editing and conversation, whereas lesser-known subjects can take years to be recognized and developed. As a member of the Irish diaspora and as a food scholar, the author's project began as one to better understand Irish culinary identity, and to

9 | P a g e contribute to what was expected to be an animated conversation about Irish food. However, the project took a sudden turn when it was met by Wikipedia's near-absence of information on the subject. Suddenly the entry became an exploration into why the topic of food—an otherwise globally popular subject—was missing in Wikipedia's Irish repertoire. Where were its experts and contributors? Its Irish cooks and everyday citizens? Was this a window into an absent connection to the Irish hearth and home? In the process of researching prehistoric Irish cuisine, what unfolded became a discovery of histories hidden from popular discourse, the suppression of Irish identity, and the attempts to disguise it. An unexpected window into subverted identity, the project summoned inquiry into those who chronicle history and the stories they intentionally and unintentionally overwrite, whether in ancient texts, or on Wikipedia.

Biography: Alexandra Kenefick is a PhD student researching the intersection of design and mindful meat consumption at Concordia University, in Montréal. Her work focuses on the ways in which contemporary production and consumption patterns have created a self-perpetuating distanciation and obfuscation in the relationship between eaters and the meat they consume. The aim of her research is to develop speculative design strategies that interrogate how to bring the mindful experiences and ideas of farmers/hunters in the field to everyday consumers as a means to bring new consciousness to their meat consumption decisions, to reveal the hidden externalities of the industrial agricultural complex, and to aggressively push today’s mindful consumption practices toward radical new ideas and latent opportunities. Her study in Concordia’s Individualized Program (INDI) intersects anthropology, design, and marketing strategies with the experiences of Irish farmers and Canadian hunters to think critically on the ways in which our respect for food reflects our respect for ourselves, our communities, and our environment.

Appendix A

10 | P a g e

Appendix B

a.

b

c.

11 | P a g e

Images A & B Images from the artist, shot in May 2018.

Images C “Sale Agreed,” Mason Estates Dundrum, last modified November 28, 2018, https://www.myhome.ie/residential/brochure/10-patrick-doyle-road-dundrum-dublin-14/4251334.

Panel 5: The Bridge Room An Baile Béaloscailte: Nuachainteoirí agus Nuafhilíocht na Gaeilge Cathaoirleach: Eoin Byrne

‘Is libhse an chathair’ – Pop Up Gaeltacht agus nuachainteoirí na Gaeilge Stiofán Seoighe (Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh)

Achoimre: ‘Is libhse an chathair’ – Pop Up Gaeltacht agus nuachainteoirí na Gaeilge Tá coincheap an nuachainteora tagtha chun cinn sa tsochtheangeolaíocht chriticiúil le roinnt blianta anuas mar fhrámaíocht anailíse a thugann dúshlán d’idé-eolaíochtaí teanga stairiúla, idé-eolaíochtaí a bhreathnaigh ar theangacha agus ar chainteoirí mar nithe aonchineálacha, teoranta (O’Rourke et al. 2015). Is féidir nuachainteoirí a shainmhíniú mar ‘social actors who use and claim ownership of a language that is not, for whatever reason, typically perceived as belonging to them’ (Ó Murchadha et al. 2018). Meastar go bhfuail tuairim is 200,000 nuachainteoir ar oileán na hÉireann (Walsh et al. 2015) agus tugann figiúirí Daonáirimh 2016 le fios go maireann 72% de chainteoirí laethúla na Gaeilge lasmuigh de cheantair thraidisiúnta Ghaeltachta. Tá spásanna nua sóisialta d’úsáid na Gaeilge tagtha chun cinn i gcathracha na tíre le roinnt blianta anuas. Dírítear san alt seo ar spás amháin den chineál sin, Pop Up Gaeltacht Bhaile Átha Cliath. Aithnítear go mbíonn nuachainteoirí gníomhach i bhforbairt spásanna den chineál seo agus iad sa tóir ar phobail chleachtais nua (Walsh agus Lane 2014) agus áitím, mar sin, go mbaineann tábhacht ar leith le hanailís a dhéanamh ar a meonta ina leith. San alt seo, déantar anailís ar shonraí a bailíodh le dhá bhliain anuas ó nuachainteoirí óga na Gaeilge trí mheán na n-agallamh leathstruchtúrtha beathaisnéiseach, cur chuige tairbheach chun conairí teanga (Busch 2015; Woolard 2016) nuachainteoirí a ransú. Scagtar ceisteanna a bhaineann ach go háirithe le barántúlacht, dlisteanacht agus féiniúlacht an nuachainteora toisc gur eascair siad go minic in insintí na rannpháirtithe. Próiseas leanúnach is ea próiseas an dlisteanaithe faoi mar a bhaineann sé le nuachainteoirí mionteangacha (Ortega et al. 2016). Chuige sin, fiosraítear tionchar féideartha Pop Up Gaeltacht ar phróiseas dlisteanaithe an nuachainteora agus a fheidhm mar phobal cleachtais do Ghaeilgeoirí uirbeacha, trí insintí na rannpháirtithe taighde a iniúchadh. Tugtar spléachadh freisin ar na hidé-eolaíochtaí teanga agus na dioscúrsaí atá á gcothú ag Pop Up Gaeltacht.

Tagairtí Busch, B. (2016) ‘Methodology in biographical approaches in applied linguistics’. In: Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies 187: 2-12.

12 | P a g e

Ortega, A., Amorrortu, E., Goirigolzarri, J. agus Urla, J. (2016) Los nuevos hablantes de euskera: experiencias. Actitudes e identidades. Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto. Ó Murchadha, N., Hornsby, M., Smith-Christmas, C. & Moriarty, M. (2018) ‘New speakers, familiar concepts?’. In: Smith-Christmas, C., Hornsby, M., Moriarty, M. and Ó Murchadha, N. (eds.) (2018) New speakers of minority languages: linguistic ideologies and practices. London: Palgrave MacMillan: 1-17. O’Rourke, B., Pujolar, J. and Ramallo, F. (2015) ‘New speakers of minority languages: the challenging opportunity – Foreword’. In: International Journal of the Sociology of Language 231: 1-20. Walsh, J. agus Lane, P. (2014) Activity of Working Group 1: Report on Conceptualisations of New Speakerness in the Case of Indigenous Minority Languages. Ar fáil ag: [faighte 30 Eanáir 2017]. Walsh, J., O’Rourke, B. agus Rowland, H. (2015) Tuarascáil Taighde ar Nuachainteoirí na Gaeilge arna hullmhú do Foras na Gaeilge. Baile Átha Cliath: Foras na Gaeilge. Woolard, K.A. (2016) Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in 21st Century Catalonia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Beathaisnéis: Stiofán Seoighe – Mac léinn Phd in Roinn na Gaeilge, OÉG. Arna mhaoiniú ag Scéim Scoláireachtaí Taighde Dochtúireachta na Gaillimhe & An Chomhairle Um Taighde in Éirinn. Tráchtas ag díriú ar mudes teangeolaíocha, féiniúlachtaí agus idé-eolaíochtaí teanga nuachainteoirí na Gaeilge agus na Bascaise.

Ar a gcompord sa bhaile? - Anailís ar léargais ghrúpa nuachainteoirí gur filí Gaeilge iad ar a mbarantúlacht mar bhaill phobail sa dá cheantar Gaeltachta; Corca Dhuibhne agus Uíbh Ráthach Shane Grant (Coláiste Mhuire gan Smál, Luimneach)

Achoimre: Fiosraíonn an páipéar seo an gaol atá ag seisear nuachainteoirí gur filí Gaeilge iad leis an áit a dtugann siad an baile uirthi. Is díol suntais an borradh atá faoin bhfilíocht i gceantar Chorca Dhuibhne ach go háirithe le blianta beaga anuas agus is spéisiúla fós an líon nuachainteoirí atá i measc an bhorrtha seo. Dírítear ar thaithí agus ar léargais sheisear fhilí anseo – is iad Simon Ó Faoláin, Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin, Peadar Ó hUallaigh, Louis Mulcahy, Áine Moynihan agus Paddy Bushe (UR). Déantar plé ar na cúiseanna gur shocraigh siad teacht chun na dúiche. Is ábhar spéise don bpáipéar seo an tslí go n- aithníonn na filí iad féin mar bhaill bharantúla an phobail agus go léiríonn cuid acu easpa compoird le gnéithe éagsúla den saol thiar – an teanga agus dearcadh na mball dúchasach. Is í aidhm an pháipéir solas a chaitheamh ar cheist an bhaile-nua seo do na nuachainteoirí a chónaíonn anois i gceantair Ghaeltachta nach raibh de dhúchas acu riamh. Féachtar ar an tslí go n-eiríonn leis na filí seo nascadh a dhéanamh leis an dúthaigh nach bhfuil de dhúchas acu. Deimhníonn cuid acu a mbarantúlacht trí tharraingt ar leith a dhéanamh ar an tírdhreach, ar mhiotas agus ar stair na háite. Bíonn cuid eile acu sáite i gcúraim phobail agus áitím go gcabhraíonn an gníomhaíochas seo leo ‘bheith istigh’ a bheith acu sa phobal.

13 | P a g e

Beathaisnéis: Tá Shane Grant mar mhac léinn PhD le Roinn na Gaeilge i gColáiste Mhuire Gan Smál, Luimneach. Cáilíodh é mar bhunmhúinteoir i 2016 agus bronnadh ‘Comhaltacht Taighde’ air sa bhliain 2017. Baineann a chuid taighde le filí comhaimseartha na Gaeilge i ndá cheantar Gaeltachta i gCiarraí; Corca Dhuibhne agus Uíbh Ráthach, atá faoi stiúir an Dr. Róisín Ní Ghairbhí. Féachann an taighde ar conas a ghintear, a chothaítear agus a chleachtaítear an fhilíocht Ghaeilge ag díriú ar na ceantair seo mar chás-staidéar. Tá spéis ar leith ag aige i bhfilíocht chomhaimseartha na Gaeilge, sa tsochtheangeolaíocht, i bhfoghlaim an tarna teanga, i bpleanáil teanga agus i bhforbairt pobail Ghaeltachta.

‘Miondéithe mo chine’: Léargas ar an mbaile i bhfilíocht Liam Uí Mhuirthile An Dr. Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh (Coláiste na hOllscoile, Corcaigh)

Achoimre: Féachfar sa pháipéar seo ar chíoradh a dhéanamh ar an ‘mbaile’ i bhfilíocht Liam Uí Mhuirthile trí mhionléamh a dhéanamh ar na dánta ‘An Parlús’ agus ‘Eolchaire.’ Rianófar an nasc a shamhlaigh sé le hIarthar Chorcaí, dúiche a mhuintire, agus an tábhacht a bhain le seanchas a shinsire. Os a choinne sin, tá an léargas ar an mbruachbhaile uirbeach in ‘Eolchaire’ mar a bhfuil uaigneas nach féidir friotal a chur air.

Beathaisnéis: Léachtóir, Roinn na Nua-Ghaeilge, Coláiste na hOllscoile, Corcaigh.

Panel 6: Room G010 Crises of Home: Exile, Displacement, Migration Chair: Malachy Egan

Dwelling and Dualities in the Irish-British Diaspora Dr. Deirdre O’Byrne (Loughborough University)

Abstract: This paper will address the concept of dwelling in the short fictions of Irish women living in Britain, focusing on the writings of Maeve Kelly and Moy McCrory. The writers come from different generations of immigrants, and their work reflects that, with Kelly writing of Irish-born workers settling in Britain, and McCrory’s stories drawing on her own Liverpool-Irish background. Nevertheless, their work shows that the newer arrivals and the children and grandchildren of immigrants share some common ground. Each author explores the conflicted and fragmented sense of ‘home’ for women of Irish heritage, how one’s language and culture can disrupt belongingness. Language is a crucial element of difference, as meanings and definitions become contested sites. In the stories I examine, women of Irish heritage find that relationships with men of the host British culture can produce areas of conflict, inflected by politics, history and religion. The paper will draw on the Freudian concept of the unheimlich, showing how these writers depict situations and circumstances in which one’s habitation can, suddenly, or gradually over time, become unfriendly, hostile and strange. Women find their own strategies for making a potentially alien space a place in which they can dwell without denying their cultural inheritance.

14 | P a g e

Biography: Deirdre O’Byrne lectures in literature at Loughborough University, specialising in Irish literature. She is interested in the fictions of other immigrant communities in Britain, and finds many connections between the experiences of the Irish and other postcolonial cultures. She is very active in outreach, and is Chair of a voluntary community organisation, Nottingham Irish Studies Group.

Dwelling between the Spaces: Liminality and Uprootedness in the Diasporic 'Coming of Age' Novel Revd. Dr. Christine O’Dowd Smyth (Waterford Institute of Technology)

Abstract: This paper proposes a comparative, transnational reading of two literary works by ‘London Irish’ writers: The Falling Angels by John Walsh and Araby by Gretta Molroney with that of two Franco-Algerian or Beur writers : Le Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed by Mehdi Charef and Le gone du Chaaba by Azouz Begag. I propose to use postcolonial theory as an enabling methodological tool, using in particular Homi K. Bhaba's term : “The indeterminacy of diasporic identity”1 to describe the problematic of a disrupted or ‘uprooted’ identity of all second generation diasporic peoples, born in displaced exile in the former colonial metropolis, simultaneously rejecting the ‘origin-al’ culture of their parents while being rejected by the host culture as being ‘Other’. Dwelling in an interstitial ‘third space’, or liminal ‘No Man’s Land’, where diasporic peoples find themselves, between the lines or borderlands of two fixed and often contrasting – even antithetical, identities, can also be a site of creative and cultural transformation, in which the question of where, if anywhere, is ones identity, ones place, is creatively explored, re-imagined and re- routed through writing. As Bill Ashcroft has stated: “It is when place is least spatial, perhaps, that it becomes most identifying.” For both Walsh and Molroney, their ancestral roots lie in the most peripheral part of the remote island of Ireland – the West of Ireland, and their portrayal of what Joep Leerssen has termed ‘the chronotope of peripherality’ -a wild and rugged place beyond the sea, peopled by people who look different, sound different, are in their turn wild and noisy and entirely and resolutely anti-modern, in binary opposition to the busy, moving urbanity and polite, enunciated vowels of ‘mainland’ civilization. This tendency to stand apart, at a slight yet perceptible distance from the speech patterns, mannerisms and values of their parents, ‘casting a cold eye’ on their difference and simultaneously rejecting that difference, is similar to the Franco-Algerian or ‘Beur’ writings of Azouz Begag and Mehdi Charef who both reject the alien Algerianness of their parents culture while longing to belong to a France that will never accept them as French. For all the writers under examination, re-imagining and rejecting the ‘Utopia’ of their parents culture can be interpreted as an exercise in exorcising their ‘Othernesss’ or indeed, as Iain Chambers has posited, as a means of claiming a ‘flexible citizenship’ in which identity is articulated across the lines, the bridge, between two interchangible and continuously emerging identities.

Biography: Revd Dr Christine O’Dowd-Smyth is a lecturer in French & Comparative World Literatures in the School of Humanities, Waterford Institute of Technology, Republic of Ireland. She has published widely, presented at

1 Bhaba Homi K, The Location of Culture (1994), London, Routledge, p.225

15 | P a g e international conferences and teaches in the areas of diasporic writing, auto-ethnographical writing and the contemporary French novel as well as Canadian Francophone literature. Most recently, she was a keynote speaker at the Borders: Inside & Out international conference at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is also an ordained minister & voluntary hospital chaplain in the Church of Ireland (a member of the Anglican Communion.)

Inclusions and Exclusions: Debunking Myths of Home and Homelessness in the Fiction of Siobhán Parkinson Dr. Ciara Ní Bhroin (Marino Institute of Education)

Abstract: A concern with home has been noted by a number of critics as a prominent characteristic of children’s literature and the one that most distinguishes it from literature for adults (Clausen; Wolf; Nodelman and Reimer). Since “texts for children act as amplifiers for the simultaneously commonplace and resonant idea of home” (Reimer xii), analysis of home in children’s literature provides a valuable lens through which to view wider culture and society. While a mobile subject is at the centre of much children’s fiction, the trajectory of children’s texts generally, as Clare Bradford and Mavis Reimer have shown, is to home the child subject, both the fictional child protagonist and the implied child reader. The process of decolonisation has been central to imaginings of home in Irish children’s literature, which, since independence, has tended to home the child in the dual sense of a secure and conservative family home and a wider homeland or nation. However, a renaissance occurred in Irish children’s fiction in the last decades of the twentieth century as it changed from being largely a vehicle for perpetuating hegemonic concepts of home to a site of resistance contesting complacent concepts of home in Celtic Tiger Ireland, a time when a critical stance was unusual. This paper will examine selected fiction of Ireland’s first Laureate na nÓg, Siobhán Parkinson. It will consider how Parkinson’s combination of social realism and experimentation with form interrogates myths of home prevalent during the Celtic Tiger period, drawing attention to patterns of inclusion and exclusion in Irish society and giving voice to those on the margins, including the homeless.

Biography: Ciara Ní Bhroin is a lecturer in the Marino Institute of Education, an associated college of Trinity College, Dublin. She is a founding member and former president of the Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature, has chaired the Children’s Books Ireland Book of the Year Award and served for many years on the executive committee of IBBY Ireland. Ciara has published a range of articles and book chapters on children’s literature and is co-editor of What Do We Tell the Children? Critical Essays on Children’s Literature (Cambridge Scholars, 2012). She recently completed her PhD in the School of English, Drama and Film in University College Dublin, under the supervision of Dr. P.J. Mathews. Her current research is on discourses of home and homeland in Irish children’s fiction.

16 | P a g e

Panel 7: The Bridge Room Home, Conflict, and Independence Chair: Síobhra Aiken

‘This is not civilised war’: Home invasions in literature of the Irish conflict, 1919-1923 Dr. Ailbhe McDaid (University College Cork)

Abstract: Analyses of war typically draw a clear boundary between battlefront and homefront, and this duality informs much of the rhetorical and representative discourse around conflict zones. However, the period of 1919-1923 in Ireland collapsed those boundaries between public military space and private domestic space, causing the family home to become a contested environment, and inflecting local concepts of home-as-community with the particular circumstances of wartime. This paper considers how literary representations of this period reflect the multiple instabilities of home through female characters, showing how domestic integrity, emotional stability, community relations, moral respectability, economic viability and even physical architecture are subjected to the privations of war. Using archival, periodical and personal manuscript sources to contextualise the events, this paper will present extracts from a number of literary works, including Emily Ussher’s The Trail of the Black and Tans, Peadar O’Donnell’s Adrigoole, Frank O’Connor’s Guests of the Nation and Maeve Brennan’s ‘Cherryfield Avenue’ stories. In doing so, this paper will examine the narrative, metaphorical and symbolic figurations of women’s experiences of conflict, specifically of violations of the home space.

Biography: Ailbhe McDaid is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Cork. She is the author of The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Her new project is entitled Domestic Disruptions: Women, Literature and Conflict, 1914-1923.

‘I was tired of war and I wanted to go home’: domestic realism in Frank O’Connor’s Guests of the Nation (1931) Dr. Stephen O’Neill (Queen’s University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin)

Abstract: In his influential study The Lonely Voice (1962), Frank O’Connor described the short-story as a platform for submerged population groups, a form which is ‘by its very nature remote from the community’. Subsequent interpretations consider this description as deriving from his own difficulties with the novel form in the 1930s, failures which belied his success in short fiction. As Declan Kiberd paraphrased the argument of The Lonely Voice, ‘without the concept of a normal society, the novel is impossible, but the short story is particularly appropriate to a society in which revolutionary upheavals have shattered the very idea of normality’. So O’Connor’s failures with the novel are metonymic of the state of Irish culture and society after the revolution. This shattered sense of normality had also been a persistent concern of O’Connor’s writing, and particularly in his accounts of the Irish revolution, which he figured as a time of intense homesickness. This paper specifically examines the representation of ‘home’ in O’Connor’s first collection of short stories, Guests of the Nation (1931), with domestic

17 | P a g e settings providing forms of sanctuary from the violence of the revolution as well as devices for metafictional asides by the narrator. In these stories, O’Connor reframes the familiar tensions between physical force and constitutional Irish nationalism in a homestead which domesticates the divisions of the revolution. But in figuring these homes as something ‘out of a Jane Austen novel’, the stories also anticipate O’Connor’s later theorizations of short fiction.

Biography: Stephen O’Neill is a teaching assistant and adjunct lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin. He is Visiting Research Fellow at the Moore Institute, NUI Galway in May and June 2019. He was previously a visiting researcher at the University of São Paulo.

‘Reflections on home and homelessness: Teresa Deevy’s Temporal Powers (1932) Dr. Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin (University of Limerick)

Abstract: Home and the loss of home are central preoccupations of Teresa Deevy’s play Temporal Powers. First performed in 1932, it was staged alongside Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News. It was Deevy’s third play for the Abbey Theatre and it was an Aonach Tailteann competition winner. The play is set in 1927 “in the interior of an old ruin on a hillside in Ireland”. The couple at the centre of the drama have lost everything: their only child, their home, and their hope for the future. It is within this context that Deevy presents these characters with a terrible ethical quandary, one that divides them ever more deeply. Their moral dilemma is particularly poignant as this couple struggle to rationalise their complex responses to their impoverished predicament and the unfairness of their social situation. This play provides insights into the defeats and frustrations of intellectuals and activists of the Free-State period, and its concerns remain relevant to contemporary audiences. In her dramas, Teresa Deevy draws out the systemic and structural elements which limited and damaged individuals and communities in twentieth-century Ireland. In Temporal Powers, she explores themes such as eviction, homelessness, emigration, justice, religion, grief and poverty. This paper introduces this little- known play, contextualises it within Deevy’s oeuvre, and discusses its treatment of key themes through an examination of its characters, dramatic structure and form.

Biography: Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin is a Lecturer in Communications at the University of Limerick. She teaches on undergraduate and postgraduate modules in the fields of Communications and Cultural Studies. Her current research interests include a broad range of cultural practices, networks, artefacts and histories from 1880 onwards. Since undertaking her PhD on the cultural history of the Irish Free State, Caoilfhionn has maintained a deep interest in the oeuvre of Teresa Deevy and has published several critical essays on her plays. She is currently co-editing a volume of Deevy’s plays for publication in 2020.

Panel 8: Room G010 Home and Dwelling in Transnational and Translated Contexts Chair: Dr. Leo Keohane

18 | P a g e

‘Decolonizing the Irish University: Towards a decolonial aesthesis of Gaelic-derived-and-Irish ways of knowing and sensing modernity/coloniality Eoin Ó Cuinneagáin (Linnaeus University)

Abstract: This paper interrogates what it may mean for Irish people to dwell in situated and decolonized knowledge in terms of coming home to the geography and biography of reason and away from the continuation of dislocated, disembodied and colonized epistemologies on Irish life, referred to in the decolonial project as the coloniality of knowledge (Gordon, 2011; Tlostanova, 2011; Maldonado-Torres, 2016). The first part of the paper traces the coloniality of knowledge in the trajectories of both the English university and the self-styled ‘Irish university’ from 1922 and how they can both be understood as Westernizing universities, revealing their role in conditioning how the Gaelicand- ancestrally-linked-Irish body enters into/is excluded from modern/colonial aesthetics. It shows how the study of Irish life has unfolded, inside what Ramón Grosfoguel (2015) has called the Westernised University, and how its knowledge is policed through the advancement of both Eurocentric and Anglocentric knowledge which affirms the system of English letters as the authority on knowledge about Irish life. Furthermore, it reflects on how how Time (epoch) and Entity (genre) are constantly used in modern/colonial disciplinarity as axioms to solidify the race/sex/class division of labour as the foundations of epistemic authority in the particular context of Irish universities (Gordon, 2011; Mignolo 2014). The second part of the paper will meditate on the question of what it means to sense/believe modernity/coloniality, destabilize universalist thinking on Irish life, and shift the geographies and biographies of reason therein (Gordon, 2011). It proposes that modern/colonial disciplinarity’s regulation of Irish literature can be decolonized by sensing it from a plurality of Gaelic-derived modes of perception and Gaelic/Irish border spaces in the pursuit of decentering and humbling Anglo-Germanic universalizing aesthetics. With this diversification of sensing, it strives to decenter ‘Reading’ as the only way to produce valid knowledge in modernity/coloniality. As such, it uses the concept of decolonial aestheSis (Mignolo and Vázquez, 2013) as an auxiliary concept that elucidates and brings into reality strategies that can encourage the repatriation, redignification and revitalization of Gaelic-derived ways of perceiving and how these sensibilities can desettle settler perspectives, power, being and knowledge in Ireland and elsewhere. This will be a project of construction and not of deconstruction, and one that recognizes the integral contributions of the historically and collectively nameless Gaelic-and-Irish revolutionary cognizersin the struggle against epistemic, political and ontological violence.

Biography: Eóin Ó Cuinneagáin, PhD Student, Linnaeus University, Sweden.

An Intertextual Exploration of the Work of Jorge Luis Borges in View of the Decolonial Connection Between Ireland and Latin America Dr. Michael Dwyer (La Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana)

Abstract: Jorge Luis Borges was one of the first Latin American writers to use parody and satire as a strategy to create an axis of political and social enunciation that came to identify the so-called universality of European culture as nothing

19 | P a g e more than a myth. Borges unknowingly adopted a cosmic vision that very well may have inspired the fundamental premises of contemporary decolonial theory with his irreverent attitude and iconoclastic instincts widely admired by his fellow writers. The Scottish scholar Robin Fiddian recently went even further by characterizing Borges as the prototype of the postcolonial intellectual exemplified by James Joyce, Aimé Césaire and Edward Said and as a writer whose geopolitical and historical repertoire resonates with those of Leopoldo Zea, Enrique Dussel, Eduardo Galeano and Joaquín Torres García. This presentation examines the place of Borges in this 'pantheon of heroes' through a comparison of Latin American and Irish literature. In this moment in time, our democratic processes have unfortunately degenerated in un monde déclassé in which alternative facts and false news rule, diversity is disparaged, and hatred and self- aggrandizement are allowed. In this kind of world, it seems especially important to address issues related to nationalistic ideologies and examine the role that language and literature can still play in the articulation of universal truths, the same universal truths that Jorge Luis Borges had boldly pursued throughout the twentieth century.

Biography: Michael Dwyer recently earned his Ph. D in the social sciences at La Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín, Colombia. He completed his year abroad at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut under the tutelage of renowned Latin American scholar Roberto González Echevarría. The title of his doctoral dissertation is “Recorriendo el Giro Decolonial de Irlanda y Latinoamérica a Partir de Producciones Literarias con Énfasis en el Aporte de Jorge Luis Borges”. Michael formerly lived in Montevideo, Uruguay where he wrote Patriot in their Midst which was published in the spring/summer issue of Dirty Chai Magazine. His memoir, Brass City Swelter, was shortlisted for the 2014 Fish Short Memoir Prize judged by the late Dermot Healy. This story was later published in Florida English (Special Irish-American Issue) in September 2014.

Panel 9: Room G011 Dwelling(s) over Time: Transformation and Preservation Chair: Aisling Ní Churraighín

Eviction: an event of sorrow or pride? Nikita Koptev (Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh)

Abstract: Several kinds of texts on life crises and disasters occur in the Schools’ Collection, a unique archive within the National Folklore Collection of Ireland, including narratives on famine, shipwrecks, illnesses, and evictions. Evictions fabulates might have been recorded aspart of longer narratives on landlords as was suggested by the questionnaire in Irish Folklore and Tradition / Béaloideas Éireann booklet, used by the Irish Folklore Commission to guide teachers and children in 1937-1938 in collecting different types of folklore and oral history. Texts on eviction, in Irish, cur as seilbh, depict events of the late 19th century and reveal two different approaches to historic narratives. One comprises the

20 | P a g e dramatic portrayal of the hardships of a family put out by a landlord or sheriff during bad weather to perish or emigrate. The other, however, could have become a starting point for the creation of an action movie. In these, evictions are depicted in detail with hundreds of soldiers storming the house and tenants fighting back with vigour using boiling water, stones and bees. The narrative style shows an epic pathos in describing confrontation between brave tenants and cruel forces of British rule, ultimately resulting in defeat for the tenant defenders. Moreover, some narratives use legendary motifs, which show how existing beliefs helped shape such stories. In this paper I discuss how traumatic 19th century eviction experiences were moulded into narratives containing two opposite sentiments: sorrow and pride.

Biography: Nikita Koptev is a Hardiman Scholar at the Department of Irish. His research is focused on transmission of texts during operation of the Schools’ Scheme initiated by the Irish Folklore Commission in 1937-1938.

From cosy homesteads to Bungalow Bliss: the ‘ideal homes’ of 20thC Ireland Dr. Stephanie Rains (Maynooth University)

Abstract: In 1925 President WT Cosgrave wrote that ‘The State must ultimately depend upon the Home. There its foundations are laid, its problems discussed; and there the security and stability afforded by the State are most acutely realised’. It is significant that he wrote those words at a time when the newly founded Free State was not only concerned with its own foundations and security as a new nation-state emerging from a period of civil war, but was also concerned with the foundations of domestic homes being built to address an acute housing shortage. Irish nationalist imagery had long emphasised the rural thatched cottage as an emblem of historic and authentic identity, but the Irish Free State proudly constructed thousands of modern houses, often praised for their modernist aesthetics of white surfaces, simple design and lack of decoration. This paper will discuss the ways in which the tension between imagery of traditional cottages as the national ideal and the Free State’s encouragement of modern houses was frequently addressed through an official and popular enthusiasm for bungalows, often depicted as modern cottages which were ideal homes for the new nation-state.

Biography: Stephanie Rains is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Maynooth University. She published Commodity Culture and Social Class in Dublin, 1850-1916 in 2010, has published articles in Irish Studies Review, Media History and Irish University Review, and is now working towards a book on 20thC Irish advertising and consumer culture.

Ties that bind: Communicating across Worlds Dr. Rita O’Donoghue (National University of Ireland, Galway)

Abstract: In traditional Irish lore, the presence and influence of the supernatural on human affairs was integral to the worldview of close-knit, rural communities – part of the ‘habitus,’ a term deployed by Bourdieu to illustrate the ingrained habits, skills and dispositions that shaped the ways in which individuals perceived their social world, and which underpinned communal interactions, experiences and communications. Central to this worldview was that of the

21 | P a g e reciprocity of care and respect between the living and the dead: one looked out for the other, and communication between worlds was an accepted phenomenon. The rupture caused by the ‘Great Famine’ (or more accurately, the series of famines) that ravaged the Irish countryside in the mid nineteenth century disrupted this older traditional way of life. In particular, for those who lived at the lower echelons of society, emigration became one of the only means of survival and of social mobility. ‘Crossing the pond’ and the Atlantic became a way of life for many, resulting in a burgeoning Irish diaspora worldwide. I argue however, that many of these deoraí - exiles, while appearing to assimilate into a new society, nevertheless continued to adhere to a worldview they had supposedly left behind. Accordingly, I present a selection of stories and experiences recorded in the archives of the National Folklore Collection 1935-7 that relate to communications at home and abroad between the living and the dead, specifically of warnings and portents from ‘Otherworld’ forces. I contend that such incidents illustrate the centrality and continued importance of the ‘ties that bind’: between worlds new and old, living and dead.

Biography: On request.

Panel 10: Room G010 Mapping and Recording Home(s) Chair: Dr. Verena Commins

Home or Hospital: Where were you born? What is your Place of Birth? Martina Hynan (National University of Ireland, Galway)

Abstract: Until the middle of the twentieth century most births in rural Ireland took place in the home. From then on childbirth increasingly took place in hospital settings. Not only did this physical relocation of birth from home to hospital affect women’s lived experiences of childbirth and traditional midwifery practices but both were also inextricably bound up with the complex relationship to women’s bodies and place within the evolving post-colonial Irish state. This paper examines the layered readings of place of birth and midwifery practices during the formative years of the Irish state (c1922-1950). It considers how this rupture from home to hospital birth affected women’s experience of childbirth, both positively and negatively and perceptions of place within the community.

22 | P a g e

This presentation will draw on preliminary research that considers the complex relationship between place and birth and will utilise deep mapping methods such maps, drawings, photography and oral testimonies to create multiple readings of birth in rural West of Ireland.

Biography: Martina Hynan is a PhD candidate with the Centre for Irish Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway. She is an artist, curator, birth activist. Her research is interdisciplinary and socially engaged allowing her to explore a dialogic reading of place and childbirth.

‘The old thin ache you thought that you’d forgotten’ – the concept of home in the narratives of Irish migrants to Leeds Anna Walsh (University of Liverpool)

Abstract: Bronwen Walter considers how the gendering of domestic space isolates women from elements of traditional national identity; she asks: ‘can women belong in the homeland as well as in the home?’ This paper will consider how the concept of home is portrayed through the life histories of Irish migrants to Leeds. It will explore how notions of home are expressed through cultural factors such as music, language and naming; ways in which home is displayed throughvisual and material culture; and how home is consumed through familiar food and drink. It will analyse the way in which gender roles are manifested in the household, and the ways in which this varies through class, age and occupation. It also considers how a focus on respectability, success and the accumulation of symbolic capital can problematize the concept of home for less successful Irish migrants. Through the use of original material including audio recordings, interview transcripts and personal artefacts, this paper examines how Irish migrants to Britain reproduce or recreate a version of home in personal, familial, social and communal settings in the city of Leeds. To what extent does this reconstruction of home reflect Ireland past, present or imagined?

Biography: Anna Walsh has a BA and MA from the University of Leeds, and is studying for a PhD at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool. She is a Fellow of the Oral History Summer Institute at Columbia University.

Holidays at ‘Home’: Visits to Ireland and the Experience of Home for the Second-Generation Irish from England Dr. Sara Hannafin (National University of Ireland, Galway)

Abstract For the children of migrants home can be a complex idea. For many, home is imagined as the place of parental origin and this may shape the experience of home and dwelling in the country of birth. For second-generations therefore home may be ‘elsewhere’ and somewhere to visit rather than a place of stability and permanence. This paper draws on research with a small group of second-generation Irish who were born and brought up in England and who have returned home to live in Ireland, permanently, as adults. For these individuals as children, regular visits ‘home’ to places in Ireland were an important and much anticipated feature of the annual routine of the family. I discuss the significance of these

23 | P a g e visits in creating a positive sense of connection to Ireland and feelings of belonging here and how these experiences influenced the decision to migrate in adult life. At the same time, there is evidence that holiday visits could prompt feelings of displacement and a questioning of the extent to which these ‘English’ children really were ‘home’ in Ireland. The accounts of these individuals therefore challenge assumptions about the fixity of home and illustrate that home can be an unsettling experience at times.

Biography: Sara has recently completed a PhD at the Centre for Irish Studies, NUIG, on the return migration of the second-generation Irish from England, which is also her own experience. Her research interest is on how (some) places become meaningful and significant, how this shapes identities, motivates behaviour and creates feelings of belonging, particularly for the children of migrants.

Panel 11: Room G010 Home in Northern Irish Writing Chair: Michael Lydon

Houses on the Edge: Belfast in Contemporary Short Fiction Jorge Rodríguez Durán (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)

Abstract: Family homes play an important role in the narratives about Northern Ireland. The houses in this context can work either as a shelter against outside violence or as asphixiating environments in which characters drown. Following Carl Sauer’s vision of the landscape as an evidence of the past (Sauer, 1963) I will argue that homes, in their physical situation within the city and their psychological implications prove to be deeply layered palimpsests stamped with a particular way of behaving. I will use for my analysis two recent short story collections: Lucy Caldwell’s Multitudes and then Wendy Erskine’s Sweet Home. Both collections have been published almost twenty years after the Troubles officially ended and still, much about the Belfast of the Troubles remains in their writings. These writers are children of the Troubles, that is someone who have not directly experienced the Troubles and yet, knew that something was not right through the transmitted social narratives. While Caldwell focuses on sharing her experience as a woman growing up in Belfast and gives voice to a section of the population that is usually dismissed as not important in public matters. Erskine’s short stories tell a new fresh perspective of the city from the homes of the different characters. The Troubles are always haunting the characters and shaping their lives and yet, their family home keeps appearing in the stories as some sort of lighthouse in the middle of a dark ocean, a counter part to the city and the danger of Northern Irish society.

24 | P a g e

Biography: Jorge Rodríguez Durán is a member of the Discourse & Identity Research Group (GRC2015/002 GI-1924, Xunta de Galicia) at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. He is currently working on his PhD under the supervision of Dr. Manuela Palacios González. Entitled Literary Cartographies of Northern Irish Urban Landscapes, the dissertation analyses the way in which contemporary Irish female writers have represented the North of Ireland and its partition. As a poet, he was runner up the in the III Mazarelos Literary Award with the collection O Sentido Común and he has collaborated in literary journals such as Dorna and Grial and the Sermos Galiza literary supplement. He is currently teaching Spanish at NUIG and collaborating with the Crosswinds Project, which translates Irish and Galician poetry.

‘At least we can lock the door’; Home, remembrance and conflict in the writing of Bernadette Devlin and Nell McCafferty. Eli Davies (Ulster University)

Abstract: This paper will consider the importance of domestic space in how we remember and talk about the Troubles in the north of Ireland. As Briony Reid points out, houses in the region “have been made full participants in the public world in ways specific to the province's history and politics.” (Reid, 2007, 943) Homes were sites of invasion and violence and continue to be, in Reid’s words “the carriers of political symbols” in the commemorative landscape. I will highlight the ways that these hegemonic male-dominated grand narratives about the Troubles have worked to erase the significance of what went on inside the home, the emotional and physical work, frequently performed by women. Literature, with its stress on the specificity of individual, private lives, is ideally placed to describe this experience and can undermine the stereotypical depictions of women which continue to feature in the Northern Irish commemorative landscape. Drawing on the non-fictional writing Nell McCafferty and Bernadette Devlin McCaliskey and the accounts of individual women I will argue that Northern Irish women’s writing – memoir, short story and novels – plays a distinctive role in inserting women’s voices and bodies into the ways in which we remember and talk about the experience of the home and conflict in Northern Ireland.

Biography: Eli Davies is a PhD researcher at Ulster University, exploring the relationship between Northern Irish women’s writing, domestic space, memory and the Troubles. She completed an M.Phil in Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin in 2003 and between then and 2016 worked as an adult education teacher and writer and editor. She is co-editor of Under My Thumb; Songs That Hate Women and The Women Who Love Them, an anthology of women's music writing published by Repeater.

East Belfast Interiors in the Short Fiction of Jan Carson, Wendy Erskine and Lucy Caldwell Dr. Caroline Magennis (University of Salford)

25 | P a g e

Abstract: This paper will explore how contemporary Northern Irish writers figure home, focusing in particular on how female writers figure the domestic in their short fiction. Indeed, the focus will narrow further still as this paper examines a specific boom in writing which explores a very specifically East Belfast sensibility. It will examine Jan Carson’s Children’s Children (2016), Wendy Erskine’s Sweet Home (2018) and Lucy Caldwell’s Multitudes (2016). East Belfast has most often been explored in the cultural imagination of male writers such as Glenn Patterson, Stewart Parker and CS Lewis. Indeed, it is in the lyrics of Van Morrison that the place names have been carved into the imagination. The East is also often figured as a Loyalist stronghold, with the attendant representations of stereotypes of paramilitary masculinity. This paper, then, will argue that these new short stories, which focus on the domestic as a place of radical change and disturbance, recast the East by focusing on what goes on in the home rather than the streets. Using theoretical perspectives from affect theory, such as Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed, we will consider how a reconsideration of the Northern Irish home on multiple levels can open up unearthed stories but also offer a way out of the representational lacunae that often haunts places in Belfast.

Biography: Having worked at Salford since 2014, I previously held research and teaching positions at University College, Dublin, Queen’s University, Belfast and the University of Limerick. I am the Chair of the British Association for Irish Studies.

Panel 12: Room G011 Visualising Home and Dwelling Chair: Martina Hynan

Embodying Home Anna Yearwood (Oxford Brookes University)

Abstract: Through an arts practice-based methodology I explore the concept of home, focusing on what it means to create or experience a sense of home. I have used a variety of methods in my research thus far: observation and reflection, experimentation with materials, the use of scale and repetition, visual documentation of processes, and personal narrative. I will discuss how my questions of where and what is home transformed into how and why is home and how this has been guided by my practice. In this presentation, I will analyze how my use of mark making as a research tool has embodied my approaches to home. I will look at two works using different mark making techniques. Firstly, I will look at using drawing as a way of remembering, for example, when I began my research project, I focused on home as a place – often returned to in memory. Secondly, I will discuss how I have been using instant polaroid film as a form of mark making. As my research has progressed, I have begun to focus more on home as a feeling that can be cultivated through ritual and I have used instant film as way of marking a repeated daily action.

26 | P a g e

Biography: PhD Researcher at Oxford Brookes University.

The Tourist View or the One Who Dwells Within: Negotiating the Visual Narrative of “Home” Dr. Jeannine Kraft (Columbus College of Art and Design)

Abstract: At odds with a larger European identity and narrative, and the integration into the EU, emphasis on an “authentic” Irish national identity carries a cultural caché beyond the confines of the country. It is this visualization that dominates the outer face of Ireland as seen in its official marketing, and was an attempt to harness the capital of the diasporac population. One such manifestation was the 2013 tourism campaign of The Gathering, which was a call for the children of the diaspora to come home. The circulation of the visual projection of Ireland and the role the American diasporic community and beyond has played a key role in the consumption and continued projection of an “authentic” construct of place and “ancestral home.” It is an identity that persists within the globalised context of contemporary Ireland and continues to condition the narrative of place both domestically and internationally; a narrative often challenged in the fine arts domain with artists renegotiating the complexities of contemporary Ireland. Many artists working in the Irish context examine liminal spaces, spaces at the “margins” not typically deemed worthy of our gaze. By removing the stereotypical reading of landscape and portraying the social experience of the everyday life of dwelling within a specific place, the work goes beyond the locality portrayed with a resonance to global dialogues around the “social consequences” of the contemporary condition. This paper will examine these contrasting visual narratives of home and the mutable relationship to place in a period of rapid socio-cultural change.

Biography: Jeannine Kraft is an Associate Professor, and Chair of the History of Art & Visual Culture department at Columbus College of Art & Design and completed her PhD with the National University of Ireland Galway in January 2019. Her work focuses on the legacy of the representation of the West of Ireland in contemporary Irish visual culture.

Mary Swanzy’s Travels: Mapping Out Belonging from Displacement Cai Lyons (University of Birmingham)

Abstract: Between 1918 and 1925, Mary Swanzy (1882-1978) travelled the globe, mapping images of community outside of Ireland, from Czechoslovakian markets to Samoan women preparing family meals. This almost anthropological depiction of the social connections that create a sense of home coincided with Swanzy’s own homelessness. Swanzy depicted moments of communal belonging with a detachment that belies her displacement. As an Anglo-Irish self-consciously modernist woman, whose cousin D.I. Oswald Swanzy was murdered by the I.R.A., and whose family home was sold after her parent’s death, Swanzy was caught in a ‘space between spaces’.

27 | P a g e

Comparing Swanzy’s paintings and drawings with well-known work by Paul Henry, Seán Keating, and Charles Lamb, I tease out the tensions between their work in their respective imaginings of home and belonging. Following Catherine Nash’s notion of ‘roots to routes’, Swanzy’s geography is used metaphorically to unpick boundaries, mapping out her journeys to explore ideas of Irishness as dynamic rather than static. I ask questions about belonging in the Irish context and the implications of an artist capturing the liminal actions that transform a space into a home, when they themselves have no home. Further, what does it mean when this artist is a woman, a woman looking outward for belonging when her home is, it can be argued, looking inward? Incorporating feminist theories of sexual difference, I question the rigidity of the Irish female experience that constrained and alienated Swanzy; ‘I deeply love Ireland […] but I couldn’t stand the narrowness of my life there’.

Biography: Cai Lyons is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History, Curating, and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham, recipient of both the Haywood Art History Doctoral Scholarship and the College of Arts and Law Doctoral Award. Their doctoral research focuses on Mary Swanzy, connecting the artist’s work to transnational networks of modernism through feminist and postcolonial art historical methodologies, and questioning the historiography of modern art, avantgardism, and the nationalist narrative of Irish art. Cai was recently published in the second issue of the Midland Arts Papers.

Images: 1. Mary Swanzy, Samoan Scene, 1924, oil on canvas, 152.6x91.5 cm, Ulster Museum. 2. Swanzy, Samoan Scene, 1924, oil on canvas, 152x92 cm, AIB Art Collection, Crawford Art Gallery. 3. Swanzy, Preparing the meal, Samoa, 1924, oil on canvas, private coll. 4. Swanzy, Deuxieme Jeunes Filles et Bananiers , 1924, oil on canvas, 76x63.5cm, private coll. 5. Swanzy, On the Lawn/La Maison Blanche No.3, 1923-1924, oil on canvas, 41.3x36.8 cm, private coll. 6. Swanzy, Figure Studies, 1924, pencil on paper, 17x13 cm, private coll. 7. Swanzy, Samoan Church, 1924, pencil on paper, 17x13 cm, private coll. 8. Swanzy, Two Native Samoan Girls Standing, 1924, wash over charcoal, 22x28 cm, private coll. 9. Swanzy, Male standing figure wearing a garland, 1924, charcoal and pastel, 26.6x19 cm, private coll. 10. Swanzy, Samoan Village, 1924, pastel on paper, 24.5x18.75 cm, private coll. 11. Swanzy, The Quay, Samoa, 1924, pencil and coloured crayons, 19x24.7 cm, private coll. 12. Swanzy, Samoan Boats, No.13, 1924, pencil and crayon, 20x25 cm, private coll. 13. Swanzy, Market Scene, c1920-1922, oil on canvas, 30x50 cm, private coll. 14. Swanzy, Czechoslovakian Market Scene, 1920-1922, crayon on paper, 19x25 cm, private coll. 15. Swanzy, Peasant Woman on a Pathway, 1920s, oil on canvas, 42x51 cm, private coll. 16. Swanzy, Two peasants at work in a landscape, 1920s, oil on canvas, 42x50.8 cm, private coll. 17. Paul Henry, Launching the Currach, 1910-1911, oil on canvas, 41x60 cm, NGI. 18. Henry, A Donkey Carrying Seaweed, undated, oil on board, 15x12 cm, NGI.

28 | P a g e

19. Henry, Lakeside Cottages, 1929, oil on canvas, 41.5x61 cm, The Hugh Lane. 20. Henry, The Potato Diggers, 1912, oil on canvas, 51x46 cm, NGI. 21. Henry, A Peasant Woman Resting, 1910-1919, graphite on paper, 21.4x16.2 cm, NGI. 22. Henry, The Village Gossip, 1910-1915, graphite on paper, 16.5x10.3 cm, NGI. 23. Seán Keating, An Allegory, 1924, oil on canvas, 102x130 cm, NGI. 24. Keating, Men of the West, 1915, oil on canvas, 97x125 cm, The Hugh Lane. 25. Keating, An Aran Fisherman and His Wife, 1916, oil on canvas, 124.5x99 cm, The Hugh Lane. 26. Keating, Men of the South, 1921–22, oil on canvas, 127x203.4cm, Crawford Art Gallery. 27. Charles Lamb, Nan Mhicil Liam, 1940s, oil on board, 41x36 cm, NGI. 28. Lamb, Connemara Man, 1922, pencil on paper, 38.7x28 cm, The Hugh Lane.

Panel 13: Room G010 A Lingering Dissolution: Liminal Spaces of Dwelling Chair: Dr. Nessa Cronin

Irish modernism and suburbia Dr. Eoghan Smith (Carlow College)

Abstract: This paper explores the suburban ‘home’ in the work of some Irish modernist writers. In particular, it will consider the significance of the suburban contexts for literary artists such as Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and Brian O’Nolan, and how suburbia – a ‘space between the spaces’ of the rural and the urban – is treated in their work. I will focus in particular on the work of Beckett, by focusing on his suburban works such as All that Fall and Company. I will consider what a reading of Beckett as a suburban writer might imply for interpretations of his work both as deracinated or ‘Irish’ by focusing on the representation of places and spaces inspired by his south county Dublin childhood home. Finally, I will explore what these suburban contexts might mean for the image of the ‘homeless’ Irish modernist as being one in either external or (as John Banville once put it) internal ‘exile’, and for Irish modernism more generally.

Biography: Eoghan Smith is the Programme Director of the BA (Hons) in Arts and Humanities at Carlow College, St.

Patrick’s. He is the co-editor of Imagining Irish Suburbia in Literature and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,

2018), the author of the novel The Failing Heart (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2018) and the monograph John Banville: Art and

Autheniticity (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013). He has published widely on Irish writing and culture in publications such as

29 | P a g e

The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, The Journal of the Short Story in English, The European Journal of English

Studies, Nordic Irish Studies, the ESSE Messenger, The Irish Times, the Dublin Review of Books, and Books Ireland.

Dwelling with Others: Remaking Time and Reclaiming the Children of the Nation, from the Tuam Babies to Asylum Seekers Dr. Maureen O’Connor (University College Cork)

Abstract: In Spectres of Marx, Jacques Derrida argues that our relationship with the dead is one of responsibility, including recognising the power of the non-living to live on. Feminist new materialist Karen Barad cites Derrida in her call for an ethics predicated on “entanglement,” an element of her theory of “agential realism” that insists there are no independent entities but phenomena in an ongoing process of ‘becoming’ through relationships and interactions with other phenomena. Dwelling is never a solitary phenomenon. This paper intends to use feminist new materialism to discuss the Irish state’s history of violent and fatal incarceration of non-criminal populations through contemplation of the bones of the dishonoured dead—to use Anne Enright’s phrase—discovered on the grounds of the former mother-and-baby home in Tuam in 2017. The remains of the dead are liminal, destabilizing, at once subject and object, the carriers of heterogeneous legacies: individual, ideological, cultural, and ethical. According to Friedrich Kittler, “the realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission of a given culture.” The corpse is at once cultural and undeniably material, disturbing distinctions between subject and object, self and other. Barad’s agential realism regards the material as inherently ethical, “the very nature of what it means to matter.” She calls for “listening for the response of the other and an obligation to be responsive to the other, who is not entirely separate from what we call the self.” Understanding how bodies, living and dead, come to matter in the past is essential to making space for co -dwelling in the present, and achieving justice in the future.

Biography: Maureen O’Connor lectures in the School of English in University College Cork. Author of The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing (2010), she has also edited and co-edited several essay collections and special journal issues and has published widely on Irish women writers and the environment.

Spectral Homes: Irish ghost estates and the trace of Futures Past Dr. Simon Workman (Carlow College)

Abstract: In its national self-conception, and within the rhetoric of international politico-economic discourse, Ireland has been allegorised variously as ‘Celtic Tiger’ and ‘Celtic Phoenix’: which is to say that it has been understood, particularly within Europe, as an exemplar of both the rapid prosperity that small nations can achieve through radical economic liberalisation, and paradigmatic of austerity as a means to economic recovery via European/IMF-directed economic and fiscal re-adjustment. Though Ireland’s disastrously unstable economic fortunes patently expose the inherent structural frailties of neoliberal capitalism, the manner in which its political economy has been narrativized, both

30 | P a g e internally and externally, has served to symbolically bolster and buttress discourses affirming the indefinite and necessary perpetuation of the economic status quo. This might imply a form of political acquiescence or ‘post-politics’ in the national social and cultural life. Yet there have been manifold political, cultural and artistic micro-movements that have sought to rupture and disarticulate the ‘symbolic order’ of the economic dominant. In media and artistic terms, the site of the Irish ‘ghost estate’, with its unfinished and often never-finished ghostly homes, has proved remarkably fertile territory for the interrogation, however uneven, of the systemic economic problems that engendered the recession in Ireland. This paper will examine the literary and visual representations of the ghost estate in Ireland, evaluating the different ways in which Irish writers and artists play upon the image of the uncanny and spectral home, so typical of ghost estates, in order to re-narrativize and problematize existing accounts of economic downturn of 2008.

Biography: Dr Simon Workman is Programme Director of the English and History programme at Carlow College, St. Patrick’s. He has published articles, chapters and reviews on modern Irish writing and culture in a number of different journals and collections, with his work appearing in the Irish Literary Supplement, Poetry Ireland, Irish Studies Review and The Review of English Studies. He has recently co-edited, with Eoghan Smith, a collection of essays on the cultures of Irish suburbia entitled Imagining Irish Suburbia in Literature and Culture that was published by Palgrave at the beginning of this year.

31 | P a g e