The Book of Abstracts

Home , Blanaid Salkeld, Brian Friel, Deirdre Madden, Frank McGuinness, Hugo Hamilton (writer), Kevin Barry (author)

IASIL 2020: Creative Borders 19-23 July 2021

Table of Contents

KEYNOTE LECTURES ...... 8 Maud Ellmann (University of Chicago) Borderation: Fictions of the Northern Irish Border ...... 9 Margaret Mills Harper (University of Limerick) Cuchulain the Cowboy: A Tale of W. B. Yeats and the Wild West ...... 10 Patrick Lonergan (National University of Ireland, Galway) Irish Theatres for the Anthropocene: Druid Theatre, Lady Gregory and Coole Park ...... 11 PAPERS ...... 12 Madalina Armie (University of Almería) About Porous – Although at Times Impenetrable – Borders: Exploring Kevin Barry’s Short Story “Doctor Sot” (2013) ...... 13 Samuel Beckton (Ulster University) The Unbroken Covenant: Could Ulster Unionists have Controlled a Nine-County State, 1920-1939? .... 14 Alessandra Boller (University of Siegen) Entangled and Entangling: Short Narratives and/in Irish Magazines of the Late 1820s ...... 15 Phyllis Boumans (University of Leuven) “Changing the Content”: Peadar O’Donnell’s Literary Poetics and Periodical Vision in The Bell ...... 16 Geraldine Brassil (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick) Mary Banim: A Voice from the Margins: ‘It takes a genuine Irishman – better still, Irishwoman – to understand the quick sensitive hearts that are common to us all’ ...... 17 Thiago Rhys Bezerra Cass (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) Completing the Union: Maria Edgeworth's National Tales and the Early Brazilian Novel ...... 18 Niels Caul (University College Dublin) Making Ready to Go: Emigration and Paths to Maturity in the Irish Bildungsroman ...... 19 Mar González Chacón (University of Oviedo) Creative Encounters and Spaces for Transformation in Unpublished Irish Versions of The House of Bernarda Alba ...... 20 Tsung Chi (Hawk) Chang (University of Hong Kong) ‘God, the hypocrisy of (wo)men!’: Religion and Gender in Frank O’Conner’s “First Confession” ...... 21 Shinjini Chattopadhyay (University of Notre Dame, IN) Towards a New Cosmopolitanism: Subverting Stranger Fetishism in the Works of Twenty-first Century Migrant Writers of Colour in Ireland ...... 23 Adel Cheong (Dublin City University) Place and Displacement in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016) ...... 24 David Clare (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick) Gradations of Class Among Irish Anglicans in Leland Bardwell’s Girl on a Bicycle ...... 25 Lucy Collins (University College Dublin) Reading Interiors in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Italy ...... 26

Francesco Costantini (Jagiellonian University) “L’anima celtica, come quella slava alla quale in molte cose rassomiglia…” (“The Celtic soul which resembles in so many ways the Slavic one…”) Transcultural Paradigms between Irishness and Polishness: Liminality and Peripherality across the Borders of Europe ...... 27 Kate Costello-Sullivan (Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY) Joseph Valente (SUNY-Buffalo) Molly Ferguson (Ball State University) Uneaseful Stirrings: Disability, Trauma, and Irish Society in Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells ...... 28 Eóin Ó Cuinneagáin (Linnaeus University, Sweden) The Birth of Irish Studies: Epistemic and Ontological Extractivism in the early 19th Century ...... 30 Miriam Cummins (Trinity College Dublin) Modern Slavery: The Postmodern Question and the Magdalene Laundry in Contemporary Irish Performance ...... 32 Eloísa Dall’Bello (Federal University of Santa Catarina) “‘Who do you think you are?’”: Migrant’s Social Agency in “This Hostel Life” by Melatu Uche Okorie 33 Leszek Drong (University of Silesia in Katowice) Partitioning Irish Memory: Cultural Representations of Borders, Barriers and Divisions in Northern Ireland in the Aftermath of 1968 ...... 34 Jun Du (University College Dublin) ‘Third Spaces’, Transformation and Translation in Sinéad Morrissey’s Poetry ...... 35 Adam Duke (independent scholar) Towards a Hauntological Reckoning: Ghost Estates in Post-Recession Irish Genre Fiction ...... 36 Ashim Dutta (University of Dhaka) Teaching Irish Poetry in Bangladesh: a Transcultural Approach ...... 37 José Manuel Estévez-Saá (University of A Coruña) Language and the Short Story in Ireland: Transcultural Reconstructions ...... 38 Margarita Estévez-Saá (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) Post Celtic Tiger Literature (II): Back to the West of Ireland ...... 40 Hamid Farahmandian (Sun Yat-sen University) James Joyce and the Romanticized Persia ...... 41 Fiona Fearon (Dundalk Institute of Technology) Culture on the Border: Theatre and the Arts in Dundalk 1918-2020 ...... 42 Jianming (Séamus) Feng (Shanghai University of International Business and Economics) Joyce’s Conscious Rejection of Established Rules in Narration ...... 43 Mark Fitzgerald (TU Dublin Conservatoire) ‘Where there are no words there is less to spoil’: Yeats’s Theatrical Collaborations with Composers in the Late 1920s and Early 1930s ...... 44 Andrew Fitzsimons (Gakushuin University) The Moment of a Poem: Kinsella’s ‘Baggot Street Deserta’ ...... 45 Dieter Fuchs (University of Vienna) Ulysses – a Borderland Narrative? ...... 46 Marine Galiné (University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne) The Bog as Liminal and Performative Space in Somerville and Ross’s An Irish Cousin (1889) ...... 47

Rosanne Gallenne (University College Dublin) Beat Drum, Beat Heart: Contested Boundaries ...... 48 Rene Gannon-O’Gara (National University of Ireland, Galway) Micheál MacLiammóir: Liminal Identities and the Queer Horizon ...... 49 Mar Garre García (University of Almería) ‘Who Shall Find me’: Liminal Spaces and Cosmopolitan Encounters in Samuel Beckett’s Poetry ...... 50 Matthew Gibson (University of Macau) Two Forgotten Depictions of Literary Dublin: the Novels of Garrett Anderson ...... 51 Sara Gilbert (Oklahoma State University) Feminism, Religion, and Cultural Memory: Derry Girls, Portrayals of the Troubles, and Other Effects on 21st Century Irish Texts ...... 52 Caitilín Gormley (independent scholar) “Blabbing on about guns”: The Ghost of the Gun in Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle ...... 53 Rui Carvalho Homem (Universidade do Porto) Cognitive and Medial Borders: Notes on Action, Contemplation and the Visual Arts in Ciaran Carson 54 Moonyoung Hong (Trinity College Dublin) “The Trinity of Jesus Freaks”: The Sacred Theatre of Tom Murphy ...... 55 Barry Houlihan (NUI Galway) Locating Home: Memory, Identity and Form: Performing Contemporary Europe at the Gate Theatre ... 56 Dearbhaile Houston (Trinity College Dublin) A Box in the Corner: Television, Space and Memory in Anne Enright’s The Wig My Father Wore (1995) ...... 57 Ellen Howley (independent scholar) Writing Women, Writing Water: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s The Mother House (2019) ...... 58 Shan-Yun Huang (National Taiwan University) Mourning His Own Death: Nostos via Nostalgia in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones ...... 59 Hiroko Ikeda (Kyoto University) ‘The black earth my earth-bed’: Sweeney, Bashō, and Others in Derek Mahon’s The Snow Party ...... 60 Hattie Induni (independent scholar) ‘Where did everyone go?’ Conor O’Callaghan’s Nothing on Earth and the Irish Ghost Estate ...... 61 Joanna Jarząb-Napierała (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań) "[Seeing] the Western Road as the Nevsky Prospekt": Frank O'Connor's literary Journeys to Russia . 62 Alexander Jones (Trinity College Dublin) ‘To win the freedom of the air’: Louis MacNeice Across the Borders of Poetry and Radio ...... 63 Youngmin Kim (Dongguk University) The Trans-bordering Poetics of the Labyrinthine Trench: Ciaran Carson's Belfast Poems [In Memoriam Ciarson Carson] ...... 64 Wojciech Klepuszewski (Koszalin University of Technology) “Getting hit, waiting to get hit, recovering; forgetting”: Alcohol and Domestic Violence in Roddy Doyle’s Paula Spencer Duology ...... 65 Pawan Kumar (University of Delhi) Yeats’s A Vision: A Text Transcending Borders ...... 66

Yi-Peng Lai (National Sun Yat-sen University) Revisiting the Border in Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark and Colm Tóibín’s Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border ...... 67 José Lanters (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) Hazel Ellis’s Gate Theatre Plays of the 1930s in Context ...... 68 Melih Levi (Boğaziçi University) “Insulators Other Than Porcelain”: Leslie Daiken and the Art of Voice after Modernism ...... 69 Lianghui Li (independent scholar) The Disappearing Border between the Living and the Dead: Reality and Anti-Realism in Solar Bones . 70 Conor Linnie (University College Dublin) ‘signposts | Briskly asserting on always on’: Patricia Avis in Post-War Belfast, Dublin and Paris...... 71 James Little (Charles University) ‘Comparative liberties’: John Mitchel’s Jail Journal and Austin Reed’s Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict ...... 72 Philip Mac a’ Ghoill (Trinity College Dublin, and National University of Ireland, Maynooth) “Ireland is yours, if you want it”: The theme of Highkingship in Classical Irish Poetry ...... 73 Annalisa Mastronardi (Dublin City University) James Joyce and Contemporary Irish Women Writers: the Case of Nuala O’Connor ...... 74 Megane Mazé (University of Orléans) Cross-identity in The Letters of Samuel Beckett ...... 75 Ciara McAllister (Queen’s University Belfast) Beyond the Body’s Borders: Abjection and Masculine Identity Formation in Glenn Patterson’s Burning Your Own ...... 76 Christina Morin (University of Limerick) ‘It is I, Melmoth’: Maturin’s Wanderer in the Twenty-First Century ...... 77 Tapasya Narang (Dublin City University) Adaptations/Non-Translations: Derek Mahon’s Rewriting of Indian Mythology ...... 78 Juan Ignacio Oliva (Universidad de La Laguna/GIECO-Franklin-UAH/Ratnakara) Revisiting Border Theories in Irish Eco-Oriented Poetry ...... 79 Sean Aldrich O’Rourke ((University of Limerick) Gothic Authorities and the Creation of (Un)Reality in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Fiction ...... 80 Kasia Ostalska (University of Łódź) Post-human: Creative Bordering on the Human and Non-human in Contemporary Irish Literature...... 81 Salomé Paul (Trinity College Dublin) Crossing the Border of Genre/Gender: Women and Tragedy in Marina Carr’s Midlands Trilogy ...... 82 Germán Asensio Peral (University of Almería) ‘the demolition of the Kennedy mud pie’: The Looming Presence of John F. Kennedy in Brian O’Nolan’s Late Writings ...... 83 Katharina Rennhak (University of Wuppertal) Cross-Gender Narrations: Irish Women Writing Men ...... 84

Laura Sheary (Queen’s University Belfast) Channels of the Self: Crossing Borders between Sound and Language in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing ...... 85 Audrey Robitaillié (independent scholar) Lines of Flight and Nomadic Border-Crossings: Negotiating Boundaries in Colum McCann’s Apeirogon ...... 86 Julie-Ann Robson (The University of Sydney) Oscar Wilde’s essays on Ethics and Aesthetics: ‘With some remarks upon the importance of doing nothing’ ...... 87 Ketlyn Mara Rosa (Trinity College Dublin) Embodiment and Perception: ’71 and a Sensorial Journey across Divided Belfast ...... 88 Aileen R. Ruane (Concordia University) “Un imaginaire féminin riche, sans censure et complètement assumé”: Crossing Creative and Ideological Boundaries via Proactive Translation and Adaptation in Jean Marc Dalpé’s Molly Bloom (2014) ...... 89 Irina Ruppo (NUI Galway) J. M. Synge in Israel ...... 90 Andrew Sanders (Texas A&M University San Antonio) “And we were proud in the knowledge that we were the Jews”: The Poetry of Sammy Duddy and the Future of Ulster Loyalism ...... 91 Chiara Sciarrino (University of Palermo) How Virtual Is the World of The Visiting Hour? The Pandemic Experience portrayed by Frank McGuinness ...... 92 John Singleton (NUI Galway) Bypassed Ireland: Forgotten Places in Contemporary Irish Fiction...... 93 Jennifer A. Slivka (Virginia Wesleyan University) Paradoxical Freedom in This Hostel Life by Melatu Uche Okorie ...... 94 Daniela Theinová (Charles University) Language, Crisis and Ecology in Ailbhe Darcy’s Poetry ...... 95 Naoko Toraiwa (Meiji University) Balancing on the Border: Poems by Sinead Morrissey ...... 96 Kristina Varade (Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York) Joyce and Sorrentino: Breaking Barriers of Genre and Fiction Through Aesthetic Playfulness ...... 97 Ian R. Walsh (NUI Galway) Performing Opening Borders: Productions of W.B Yeats’s Plays 1957-1965 and the Programme for Economic Expansion ...... 98 Tom Walker (Trinity College Dublin) Yeats and the Writing of Edwardian Portraiture ...... 99 Loic Wright (University College Dublin) “Beggarly City Clerkships:” Breadwinning and Conflicted Masculinity in Twentieth Century Irish Fiction ...... 100 Yuan Li (Guangdong University of Foreign Studies) Staging Tian Han’s Salome Complex: Romanticism and Revolutionary Spirit in Tian Qinxin’s Hurricane, the Life of Tian Han ...... 101

Plenary Panels and Roudtables ...... 102 International Drama on the Irish Stage ...... 103 An Imagined Border, or Beckett in Gdańsk ...... 106 Publishing in the 21st Century and Age of #MeToo ...... 108 Tom Murphy in Translation ...... 110 ARTISTS IN CONVERSATION ...... 113 Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi...... 114 Maurice Fitzpatrick…………… ………………………………………………………………………………..…116 Hugo Hamilton ...... 114 Siofra O’Donovan ...... 115 Caitríona O’Reilly ...... 115 Enda Walsh ...... 116 BOOK LAUNCHES ...... 117 Contemporary Irish Documentary Theatre, edited and introduced by Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos and Shaun Richards (Bloomsbury, 2020) ...... 118 Ireland in the European Eye ed. by Gisela Holfter and Bettina Migge (RIA, 2019) ...... 120 Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space by James Little (Bloomsbury, 2020) . 122

KEYNOTE LECTURES

Maud Ellmann University of Chicago

Borderation: Fictions of the Northern Irish Border

Biographical note:

Maud Ellmann’s research and teaching interests focus on British and European modernism and critical theory, particularly psychoanalysis and feminism. Her first book, The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Harvard UP, 1987), takes a deconstructive approach to these poets’ work, analyzing how their championship of literary impersonality – i.e. the disappearance of the poet in the poem – reveals their divided political and philosophical allegiances. Her second book, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (Harvard UP, 1993), examines the phenomenon of self-starvation, ranging from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa to Bobby Sands, the iconic martyr of the Irish Hunger Strike of 1981. What these starvers have in common is the inverse relationship of food to words; the less they eat, the more they write. Imprisonment, imposed from without or from within, intensifies this struggle between word and flesh, in which the body seems to be devoured by its own loquacity. The theme of imprisonment re-emerges in her third book on Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish writer whose fiction is obsessed with architectural and psychic enclosures and encryptments (Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page, Edinburgh UP, 2003). Her most recent book, The Nets of Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2010), attempts to sharpen our sense of what has been called the “dissolution of the self” in modernist fiction, particularly by exploring the significance of images of bodily violation and exchange – scar, bite, wound, and their psychic equivalents – to the modernist imagination.

Margaret Mills Harper University of Limerick

Cuchulain the Cowboy: A Tale of W. B. Yeats and the Wild West

Biographical note:

Margaret Mills Harper got her first degree summa cum laude from Florida State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After teaching at Ohio State University, she became Professor in English and Women’s Studies at Georgia State University (1989-2010). Currently she is Glucksman Professor in Contemporary Writing in English at the University of Limerick, serving a semester as Visiting Professor at the Université de Lille 3 in 2015. She is the Director of the Yeats International Summer School and the President of the International Yeats Society. She regularly contributes to the Yeats Annual and has a huge number of publications on Yeats with Clemson, Oxford, and Cambridge University Press. She published on Joyce with Palgrave Macmillan and contributed major articles on contemporary Irish literature to several outstanding journals of Irish literature. In September 2015 her long-awaited study on A Vision came out, coedited with Catherine Paul as Volume 14 of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (Scribner).

Patrick Lonergan (HE) National University of Ireland, Galway

Irish Theatres for the Anthropocene: Druid Theatre, Lady Gregory and Coole Park

Biographical note:

Patrick Lonergan is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at National University of Ireland, Galway and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He was the 2019 Burns Visiting Fellow at Boston College. He has edited or written eleven books on Irish drama and theatre, including Theatre and Globalization (winner of the 2008 Theatre Book Prize), The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh (Methuen Drama, 2012), Theatre and Social Media (2015) and Irish Drama and Theatre Since 1950 (Bloomsbury, 2019). At present, he is completing a book about Shakespeare and the Modern Irish Theatre. He is on the board of directors of the Galway International Arts Festival, a member of Future Earth Ireland, and is an Editorial Associate of Contemporary Theatre Review. For Methuen Drama, he is co-editor of the ‘Critical Companions’ series which has published new books on such dramatists as Friel, Murphy, Pinter, Beckett, Churchill, Hwang, and Ruhl, and on topics including disability theatre, verse drama, and the British and American stage musical. He has lectured widely on Irish drama internationally, including recently in Princeton, Florence, Florianapolis (Brazil), Wroclaw, and Tokyo.

PAPERS

Madalina Armie (SHE) University of Almería About Porous – Although at Times Impenetrable – Borders: Exploring Kevin Barry’s Short Story “Doctor Sot” (2013)

If something unifies Kevin Barry’s anthology Dark Lies the Island (2013) is the short stories’ construction around marginal figures that seem “easy to summarise, familiar, close to cliché” (Ridgeway 2012). Nonetheless, Barry’s prose goes beyond the confinements of simplicity of stereotypes with common lives, and overcomes the limits of long-standing conceptualisations, therefore, the author “may work with traditional materials, but he builds with them structures that seem new, and which tower above the flatness of contemporary Irish writing like monuments” (Ridgeway 2012). What makes “Doctor Sot” particularly special is the fact that the short story “is many things at once: a conventionally told tale of a stock character, a moving portrait of addiction and madness, a paean to the rhythms of marriage and a tender depiction of forbidden desire” (Canfield 2013). Also, I would describe the piece of short fiction as being one constructed around porous —although at times impenetrable— borders erected between old and new, progress and decay, luxury and misery, materiality and imagination, sobriety and inebriety, alienation and inclusion, and overall, between the Irish citizens and the New Age Traveller minority, the latter being here depicted as the other. The present essay aims to explore and understand these dichotomies through the reading of an Ireland torn out between the discourse of the glorious economic prosperity of the Celtic Tiger, and a dose of reality that recalls the bust of the Republic’s economy in the late months of the year 2007.

Biographical note:

Madalina Armie studied English language and literature and earned a master’s degree in the same field in 2014 from the University of Almería. In 2014, she obtained the Patricia Shaw Research Award granted by the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN). She completed her PhD at the University of Almería in 2019 on the contemporary Irish short story at the turn of the twenty-first century. Her current areas of research include the contemporary Irish short story, Irish contemporary women’s writing, women’s studies, and gender studies. The author is currently teaching English at the University of Almeria.

Samuel Beckton (HE) Ulster University The Unbroken Covenant: Could Ulster Unionists have Controlled a Nine-County State, 1920-1939? ‘What Ifs’ in regards to history are often seen as purely entertaining works of fiction, however some have academic merit. In 1974, Dr Paddy Griffith from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst organised a wargame to determine what could have happened if Nazi Germany in September 1940 launched its planned invasion of Great Britain, Operation Sea Lion. During Northern Ireland’s centennial, this is a period to reflect the Irish boundary line. A century ago, there were consideration for the creation of a nine county state, for all of the province of Ulster to remain part of the UK. Primarily through the case study of Cavan and Monaghan, this paper will see how local Unionists and Nationalists would have reacted through utilising academic studies of the period, including documents and archives from the period. Through the 1911 census data to individual districts and townlands, this paper has created maps of how Unionists could have gerrymandered elections for the local government and Stormont, showing even a 25% Protestant minority could have taken Monaghan County Council. This paper has two objectives, firstly to answer a key ‘what if’ within Irish Studies and subsequent questions of what the knock-on impact would have been. For example, how would this altered timeline affected local demographics in Ulster and community relations in the border counties? Second, as part of peacebuilding by providing closure to Protestants in Cavan, Donegal, and Monaghan that felt they were abandoned by their counterparts in the six counties. A legacy that affected multiple generations.

Biographical note:

Samuel Beckton is a History PhD Researcher at Ulster University. His thesis focuses on the history of the former Southern Protestant communities in the Irish Free State after the partition of Ireland, particularly focusing on the border counties of Cavan, Donegal, and Monaghan. He has a BA (Hons) in Politics and International Relations from the University of Hull, an MPhil in International Peace Studies from Trinity College Dublin, and an MPhil in Politics from Queens University Belfast. Also, he has undertaken political work placements in Westminster and Holyrood, and development work in Kenya, Colombia and Cambodia.

Alessandra Boller (SHE) University of Siegen Entangled and Entangling: Short Narratives and/in Irish Magazines of the Late 1820s The proposed paper is part of a project which analyses the intertwined dynamics and developments of an Irish literary market, of political, religious and cultural nationalism(s) and of the precursors of short fiction in the context of Catholic Emancipation. The Roman Catholic Relief Act (1829), in particular, marked the partial dissolution of specific borders but was conducive to the production of new and shifting divisions as well as affiliations and possibilities. Differing evaluations of the Relief Act did not only find reflection in fictional texts published in the often sectarian magazines of the time which were aimed at distinct readerships and offered platforms to either Protestant or Catholic writers; such texts actually played a role in shaping public discourses and the contested notion of Irishness. Reading these literary texts as mere representations or manifestations of religious and culturalpolitical strife would evoke a hierarchical model of influence in a society that has been interpreted in terms of dichotomized divisions for a long time. Scrutinizing this idea, my project applies a network theory approach to discuss the notion of entangled and entangling short narratives and their publishing outlets within a complex web and at a time during which society or ‘the social’ was in a constant process of being formed, disrupted and (re-)assembled. The proposed paper illustrates these ideas by drawing on two examples linked to the early works of William Carleton whose conversion to Protestantism and contribution to Protestant magazines was regarded as a serious act of transgression.

Biographical note:

Alessandra Boller is currently working as a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Siegen, Germany. She is the author of Rethinking the Human in Dystopian Times, and has co-edited volumes titled Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post- Apocalypse, and Canadian Ecologies Beyond Environmentalism. Her research interests include 19th - and 20th -century Irish literature, dystopian fiction, ecocriticism, bioethics, gender studies and (eco-)feminism, as well as Irish and British short fiction. Her current project analyses the intertwined dynamics and developments of an Irish literary market, nationalist discourses and the precursors of short fiction in the 1820 and 30s.

Phyllis Boumans (SHE) University of Leuven “Changing the Content”: Peadar O’Donnell’s Literary Poetics and Periodical Vision in The Bell Seán O’Faoláin’s and Peadar O’Donnell’s iconic magazine The Bell (1940-1954) was Ireland’s most influential literary periodical in the twentieth century. As the voice of dissident Ireland, the magazine is credited with propelling the emergence of a more open and tolerant society. Moreover, with its sustained focus on creative fiction and literary criticism the magazine served as a writing school and rostrum for the new literary talent that would come to define Irish literature in the second half of the twentieth century. While O’Faoláin is often portrayed as the linchpin of this trailblazing magazine, his editorial reign only spans the first six years of the magazine’s twelve-year run. O’Donnell, who took over after O’Faoláin resigned, was never attributed the same status of literary pundit as O’Faoláin was, when in fact his advice and encouragement influenced a generation of emerging writers including Mary Beckett, Val Mulkerns and Brendan Behan, and his literary stewardship impacted the magazine’s literary content for many years. The aim of this paper is to examine O’Donnell’s literary poetics and the type of short story writing that was fostered in The Bell during his early years as editor: his editorials signal in many ways a departure from O’Faoláin’s editorial course, and this also had an impact on the short stories that appeared in the magazine’s pages after O’Faoláin stepped down. This paper, then, considers the changes in editorship direction the two editors in an attempt to account for the different stylistic and thematic preoccupations under O’Donnell’s tenure.

Biographical note:

Phyllis Boumans is a PhD student at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Her PhD research, supervised by Professor Elke D’hoker, investigates the publication and mediation of the Irish short story in The Bell (1940-1954) and the magazine’s literary legacy. She has published on Irish short fiction and The Bell in Irish Studies Review and New Hibernia Review.

Geraldine Brassil Mary Immaculate College, Limerick Mary Banim: A Voice from the Margins: ‘It takes a genuine Irishman – better still, Irishwoman – to understand the quick sensitive hearts that are common to us all’

Little is known of Mary Banim (c.1847-1939), either personally or as a significant nineteenth-century woman of letters, her oeuvre overshadowed by the successful collaborations of her father Michael Banim (1796-1874) and his brother John (1798- 1842). Mary Banim was however, an extraordinarily mobile and professional journalist who crossed physical, social, and gendered borders in ways that have been, until now, entirely undocumented. Between 1891 and 1892 she published a travelogue, Here and there Through Ireland, the chapters reprinted from the Weekly Freeman. In her writing she debunks stereotypes of the Irish peasant or ‘the real old stock’ arguing that ‘broad sympathy’ is the key to ‘know[ing] a country and the people who give it character, and derive character from it’ (1891, pp 20-21). Banim’s eclectic output had transatlantic reach, many of her articles appearing in, for example, the The Catholic World: A Monthly Magazine of Literature and Science. Leading the way for Irish Contributors (including W.B. Yeats, and Katharine Tynan), Banim ‘wrote steadily on Irish manners, scenery, customs and traditions, the long, leisurely articles of Victorian Journalism’ (Reynolds 1929, p.15). Connecting with a burgeoning field of interest in the recovery of neglected Irish women writers, for example, Kathryn Laing’s and Faith Binckes work on Hannah Lynch (2019) and with scholarship such as Marguérite Corporaal’s (2020, p.164), which identifies as under-researched ‘the intensive transnational literary infrastructures that existed between Ireland and countries in which many Irish emigrants had settled,’ this paper will analyse Banim’s literary production locally and transnationally.

Biographical note:

Geraldine Brassil is a PhD Student at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. She has been awarded an IRC 2020 Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship. She was also selected as the recipient of the 2020 MIC Postgraduate Studentship award. Her work focuses on the study and recovery of nineteenth century Irish women writers and evolving print cultures in contemporary publishing contexts. Her research interests include mid-late nineteenth Century Irish Women’s Writing; Irish Periodical and Print Culture; Irish Women in History; the History of the Book. She is a postgraduate assistant researcher with the Irish Women’s Writing (1880-1920) Network.

Thiago Rhys Bezerra Cass (HE) Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Completing the Union: Maria Edgeworth's National Tales and the Early Brazilian Novel Maria Edgeworth’s national tales have never been acknowledged as a major repository of narrative paradigms for the incipient Brazilian novel. And yet her novels were widely available in nineteenth-century Brazil. Archival evidence indicates, for example, that Tales of Fashionable Life (1809-1812) were the eighth most imported work of fiction through the Rio de Janeiro customs in the waning days of colonial rule (1808- 1822). This paper is invested in exploring whether, circulating in Brazil for at least seven decades, Edgeworth’s national tales may have purveyed a narrative framework whereby the unsolvable contradiction between colonial heritage and postcolonial nationalism could be novelistically negotiated. Such national tales, as it is well known, fictionally dispelled social dilemmas inherent to a multicultural state, like the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Works such as The Absentee (1812) engendered sentimental plots of star-crossed lovers who stood for the divergent Union nationalities, allegorically and didactically overcoming the perceived English prejudice against the Irish. Have Indianist novels like José de Alencar’s O Guarani (1857) re- enacted such plots?

Biographical note:

Thiago Rhys Bezerra Cass is an Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Niels Caul (HE) University College Dublin Making Ready to Go: Emigration and Paths to Maturity in the Irish Bildungsroman George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin (1886), George Egerton’s The Wheel of God (1898) and Hannah Lynch’s The Autobiography of a Child (1899) have all been recognised as New Woman interpretations of the Bildungsroman form, in which the protagonists come to reject the Catholic religion they were born into and are ultimately forced to leave Ireland because of the social, economic and cultural forces hostile to their characters. By reading James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) in the context of these New Woman novels, they can be understood as forerunners of Joyce’s paradigmatic Modernist Irish Bildungsroman. The similarities Alice Barton, Mary Desmond and Angela all share with Stephen Dedalus have been acknowledged but not examined thoroughly. Doing so elucidates each text and illustrates the difficulties associated with coming-of-age in the age of Empire. The gendered societal expectations of young men and women are evident in discrete differences between the protagonists similar religious educations, personal attitudes towards Catholicism, defiance of parental moral authority, artistic ambitions, and finally, their decisions to leave Ireland. Critics of the colonial and Modernist Bildungsroman such as Tobias Boes, Gregory Castle and Jed Esty are in agreement that the inability of the protagonist to integrate into their society is a characteristic feature which distinguishes Irish and other colonial iterations of the Bildungsroman from the earlier European tradition. Stephen Dedalus is perhaps the most well-known Irish exile, but he was preceded by Alice Barton, Mary Desmond and Angela.

Biographical note:

Niels Caul is a PhD Candidate at University College Dublin who is due to submit his thesis “‘You could do nothing in Dublin’: Irish Print Culture and the Early Works of James Joyce, 1882-1922” on 7 May 2021. The thesis explores Joyce’s early works as part of a broader canvas of Irish writing and establishes a more complete context for understanding Irish and British print culture at the turn of the twentieth century. He has previously presented at the James Joyce Italian Foundation’s annual conference.

Mar González Chacón University of Oviedo Creative Encounters and Spaces for Transformation in Unpublished Irish Versions of The House of Bernarda Alba Crossing the frontiers looking for inspiration has been part of the Irish literary tradition. Translation and adaptation of continental writers such as Federico García Lorca have been used to speak through another culture in Irish contemporary theatre. The dissenting Lorquian voices revive in the Irish context to find new meanings for the silences of the original play. This paper intends to offer an analysis of two unpublished versions of The House of Bernarda Alba, by Federico García Lorca, which have not received much critical attention. Frank McGuinness’ The House of Bernarda Alba (1991) allows to address the strategies used by the playwright to accommodate Lorca in the Belfast of the 1990s, where the play was first produced. The analysis shows that Irish women can express their realities through Lorquian universal voices and also that the English version of the play can be written forward in the Irish context. Lynne Parker, joint founder and artistic director of Rough Magic, hibernized the text in her adaptation (1993) produced by Charabanc, also in Northern Ireland. The version constituted and attempt to render the play into the non-lyrical idiom of the Northern Irish. The paper will include a short interview with the author. Conclusions aim at acknowledging the importance of these two texts as examples of how crossing the borders to translate literary texts fosters creative encounters where spaces for transformation are (re)created. Biographical note: Mar González Chacón is assistant lecturer at the Department of English, French and German Philology of the University of Oviedo, in the Principality of Asturias. Her main research is focused on contemporary Irish theatre, with a special interest in the rewriting of Greek myths, and the translations and adaptations of Spanish plays. Her latest publications are “’This is not about love, this is about guilt and terror’: Phaedra Backwards (2011) and forwards by Marina Carr” (2020), and “’Speaking through Another Culture’: Frank McGuinness’s Version of Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba (La Casa de Bernarda Alba)” (2019).

Tsung Chi (Hawk) Chang (HE) University of Hong Kong ‘God, the hypocrisy of (wo)men!’: Religion and Gender in Frank O’Conner’s “First Confession” Frank O’Conner is arguably one of the best Irish writers who are interested in exploring religion via short stories. Although most of his stories are rooted in Ireland and the Irish people, they succeed in making statements on the universal experiences such as love, family, maturation, and religion. While demonstrating the harsh reality of human existence, his short stories feature a unique sense of humor and sympathetic understanding of human foils. Whereas the character’s naivety is articulated in a simple style, it is normally conveyed with a tone of pleasant intimacy and humor. O’Conner’s “First Confession” is a case in point. This story tells of how Jackie, a 7-year old schoolboy who is troubled by his relationship with his family, woman members in particular, and his confrontation with religion, is stuck in-between innocence and experience. Notably, unlike many other stories in 20-century Irish literature, in this story it is women rather than men who are to blame for domination and violence. In the existing literature, most critics discuss O’Conner’s emphasis on love and leniency in the Catholic religion, while the interplay between gender and religion has not been so well researched. Reading O’Conner’s “First Confession,” this paper investigates O’Connor’s deconstruction of the Catholic religion in relation to gender. My argument is that in this fiction O’Conner is committed to constructing a religious world where men rather than women are morally right and justifiable. In addition to textual analysis, feminist ethics of care proposed by Carol Gilligan will be brought into discussion to help elaborate O’Connor’s peculiar notions of religion and gender. It is expected that the analysis will contribute to our better understanding of O’Conner’s notions of gender and religion. Biographical note: Dr Tsung Chi (Hawk) Chang is Assistant Professor of the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at The Education University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD from National Taiwan Normal University and did his post-doctoral study at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Dr. Chang’s research and teaching interests include Modern & Contemporary Irish Literature, Women’s Writing, Short Story, 20th-century English and American Poetry, Translation Studies, and Language and Culture. Some of his works have been published in Neohelicon, Tamkang Review, Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (accepted; forthcoming), English Teaching and Learning, Universitas, Wenshan Review, Review of English and American Literature, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Journal of English Studies, GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies, 3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature, etc. His translation of John Millington Synge’s play The Playboy of the Western World (English-Chinese) was published by Bookman Books (Taipei) in 2012. Additionally, he was awarded First Book Prize 2019 for his submitted monograph titled Ireland Then and Now: Traditions and

Difference in Contemporary (Irish) Short Fiction (to be published by Springer in 2020/21). He was also awarded a Junior Fellowship in the Academy for a five-year term (2019-24).

Shinjini Chattopadhyay (SHE) University of Notre Dame, IN Towards a New Cosmopolitanism: Subverting Stranger Fetishism in the Works of Twenty-first Century Migrant Writers of Colour in Ireland In James Joyce’s The Dead Gabriel Conroy copiously praises Irish hospitality as a long-cherished and honoured tradition. But Jacques Derrida points out that even in extending hospitality the hosts/natives distinguish themselves from the guests/strangers and exert authority by establishing a sense of territoriality. The boundary between natives and strangers seems especially strict in case of immigrants and asylum seekers in twenty-first century Ireland. This paper argues that in the works of twenty-first century migrant writers of colour, immigrant figures employ spatial tours to subvert the stranger fetishism imposed by the natives and cultivate a new cosmopolitanism that transcends borders and dismantles the binary of insider/outsider. By focusing on the spatial practices of the protagonist in Melatu Uche Okorie’s This Hostel Life (2018), the paper demonstrates how black immigrants in Dublin decode the ways in which they are framed as ‘strangers’ by natives or what Sara Ahmed terms as “stranger fetishism.” The paper then shows that the immigrants employ discursive spatial tours – which according to Michel de Certeau reveal the cultural diversity latent in local details – to subvert the stranger fetishism. Revealing the sedimented multiculturalism of the cityscape helps immigrants invalidate such notions that outsiders are contaminating an otherwise homogenous native community. Through tours immigrants cultivate a new cosmopolitanism and foster a sense of belonging to the newly adopted homeland. The new cosmopolitanism of the immigrant communities negates the idea that cosmopolitanism is an exclusive domain of the privileged white elites and delegitimizes guest/host binaries in favour of multifarious cultural and ethnic affiliations. Biographical note: Shinjini Chattopadhyay is a PhD candidate at the Department of English, University of Notre Dame, IN, US, pursuing minors in Irish Studies and Gender Studies. She completed her MA and MPhil in English Literature from Jadavpur University, India. She works on British and Irish modernisms and global Anglophone literatures. Her dissertation investigates the construction of metropolitan cosmopolitanism in modernist and contemporary novels. Her articles have been published or are forthcoming in James Joyce Quarterly, European Joyce Studies, Joyce Studies in Italy, and Modernism/Modernity Print+.

Adel Cheong (SHE) Dublin City University Place and Displacement in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016) The settings of Mike McCormack’s novels and short stories are typically situated in the West of Ireland, specifically Mayo, where McCormack himself is from. McCormack has acknowledged this somewhat subconscious proclivity to write stories that take place in these parts of Ireland.1 His decision, wittingly or not, to set his fiction in the west of Ireland stems in part from a reaction against stereotypical depictions of rural Ireland. A strong correlation between the representation of certain kinds of landscapes and what we call ‘Irishness’ in general have been proliferated by novels in the past. Such stereotypes that these novels perpetuate ultimately reify the assumption that rural, untamed country is an authentic representation of Ireland. McCormack is not alone in writing novels that dispel these notions of ‘Irishness’ and its associations, recent novels like Sara Baume’s Spill Simmer Falter Wither (2015) contribute to new ways of thinking about the country that do not romanticise its landscape. In Solar Bones (2016), Marcus Conway’s memories of the past which form his self-narrative reveal an intricate, personal web of relationships between his country, home, family that underpin his sense of identity and history. This paper explores the links that space has with memory and identity in Solar Bones as I pay attention to the ways in which narrative – particularly the form of the self-narrative – which we tell ourselves and others is crucial to how we understand and relate to space. Biographical note: Adel Cheong is currently a PhD student at Dublin City University and her interests are in the novel form, narrative theory, and aesthetics. Her PhD project is centered around the negotiation with realist narrative techniques in twenty-first century experimental Irish and British fiction by authors like John Banville, Mike McCormack and Ali Smith. She received her Master of Arts from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

David Clare (HE) Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick Gradations of Class Among Irish Anglicans in Leland Bardwell’s Girl on a Bicycle In her 1977 novel Girl on a Bicycle, Leland Bardwell is keen to depict the subtle variations in social class standing between the different Irish Anglican characters in the novel. Bardwell ultimately suggests that the nature and degree of an Irish Anglican’s Irish/British hybridity varies, depending on where one is located on the social scale and where one resides. She suggests that the quotient of “Britishness” is often higher and more political among Big House owners, Ulster working-class Anglicans, and middle-class Anglicans from across the island who deliberately mimic and uphold the gentry. By contrast, Irishness is often more to the fore for Anglican people outside of Ulster whose backgrounds are self-avowedly middle-class (as with protagonist Julie and her family) or working-class. According to Bardwell, Irish people from Catholic Nationalist backgrounds often ignore such subtle distinctions, regarding all Irish Anglicans as somewhat “English.” A resentment over the exclusion of Protestants of all stripes from unequivocal “Irishness” can be traced in Bardwell’s next three novels. In London Winter (1981), The House (1984), and There We Have Been (1989), the middle-class, Irish Anglican protagonists struggle to bridge the perceived cultural gap between themselves and the Irish Catholics in their lives. And in Bardwell’s final novel Mother to a Stranger (2002), the character of “Barney the Protestant” is “othered” by the neighbours in his village in the northwest of Ireland. These works strongly suggest that personal experience had taught Bardwell that Protestants are required to (in Edna Longley’s famous words) “work their passage to Irishness”. Biographical note: Dr. David Clare is Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. His books include the monographs Bernard Shaw's Irish Outlook (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Irish Anglican Literature and Drama: Hybridity and Discord (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in 2021) and the edited collections The Gate Theatre, Dublin: Inspiration and Craft (Carysfort/Peter Lang, 2018) and The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights (1716-2016) (2 vols., forthcoming from Liverpool University Press in 2021). Dr. Clare is curator of the www.ClassicIrishPlays.com database, which was created during an IRC-funded postdoctoral fellowship undertaken at NUI Galway.

Lucy Collins (SHE) University College Dublin Reading Interiors in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Italy Throughout her career as poet, translator and scholar, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (b. 1942) has explored the role of language in the shaping of shared histories. Growing up in a bilingual household has made her sensitive to the particularity of language in its navigation of the dynamics of past and present. Among European countries, her connection to Italy is an especially profound one, combining familial bonds and strong intellectual links to the country’s spiritual and material past. Beginning with childhood holidays in Rome and continuing through annual visits to her second home in Umbria, many of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems explore Italian environments – the domestic space of intimacy and creation, and the sacred architecture that expresses human communities across time. Given these concerns, it is not surprising that her poetry frequently maps linguistic boundaries, situating the Irish woman poet within an expressive network that reflects not Ireland’s peripheral status but rather its close connections to the history and culture of Europe. These poems often explicitly link language and space, but even within apparently stable environments, words may function as a form of concealment. Milan Kundera’s observation that “small nations do not have the comfortable sense of being there always, past and future” sheds light on Ní Chuilleanáin’s preoccupation with rupture, and with discontinuities in poetic form and language. In this paper I will explore how these concerns are expressed through the poet’s representation of Italy, and how the space of the poem enacts various forms of imaginative mobility. Biographical note: Lucy Collins is Associate Professor of English at University College Dublin. Books include Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970 (2012) and a monograph, Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (2015), both from Liverpool University Press. She has published widely on contemporary poets from Ireland, Britain and America, and is co-founder of the Irish Poetry Reading Archive, a national digital repository.

Francesco Costantini (HE) Jagiellonian University “L’anima celtica, come quella slava alla quale in molte cose rassomiglia…” (“The Celtic soul which resembles in so many ways the Slavic one…”) Transcultural Paradigms between Irishness and Polishness: Liminality and Peripherality across the Borders of Europe In one of his lectures given in 1907 at the Università Popolare di Trieste James Joyce traces a path by delineating a parallel between the Celtic and the Slavic souls which encompasses the potential for an analysis that answers to some of the open questions that the dialogue between Irish studies and postcolonial studies has disclosed. Postcolonial reinterpretations of Irish culture have struggled to define a satisfactory model which would fit the peculiarity of Irish literature, although it has provoked a variety of new ways of reading Ireland. The partial inadequacy of the comparisons with Third World countries has lately prompted important scholars (such as S. Howe and J. Leerssen) to look at the colonial experience of Central Europe, especially Poland, as a more befitting comparative model. Many scholars have pointed out the striking cultural and historical similarities between Poland and Ireland from the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th, resulting from the shared lack of sovereignty and the need to preserve an “imagined community” through culture and literature. In this paper I wish to portray the transcultural paradigms which convey the Irish-Polish way of conceiving the borders of their identity and peripherality. In analysing Polish and Irish dialectics between native traditions and cosmopolitanism, cultural nationalism and hybridity it is possible to unearth the colonial sins of modernist literature and to draw unexpected parallels, such as between W.B. Yeats and H. Sienkiewicz. Being both part of Europe and part of a denigrated colonial periphery they are “subject to hegemonistic representation, but also has access to it”, rendering their experience unique. Biographical note: Francesco Costantini, MA is a PhD student at the Department of Literary Anthropology, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. His Phd project is entitled On the way to independence: the role of literature from a postcolonial perspective in a comparative context between Poland and Ireland and includes an analysis at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries of the two cases of internal colonialisms questioning the role of literature in relation to national issues, epistemic and discursive violence, ultimately deconstructing imperialism by unravelling its colonial “sins” within modernism. He studied in Italy (BA, University of Bologna), Poland (Jagiellonian University) and Ireland (University of Limerick, MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies).

Kate Costello-Sullivan (SHE) Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY Joseph Valente (HE) SUNY-Buffalo Molly Ferguson (SHE) Ball State University Uneaseful Stirrings: Disability, Trauma, and Irish Society in Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells In Aesthetic Nervousness, Ato Quayson characterizes the titular phenomenon as short-circuiting of the protocols of representation manifest in “the interaction of disabled and non-disabled characters in the text” and in the uneaseful stirring of the reader’s own “unexamined prejudices and biases.” Our panel treats Caitriona Lally’s award winning novel, Eggshells as an extraordinarily textured specimen of aesthetic nervousness, which situates its narrator-protagonist, Vivian, at the intersection of psychosocial and developmental disability, queer sociality, and child abuse PTSD. Katherine Costello-Sullivan’s talk, “Trauma, Shame and Embodiment in Catriona Lally’s Eggshells,” explores how the critical responses to Vivian have evinced “aesthetic nervousness,” treating her creative, endearing quirkiness as proof against, rather than congruent with, the palpable, if imperfectly classifiable disability she displays. This valorization renders Vivian’s disability comfortably invisible. In “Shell-Shocked” Joseph Valente observes that the changeling invoked by Vivian’s abusive parents is not only a central figure in the folklore of faery abduction, but a dominant figure for the horrified image certain parents bore of their unwanted autistic children. But metonymically identifying Vivian with a motif distinctive of the Irish social imaginary and of a putatively congenital disorder, Lally works to deconstruct the nature/nurture, medical/social binary, on which normative diagnoses of neuro- cognitive-psychosocial disability ultimately depend. Molly Ferguson’s essay “The Changeling Legend and Queer Kinship,” treats the Irish myth of faery abduction as code for violence committed within the nuclear family, which Vivian resignifies along two interlocking chains of agency: as a protective device and as a predicate for establishing alternative familial relationships. Biographical notes: Kate Costello-Sullivan is Professor of Modern Irish literature at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY. She earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Boston College. She is the author of Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín and edited critical editions of J. Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla and Norah Hoult's Poor Women!. Her most recent monograph, Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-first- Century Irish Novel , was published in March 2018. Kate is the current President of the American Conference for Irish studies – the largest Irish academic organization in the world – and the first female Series Editor of the Syracuse University Press Irish line.

Joseph Valente is UB Distinguished Professor at SUNY-Buffalo and Vice-President of NEMLA. He is author of The Myth of Manliness in Irish Nationalist Culture, 1880- 1922; Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness and the Question of Blood; James Joyce and the Problem of Justice: Negotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference; and co-author of The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (Indiana UP, 2020). His edited collections include Quare Joyce; Urban Ireland (a special issue of Eire-Ireland); Yeats and Afterwords (with Marjorie Howes), and Ireland in Psychoanalysis (with Seán Kennedy, a special issue of Breac). He has also published over 65 journal articles and book chapters. Molly Ferguson is an Associate Professor of English at Ball State University, where she teaches Postcolonial literatures and Women's & Gender Studies. She has published articles on Irish literature and film and teaching in journals including New Hibernia Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Nordic Irish Studies, LIT, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She is currently working on a book about contemporary feminist reinterpretations of folklore by Irish women writers, titled Disobedient Daughters: Feminist Folklore Adaptations in Contemporary Irish Writing.

Eóin Ó Cuinneagáin (HE) Linnaeus University, Sweden The Birth of Irish Studies: Epistemic and Ontological Extractivism in the early 19th Century Decoloniality is a political and epistemic movement that started with the onset of colonialism and is recently gaining some legitimacy inside the domains of westernized/anglicized universities. It seeks to critically examine the biography and geography of knowledge and resist/exit the race/sex hierarchies in the structures of Western knowledge. In my PhD dissertation I show how decoloniality can be invoked to understand how epistemologies and ontologies in Ireland were constituted and de- constituted as part of the establishment of professional study of the land, music and the past in the 1820’s. In 1868, it was said by William Stokes that “the foundations of Irish History cannot be said to be fairly laid, until a large portion…” of the work of “Petrie, O’Donovan, O’Curry, Todd, Reeves and Graves… are made available by publication.” The early 19th century encompassed the drive for the establishment of professional disciplinarity with the Royal Irish Academy and George Petrie being credited with construction of the “foundations of the serious study of Irish archeology and history”. In many ways Petrie’s contributions to the study of Irish land, language and history are unavoidably ground-breaking; he is understood as the father figure of the study of ‘modern’ Irish history. Yet, as we learn from the decolonial movement, there is no modernity without coloniality, meaning the processes that have allowed this select few to have been creative have involved the erection of borders around history and humanity – exclusions from the domains of knowledge, being and power. A decolonial assessment of the thoughts of Stokes calls into question the idea that the foundations of Irish history could be laid by 6 men in the early 19th century, as this view overlooks underpinnings of Irish history in the collective struggles against the unfolding of modernity/coloniality. Stokes’ perspective circumvents the view of the colonized, for whom modern/colonial borders cross people before people can cross the borders of modernity/coloniality. This paper argues that the building of what Santiago CastroGómez calls the epistemology of the zero point in Ireland had its birth in the antiquarian projects of the 1820’s and 1830’s. Furthermore, it suggests that Irish Studies is rooted in the extractivism that unfolded in Ireland in the early 19th century, which had at its apex the relationship between George Petrie and John O’Donovan while in the centre was the writing of the dispossessed out of history as retelling history took a ‘professional’ and centralized shape. Understanding this epistemic violence can shed light on how a range of different extractivist practices are executed from within Irish Studies today. Biographical note: Eóin Ó Cuinneagáin is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Linnaeus University Sweden. His PhD thesis is concerned with delinking from the coloniality of perception as instigated by the antiquarian and folklorization movements with a specific focus on the artist, antiquarian, cartographer and music collector George Petrie (1790-1866). His work aims to question how

decoloniality can shift the geography and biography of knowledge of modernity/coloniality in Ireland via the formulation of a decolonial aestheSis of Gaelic modes of sensing and believing.

Miriam Cummins (SHE) Trinity College Dublin Modern Slavery: The Postmodern Question and the Magdalene Laundry in Contemporary Irish Performance This paper investigates the representation of the Magdalene laundry in a selection of contemporary Irish performances through the lens of postmodernism. For example, in Eclipsed (1992) by Patricia Burke Brogan, the incarcerated Magdalene Brigit launches a scathing attack on the white-veiled novice Sister Virginia over the church’s insistence on “Prayers and Hymns and heaven when we die!” which culminates when she tears off the postulant nun’s veil and throws her to the floor where she falls on top of soiled linens. Alternatively, in Stained Glass at Samhain (2002), Burke Brogan’s companion piece to Eclipsed, the novitiate Sister Benedict defies Mother Victoire when she leaves convent life by keeping her veil so that it spreads and spreads “like Brigit of Kildare’s cloak!” taking the elderly eccentric Sister Luke’s book with it on all its journeys. And in Laundry (2011), the immersive site- specific performance by ANU Productions, the spectator is transported by taxi from the former laundry at Seán McDermott Street in Dublin’s north inner-city to a present- day launderette where she is tasked with counting small change as she overhears “locals” conversing about the old laundry at the shop counter. With regards to the debate as to whether postmodernism continues or opposes modernism, I will draw on theories from the Frankfurt School, Donna Haraway, and Jean Baudrillard to argue that postmodernism is an extension of modernism insofar as although all of the performances register a deep distrust of modern Irish Catholic society, ultimately, an abiding yearning reveals itself for a former sense of wholeness that cannot be recovered. Biographical note: Miriam Cummins is a PhD student in the Department of Drama at Trinity College Dublin. Her doctoral research, which is funded by an Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship, examines the representation of religion on the contemporary stage in Britain and Ireland from a feminist perspective. In 2017, Miriam was awarded the Eda Sagarra Medal of Excellence by the Irish Research Council for being the top-ranked postgraduate scholar in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. From 2017-19, she was an Early Career Researcher at Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.

Eloísa Dall’Bello Federal University of Santa Catarina ‘Who do you think you are?’: Migrant’s Social Agency in “This Hostel Life” by Melatu Uche Okorie In this work, I propose an analysis of Melatu Uche Okorie’s short story “This Hostel Life”, published in the homonymous collection in 2018. The story is set in a Direct Provision (DP) Center in Dublin – one of the many hostels conceived as a short-term solution to the immigrants who sought asylum in the Irish State. Okorie’s narrative gives the spotlight to Beverlée, a Congolese woman who dwells in a DP center amongst immigrants from many other nationalities; “This Hostel Life,” thus, sheds light on the daily life of these newcomers, living in a system which is shown to be highly controlling at all levels of their experience. If, in an overall basis, immigrants have their potentials for autonomy constrained due to their status as “outsiders”, it is unsurprising that immigrants within the category of asylum seekers, living under such regime, would have their conditions worsened and find themselves in a position of helpless disadvantage. Thereby, my main objective in this paper is to examine whether Berverlée depicts – from the viewpoint of social agency – a position of active mediation in face of the constraints presented in such circumstances. To do so, I pose some guiding questions: how did this character cope with the restrictions and impairments presented? Did she find any pathway for empowerment? And, if so, how was it portrayed in the story? As regards the analysis, I rely, mainly, on appraisals of the Direct Provision System in Ireland by O’Reilly and Roddy, on Bryan Fanning’s “Multiculturalism in Ireland,” as well as resort to the concept of social agency, as discussed by Jepperson and Meyer in “The ‘Actors’ of Modern Society: The Cultural Construction of Social Agency” and by Hitlin and Elder in “Time, self, and the curiously abstract concept of agency.” Biographical note: Eloísa Dall’Bello has a BA in English from the University of the State of Pará and an MA in English from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, where she is currently a PhD student. Her research addresses the issues of immigration, multiculturalism and social agency in contemporary Irish short fiction. She has published on the works of Roddy Doyle, Eiemar McBride and Mary Lavin. Her PhD research focuses on the works of Roddy Doyle, Roisín O’Donnell and Melatu Uche Okorie and her scholarly interests comprise, within the Irish studies field, women’s writing, the modern and contemporary Irish short story, especially those which focus on the issues of multiculturalism, female and social agency.

Leszek Drong (HE) University of Silesia in Katowice Partitioning Irish Memory: Cultural Representations of Borders, Barriers and Divisions in Northern Ireland in the Aftermath of 1968 In David Park's Travelling in a Strange Land (2018), Tom, the novel's protagonist, leaves Belfast to cross the Irish Sea and then Hadrian's Wall. His journey is both urgent and metaphorical, enmeshed in numerous contexts to do with the past and the present situation of the British Isles and the European continent as well as the entire globe and its exigencies. He travels to England because in 2018 his Belfast born son is ill and stranded at his university campus in Sunderland. Brexit is in the air; so is the ubiquitous snow in Park's novel. Borders are more than just divisions and separations. They are also symbolic manifestations of power and control; (back)stops to mobility, cultural miscegination, intellectual crossbreeding and natural social evolution. The so called 'neotribalism' (Michel Maffesoli's term) finds borders and barriers particularly useful: that is why Irish studies may benefit enormously from insights from recently developed border studies. In this paper I offer several suggestions how border studies may be applied to a reading of Troubles fiction and post-Troubles narratives. My focus is on how representations of borders and tribal divisions affect memory. The claim that transpires from my discussion of Deane's Reading in the Dark, Park's Travelling in a Strange Land and Milkman by Anna Burns is that individual memories (in fiction) are pre-formed by inexorable divisions determined both spatially and politically.

Biographical note:

Leszek Drong specializes in literary studies, Irish studies (especially Northern Irish studies), rhetoric and cultural memory. He is associate professor in the Institute of Literary Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice. Also, he is President of the Polish Association for Irish Studies. His major publications include: Tropy konfliktu. Retoryka pamięci kulturowej we współczesnej powieści północnoirlandzkiej [Troping the Troubles: the Rhetoric of Cultural Memory in Recent Northern Irish Fiction] (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2019), Disciplining the New Pragmatism: Theory, Rhetoric, and the Ends of Literary Study (Peter Lang, 2006) and Masks and Icons: Subjectivity in Post-Nietzschean Autobiography (Peter Lang, 2001). His current research interests include post-Troubles fiction, border studies and tribalism.

Jun Du (SHE) University College Dublin ‘Third Spaces’, Transformation and Translation in Sinéad Morrissey’s Poetry Abstract: Sinéad Morrissey’s artistry is enriched with different perspectives, be it poetic, historical or philosophical. A migrant aspect pertinent to places, movements and travels feature prominently in her early collections, such as There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002) and The State of the Prisons (2005). Her experiences of migration and travel in Asian countries, primarily Japan and China, where she encountered significantly different culture and language, are encoded in her poetic projects. In concentrating on poems related to China from Morrissey’s latest collection Found Architecture: Selected Poems (2020), this paper probes how Morrissey codifies her experience of different aspects of China, involving language, culture, literature, history and landscape, into her poems and how she interrogates and reflects on her perspectives in the process of her aesthetic creation. In the light of Homi K. Bhabha’s cultural theories and Paul Ricœur’s theorisations on translation, this essay also explores relationships among language, place and identity in Morrissey’s poetry.

Biographical note:

Jun Du received a Master’s degree in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama from University College Dublin in 2018, and a Master’s degree in Irish Studies from Beijing Foreign Studies University in 2019. Jun Du is currently a PhD student in the School of English, Drama and Film of University College Dublin (supervisor Professor Margaret Kelleher) working on a PhD project that seeks to analyse Irish women’s writing, post 2010, through the lenses of biopolitics and geocriticism.

Adam Duke (HE) independent scholar Towards a Hauntological Reckoning: Ghost Estates in Post- Recession Irish Genre Fiction The journalist Fintan O’Toole argues that the reason why the collapse of the Celtic Tiger created a sense of existential angst in Ireland is due to the fact that the material wealth generated by the Celtic Tiger had become increasingly important in configuring Ireland’s sense of identity. The end of the Tiger damaged not only Ireland’s economy, but, according to O’Toole, a national sense “for better or worse [….] of what it meant to be ‘us’.” A term that captures this sense of loss is “hauntology”. Originally coined by Jacques Derrida, the term was expanded upon and developed by the theorist Mark Fisher, who describes it as mourning the loss of a future we had “been taught to anticipate.” Over the last decade or so, abandoned or ruined estates have begun to appear in Irish fiction that attempts to interrogate the impact of the Celtic Tiger on the configuration if Irish identity, with these “ghost estates” becoming ruins of a promised future that never came to pass. Tana French’s 2012 crime novel Broken Harbour centres around the investigation of a body found in a ghost estate and Oisin Fagan’s 2019 historical novel Nobber follows a band of English noblemen travelling through Ireland and purchasing estates that have been made desolate by a recent outbreak of the black death. In each of these texts, place is used to examine the failures of neo-liberal capitalism in Ireland and the borders that the ideology placed on Ireland’s ability to define its sense of self.

Biographical note:

Adam Duke has recently graduated from Utrecht University's MA programme Literature Today. He received his BA from UCD, where he studied English and History. His primary research interests are ideas of nationhood and the perception of history and time under late capitalism.

Ashim Dutta (HE) University of Dhaka Teaching Irish Poetry in Bangladesh: a Transcultural Approach This paper will offer insights into teaching Irish literature at University level in Bangladesh. It will focus on the experience of teaching W. B. Yeats’s and Seamus Heaney’s politically informed poems to undergraduate and graduate students in Bangladesh, in order to show how such poems could be used to both enhance the students’ understanding of Irish literature and culture, and to indirectly sharpen their perception and evaluation of our own cultural and political problems which are analogous to those dealt with in the poems concerned, such as conflicting cultural, religious and political identities, and roles of art and literature in a polarised social context. Born into a Protestant middle-class family in the Republic and a Catholic rural family in Northern Ireland respectively, Yeats and Heaney often reveal in their poems a cultural ambivalence born out of ‘being in two places at once’, to use Heaney’s phrase. They also betray their longing for an alternative cultural-poetic space where their divided allegiances might be accommodated. Despite its independence, Bangladesh is still negotiating between a liberal secular identity and a Muslim fundamentalist one, not to mention the proto-Indian and proto-Pakistani sentiments. Hence our students can not only empathically relate to the cultural- politically inclined poems of Yeats and Heaney and develop deeper understanding of Irish literature and culture than it would have been otherwise possible, but also gain from them insights into their own cultural dilemmas and, probably, ways out of those through respectful acceptance of differences.

Biographical note:

Ashim Dutta is a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He has a PhD in English from the Department of English and Related Literature of the University of York, UK. Funded by an Overseas Research Scholarship (ORS), his dissertation explored the intersection of mysticism and modernity in the works of Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats. He was also a Fulbright MA scholar at Montclair State University, USA from 2011 to 2013. His scholarly essays have been published in International Yeats Studies, Gitanjali and Beyond (a journal of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies, Edinburgh Napier University), Bangladesh Journal of American Studies, Spectrum: Journal of the Department of English (University of Dhaka), and Probhatshurja (a sesquicentennial tribute to Rabindranath Tagore in Bengali, Dhaka). He is a professional singer of Rabindrasangeet (Tagore songs) and teaches the same at Chhayanaut, a leading school of music in Dhaka. A member of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL) and of the International Yeats Society, he has presented scholarly papers at conferences of both.

José Manuel Estévez-Saá University of A Coruña Language and the Short Story in Ireland: Transcultural Reconstructions The short story is proving to be one of the favourite literary forms for deploying the previously silenced voices of the other in our culturally diverse contemporary societies. The possibilities of the genre are being explored and exploited by writers from the most different provenance, and collections such as Refugee Tales I, Refugee Tales II, Refugee Tales III, The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write, The Good Immigrant, Iraq+100, This Hostel Life, or Dublin: Ten Journeys, One Destination, are interesting and representative examples of successful and powerful renderings of what in this paper we deem transcultural texts; that is, fictions which, going beyond multicultural and intercultural perspectives and policies, deploy the inevitability as well as the difficulties of coexisting in diversity. Informed by recent developments of transculturalism (Dagnino, McLeod), this contribution studies the varied aesthetic proposals and the undeniable sociocultural and ethic dimension of some of the tales included in the collection Dublin: Ten Journeys, One Destination (2010) and in Melatu Uche Okorie’s This Hostel Life (2018) as representative and interesting instances of recent developments and brilliant uses of the short story in Ireland for rendering one of the most pressing concerns of our culturally diverse societies: the need of listening to the voice of the other and the necessity of acknowledging silence, misunderstanding, and failures of communication as part of contemporary sociocultural contacts. This work is part of the activities being carried out in the context of the research project “NEMICATID: Aesthetics, Ethics and Strategics of the New Migratory Cartographies and Transcultural Identities in Twenty-First-Century Literture(s) in English (2007-2019)” (PID2019-109582GB-100), recently founded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Biographical note:

Dr José Manuel Estévez-Saá, Ph.D (English), LL.M.Eur (Law), M.Phil (Politics & Sociology), is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature and Culture at the University of A Coruña, and member of The Amergin University Institute of Research in Irish Studies, Spain. His main fields of research are Contemporary Literature and Irish Studies, Critical Theory, International Politics and Cultural Studies, on which he has published editions, book chapters and articles. He has co-edited, among others, the volumes Joyceana: Literaria Hibernica (2005), JoyceSbilya (2011), and Dreaming the Future: New Horizons / Old Barriers in 21st-Century Ireland (2011). He has published chapters and articles on the influence of Joyce’s aesthetics in contemporary Irish writers such as Julia O’Faolain, Edna O’Brien, Joseph O’Connor, Dermot Bolger, William Trevor, etc. He is the Director of the International Policy and Transcultural Relations Observatory (OPIRET-UDC). He has coordinated research projects on the Great Irish Famine and Its Artistic Representations, as well as on New Typologies of European Migrations and Their Representation in Twenty-First-

Century Literature in English. He is the coordinator of the UDC Ph.D program “New Approaches to Anglo-American and Irish Studies” and the UDC “Inter-university Master in Advanced English Studies and its Applications (iMAES)”. Web-page: www.josemanuelestevezsaa.com

Margarita Estévez-Saá Universidade de Santiago de Compostela Post Celtic Tiger Literature (II): Back to the West of Ireland The present contribution intends to study recently published novels by young Irish writers who are intent on offering narratives that delineate a recurrent movement to the West of the country, to rural areas and island enclaves that I analyse and interpret as a renewed identity quest in the context of Post Celtic Tiger Ireland. I intend to focus on three novels published in 2020: Molly Aitken’s The Island Child, Helen Cullen’s The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually and Donal Ryan’s Strange Flowers. These three narratives deploy a sound concern with topics such as place, community, family life, parenthood, sexuality, sanity and belonging. I have spent some years studying narratives of Celtic Tiger literature, that is, representative fictions dealing with the context of the years of economic welfare in Ireland, predominantly focused on describing urban settings and on registering the collective impact of financial success on the sociocultural landscape of Ireland and on the way of living of the Irish. This contribution is part of a series of analyses in which I argue that Post Celtic Tiger Irish writers are nowadays revising the meaning of Irishness in the twenty-first century and offering, in contrast with Celtic Tiger novels, a more intimate and lyrical type of narratives in which the protagonists try to come to terms with their own unique selves through acts of narration that, although not exempt from difficulties, silences and secrets, seem to be their only possibility to transcend their unstable liminal condition and to revise their relationship with the land, with the past, with their communities and families, and even with the complexity of their own human condition.

Biographical note:

Margarita Estévez-Saá is Associate Professor in English and American Literature at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Her research interests include the work of James Joyce, Bernard MacLaverty and, more recently, contemporary Irish fiction by women. She has published articles and book chapters on contemporary Irish women writers such as Alice Taylor, Deirdre Madden, Anne Haverty, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Sara Baume, Anna Burns, Eleanor O’Reilly or Anne Enright which have appeared in prestigious indexed academic journals such as Nordic Irish Studies, Oceánide, Estudios Irlandeses, and publishing houses such as Manchester University Press and Routledge, among others.

Hamid Farahmandian (HE) Sun Yat-sen University James Joyce and the Romanticized Persia The study of Irish-oriental relationships peaked in the 19th and early 20th centuries and influenced Irish literary authors including James Joyce. Nationalist Irish authors and thinkers made efforts to place its historical and cultural origins well beyond the British Isles. Although Joyce’s creative interest in Middle Eastern and Asian societies and their cultures has been explored from postcolonial, historical, and religious perspectives, the concrete relevance of Persian culture and literature, which occupies a significant position in World Literature, has been overlooked in criticism of Joyce’s fiction. My investigation into Joyce’s knowledge and representation of Persian culture, mythology and politics in his fiction aims to provide new insights into Joyce’s literary Orientalism, his practices of intertextuality and cross-cultural engagement with the Middle East, and their political implications. To explore Persian-Irish cross- cultural, mythological and political connections in Joyce’s fiction, I use interdisciplinary insights from postcolonial theory, Imagology, and Cross-Cultural Studies. I demonstrate how Joyce knowingly romanticized Persia in an anti-British imperialist embrace of Irish identity, thus shedding new light on the relation between Joyce, Irish nationalism and the Middle East.

Biographical note:

Hamid Farahmandian is a post-doctoral fellow at the school of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University. His research interests include British Modernism, Irish Studies, and Comparitive Literature.

Fiona Fearon (SHE) Dundalk Institute of Technology Culture on the Border: Theatre and the Arts in Dundalk 1918-2020 In December 1922 Northern Ireland succeeded from the Irish Free State and established a border on the island of Ireland, that exists to this day. As everyone in Europe is now probably aware, negotiating that border in a time of pandemic and Brexit is still extraordinarily precarious. Two jurisdictions with highly complex emotional baggage adjudicate the legal and bodily autonomy of everything from cows to citizens. What is less obvious perhaps is the impact on the culture of the towns and villages that live along that border. For some towns, like Dundalk, the Border provided an artificial break in the landscape where a natural crossing point had existed for millennia in the Gap of the North. The impact of the establishment of the Border in 1922 was to isolate the town from much of its natural hinterland and to solidify the economic and cultural rivalry with its twin town on the other side of the border, Newry. For nearly 70 years before the Border the two towns had shared travelling theatre companies, feis and drama competitions and a healthy rivalry over the status of their theatres. Since even before the establishment of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, cross border cooperation on arts and cultural activities had been a mainstay of the Peace Process. This paper will analyse the impact of the Irish Border on the cultural life of Dundalk, Co. Louth, in the century since the creation of the Border.

Biographical note:

Dr. Fiona Fearon is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland. Her principal areas of interest are audience and performance studies, and she has published on audience ethnography and the performance of grief in contemporary society. Recently she has been working on working class performance culture in County Louth from Home Rule to the Free State. Her most recent publication was ‘Playing the Rebel: Propaganda and Amateur Dramatics in County Louth, 1902-1916’ published in Donal Hall and Martin Maguire’s County Louth and the Irish Revolution (Irish Academic Press, 2017). This will form part of a forthcoming monograph, Dundalk in Revolution: Cultural Life in Dundalk 1898-1923.

Jianming (Séamus) Feng (HE) Shanghai University of International Business and Economics Joyce’s Conscious Rejection of Established Rules in Narration James Joyce is known for his innovation in narration. In order to present literary world in new ways, he consciously rejected the established rules in narration, and he allowed his readers to see things differently. Innovation is partly a matter of finding invented techniques of defamiliarization. “Defamiliarization” can be considered one of the methods in which a literary language distinguishes itself from ordinary languages. “Defamiliarization” is employed to realize Joyce’s conscious rejection of the established rules in narration, and it is mainly presented by Joyce in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Defamilarization in Joyce’s novels is mainly shown is the followings aspects: (1) Defamiliarization in Syntax. A chosen example of shifts of viewpoints in Ulysses shows the way that these words and phrases are put together is unfamiliar to readers. (2) Defamiliarization in Structure. No accepted rules for the “Beginning” & the “End” of Finnegans Wake help readers to appreciate the unfamiliar aspect of the narrative art in constructing a novel. (3) Defamiliarization in Diction. Literary art has become a word game in Joyce’s post-modern work. (4) Defamiliarization in Symbols. In Finnegans Wake words are arranged to form a symbol. Sometimes, Joyce’s words and symbols are hard to distinguish. (5) Defamiliarization in Figure of Speech. A chosen series of sounds consists of the onomatopoeic words of many languages. This series of unique sounds suggests various meanings. The way used in figures of speech in Finnegans Wake is unfamiliar to readers. (6) Defamiliarization in characterization: puns. Joyce uses puns as a new joking way for defamiliarization in characterization. (7) Defamiliarization in plot by reshaping a nursery rhyme. All in all, defamiliarization in Joyce’s novels is important to in Joyce study, and it is a unique window to Irish studies.

Biographical note:

Jianming (Séamus) Feng Ph.D. is the director of the Irish Studies Centre, professor of English Language and Literature at Shanghai University of International Business and Economics (SUIBE). His main research interests: English Language and Literature, Translation, and Country and Regional Studies. He is the host of a project of the National Social Science Foundation of China and a project financed by the Ministry of Education of China. He gives lectures on Joyce Study at SUIBE. His has published 5 academic books and more than 30 papers on Irish studies.

Mark Fitzgerald (HE) TU Dublin Conservatoire ‘Where there are no words there is less to spoil’: Yeats’s Theatrical Collaborations with Composers in the Late 1920s and Early 1930s Untangling Yeats’s views on the use of music in productions of his plays is made difficult by the contradictory nature of the various pronouncements he made a different points in his career. The situation is further complicated when one considers the somewhat haphazard collection of people he collaborated with, including amateurs such as Edmund Dulac who was not primarily a composer, conservative or traditional figures such as John Larchet who was director of music at the Abbey for 27 years, and the American modernist George Antheil. This paper will focus on Yeats’s collaborations with Antheil (Fighting the Waves) and Irish composer Arthur Duff (The King of the Great Clock Tower). It will examine how these work differ from his earlier collaborations and investigate the ways in which the music for these plays negotiates the complex blend of the modern and the romantic in Yeats’s work. By contextualising these works with Yeats’s writings on music it will also demonstrate the ways in which such collaborations altered the writer’s perception of the role of music in dramatic works. Biographical note: Mark Fitzgerald is a senior lecturer at TU Dublin Conservatoire. Publications include Music and Identity in Ireland and Beyond (co-edited with John O’Flynn, Ashgate, 2014) and The Life and Music of James Wilson (Cork University Press, 2015) and essays on Gerald Barry, Frederick May, Modernism, Ferruccio Busoni and Irish theatre music in the 1930s. He is Executive Editor of the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland and an affiliated member of the Gate Theatre Research Network.

Andrew Fitzsimons (HE) Gakushuin University The Moment of a Poem: Kinsella’s ‘Baggot Street Deserta’

In this paper I will examine the ‘moment’ of ‘Baggot Street Deserta’: moment meaning ‘occasion,’ and moment meaning ‘significance.’ I will briefly survey the contemporary scene between 1955 and Spring 1956, in Ireland, and in elsewheres immediately available in Ireland, namely the UK, and the U.S., when the first version of ‘Baggot Street Deserta’ was published in Irish Writing. I will then go on and survey areas not immediately within earshot of an Irish poet in 1955, but which show how the frequencies picked up by Kinsella, the dilemmas with which he was engaging in ‘Baggot Street Deserta,’ were in touch with anxieties about the claims and capabilities of the poetic act to which poets far removed from Ireland, and in languages other than English, were also responding. I will argue that Kinsella’s poem, the moment of its moment, is a perennial one in that in ‘Baggot Street Deserta’ he is exploring the quintessential poetic dilemma, as figured by Allen Grossmann in an essay entitled ‘My Caedmon: Thinking About Poetic Vocation.’

Biographical note:

Andrew Fitzsimons is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Cultures at Gakushuin University, Tokyo. His publications include The Sea of Disappointment: Thomas Kinsella’s Pursuit of the Real (UCD Press, 2008); Thomas Kinsella: Prose Occasions 1951-2006, ed. (Carcanet, 2009); What the Sky Arranges (Isobar Press, 2013); A Fire in the Head (Isobar Press, 2014); and The Sunken Keep (Isobar Press, 2017), a translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Il Porto Sepolto.

Dieter Fuchs (HE) University of Vienna Ulysses – a Borderland Narrative? Owing to its intertextual dialogue with the foundational myths of classical and medieval Europe, James Joyce’s Ulysses reflects the borderlines of traditional Eurocentric culture. As its intertextual backbone, Joyce’s Ulysses refers to the Homeric Odyssey which – according to Victor Bérard’s Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée – presents Ulysses as an outsider of classical ancient European culture. As Bérard claims that the Homeric Ulysses has ‘Semitic’ roots in the North-African borderland and lives on the island of Ithaca as his elective home as a foreigner, the Homeric sailor – whose errand journey includes cases of shipwreck and disorientation – is featured as a person we would nowadays call a Mediterranean refugee. Although he is presented as an outsider of indigenous ancient Greek society in this way, Ulysses is enlisted as a Greek soldier and has to join the war against Troy, which takes place on the Eastern European border between imperial Greece and Asia Minor. Being the great war of the ancient world, the Battle of Troy is presented in the Homeric Iliad as another classical intertext of Joyce’s Ulysses. In addition to its intertextual dialogue with the Homeric foundational myths, Ulysses rewrites the myth of Jason and the Argonauts who leave the European core territory of the Mediterranean Sea, cross the Eastern border of Europe and sail the Black Sea to explore unknown parts of the East in a proto- orientalist manner. And in addition to these samples of classical ancient mythology, Ulysses refers to the medieval Christian epic of Dante’s Divine Comedy which features Ulysses as an overreacher whose hubris induces him to leave the European hemisphere of the Mediterranean Sea known as il mare nostro: crossing the Straits of Gibraltar as the Western border of the European continent, Dante’s overreaching Ulysses enters the unknown territory of the Atlantic Ocean and dies as a shipwrecked mariner. Whereas all the intertexts mentioned above define European identity in contrast to its non-European ‘other’ beyond the Eastern and Western borderland in terms of essentialist binary opposition, Joyce’s Ulysses features these borders as third spaces where a creative struggle for new and hybrid identity construction takes place. Overcoming traditional Eurocentric identity formation and constructing new globalized identities in this way, Joyce’s Ulysses may be considered a piece of world literature in the truest sense of the word. Biographical note: Dieter Fuchs is Assistant Professor with tenure track for Literatures in English and Cultural Studies at the Department of English and American Studies of the University of Vienna. He is also Director of the Vienna Centre for Irish Studies founded by Werner Huber. He received his doctorate from LMU Munich, his PhD thesis on James Joyce and Menippean Satire was supervised by Hans Walter Gabler. From 2011-14 Dieter Fuchs held a Professorship at the Institute of English, German and Communication Studies at the Technical University of Koszalin.

Marine Galiné (SHE) University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne The Bog as Liminal and Performative Space in Somerville and Ross’s An Irish Cousin (1889) In his 2016 monograph Contentious Terrains, Derek Gladwin pinpoints the intricate relations between the Irish bog and the Gothic, two cultural constructs which pertain, according to him, to the mysterious, the mesmerizing and the macabre. In many Irish gothic works, the bog is akin to a threshold where boundaries are blurred – a protean space conjuring up motifs of stasis, collapse, life and death. This paper seeks to focus on the first novel written by Edith Somerville and Martin Ross, An Irish Cousin (1889), where the bog appears at the margins of the social and narrative space. Hosting the slippery body of a female murderer and reversed mother figure, the bogland is only understood by the heroine, Theo, as an elusive border surrounding the secluded estate of her family. As the climactic ending of the novel features the suicide of her uncle Dominick, the only male heir to the Sarsfields, Theo hears the manic scream of Dominick’s once mute lover, Mad Moll, echoing from the bog where she has found shelter. Both Moll’s body and the bog become liminal vessels for the rewriting of Irish domesticity and femininity. This paper also aims to put into perspective the marginal position of the novel itself within the Irish gothic tradition and its transformative use of conventional and even hackneyed tropes and motifs. Overall, An Irish Cousin transcends the manifold fetters of its time (gendered, generic, ideological) and offers its readers new performative spaces of interpretation.

Biographical note:

Marine Galiné holds a PhD in Irish studies from the University of Reims Champagne- Ardenne (France). While interested in the evolution of the gothic in literature and art, currently her research and writing are devoted to the representation of women in nineteenth-century Irish gothic literature. Her recent publications include ‘The 1798 Rebellion: Gender Tensions and Femininity in the Irish Gothic’ (Review of Irish Studies in Europe 2.2, 2018) and ‘The Hysterical Body: deconstruction and confinement of the female body in the Irish Gothic’ (Liverpool Postgraduate Journal of Irish Studies 3, 2018).

Rosanne Gallenne (SHE) University College Dublin Beat Drum, Beat Heart: Contested Boundaries Wars are usually considered to draw attention to boundaries. However, artists’ responses often reveal a deep engagement that transcends national borders. Although World Wars I and II generated many poetic works, the marginal position of Ireland in relation to these conflicts have meant that few Irish poets – and even fewer Irish women poets – have responded to them. Published in 1946, Sheila Wingfield’s Beat Drum, Beat Heart is thus a very uncommon response to World War II. Translating the poet’s experience as an ‘outsider’ – because of her personal background – this volume challenges Ireland’s neutrality during the war and questions the government’s rigid policies. This volume also reveals the poet’s acute perception of power and add to a deeper understanding of the social relations at work in her environment. Wingfield more specifically interrogates the Woman’s place in a changing society as she disrupts gendered binaries through her use of the (post)war context. Although her poems are often set in spaces usually associated with domesticity, the fluidity with which she navigates between private and public spaces emphasises their shape-shifting nature and undermines the fixity of borders. Wingfield’s poetry investigates the distribution of spaces as either private or public, according to the social standards of her time, and re-designs them. So, through a deliberate process of inclusion generative of empathy, Wingfield deconstructs borders that segregate genders, cultures and social classes. This paper will thus explore how Wingfield’s poetry demonstrates the artificiality of socially constructed boundaries, and challenges a biased and exclusive telling of conflicts.

Biographical note:

Rosanne Gallenne is a third-year Ph.D. candidate at University College Dublin. Located at the intersection between affect and ecofeminist theories, her thesis explores the theme of the garden in Irish women’s poetry, from the mid-twentieth century to the present. She is also a tutor at the School of English, Drama and Film (UCD) and is a member of the jury of the Students’ Short Story Awards co-organised by the Angers University and the Catholic University of the West.

Rene Gannon-O’Gara (THEY) National University of Ireland, Galway Micheál MacLiammóir: Liminal Identities and the Queer Horizon Micheál MacLiammóir was a writer and actor, co-founder of the Gate Theatre in Dublin, champion of Irish language theatre, and among the most prominent queer public figures in mid-twentieth century Ireland. Yet he was born Alfred Willmore in England, with no Irish ancestry or apparent connections. He constructed Micheál MacLiammóir, a Harlequin figure (to borrow one of his favored archetypes) to traverse the limits of identity, and seek out a queer utopia of reinvention in a post- independence Ireland that was also reinventing itself. If the typifying gesture of “camp” is the moment when a consumer of culture says, ‘what if whoever made this was gay too?’ thereby muddying the line between consumer and creator, the typifying gesture of Micheál MacLiammóir’s life were his childhood encounters with the work of Yeats and Wilde which he greeted with an inversion—’what if whoever is reading this was Irish too?’ In one of his memoirs he quotes his partner as saying, ‘we in the Gate began by attempting to show the world to Ireland,’ and they did so with their eclectic programming. But MacLiammóir’s life was also a mirror to Ireland, reflecting back what he saw, and giving back what he could through his work to the place that had given him refuge to reinvent himself. The notion of queer utopianism put forward by José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia provides a framework for understanding the nuance of MacLiammóir’s life and work as more than paddywhackery, but instead as a blurring of lines in pursuit of manifesting the world in which he wished to see himself. He wrote, ‘for us who labour under the changing lights and looped-up borders of the stage there is no future but the immediate and urgent rise of the curtain.’ He created his queer futurity in the present, on stage and on paper, where the border is the one between performer and audience, across which he would give a knowing wink and nod.

Biographical note:

Rene Gannon-O'Gara is a writer and filmmaker from in Los Angeles, USA, and a graduate of the MA in Culture and Colonialism at NUI Galway, with a special interest in postcolonial and queer theory, cinema, and performance.

Mar Garre García (SHE) University of Almería ‘Who Shall Find me’: Liminal Spaces and Cosmopolitan Encounters in Samuel Beckett’s Poetry Samuel Beckett never felt identified with the culture and the ideological values of his native Ireland. Far from addressing mainstream topics of tradition and nationalism, he switched to unconventional discourses that not only allowed him to expand the limits of his poetry, but also those of his own life. During his youth, the acquaintance with avant-garde and Modernist artists, the lexical freedom that was permeating his writing, and the implementation of anti-canonical poetic procedures nurtured his poetry with a spirit of rebelliousness and intimacy. In his poems Beckett the flaneur presented cosmopolitan images of despair and isolation. However, the connection with Ireland was still present, especially in the Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935) collection. Blurred memories from some of the most iconic places in Dublin were represented, for instance, in ‘Enueg I’, encompassing “a dying world populated by putrid flora, verminous fauna, moribund human beings” (99). As Beckett’s life evolved, so did his poetry. The ‘mirlitonnades’ (1978) attest to his experiences in Tangier, Stuttgart and Saint-Lô, comprising a liminal space between his youth and his mature experiences. My objective is to examine a selection of Beckett’s poems as an exploration of the personal and creative limits existing beyond geographical barriers. The ways in which his poetry addressed Beckett’s relationship with Ireland will be a major issue. Additionally, I will examine the poems’ gradual advocacy for a coalescence of locations, aesthetics and cultural paradigms that reconciled the poet with his roots while exploring new literary manifestations.

Biographical note:

Mar Garre García obtained her Bachelor's Degree in English Studies at the University of Almería (Spain) in 2016 and earned her Master’s Degree in English Literature and Linguistics at the University of Granada (Spain) in 2017. She is currently working as a Gerty Cori fellow lecturer and researcher at the University of Almería (Department of Philology) and writing her PhD dissertation on Samuel Beckett’s poetry: “Evolutive analysis of Samuel Beckett’s poetry. Towards a Definition of Beckettian poetics”. Her research focuses on an evolutive definition of Beckett’s poetry finding similarities between his life, personal interests and literary sources of inspiration.

Matthew Gibson (HE) University of Macau

Two Forgotten Depictions of Literary Dublin: the Novels of Garrett Anderson Garrett Anderson, a graduate of TCD born and raised on the Irish periphery of Liverpool, is a novelist entirely forgotten by both academia and today’s dwindling devotees of fifties Ireland, despite having written two of the most entertaining exposés of literary Dublin in that decade. Both novels are somewhere between a roman-à-clef and a Juvenalian satire, as recognizable characters are merged and transformed for the sake of exposing fraudulence in the literary world. The first, Brennan’s Book (1972), merges the characters of Flann O’Brien and Brendan Behan in the new character of Eamonn O’Connor in order to satirise Dylan Thomas’s later literary fixer, John Brinnin, while the second, Until the Greyhound Comes (1976) is an early and shocking expose of the true identity of the novelist and inauthentic Irishman, Patrick O’Brian, long before that novelist was publicly unmasked as the Englishman Richard Russ, but which chooses to transform the real life situation of an English writer who masqueraded as an Irish one into an Irish writer who becomes English. While Garrett Anderson warned his readers not to see the close resemblances to reality as romans-à-clefs, nevertheless, the avoidance of comic, satirical hyperbole by maintaining the strictures of that closely mimetic subgenre, while subtly changing and merging the life stories of the people his novels transparently implicate, bitterly exposes the misdemeanors of the literary works at that time, while also extending the satire beyond more than one individual, in a form of homogenising mimesis which widens the target in a way similar to the universalizing techniques of Augustan aesthetics.

Biographical note:

Matthew Gibson is Associate Professor at the University of Macau, having worked in many universities, including the University of Lodz, where he began his career. He is the author of Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage (Macmillan Press, 2000), Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth Century Near East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and The Fantastic and European Gothic: History, Literature and the French Revolution (2013). He is currently completing a new monograph on philosophy and Modernism, as well as a selected edition of the correspondence of Bram Stoker.

Sara Gilbert (SHE) Oklahoma State University Feminism, Religion, and Cultural Memory: Derry Girls, Portrayals of the Troubles, and Other Effects on 21st Century Irish Texts When Lisa McGee’s television show Derry Girls premiered in early 2018, many viewers wondered why she chose to bring the Troubles into the spotlight twenty years after the Peace Agreement of 1998. This paper investigates the importance of feminism and contemporary representation of the Troubles within the first two seasons of the show to create a new hegemonic discourse and rewrite history. I will use contemporary feminist scholars such as Theresa O’Keefe and Kimberly Cowell- Meyers to dive into the importance of third wave feminism during the Troubles, look at epistemological approaches to memory/remembrance theory through the lens of cultural memory, and the religious and socio-political climates of the mid-to-late 1990s as a way to prove that McGee’s show is a tool to shape the cultural memory and change the dominant discourse surrounding a set of events.

Biographical note:

Sara Gilbert is a Ph. D. Student at Oklahoma State University.

Caitilín Gormley (SHE) independent scholar “Blabbing on about guns”: The Ghost of the Gun in Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle Following the IRA ceasefire in the autumn of 1994, the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998 heralded a new era of relative peace and reconciliation in the Northern Irish state after decades of intense political and paramilitary violence. For the first time in decades, there was a renewed sense of hope that peace could be achieved. However, the progressivist gaze seemingly advocated by the Agreement and by politicians in the UK and Ireland was not shared by all. In lieu of support from either Irish or British governments, Northern Irish art took on the “public role of highlighting the dangers of forgetting the past and of not dealing with the legacy of violence” (Alcobia-Murphy, 2016). In this paper, I will suggest that Seamus Heaney provides an alternative approach to the atmosphere of willed amnesia that dominated in Ulster from the late 1990s onwards. His works, while obvious in their Catholic and Nationalist sensibilities, do not advocate revenge or recompense, rather they utilise the symbol of the gun to call on the reader to acknowledge the trauma that the signing of the Good Friday Agreement essentially consigned to history. The recurrence of the gun in Heaney’s poetry from Death of a Naturalist to District and Circle, I will argue, utilises the trope of “haunting” (Whitehead, 2004) to allow readers to understand the complicated narrative of trauma, as opposed to the streamlined rhetoric of the Agreement which denied certain factions of Northern Ireland their opportunity to grieve their loss.

Biographical note:

Caitilín Gormley is an Irish poet and essayist. She has graduated from the University of Plymouth (BA Hons) and the University of Exeter (MA). Her writing has appeared in various literary journals in the UK, Ireland and the USA, as well as featuring in the Belfast installation of ‘Poetry Jukebox’. Her work focuses on contemporary Irish and Northern Irish poetry, particularly where it relates to trauma theory.

Rui Carvalho Homem (HE) Universidade do Porto Cognitive and Medial Borders: Notes on Action, Contemplation and the Visual Arts in Ciaran Carson Ciaran Carson’s poetry often pondered the challenges posed by the domain of action (aka ‘the world out there’) to the imaginative remit of the poet, conventionally bound as it may appear, within the generic range of the lyric, to a subjective space, a space of contemplation and interiority. Such challenges obtain a sharper delineation when the interface between experience and the writer’s consciousness gains the additional complexity brought by creations in another medium, such as those offered by the visual arts. Painting, in particular, often impacted Carson’s poetic output, and several of his ekphrastic exercises brought out the perplexities of finding, in an art ordinarily described as static (the still image on the canvas), a stimulus for the dynamics of poetic discourse to meet the dynamics of history. This paper will discuss Carson’s refractions of the tension between active and contemplative, civic and aesthetic, through some of the poems in which he ponders the medial interface between verbal and visual. From his vast oeuvre, the collections to be more directly considered will be Breaking News (2003) and Still Life (2019) (his final book, published shortly after his death in early October 2019).

Biographical note:

Rui Carvalho Homem is Professor of English at the University of Oporto, Portugal. He has published widely on Irish poetry, early modern drama, translation, and intermediality. As a literary translator, he has worked on Shakespeare, Marlowe, Heaney and Larkin. He is currently the Chair of ESRA, the European Shakespeare Research Association.

Moonyoung Hong (SHE) Trinity College Dublin “The Trinity of Jesus Freaks”: The Sacred Theatre of Tom Murphy This paper analyses two plays written by Tom Murphy – The Sanctuary Lamp (1975) and The Gigli Concert (1983) – from the perspective of Peter Brook’s “Holy Theatre,” which responds to “the need for a true contact with a sacred invisibility through the theatre,” at a time when all “forms of sacred art have been destroyed by bourgeois values.” Murphy’s two plays reflect his attempt to find the sacred in the post-Catholic secular world. In Sanctuary, Murphy literally portrays a desolate church deprived of its sacredness, and Gigli shows how the sacred has been replaced by capitalist values and therapy culture: the men have sold their souls to money, while psychoanalysis and clinical treatments are being used as a remedy for disorders of the soul misdiagnosed as “mental illness.” Both spaces in Sanctuary and Gigli are disused or downgraded versions of the conventionally sacred spaces; in Murphy’s theatre, itself an alternative to the mainstream drama, the sacred can only be rediscovered in the least likely spaces, in a travesty of standard places of ritual, blurring the boundaries between religion and sacrilege. This paper examines Murphy’s process of recreating the sacred in theatre by looking at his manuscript drafts (MS11115), which reveal his involvement with the International Commission on English in the Liturgy and investigations into Scientology, psychoanalysis and Continental philosophy. By incorporating materials from the Abbey Theatre Digital Archive, the paper also discusses how performances of the plays have allowed for a form of sacred community in the space of theatre itself.

Biographical note:

Moonyoung Hong is a PhD candidate in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. Her research explores the works of Tom Murphy from the perspective of everyday space. She is a recipient of the Ussher Fellowship and the Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship, and holds an Early Career Research residency in the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute (2019-2021). She has published in The Yeats Journal of Korea, Trinity Postgraduate Review and Études Irlandaises (forthcoming).

Barry Houlihan (HE) NUI Galway Locating Home: Memory, Identity and Form: Performing Contemporary Europe at the Gate Theatre This paper will explore contemporary Irish-European identity as staged at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, and through the plays of Hugo Hamilton. It will address the adaptation of memoir for/in performance, a theme that is centrally present within the German-Irish identity as explored in The Speckled People (2011), a stage adaptation of family memoir by the German-born Irish-based writer, Hugo Hamilton. Set in 1950s Ireland, the play tells the story of a young boy trapped in a language war, struggling with what it means to be speckled, “half and half...Irish on top and German below”. As Hamilton writes in the preface to the playtext, entitled “The Memory Room”: “Adapting the memoir for the stage was not a retelling but a completely new way of explaining childhood chaos. The language of the theatre reveals many things I am not aware of”. This will be followed by an examination, within a memory studies perspective, on Hamilton's original play, The Mariner (2014). (Both Hamilton plays at the Gate Theatre were directed by Patrick Mason and designed by Joe Vanek.) The Mariner focuses on the experiences of a traumatised soldier following the battle of Jutland during World War I. The play draws on Hamilton’s family experience of war and trauma within Europe, with Hamilton’s own family archives being used as dramaturgical devices within the production. This analysis will be considered in context of the Irish ‘Decade of Commemoration’ and the (non)remembrance of those Irish who also served in World War I and within the ‘Official’/State performance of memory as part of the Decade of Commemoration, which ran concurrent to the production of Hamilton’s plays at the Gate Theatre. Theoretical questions around the concept of home, memory and identity, put forward by critics such as Roland Barthes, Gaston Bachelard and Richard Kearney, will contextualise the study of these plays in their respective productions at the Gate Theatre. A scenographic context is also important to understand the visual staging and audience recognition of the European and Irish worlds, jointly explored in these plays. This paper will draw on newly released archive material relating to these plays sourced from the Gate Theatre Digital Archive and the Joe Vanek Archive of Design, located at NUI Galway, and which include draft and final stage designs, costume designs, digitised video recordings and press and marketing material.

Biographical note:

Barry Houlihan works at NUI Galway where he teaches Theatre History and Archives, and Digital Cultures. As an archivist, Barry curates the theatre collections of the Hardiman Library, NUI Galway. He is the editor of the recent volume of essays: Navigating Ireland’s Theatre Archive: Theory, Practice, Performance (Peter Lang Press, 2019) and is editing forthcoming special issues of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies and the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media.

Dearbhaile Houston (SHE) Trinity College Dublin A Box in the Corner: Television, Space and Memory in Anne Enright’s The Wig My Father Wore (1995) This paper will focus on the television set as a significant object in the domestic spaces of Anne Enright’s debut novel. Domestic space is epitomised in Wig by a blurring of boundaries between modernity and tradition, public and private. This paper will explore how the presence of the television in the Irish home—in the 1960s and Celtic Tiger settings of the novel—impacts on lived, architectural space and understandings of Irish identity, particularly along class and religious lines. As well as changing the materiality of the Irish living room on its introduction as a domestic consumer product, the television is a medium that collapses notions of linear time, public and private space, and allows for memory to be processed and accessed. The founding of RTÉ and the proliferation of the television in the 1960s signals changes regarding the home’s material culture as well as ideas of post-independence Ireland as a modern, cosmopolitan nation. Similarly, Grace, the novel’s protagonist who works in television, appears to embody the progressive changes of the Celtic Tiger era. However, the connection between Ireland in the 1960s and 1990s as times of perceived breaks with the past is challenged by Enright through the motif of the television. The television in Wig, as both a symbol of a modernist future and a conduit to the past, disrupts fixed understandings of identity and memory on personal and national levels. The television infiltrates private living spaces of the Irish home with the uneasy presence of the nation’s hidden traumatic history.

Biographical Note:

Dearbhaile Houston is a final-year PhD candidate in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin and her research is supported by the Pyle Postgraduate Bursary 2020/21. She received her MPhil in Gender and Women’s Studies from TCD in 2017. Her doctoral research focuses on hauntologies of domestic space in contemporary women’s fiction since 1980, including the work of Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, and Anne Enright.

Ellen Howley (SHE) independent scholar Writing Women, Writing Water: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s The Mother House (2019) Published by Gallery Press in 2019, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s The Mother House features new poems from Ireland’s former Professor of Poetry (2016-2019). The poems cross historical and personal memories as Ní Chuilleanáin writes about figures such as James Connolly and Maria Edgeworth, as well as her grandparents and grandson. As with much of Ní Chuilleanáin’s earlier poetry, female figures feature heavily as she returns to familiar tropes of the isolated woman and forceful nuns. This paper examines the female characters, personas and voices evident in The Mother House. In particular, it demonstrates the relationship Ní Chuilleanáin portrays between woman and water. An examination of the presence of the sea, rivers and streams can reveal much about how Ní Chuilleanáin attempts to create a unique, female perspective. Moreover, these poems also exhibit a continuation of ideas found in earlier works about women and the sea. As such, this paper compares key poems from The Mother House with work from Ní Chuilleanáin’s earlier collections, notably, The Second Voyage (1997), The Sun-Fish (2009). and The Boys of Bluehill (2015). Ní Chuilleanáin has spoken of the need for women writers to work in the borderlands of poetry, across traditions, languages and styles (37). This paper acknowledges the centrality of water to Ní Chuilleanáin’s concept of working in these borderlands of Irish poetry, as the sea’s currents and rushing rivers flow throughout her body of work, crossing the boundaries of her collections, and finding new routes in The Mother House.

Biographical note:

Dr Ellen Howley completed her PhD in 2020. The thesis focuses on the place of the sea in contemporary Irish and Caribbean poetry. She was a lecturer at DCU during 2020/21. She has published work in Irish Studies Review and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Her latest article is forthcoming in Comparative Literature. Research interests include the Blue Humanities, postcolonialism and feminism. In 2019, she co-organised the IRC-funded workshop, “Planet Ocean”, which brought together scholars from across the STEM-AHSS axis to discuss the sea.

Shan-Yun Huang (HE) National Taiwan University Mourning His Own Death: Nostos via Nostalgia in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones

Solar Bones tells the life story of a civil engineer Marcus Conway, narrated by his very own ghost. The post-mortem nature of the narrative is not revealed until the end of the novel, but it is deliberately flaunted to the readers on the back cover of the book, which notes, “Marcus Conway is dead. But sometimes, on All Souls’ Day, the dead return to us.” The ghost narrator to a large extent accounts for the teeming sense of nostalgia in the novel. For one thing, nostalgia is the emotion of loss. Since death is the ultimate loss of a human being, the ghost produced by that loss is by nature nostalgic. For another, nostalgia is the emotion of pain, engendered when the longing for return is invariably thwarted by the awareness of its impossibility. As a ghost, even though Marcus may “sometimes” return to his house, he certainly cannot return to life or his life in that house. The returned ghost is thus at home but not really, which intensifies the already acute nostalgia. Through the homecoming ghost narrator, this paper examines the function of nostalgia in Solar Bones. I argue that nostalgia serves as a means of mourning (with Freudian implications) and recuperation, even though or precisely because the mourning is carried out by the dead himself – preposterous indeed but no less restorative. Through nostalgic musings, Marcus re-forms his identity in a changed state, and the paper will end with a conjecture on the significance this reformulation may have for the changed, post- crash state of Ireland.

Biographical note:

Shan-Yun Huang is Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University. His most recent publication is “Modernism against/for the Nation: Joycean Echoes in Post-War Taiwan” in The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism. His current research focuses on Irish novels published after the crash of the Celtic Tiger.

Hiroko Ikeda (SHE) Kyoto University ‘The black earth my earth-bed’: Sweeney, Bashō, and Others in Derek Mahon’s The Snow Party Published in the time of intensifying sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, Derek Mahon’s The Snow Party (1975) has been read in the political context. While it has been pointed out that what underlies the collection is the poet’s sense of guilt due to his flight from his hometown, Belfast, it is worth focusing more attention to his meditation on a state of in-between. The profound, symbolic potential of in- betweenness is variously and extensively explored in The Snow Party, mediated by Mahon’s alter-egos or dramatis personae, such as Mad Sweeney, Matsuo Bashō – the Japanese poet of the 17th century –, a legendary ‘fire king’, a hermit, non-human entities such as disposed tins and mushrooms, and forgotten pagan gods. To remain unsettled between opposites is not necessarily seen to be desirable, but it seems to be inescapable. A close examination of the subtle variation of in-between conditions featuring in The Snow Party will reveal radical implications latent in Mahon’s urge to escape. The main discussion of this paper is based on a minute analysis of his relatively minor poem, ‘Epitaph for Flann O’Brien’, which has a crucial link to ‘The Snow Party’, ‘The Last of the Fire Kings’, and ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’. A vital question to contemplate is why Mahon’s imagination seems to circulate around the threshold of life and death.

Biographical note:

Hiroko Ikeda is a Professor in Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University. She obtained an M.A. from University College, Dublin (1999) and a Ph.D. from Kyoto University (2005). Her recent essays published in JIS include ‘Toward our own Murúch: Reading Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s The Fifty Minute Mermaid’ (2010), ‘The Explorations of Ancient Memories: Shadows of Irish Tradition in W.B. Yeats's The Wanderings of Oisin’ (2016), and ‘“The whole world was alive”: Michael Hartnett’s Inchicore Haiku, Tao, and the Gaelic tradition’ (2018). Her recent publications include ‘Beyond being Irish or Celtic: The Double Vision of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s ‘Cailleach/Hag’ in Feis in Irish Literature in the British Context and Beyond: New Perspectives from Kyoto (Peter Lang, 2020).

Hattie Induni (SHE) independent scholar ‘Where did everyone go?’ Conor O’Callaghan’s Nothing on Earth and the Irish Ghost Estate Despite recovery from the deep recession which followed the Celtic Tiger property boom, Ireland’s built landscape beyond Dublin remains dominated by the ruins of housing estates, left incomplete by the 2008 market crash. Partially inhabited, these increasingly deteriorated sites continue to exist at the margins of Irish society: unmanaged borderlands symbolising national expansion and collapse. This paper will examine the fictionalisation of ‘ghost estates’ in Conor O’Callaghan’s 2016 novel Nothing on Earth. The novel concerns a family who return to Ireland from Germany. They move into the showhouse of an unfinished housing development which, though in the process of being built, is already ‘beginning to resemble some historic ruins’. Gradually, as their environment atrophies, family members disappear one by one. The text presents characters’ lives as dominated by disturbing liminality, bringing to light uneasy boundaries between habitation and abandonment, presence and absence. I argue that O’Callaghan offers a portrait of twenty-first century Ireland characterised by insecurity in both identity and space. I discuss, firstly, the proliferation of material ruin through the novel – exploring how the ghost estate exists as both a future-oriented development and a defunct, historicised site. Secondly, I consider how the theme of human disappearance (and supernatural reappearance) is tied to this decayed, peripheral environment. Lastly, I scrutinise how the border between existence and absence is policed by the narrator, an increasingly suspect priest. Rather than a progressive society, anchored by spatial fixity or control over landscape, O’Callaghan depicts post-recession Ireland as haunted and ambiguous, with idealised modernity moving inexorably into ruin.

Biographical note:

Hattie Induni completed her doctorate at the University of Leeds in 2019, researching ruins and cultural memory in literary representations of Ireland. Her work explores how imaginary landscapes are used to stage political and emotional interventions in narratives of national heritage. Hattie has a BA in English from the University of Cambridge and an MPhil in Irish Writing from Trinity College, Dublin.

Joanna Jarząb-Napierała (SHE) Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań "[Seeing] the Western Road as the Nevsky Prospekt": Frank O'Connor's literary Journeys to Russia

"Michael did for Ireland what Chekhov had done for Russia" (McKeon 1998, p. 85) is the comparison made by W.B. Yeats concerning Frank O'Connor's place on Irish literary scene in the first decades of the twentieth century. O'Connor must have been delighted with such an analogy drawn between him and the world-wide known Russian writer, since the author of The Guests of the Nation presented a cosmopolitan approach towards literature, searching for an artistic inspiration far beyond Irish borders. The paper aims to scrutinize Frank O'Connor's fascination with Russian prose writers as well as answer the question to what extent this outside influence is traceable in his own works. Due to the comparative character of the study, a focus is also placed on the universality of literary language and human experience which allowed an Irish writer to find inspiration in geographically and culturally disparate Russian men of letters. The analysis of chosen prose works by O'Connor presented in the article is an incentive for a wider discussion on the phenomenon of Irish cosmopolitanism, present in the first decades of the twentieth century in Ireland, trying to answer the questions whether it can be treated as a movement and what possible impact it had on the development of modern Irish prose.

Biographical note:

Joanna Jarząb-Napierała is an assistant professor at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. She is the author of a monograph Houses, towns, cities – the changing perception of space and place in contemporary Irish novels (2016) and a co-author of a monograph Between the Self and the Other. Essays on the Poetry of Paul Muldoon (2018). The paper "’[Seeing] the Western Road as the Nevsky Prospekt’ – Frank O'Connor's literary journeys to Russia" is a part of the project "Irish cosmopolitanism – the case of Russian literary and cultural influence on the development of new Irish prose" financed by the National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki).

Alexander Jones (HE) Trinity College Dublin ‘To win the freedom of the air’: Louis MacNeice Across the Borders of Poetry and Radio Belfast-born Louis MacNeice is best known now for his prolific poetry output. During his own time, he also had an equal reputation as a writer and producer of radio plays during his twenty-two-year career with the BBC. However, criticism has struggled to reconcile these two facets of his writing. Critics such as Peter McDonald have noted the connections between MacNeice’s radio work and the parable forms of his late poetry, but the way that his career in broadcasting fits with his wider aesthetic development remains underwritten. The proposed paper seeks to address this critical gap by positing that the radio medium itself enables the development of the parable form due to its contemporaneous association with the psychological. Through novel readings and new archival findings, plays such as The Dark Tower, Prisoner’s Progress, The Careerist, and MacNeice’s 1954 adaptation of Faust, are recontextualised within contemporaneous aesthetic discourses of radio drama in order to better position his plays within the changes that characterised his post-war poetry. It will be demonstrated that a view of MacNeice’s development that crosses the borders between mediums is necessary to account for the way that his poetry increasingly crosses the borders between the conscious and unconscious. These insights will then be used to offer a radical reappraisal of his late poetry and the intellectual sources that constitute the parable form. As such, the paper opens up new possibilities for a holistic view of the work of a writer whose critical reputation has heretofore remained segmented.

Biographical note:

Alexander Jones is a final-year PhD student in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin, where he is writing a thesis on psychology and philosophy of mind in the work of Louis MacNeice. He holds an MA (Hons) in English from the University of Aberdeen and an M.Phil in Irish Writing from Trinity College Dublin. He has reviewed for Irish Studies Review and was the editor-in-chief of Trinity Postgraduate Review for its seventeenth volume

Youngmin Kim (HE) Dongguk University The Trans-bordering Poetics of the Labyrinthine Trench: Ciaran Carson's Belfast Poems [In Memoriam Ciarson Carson] In Ciaran Carson's "Belfast Confetti," a companion poem with "The War Correspondent," the speaker is caught in a war-zone, a "hyphenated line, a burst of rapid fire" recalling a labyrinthine trench-like metaphor: "I know this labyrinth so well – Balaclava, Raglan, Inkerman, Odessa Street – Why can’t I escape? Every move is punctuated. Crimea Street. Dead-end again" (The Irish for No 31). The place and violence in "Belfast Confetti" enlarges its context in time and space, and the map of Belfast is its own site of conflict in the streets around the Shankill and the Falls. Thus, Belfast works as the representation of both literal and symbolic site in which past and present co-exist in perpetual flux. Neil Corcoran argues that Carson’s works register "the full shock of the challenge to recognized modes and forms represented by the realities of post-1968 Northern Ireland," and that Carson’s poetic discourse is "an exfoliating narrative of turnings and returnings, digressions and parentheses, lapses and dissolvings, the haphazard and the circuitous" (216). This trench border of the complex labyrinth experienced by the Great War soldier thus stands as the borderline for an artistic dilemma. For Carson, the Northern Irish situation appeared to be static, although movement is indicated with its underlying complexities in living and writing within the ‘labyrinth’ of "Belfast Confetti." In an interview with Frank Ormsby, Carson confesses that the labyrinth in his work is in fact a return to the trench labyrinth: “For years I’ve had a series of recurrent dreams about Belfast-nightmares sometimes, or dreams of containment, repression, anxiety and claustrophobia . . . often, I’m lost in an ambiguous labyrinth between the Falls and the Shankill” (5). Belfast seems like those dissolving maps of the trenches which exist in different forms as a series of memory maps. However, Carson's true intention is to piece the map “together bit by bit,” thereby referring to the vanished reality of a specific locale as well as to a symbolic projection of space as history in flux.

Biographical note:

Youngmin Kim has been teaching literatures in English and critical theory at the Department of English, Dongguk University since 1991 after he got his PhD at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is currently Jack Ma Chair Professor of Ma Yun Education Fund at Hangzhou Normal University (2019-2020) and Director of Digital Humanities Center at Dongguk University, Seoul, Korea. He has been serving as Editor-in-Chief of Journal of English Language and Literature (2013-2020). His current interest is Yeats, Hopkins, Pound, and modern and contemporary Irish poetry, transnationalism, world literature, and digital humanities. He wrote articles and books on modern and contemporary poetries in English, critical theory, psychoanalysis, comparative literature, world literature, and Digital Humanities.

Wojciech Klepuszewski Koszalin University of Technology “Getting hit, waiting to get hit, recovering; forgetting”: Alcohol and Domestic Violence in Roddy Doyle’s Paula Spencer Duology

Considering that drinking in Ireland has for centuries been an important cultural phenomenon, and, more to the point, has been thematised in a great number of literary texts, it seems quite surprising that representation of alcoholism in Irish literature is relatively marginal. Even more rare are literary texts focused on alcohol- dependent women as well as alcohol-induced domestic violence, which is something writers almost completely ignore. One exception is Roddy Doyle with his sequel of novels, The Woman Who Walked into Doors and Paula Spencer. The novels not only challenge the stereotype of jubilant inebriation as a predominant feature of Irish attitude to drink, but probe into the most horrifying facets of alcoholism. The aim of this paper is to show how Doyle links alcohol(ism) and domestic violence in what seems a comparable pattern of behaviour, one fuelling the other, and seemingly inseparable.

Biographical note:

Wojciech Klepuszewski is associate professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Koszalin University of Technology, Poland. His research area focuses on literary representations of alcohol(ism), mainly that written in the British Isles, but also, in a more comparative dimension European literatures. His latest book is The Proof is in the Writing: Kingsley Amis’s Literary Distillations (2018).

Pawan Kumar (HE) University of Delhi Yeats’s A Vision: A Text Transcending Borders

This paper will offer a reading of Yeats’s A Vision as an exemplar of a text/philosophy that transcends borders, both as a multicultural and a postcolonial text. It is a fact well-researched and documented that Yeats drew his creative fodder from myriad sources: Irish and numerous Western traditions, but also a significant number of Eastern sources. This paper is based on the premise that for Yeats, the philosophical wisdom of the East, especially from India, acted as the fountainhead of his creative inspiration, making his works both cryptic and distinctive at the same time. Starting from his early Indian poems till the last days of his life, one can find that there are numerous Indian ideas, images, and symbols consciously embedded in his work, which make it possible to interpret Yeats’s creative output as an act of decolonization. Edward Said, in his essay “Yeats and Decolonization,” has aptly labelled Yeats as “a poet of decolonization.” As a poet, writer and philosopher, Yeats never believed in the idea of fixed creative borders. On the contrary, he borrowed ideas from different cultures and traditions to create a literary niche. A Vision proves to be an illuminating case in point. Yeats worked on this magnum opus for almost two decades before it took its final shape. During this period, he was constantly engaged in a relentless search for novel and hitherto undiscovered Eastern sources to accord a universal value to his mystical/ mythical system. Although he received most of this knowledge through books (accessed in English or English translation), mystics, poets/writers and scholars whom he met during this period – his desire to travel to India remained unfulfilled – he expanded his creative imagination beyond his political borders to understand the mystical and philosophical ideas from the Far East. The central argument of this paper is that although Yeats’s A Vision appears to be a mystical/mythical text, it is, at its core, a political text that subverts the colonial cultural politics, which in turn accords it the position of a multicultural and postcolonial text.

Biographical note:

Pawan Kumar is an Assistant Professor of English at University of Delhi. He completed his doctoral degree from the Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. His doctoral thesis explores the influence of Eastern esoteric and philosophical systems on the oeuvre of W. B. Yeats. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin under the SPECTRESS project funded by the European Union in the year 2016. He completed his postgraduate and undergraduate degrees from the University of Delhi. In addition to his abiding enthusiasm for and scholarship on Yeats, he is also interested in the fields of mysticism, esotericism, Indian philosophy, Tantra and Hindi literature.

Yi-Peng Lai (SHE) National Sun Yat-sen University Revisiting the Border in Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark and Colm Tóibín’s Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border

In Northern Ireland, borders do not simply exist along national territories. Sometimes they divide a city into diverse parts where the history of conflicts leaves its mark. Even prior to the Troubles, the border town of Derry had had a history of witnessing how territorial border between the Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods shaped the identity and ideology of these borderland communities. This paper attempts to read Seamus Deane’s 1996 Reading in the Dark alongside Colm Tóibín’s 1987 Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border to consider the question of contested border in contemporary Northern Irish writings against the troubled setting up to the 1980s, and how remembering – and re-membering – the border through the unreliable adolescent narrator of the former allows an alternative historical narrative that echoes, and in a way redefines, the Irish oral tradition of folklore and affective storytelling.

Biographical note:

Yi-Peng Lai is Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Sun Yat-sen University. A graduate of Queen’s University, Belfast, she is interested in Joyce studies, contemporary Irish fictions, ecocriticism and (at the moment) border studies. Among other works, her most recent publications include EcoUlysses: Nature, Nation, Consumption (Peter Lang, 2018).

José Lanters (SHE) University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Hazel Ellis’s Gate Theatre Plays of the 1930s in Context Between 1929 and 1936, Hazel Ellis was an actor in several Gate Theatre productions. She subsequently went on to write two plays for the Gate, A Portrait in Marble (1936) and Women without Men (1938); Hilton Edwards had a hand in shaping the texts and also directed the productions. A Portrait in Marble is a historical biographical drama dealing with Lord Byron’s relationship with his lover, Caroline Lamb, and his wife, Annabella Milbanke. Ellis took much of the material for the play from the Life of Byron by Thomas Moore, who is also a character in the play. Women without Men is set in the present in a small private girls’ boarding school (based on the French School in Bray, Co. Wicklow, which Ellis attended); it focuses on the anxieties, obsessions, and petty grievances of the school’s female teachers, all of whom are unmarried. This paper will address these ostensibly very different plays in the social and political context in which they must be understood. These were the years leading up to the adoption of the 1937 Constitution, when much public debate focused on issues of marriage, gender, the family, and the workplace. When Ellis got married in 1937, she ceased all her activities with the Gate Theatre.

Biographical note:

José Lanters is Professor of English and co-director of the Center for Celtic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has published widely on Irish drama and fiction. Her books include The ‘Tinkers’ in Irish Literature (Irish Academic Press, 2008); The Theatre of Thomas Kilroy: No Absolutes (Cork University Press, 2018); and Beyond Realism: Experimental and Unconventional Irish Drama since the Revival, co-edited with Joan FitzPatrick Dean (Brill/Rodopi, 2015). She is a former president of the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) and currently serves as the vice chair for North America on the IASIL executive committee.

Melih Levi (HE) Boğaziçi University “Insulators Other Than Porcelain”: Leslie Daiken and the Art of Voice after Modernism Leslie Daiken (1912-1964) was a poet and writer born in Dublin, whose work in a variety of genres reveals an eclectic set of interests including Jewish life in Dublin, socialist-Marxist movements of his time, children’s games, nursery rhymes and education. His literary works, especially those written during and shortly after the Second World War, stand out for the fresh negotiations they enact with the then- recent legacies of modernism. His 1945 poetry collection, Signatures of All Things, demonstrates a kinship with modernist experimentations with voice, imagery, and collage. Writing toward the end of the Second World War, Daiken utilizes a self- consciously overcharged language and an active referential attitude to test the limits of individual speech against a congested public imagination. Alongside descriptive accounts of family, landscape, and an immigrant’s nostalgia, these poems gather their materials from different fields of reference, stretching the negotiations between public and private registers in modernist Irish literature to worker’s movements, Jewish life in Dublin, Hebrew poets, and the Second World War. Therefore, Daiken deserves to be read alongside poets like Blanaid Salkeld, Austin Clarke, Louis MacNeice, Thomas MacGreevy, and Denis Devlin, as part of that survey of fresh negotiations with modernism in the Irish context. In addition to analyzing the tenor of Daiken’s self-actualization as a poet against a modernist backdrop, this paper will turn to “As the Light Terrible and Holy,” two sequential stories he published in 1946 in The Dublin Magazine, to think about how his Jewish identity informs his experimentation with language.

Biographical note:

Melih Levi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. He studies modern poetry in English, Turkish and German, as well as connections between poetics in the modern period and the Renaissance. He is currently working on a project on Irish poetry between 1930 and 1950.

Lianghui Li (SHE) independent scholar The Disappearing Border between the Living and the Dead: Reality and Anti-Realism in Solar Bones In Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones, Marcus Conway comes back to his house on All Souls’ Day and waits for his wife to join him after work. During his wait, Marcus engages himself with the local news and his memories about his work and his family. These memories gradually lead to Marcus’s awareness of his own death. McCormack’s creative objective of Solar Bones is “the great novel of social overview” (Nolan 97). But his commitment to experimentation should be recorded. As a matter of fact, the relationship between reality and anti-realism bears on the emplotment of the novel. Only by considering Marcus as not materially located or anchored to a single place, can his anxiety over existence be exposed. Even though the revelation about his death occurs at the end of the novel, this ending twist demolishes the comprehensive setting of the story. Examining Solar Bones in light of Mark Currie’s double time system incorporated within the reading process, I argue that Marcus’s process of remembering with continuous acts of recognition is comparable to a reading process. This study of the novel is divided into two parts. The first part explores the endless moments of recognition within the narration of Marcus. The second part explores the conflict between recognition and anticipation, underscoring the loss of futurity in the novel.

Biographical note:

Lianghui Li recently obtained her PhD from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her thesis explores time and anti-realism in modern and contemporary Irish novels. She was a visiting scholar at Dublin City University in 2018. Her publications include “Simultaneous Past and Present in The Sea” and a forthcoming article titled “The Process of Mourning in Anne Enright’s The Gathering.”

Conor Linnie (HE) University College Dublin ‘signposts | Briskly asserting on always on’: Patricia Avis in Post- War Belfast, Dublin and Paris Published in The Listener in November 1958, ‘Peninsula’ by Patricia Avis (1928- 1977) is a poem on the move, following a restless holidaying couple as they drive out toward a remote coastline from a highway of ‘signposts | Briskly asserting on always on’. Avis’s life and literary career were similarly defined by mobility. Born in 1928 to an Irish mother and a wealthy Dutch father in Johannesburg, South Africa, she studied medicine at Oxford though refrained from taking up a formal practice after graduating. Avis drifted instead from the medical world into the vagrant post-war literary circles of Belfast, Dublin, London and Paris. Transnational in her affiliations and influences, she absorbed the divergent influences of Parisian existentialism and British ‘Movement’ poetry in turn, establishing herself within a widening circle of writers, publishers and editors including Philip Larkin, Richard Murphy and Patrick Kavanagh; Charles Monteith and J.R. Ackerley. Faced with the challenges of a male dominated literary scene, Avis nonetheless assumed a range of literary personae during the 1950s and 60s as poet and patron, editor and novelist. Officially becoming an Irish citizen in 1955, her life and writing expand restrictive notions of Irishness and Irish literature at the mid-century, and signal a unique and daring voice in the tradition of Irish women’s writing. This paper locates Avis’s poetry and publishing in the transnational contexts of their production. It considers her work both within and in response to patriarchal conventions and structures of the mid-twentieth century and in relation to her posthumous reception.

Biographical note:

Dr Conor Linnie is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of English, Drama, and Film, University College Dublin. He is co-editor with Dr Maria Johnston of the forthcoming collection of essays Irish Women Poets Rediscovered: Readings in Poetry from the 18th-20th Centuries (Cork University Press, 2021).

James Little (HE) Charles University ‘Comparative liberties’: John Mitchel’s Jail Journal and Austin Reed’s Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict In Jail Journal (1854), John Mitchel describes receiving a hero’s welcome on his arrival in New York as an escaped convict on 29 November 1853. That same day, Austin Reed was enjoying one of his rare periods of freedom from the same state’s penal system. Reed’s recently discovered memoir, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict (completed c. 1858; published 2016) – the earliest known prison memoir by an African American – uses his experiences of incarceration to interrogate the United States’ colour-coded system of constrained freedoms. By contrast, for Mitchel, freedom means escaping from the metropolitan bustle of New York to meet fellow slavery advocates in Virginia, an account which is deleted and only briefly summarised by the editor of his memoir, creating an important ‘textual scar’ in his narrative (Van Hulle 2014). Starting from the position that such instances of textual ‘forgetting’ form a crucial part of cultural memory, this paper will examine the serialised versions of Mitchel’s journal as well as Reed’s authorial manuscript to track the geneses of contrasting narrative strategies in these interrelated accounts of coercive confinement. In doing so, it aims to shed light on the ‘comparative libert[ies]’ afforded to those confined in the nineteenth century, helping us re-evaluate conceptions of freedom in Irish and American forms of republicanism.

Biographical note:

James Little is a postdoctoral researcher at Charles University, Prague and Masaryk University, Brno. Author of Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space (Bloomsbury, 2020), his most recent work can be found in Text and Performance Quarterly, the Irish University Review and the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. His monograph The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas is forthcoming with Bloomsbury and University Press Antwerp (2021).

Philip Mac a’ Ghoill (HE) Trinity College Dublin, and National University of Ireland, Maynooth “Ireland is yours, if you want it”: The theme of Highkingship in Classical Irish Poetry Before the Norman invasion of Ireland in the 12th century, Ireland may have been on track to the successful establishment of a highkingship, though contentions between powerful Irish dynasties meant that a king who might successfully and sustainably unite the island under a single ruler was never appointed. From the 13th century onward, Ireland had been divided into feudal lordships of various sizes, some controlled by the new Anglo-Norman families, others still under the control of native dynasties, and the prospect of establishing an Irish highkingship was now all but impossible. The 13th century also marks the beginning of the classical period for Irish literature, and over the following 400 years the art of bardic poetry would flourish under patronage of the feudal lords all over the island. Highkingship is among the most common themes in poems of praise from this period, where the dream of a Gaelic king ruling all of Ireland was still very much alive. Professional poets called on their patrons to subdue their adversaries, drive foreign invaders back to the sea, and claim what is, after all, their birthright. This theme came to counter that of English rule in Ireland, especially during the Tudor reconquest in the 16th century. This paper explores the theme of highkingship in some 16th century Irish poems addressed to leaders of the Ó Domhnaill dynasty of Tír Chonaill, one of the most powerful Gaelic families in Ireland in this period.

Biographical note:

Philip Mac a’ Ghoill completed his PhD studies with the Department of Irish at Trinity College Dublin in 2020. The primary area of his research is classical Gaelic poetry, which involves the editing, translating and literary analysis of Irish poetry from the 16th and 17th centuries. He is currently teaching in Trinity College Dublin, and in the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

Annalisa Mastronardi (SHE) Dublin City University James Joyce and Contemporary Irish Women Writers: the Case of Nuala O’Connor “Joyce really set my universe on its end. Reading Ulysses changed everything I thought about language, and everything I understood about what a book could do,” declared Bailey’s Prize-winning Eimear McBride in a 2014 article. McBride’s debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013), was very much influenced by James Joyce’s masterpiece. In 2019, author Mary Costello paid homage to Joyce in her second novel The River Capture, a journey into the life and the mind of a middle- aged Joyce scholar obsessed with Leopold Bloom. The same year Nuala O’Connor won the James Joyce Quarterly competition to write the missing story from Dubliners, 'Ulysses', as well as being awarded UK’s 2018 Short Fiction Prize for “Gooseen,” a short story about Nora Barnacle and her first encounter with James Joyce. Recently, the story of Joyce’s wife has been expanded in her novel, Nora, which will be released in Ireland by New Island next month. As Professor Gerardine Meaney points it out, “it appears to be Irish women writers in the twenty-first century who have the most robust relationship with Joyce’s work.” With this in mind, this paper sets out to examine how the work of a twentieth-century author still resonates so much with contemporary Irish women writers, thus overcoming time and gender borders. Particularly, this paper intends to explore its impact on Nuala O’Connor’s writing, placing an emphasis on the abovementioned works.

Biographical note:

Annalisa Mastronardi is a PhD student in Dublin City University researching Joyce’s influence on contemporary women’s writing, specifically in the works of Edna O’Brien, Anne Enright and Eimear McBride. She graduated from high school at the top of her class and was subsequently awarded a scholarship funded by the MIUR (the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research) and was listed on the National Excellence Honours Roll (2012/2013). From 2013 to 2018 she pursued her academic studies at Roma Tre University. Achieving a Bachelor’s in Languages and Foreign Cultures with a First-Class Honours within the three-year-full-time course limit enabled her to receive a grant during the first academic year of her Master’s in Literature and Intercultural Translation. She completed her degree in less than the planned two years and graduated with First-Class Honours. In the Summer of 2018, she was also awarded a scholarship to attend the Trieste Joyce School. Additionally, in June 2019 she received a four-year Post-Graduate Research Scholarship within the School of English, funded by Dublin City University, under the supervision of Professor Derek Hand. In November 2019, Annalisa’s Master’s thesis “James Joyce: Attraction and Repulsion towards the Catholic Church” was awarded a prize of 1000 euros from UAAR (the Italian Union of Atheists, Agnostics and Rationalists), and was published on the UAAR website.

Megane Mazé (SHE) University of Orléans Cross-identity in The Letters of Samuel Beckett

As readers or spectators of Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre, we are invited to constantly cross borders and question the idea of liminality. May they be linguistic, geographical or aesthetic borders, they all aim at showing the intersection between different parts of a margin, reducing thus the characters’ identity to nothing. But when it comes to talking about his self and his work, Beckett mainly refused to make any declaration, drawing a clear line between the private and the public, in other words between the man and the writer. Nevertheless, we have a precise knowledge of his life thanks to his only authorised biography Damned to Fame written by James Knowlson (1996). Adding to that, the publication of part of his correspondence gives a clearer overview of his working process and some interesting details about his everyday life. Beckett was indeed a prominent letter-writer. It must nonetheless be kept in mind that most of his letters remain only accessible through archives. The decision to publish or not to publish his letters has weakened the boundary between the intimate and the public, opening new avenues to study Beckett’s work and to portray Beckett himself. The paper wants to investigate and to show how his correspondence can actually be seen as a liminal space between narrative and self-writing: an “autography” (H. P. Abbott, 1996).

Biographical note:

Megane Mazé is a second year PhD student at the University of Orléans (France). She is as well a Teaching Assistant in the French Department at Trinity College Dublin. Her thesis focuses on the elaboration and dis-figuration of the author persona in The Letters of Samuel Beckett. She has communicated on the subject at international conferences in Brussels, Beckett and the Nonhuman (Feb. 2019), in Paris, Beckett Beyond (March 2019), in Brest, The Unsaid in Images and Texts (June 2019) and in Bordeaux, Sex and Gender in Samuel Beckett (May 2021). She is a co- organizer of the Beckett Brunch 2021 taking place in Dublin on CrossBorder Beckett (April 2021).

Ciara McAllister (SHE) Queen’s University Belfast Beyond the Body’s Borders: Abjection and Masculine Identity Formation in Glenn Patterson’s Burning Your Own Glenn Patterson’s 1988 novel, Burning Your Own, tells the story of Mal Martin’s socialisation into a working-class community on the outskirts of Belfast in 1969. Reading the text primarily in terms of postmodernism, critics such as Klaus Gunner Schneider (1998) have argued that in his work Patterson engages in a process of dismantling the colonial stereotype, opening it up for a discussion about “difference and meaning” (61). However, as John Goodby (1999) has highlighted, in Schneider’s reading of the novel, the social and material contexts of Northern Ireland are discounted, resulting in Patterson’s novel becoming “bizarrely disembodied, simplifying its textual contradictions—particularly in terms of its treatment of gender and class” (66). In this paper, I seek to rectify this by analysing the representation of identity formation in the novel, suggesting that the construction of a unionist, working- class masculinity is completed through a process of abjection that rejects femininity and ‘Others’ (Catholics). Taking Kristeva’s (1982) definition of the abject as that which “does not respect borders” (4), and paying attention to the representation of Otherness, excrement and bodily fluids in the novel, it may be argued that Mal, coming of age at the outbreak of the Troubles, is forced to close the borders that might allow for peace and the acceptance of difference in order to be accepted into an insecure masculine community. Through the metaphor of bodily abjection, as I argue, Patterson suggests that masculine, working-class identity formation involves a severing of ties that results in destruction and hate, but is born out of fear, insecurity and a desire for self-preservation.

Biographical note:

Ciara McAllister is a second year PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast, funded by AHRC’s Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership. Her research project, ‘Gendered and Classed: An Intersectional Approach to the Drama and Fiction of the Troubles’ is supervised by Dr. Michael Pierse and Dr. Mark Phelan at Queen’s and Eilish Rooney at Ulster University. Ciara obtained her Master’s degree in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama from University College Dublin and her undergraduate degree in Drama and English from Queen’s University Belfast.

Christina Morin (SHE) University of Limerick ‘It is I, Melmoth’: Maturin’s Wanderer in the Twenty-First Century Considered something of an oddity, if not a downright insult to decency and good taste, upon its first publication, Charles Robert Maturin’s labyrinthine gothic novel, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) holds a curiously ambivalent but no less significant space in the literary history of Irish literature. Somehow out of time in the sense that it does not fit in the dominant cultural nationalist agenda of early-nineteenth century Irish fiction and is also far too early for the fin-de-siècle gothic of Le Fanu, Wilde, and Stoker, Melmoth is a literary anomaly that upsets conventional Irish literary historiography. As such, it is frequently marginalised in accounts of nineteenth- century Irish fiction. Nevertheless, the novel’s continued cultural impact is clear. Indeed, Melmoth is still in print today and has inspired a number of popular literary adaptations, including Sarah Perry’s most recent novel, Melmoth (2018), and Big Telly Theatre Company’s 2012 production, Melmoth the Wanderer. So expansive is Melmoth’s influence, it is even possible to purchase a Melmoth the Wanderer IPA, brewed by Florida-based Four Stacks Brewing Company. This paper turns attention to the continued relevance of Maturin’s novel and its infamous wanderer to writers today, looking in particular at the examples of Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know (2012) and Perry’s Melmoth. Considering how these works adapt and re-imagine Melmoth and its central Faustian pact for a twenty-first century audience, this paper seeks to explore and celebrate the novel’s long-lasting legacy while also making a case for its centrality to our understanding of nineteenth-century Irish literary production.

Biographical note:

Dr. Christina Morin lectures in English at the University of Limerick. Her publications include The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760-1829 (2018), Traveling Irishness in the Long 19th Century (2017; co-edited with Marguérite Corporaal), Irish Gothics (2014; co-edited with Niall Gillespie), and Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction (2011).

Tapasya Narang (SHE) Dublin City University Adaptations/Non-Translations: Derek Mahon’s Rewriting of Indian Mythology Derek Mahon, a late modernist poet from Northern Ireland, in his recent collections, Raw Material and Echo’s Grove, sets out to translate, what he calls, Indian regional languages literature into English by assuming the persona of an Indian poet, Gopal Singh. Instead of aspiring to provide ‘authentic’ translations, Mahon adapts Indian mythology to address socio-political issues confronting Ireland, India and the rest of the world. While Mahon’s early works address violent conflicts in Northern Ireland and are primarily set in European landscapes, his late works, conceived in a post-conflict society, travel across the world and draw literary inspiration from India and elsewhere. He aspires to build novel metaphoric frames to address neo-colonialism, American hegemony and environment degradation. His poetic, modern and secular adaptations of mythological models from India and elsewhere aim to rise above cultural and geographic particularities. For instance, to stress on the significance of recycling waste and avoidance of its perpetual existence, Mahon rewrites the myth of continual existence of energy, originally written in an Indian epic, Gita, and warns his readers against increasing garbage disposal on the planet. Although translation is often referred to as ‘an act of the impossible’ (A.K. Ramanujan), Mahon attempts to move beyond the translator’s failure and actively rewrites and adapts elements from South Asian languages to address contemporaneity. In the paper, I will assess the imaginative range and mode of address that Mahon posits to challenge twenty first century audience’s intellectual listlessness and nihilism. I shall argue that mythology provides essential tools that allow for evocation of shared human predicament. Mahon’s unsentimental rewriting of myths, keeping in mind contemporary political issues, allows him to narrow the gaps between different cultural communities of the world and envision universal aspirations.

Biographical note:

Tapasya Narang is a PhD student, researching in the School of English, D.C.U. She did her Masters’ from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. In 2018, she participated in the foundation of Irish Association of South Asian Studies. She has involved herself in several projects, such as MELLIE project for language and cultural exchange, which allow for cultural exchanges between Irish Universities’ academia and the rest of the world. She organized a day long symposium on Unpublished works titled, ‘In and Out of Silence: Unpublished Works from India and the World’. She has also received several grants and awards including Government of Ireland-HEA scholarship (declined).

Juan Ignacio Oliva (HE) Universidad de La Laguna/GIECO-Franklin-UAH/Ratnakara Revisiting Border Theories in Irish Eco-Oriented Poetry

This paper aims at revising border theories – such as liminality (Aguirre), “third space” (Bhabha), interstices (Said), or in-betweenness (Giesen) – by using a new concept that is linked to the New Materialism School: that of the ‘ecotones.’ Deriving originally from biological regions, an ‘ecotone’ is a zone of ecological tension between two biomes, that is, two bio-communities that are in tension because of their seemingly antagonistic identity. It should be added that the more opposite they show, the more active they can become an ‘ecocline,’ or transition zone between two contact biomes (or ‘ecotypes’). Obvious similarities with the aforementioned ‘third spaces,’ ‘contact zones’ and ‘interstices’ can be observed, but physicality and corporeality are highlighted in this case, leading into material concepts such as ‘viscous porosity’ of being (Tuana, Alaimo), or ‘animality’ and ‘sustainability,’ that were insignificant or invisible to prior studies. Also, the dividing lines between ‘human’ and ‘Other-than-human’ are blurred or put into question by, for instance, the ‘Cyborg’ theory (Haraway) and other studies about the transition to degrowth societies (Riechmann), and the end of Humanism as such, or so to say, as a binary, dichotomous reality of human and other biological species confronted and in subaltern position. To this purpose, a comparative analysis of some eco-oriented poems (by Eavan Boland, Eileen Carney Hulme, Eamon Grennan, Paul Muldoon, and Seamus Heaney) that use frontiers and dividing lines as metaphors of fragmented realities and identities will be conducted to show the death rattle of the Anthropocene era (Crutzen).

Biographical note:

Juan Ignacio Oliva is Professor of Postcolonial Anglophone Literatures at Universidad de La Laguna (Tenerife, Canaries, Spain). He has edited The Painful Chrysalis. Essays on Contemporary Cultural and Literary Identity (Peter Lang 2011) and Realidad y simbología de la montaña (UAH 2012). He is currently President of the Spanish James Joyce Association (2019-).

Sean Aldrich O’Rourke (HE) University of Limerick Gothic Authorities and the Creation of (Un)Reality in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Fiction The fiction of Irish Gothic writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu often centres on characters living in a reality that resembles our own in its rules about what is materially and socially real, who encounter entities that do not conform to that vision of reality. These characters therefore experience a hesitation between stubbornly denying that which exists outside the scope of reality and accepting it as real, disrupting their own sense of reality. These stories typically have authority figures that are meant to parse through such hesitations. It is their job either to deny the existence of a marauding Gothic other or to identify and defeat that other and thus lead the establishment and maintenance of an imaginative border between the real and unreal. Literary scholars have widely acknowledged the uncertain nature of reality in Gothic fiction. However, less attention has been given to the ways in which this imaginative border between reality and unreality is created and transgressed in works of Gothic fiction. In Le Fanu’s stories, authority figures – usually men in socially respected positions – lead the way in communally identifying what is real and not so their societies can function. These efforts, which often harm those they are meant to protect, are done in service of Victorian, imperialist, and patriarchal norms. My presentation explores these authority figures in Le Fanu’s work, showing his insights on what constitutes authority in Victorian society and on how this flawed, patriarchal, imperialist authority ultimately damages attempts to create a coherent sense of reality.

Biographical note:

Sean Aldrich O’Rourke is a current Government of Ireland – International Education Scholar and a former Fulbright scholar who has written extensively on 19th century Irish literature, especially on the works of Maria Edgeworth and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. He is currently undertaking PhD studies at the University of Limerick where he is studying Le Fanu’s fiction with Dr. Christina Morin.

Kasia Ostalska University of Łódź Post-human: Creative Bordering on the Human and Non-human in Contemporary Irish Literature

The paper shall examine the representations of post-human thought and object-ness in contemporary Irish literature, with a special emphasis on literature written by women authors. The non-anthropocentric perspective will be applied to all analyses. Braidotti explains that "the common denominator for the posthuman is an assumption about the vital, self-organizing and yet non-naturalistic structure of living matter itselff " (2). Acknowledging that such an approach is not solely our day phenomenon, as it was represented in the earlier writing as well, the paper shall study in detail examples from the books (poetry and fiction) published within the last decades. The presentation shall address the issue whether Irish post-human practice has some distinctive features that cannot be observed elsewhere. Among other authors, the paper shall look at the work by Sinéad Morrissey, Caitríona O’Reilly, and Paula Meehan and Anne Enright.

Biographical note: dr hab. Katarzyna Ostalska (née Poloczek) is Assistant Professor in the Department of British Literature and Culture at the University of Łódź, Poland. She is the head of the Posthumanities Research Centre at the Faculty of Philology, University of Lodz. She holds PhD and a postdoctoral degree (habilitation) in literature. Her research is concerned with contemporary Irish and British literature and culture, particularly Irish women poets, gender studies, animal studies, ecofeminism, posthumanism (mainly New Materialisms and object-oriented ontology) and film studies. In her doctoral dissertation, she examined HA/NHA transformations in contemporary Irish women’s poetry; her postdoctoral monograph (2015) Towards Female Empowerment-the New Generation of Irish Women Poets: Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey, Caitríona O’Reilly, and Mary O’Donoghue analysed the areas (with a special emphasis on ecofeminism) from where female empowerment can be drawn. She co-edited with dr Goszczyńska two collections of essays, Changing Ireland: Transformations and Transitions in Irish Literature and Culture (2010) and The Playful Air of Light(ness) in Irish Literature and Culture (2011).

Salomé Paul (SHE) Trinity College Dublin Crossing the Border of Genre/Gender: Women and Tragedy in Marina Carr’s Midlands Trilogy Marina Carr’s Midlands trilogy – The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1996) and By the Bog of Cats… (1998) – dramatizes the tragic lack of fulfilment of women living in the West of Ireland caused by the gender expectation set in the 1937 Irish Constitution. In these three plays, Carr mingles mythological narratives to realistic theatre in order to create a hybrid world simultaneously natural and supernatural able to address not only the current gender issues in Ireland but also the metanarratives sustaining them. And in doing so, Carr’s Midlands trilogy challenges the traditional conception of tragedy. Aristotles conceptualizes tragedy as the dramatization of the unfortunate fate of a high-born male hero. Such a definition of tragedy displays several obvious inaccuracies with the actual practice of that dramatic genre, even in the Greek classical period of the 5th century B.C.E., since quite a number of classical plays deal with the tragic story of a woman, like Sophocles’s Antigone or Euripides’s Medea to name a few. Yet, women in tragedy are traditionally perceived either as the “victims” or the “torturers,” but never as the heroic character performing the action. Carr challenges that very conception of tragedy in the Midlands trilogy as its protagonists are the subject of the dramatic action. She thus crosses the generic border usually associated with tragedy in order to offer a creative renewal of that dramatic genre so it would adequately reflect women’s experience in Ireland at the end of the 20th century.

Biographical note:

Dr. Salomé Paul completed her PhD in May 2020. Her thesis, “Contemporary Variations upon the Greek Tragic. The Myth in Sartre, Anouilh, Camus, Paulin, Kennelly and Heaney’s Theatre”, which was jointly prepared at Sorbonne University and University College Dublin, explores the political use of Greek tragedy during the twentieth-century war and warlike periods. A monograph based on her thesis is in the process of publication. She is a recipient of the 2020 Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship. She currently works on a monograph examining the feminist transposition of Greek tragedy in Marina Carr’s theatre at Trinity College Dublin under the mentorship of Dr. Melissa Sihra.

Germán Asensio Peral (HE) University of Almería ‘the demolition of the Kennedy mud pie’: The Looming Presence of John F. Kennedy in Brian O’Nolan’s Late Writings

In a letter of May 8, 1965, Irish writer Brian O’Nolan (1911-66), better known as Flann O’Brien or Myles na gCopaleen, hinted that his last, and eventually unfinished, novel Slattery’s Sago Saga would “turn out to be a comic but unmistakable attack on the Kennedy family,” while also adding that “President Jack will be let off lightly for undoubtedly he had some fine qualities” (O’Brien, 497). References to the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy (1917-63), famously of Irish Catholic descent, can be found not only in Slattery’s Sago Saga, but also across many of O’Nolan’s late writings, including his Irish Times column Cruiskeen Lawn (1940-66), and his personal correspondence. Wealthy, glamorous, and charismatic, Kennedy was – and still is – seen by many as one of the most successful Irish-American individuals in history, living proof that the downtrodden Irish could make an impact on the world. Somehow prophetically, his short presidency coincided with Ireland’s own period of economic and diplomatic expansion following the country’s period of stagnation at all levels – financial, social, and cultural – during 1940s and 1950s. Following Kennedy’s official visit to Ireland in June 1963, Anthony Cronin, O’Nolan’s biographer, revealed the writer’s fixation with the American President, declaring that O’Nolan “had become imaginatively obsessed with the subject of Irish America” (Cronin, 339). Bearing in mind his professional and personal interest in political affairs as demonstrated by his past career as a civil servant and Private Secretary to government ministers, as well as by the abundance of political commentary in Cruiskeen Lawn, O’Nolan’s multiple observations on the President merit detailed examination. Therefore, this paper seeks to examine a selection of O’Nolan’s letters and Cruiskeen Lawn columns, and Slattery’s Sago Saga as a whole, with the aim of determining the extent to which O’Nolan’s fascination with Kennedy shaped his later writing and his ambivalent vision of the Irish political milieu of the time.

Biographical note:

German Asensio obtained both his bachelor’s degree and his master’s degree in English Studies at the University of Almería (Spain), both with honorary distinctions. He completed his PhD dissertation at the University of Almeria (2020) on Irish writer Brian O’Nolan (1911-1966), also known as Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, and mid-twentieth century Irish politics in his Cruiskeen Lawn column (1940-1966). He is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Almería (Department of Philology/ English Division) and has published articles and delivered papers on O’Nolan’s novels, short stories and columns.

Katharina Rennhak (SHE) University of Wuppertal Cross-Gender Narrations: Irish Women Writing Men “The patriarch is still at large in Irish society”, writes Caoilinn Hughes in The Irish Times (15 July 2020). Her novel The Wild Laughter (2020) deals with this tradition by narrating contemporary Ireland from the perspective of a young farmer and constructing a plot that revolves around this man’s “beloved, beneficent father.” In my paper I will demonstrate that contemporary Irish and Northern Irish women writers, more generally, contribute to reconstructing concepts of masculinity. Anna Burns’s Milkman not only provides a sharp analysis of the toxic masculinity of Northern Irish paramilitaries; her novel also imagines alternative male role models, such as “the real milkman”. Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015) gives almost as much narrative space to the male members of the Madigan family as to its female members. Like Hughes Jan Carson focuses on issues of fatherhood in The Fire Starters (2019). Sara Baume’s Spill Simmer Falter Wither (2015) and Mary Costello’s The River Capture (2019) also feature male narrator-protagonists, to name but two more examples. While gender critics still tend to believe with Virginia Woolf that “women do not write books about men,” Irish women have certainly always ‘written men.’ I will briefly chart a tradition since the 1790s which demonstrates that Irish female novelists have often put male characters in the centre of attention in order to analyse the causes and effects of patriarchal (and other) power structures and to construct alternative identities. On this basis, I will comment on forms and functions of the re-imagining of masculinity in selected novels by contemporary women writers.

Biographical note:

Katharina Rennhak is professor of English Literary Studies at the University of Wuppertal. She has published mainly on British and Irish Romanticism and contemporary fiction and is the author of two monographs, the more recent one dealing with the narrative construction of masculinities in British and Irish women writers' novels around 1800 (WVT, 2013). Among her edited collections are Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750–2000 (with S. Frantz; Lexington, 2010), Narrating Ireland in Different Genres and Media (WVT, 2016); and Postfaktisches Erzählen? Post-Truth, Fake News, Narration (with T. Weixler et al.; de Gruyter, 2021). Walter Macken: Critical Perspectives, co-edited with S. Heinen has just been accepted for publication by Cork University Press. She is president of the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies (EFACIS), a member of the IASIL Executive (European Representative), and a board member of the Center for Narrative Research/Zentrum für Erzählforschung (CNR/ZEF) at the University of Wuppertal.

Laura Sheary (SHE) Queen’s University Belfast Channels of the Self: Crossing Borders between Sound and Language in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is a novel that travails the inner workings of its protagonists mind, from childhood innocence through to the troubled beginnings of adulthood. The narrator’s formation (or un-formation) of subjectivity is told through fractured prose which conveys the voice of a girl who has suffered at the actions of others and lived through patterns of abuse and trauma. McBride writes in an experimental, pre-stream of consciousness style to express what she terms “the moment before language becomes formatted thought.” She crosses the imaginary border that exists between sound and language, utilising techniques such as rhythm, rhyme and repetition. The result is an overwhelming soundscape that presses the reader unbearably close to the psychic world of the girl as it comes apart. This is a space in which external dialogue merges with thought; where words break away from direct meaning and communicate in symbolic, atmospheric ways. In analysing the use of these sound techniques, rather than focus on how the author employs them, we most focus on why. What is it about the portrayal of a traumatised internal world, a psychological landscape filled with borders, that benefits from this convergence of forms? This paper will discuss McBride’s traversing of creative borders and attempt to understand her motivation for doing so, focusing on the challenges/impossibilities that go along with attempting to portray the multiplicity of inner voice and the experience of trauma. What effect does journeying along these creative perimeters have on the reader?

Biographical note:

Laura Sheary is a Creative Writing PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast. She is currently working on a novel that portrays multiple, intertwining voices. Her research focuses specifically on the intersections that exist between sound and language and how fiction writers utilise these connections. She writes and performs music as part of Kyoto Love Hotel, an Irish electronic duo.

Audrey Robitaillié (SHE) independent scholar Lines of Flight and Nomadic Border-Crossings: Negotiating Boundaries in Colum McCann’s Apeirogon This paper will explore both the imagery of birds and the significance of borders in the creation of a reterritorializing process for the characters of Colum McCann’s latest novel, Apeirogon (2020). The Deleuzian concept of “line of flight” expresses the deterritorialization undergone by a protagonist (in the case of literature), and has originally nothing to do with flying. Nomads, for Gilles Deleuze, are deterritorialized beings who, because they do not belong to a territory (be it geographical or metaphorical), challenge them and become agents of change. McCann’s acclaimed novel brings together these concepts through the story of two bereaved Middle-Eastern fathers. This study argues that McCann uses the avian imagery to reflect on the borders that are crossed in the narrative and illustrate the emotions of the uprooted, and rerouted, characters. Constantly crossing boundaries, both physical, geographical, political, and metaphorical, the nomadic characters of Bassam and Rami, once deterritorialized by the history and politics of Israel and Palestine, reterritorialize themselves through storytelling. Biographical note: Dr Audrey Robitaillié’s PhD thesis, which received a special commendation from the Michaelis-Jena Ratcliffe Prize for Folklore Studies in 2018, was on changelings in literature. These folkloric figures who cross borders have led me to study migration and border literature: his latest article on the migrant geographies of Hugo Hamilton’s work was published in Environment, Space, Place in 2019.

Julie-Ann Robson (SHE) The University of Sydney Oscar Wilde’s essays on Ethics and Aesthetics: ‘With some remarks upon the importance of doing nothing’ Oscar Wilde’s reputation as aesthete – recognisable today in the iconic 1882 photographs by Napoleon Sarony, and for Wilde’s contemporaries in a series of foppish cartoons in the magazine Punch – belies a serious commitment to examining the philosophical relationship between art and the society in which it is produced. His early musings on the role not only of art, but art criticism, first analysed in his Oxford notebooks and articulated in his university essay ‘The Rise of Historical Criticism’, would be fleshed out in his writing, both in fiction and his critical essays. The more mature expression of his aesthetic is carefully articulated in his later essays, particularly in his 1891 collection ‘Intensions’. This paper will examine this critical collection of essays, which includes two Socratic- style dialogues, and focus on the relationship between the ‘practical organisation of life that we call society… which is the beginning and basis of morals’, and art, which the essays as a whole argue should be ‘treated, not from the moral, but from the purely aesthetic point of view’ (Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’). This point of view, informed by a deep understanding of classical philosophy filtered through the lens of Keats, Gautier, Baudelaire, and a Pater, argues that art is removed from the sphere of action. Drawing on Aristotle’s Ethics, Wilde separates action – deemed part of society, and therefore intrinsically yoked to legal, political, and even Darwinian notions of limitation – and contemplation, which is the sphere of art, and of art criticism.

Biographical note:

Dr Julie-Ann Robson teaches literature and drama at the University of Western Sydney. She has published on Irish and Australian drama, the Gothic, and on Oscar Wilde. She has a keen interest in Wilde’s aesthetic, particularly the relationship between his critical and literary writings. She is also a founding member of the National Alliance for Public Universities in Australia.

Ketlyn Mara Rosa (SHE) Trinity College Dublin Embodiment and Perception: ’71 and a Sensorial Journey across Divided Belfast

The issue of the Troubles in Northern Ireland has been massively present in films that represent the contemporary political situation of the country, at times foregrounded as a central point of the narrative or as a historical backdrop for action, thriller films and other genres. The relevance of the continuous conversation about the topic is raised by the appearance of contemporary films that, although years apart from the Good Friday agreement, continue to explore different facets and interpretations of the events. Films such as ’71, directed by Yann Demange in 2014, help establish the flow of dialogue regarding the Troubles, the memories of the past, and their consequences in society. This paper proposes to analyze how the film ’71 conveys images of violence to the body, both British and Irish, and illuminates potential significances related to identity and memory, foregrounding the sensorial perception of the characters as a major catalyst of experiences and meanings. By focusing on a chain of characters whose lives are, in different proportions, touched by violence, the film attempts to represent an urban and sectarian context that relies on unrestrained violent acts from all sides. Such tumultuous environment is portrayed in a way that appeals to the senses, in a deep engagement with the body and the immersive effects of violence. The representation of the violated body and its sensorial spectrum adds to the notion of conflict cinema as an intimate portrayal of trauma and urban warfare.

Biographical note:

Dr Ketlyn Mara Rosa is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Film Studies, Trinity College Dublin, carrying out a research funded by the Irish Research Council on urban conflicts cinema in Northern Ireland and Brazil. She holds a Master’s and Doctoral Degree in English: Linguistic and Literary Studies from Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC – Brazil). Her research emphasis is on war cinema, having worked with films that portray WW2, Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and currently, late twentieth-century urban warfare in Northern Ireland and Brazil, analyzing embodied violence and the possible meanings it conveys in cinematic representations.

Aileen R. Ruane (SHE) Concordia University “Un imaginaire féminin riche, sans censure et complètement assumé”: Crossing Creative and Ideological Boundaries via Proactive Translation and Adaptation in Jean Marc Dalpé’s Molly Bloom (2014) Adaptation problematises the creative boundaries between genres, creating a space for the novel to become “theatrical” through performance, for example. This act takes on new dimensions when it involves translation, which raises questions concerning the ethical and creative borders separating adaptation from translation, when the former encompasses appropriating a text in the target culture. Adapting and translating Irish literature and theatre outside of Ireland involves the processes of globalisation, most notably in the relationship between canonical works and the impressions of Irishness and/or the Irish nation that they engender (Lonergan 2009). The tension between adaptation, translation, and globalisation is striking in Jean Marc Dalpé’s theatrical reworking of the “Penelope” chapter as Molly Bloom (2014) from James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses. In his dramatic text, Dalpé adapts and translates the celebrated interior thoughts of the eponymous Molly as a monologue play addressed to an audience in order to give voice to “a mind that is free, feminine, intimate, and also universal” (Demers). Dalpé also reveals that, for translators, the essential task is to imagine an ideological interpretation destined for the stage rather than a mirror-image of the source text that respects its generic conventions, however revolutionary they may be in this case. In evoking theatrical translation as inherently ideological, Dalpé effectively blurs the borders between official and alternative interpretations of canonical Irish novels. Through a comparative approach that will incorporate translation and adaptation theories (Louis Jolicoeur [1992], Michael Cronin [1996, 2003], Sherry Simon [2010, 2019], and Linda Hutcheon [2013], respectively), this paper argues that Dalpé’s theatrical adaptation of Joyce is productive translation, which appropriates Molly Bloom’s interior monologue to underscore potentially feminist themes in a transnational context. In exteriorising this monologue, Dalpé engages with the performative force of Joyce’s own imaginative use of language in order to reimagine a liberated woman.

Biographical note:

Aileen R. Ruane holds a PhD in Études littéraires from Université Laval in Quebec City, in which she analysed the notions of performativity, identity, and alterity in Québécois translations of classical and contemporary Irish theatre. She is presently an FRQSC funded postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University in Montreal, working on a project provisionally titled “Performative Femininity and Performing Feminisms: Translated Theatre in Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries Quebec and Ireland.” Her work can also be seen in the forthcoming Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland (Palgrave Macmillan).

Irina Ruppo (SHE) NUI Galway J. M. Synge in Israel The borders involved in cross-cultural migration of literary works are not only spatial. As the case of the Hebrew and Israeli reception of the writers of the Irish Literary Revival indicates, the temporal borders often prove more difficult to cross. The connections between the history of Zionism and the Irish Revival have been noted (Wright 1996, Eliash 2007, Suzman 2016). Moreover, while the subject has not received a great deal of critical attention, there seem to be significant similarities between the political thrust of the Irish Literary Revival and the Hebrew literature that emerged in the period of early Zionism. However, the works of the Irish revival only reached Israel in the 1960s, with the productions of J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, which was followed then in the 1980s by Riders to the Sea. What did these plays mean for the Israeli public? Did Synge’s complex response to nationalism and revivalism allow the public to reflect on the core ideology of the state? In answering these questions, this analysis of the 1960s and 1980s productions of Synge’s plays in Israel addresses a larger issue, namely the need to study Romantic Nationalism as a cross-national phenomenon (Leersen 2006, Campbell and Perraudin 2013). It allows us to examine the temporal axis of the cross-national impact of the revivalist ideology.

Biographical note:

Irina Ruppo is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Trinity College Dublin, and the National University of Ireland Galway. A past recipient of the IRC fellowship, she is the author of Ibsen and the Irish Revival (Palgrave, 2010) and Ibsen and Chekhov on the Irish Stage (with and in memory of Ros Dixon, Carysfort 2012). She teaches in the School of Humanities, NUI Galway, where she also manages the Academic Writing Centre.

Andrew Sanders (HE) Texas A&M University San Antonio “And we were proud in the knowledge that we were the Jews”: The Poetry of Sammy Duddy and the Future of Ulster Loyalism Sammy Duddy, a founding member of the Ulster Defence Association and its former political relations officer, devoted his life to loyalism. An early member of the UDA, he came out of retirement to help deal with the rising tensions across loyalism and a series of internecine feuds. Several attempts were made on his life during these years before his death, in 2007, from a heart attack. Duddy’s artistic side provided loyalist clubs with country and western singing and a drag act known as “Samantha”. In 1983 he published a collection of poetry, Concrete Whirlpools of the Mind, from which the poem “Our Way” provides the title for this paper. Duddy wrote this poem to explore his view that the loyalists of Northern Ireland could acquiesce in their own fate and face the extinction of their identity and culture. Today, loyalist communities in Northern Ireland continue to struggle. The west Belfast where Duddy grew up is one of the most deprived communities in the European Union, with major employment, health, and education issues. Organizations working in peace and reconciliation projects across Northern Ireland report low involvement among youths from loyalist areas in their projects. In this paper I will draw on Duddy’s 1983 writings and offer analysis of the future he envisioned for his community, and counterpose them with observations about the current status of Northern Ireland. I will consider the potential impact of the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union and the possible impact on loyalist communities and Ulster loyalism more generally.

Biographical note:

Andrew Sanders is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University San Antonio. A PhD graduate of Queen’s University Belfast, he is the author of The Long Peace Process: The United States of America and Northern Ireland 1960-2008, Inside the IRA: Dissident Republicans and the War for Legitimacy, and the co-author of Times of Troubles: Britain’s War in Northern Ireland.

Chiara Sciarrino (SHE) University of Palermo How Virtual Is the World of The Visiting Hour? The Pandemic Experience portrayed by Frank McGuinness In my paper, I intend to present and analyze the latest play by Frank McGuinness, The Visiting Hour. Directed by Caitríona McLaughlin, the play was written by Frank McGuinness during the lockdown and features Stephen Rea and Judith Roddy as the elderly father and his daughter who visits him in his nursing home during the Covid Pandemic. The play, which is going to be staged at the Gate Theatre in late April 2021 aspires to be an all-interesting, updated look at Ireland living at a time of big economic, social, interrelational difficulties caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. How do feelings and familial relationships survive through these hard times? What can be said during the only time allowed to a father living in a nursery home and a daughter, perched outside his window, as close as the pandemic allows? As the menace of time takes over during the conversation, memories movingly unfold and are shared by an elderly figure who looks back at his own life. Yet, a look from the outside is also conveyed through the eyes of the daughter, who remembers differently and moves between the here and there, the past and the present, holding the ability to look ahead despite everything. As the play will be performed and recorded in the Gate auditorium, and streamed to audiences around the world in late April 2021, I am also interested in examining the impact its digital showing will have on paper and online newspapers, journals and magazines.

Biographical note:

Chiara Sciarrino is an Associate Professor in English and Irish Studies at the University of Palermo. She was member of Efacis Committee and organised the Efacis Conference in 2015. She has publications on the influence of Italian culture in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama and on the translations of James Joyce’s works into Italian. She is currently editing a volume of essays on Irish Theatre with Carocci publishing house which will be out by the end of 2021.

John Singleton (HE) NUI Galway Bypassed Ireland: Forgotten Places in Contemporary Irish Fiction By the end of the 20th century in Ireland, a much-celebrated program of investment in transport and telecommunication, financed by the EU, had created umbilical cords spanning out from Dublin, traversing the island. These networks linked disparate regions of the island that had been, at least ideologically, constructed through a series of binary polarities – North/South, East/West, Rural/Urban, Gael/Jackeen – and realised a sense of national unity beyond earlier prescriptive ideologies. Little attention was paid, however, to how such networks bypassed communities and further isolated those who remained in the overlooked middle ground. My paper addresses how a new generation of authors have shifted their attention onto these hinterlands between the ‘city’ and the ‘country’. I argue their work eschews the draw of clichéd binary polarities – cosmopolitan capital or virginal Gaelic outpost – and focuses on the sequestered, heterotopic spaces of modern Ireland: the suburban- rural town, the detached (ghost)estate, the post-industrial town, the direct provision centre. Specifically, I will examine Sarah Baume’s Spill Simmer Falter Wither, Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond and Colin Barrett’s Young Skins. These works explore an Ireland which benefited little from the Celtic Tiger and suffered most after the 2008 financial crash. And which was then unconsciously forgotten or deliberately hidden. I will discuss the topopoetic production of space in these works to argue that they reflect a changing relationship between a bypassed centre and the focus on the peripheries in the Irish socio-cultural understanding of itself. This paper question if modern Irish identity has become less a question of ‘what is my language?’ and more a case of ‘where is my place?’

Biographical note:

John Singleton is a PhD candidate at NUI Galway. He submitted his PhD for examination in December 2019 and is awaiting his Viva in March 2020. His doctoral thesis explores the topopoetic production of space in John McGahern’s novels. It examines the changing presentations of space, particularly domestic space, across the novels and questions how the specific socio-cultural context of each novel is related to the narrative form and vision. John has published in the Review of Irish Studies in Europe and in NPPSH Reflections. His research was funded by the NUI Galway Doctoral Scholarship and the NUI Galway Write-Up Bursary. In 2017, he received the IASIL Professor Warner Hubert Travelling Scholarship.

Jennifer A. Slivka (SHE) Virginia Wesleyan University Paradoxical Freedom in This Hostel Life by Melatu Uche Okorie In This Hostel Life (2018), Melatu Okorie writes from her own experiences as a former asylum seeker from Nigeria living in Ireland. Those stories range from a woman trapped in the dreary existence of direct provision, to a young student’s struggles to express her daily experiences with racism, to a mother of twins, still living in Nigeria, who fights to save the lives of her newborn twins who are taken away because of an ancient superstition. Each of these stories can be considered a presentation of various stages a female refugee endures in her quest for a life that recognizes her own subjectivity. Even though her stories feature female protagonists of differing ages and backgrounds, the common thread throughout is that the only kind of freedom available for these women is a paradoxical one. In the first story, direct provision is a key step for asylum seekers in gaining permanent residency in Ireland, yet the institutional nature of it and the enforced control over every mundane aspect of their basic living is anything but liberating. Indeed, one cannot help but think of Ireland’s history of enforced dependency and institutionalization, especially for women. In the second story, the young student’s piece of writing, inspired by her own experiences of daily racism and isolating loneliness, is criticized and invalidated by her classmates who do not and cannot understand her experiences as an immigrant woman of color living in Ireland. In both her narrative and the frame story, the protagonist seeks freedom through expression, but her voice is silenced because her story is too “negative” to be believable or more accurately, not palatable enough for white, Irish audiences. In the final story, the protagonist finally brings honor to her husband’s family because she is pregnant with a son (after having a daughter), but when she discovers that she is having twin sons (a cultural taboo) it quickly turns to dishonor. The story is left unfinished as she desperately searches for her babies before the men who took them kill them, which again, interestingly parallels Ireland’s mother and baby homes. While each story seemingly closes with an uncertain ending, the theme throughout the collection highlights how their agency and voice are taken away through actions that are presented to them as “what’s best for them.”

Biographical note:

Jennifer Slivka is an Associate Professor of English, who also teaches in the Women’s & Gender Studies program at Virginia Wesleyan University, where she is also the Director of the Office of Gender & Sexuality Equity. Her research focuses on representations of women’s experiences, the home, trauma, and personal and national identities in contemporary Irish women’s writing. She has published articles on the works of Edna O’Brien, Kate O’Riordan, Jennifer Johnston, and Philip Roth. Most recently, she has served as co-editor and contributor to a special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities titled, “Epidemics and Disease in Ireland: Literature, Culture, Histories.”

Daniela Theinová (SHE) Charles University Language, Crisis and Ecology in Ailbhe Darcy’s Poetry The growing consciousness of ecological breakdown goes hand in hand with the need for constantly revised terminology. With each new updating, climate scientists, commentators and organisations use stronger language to drive home the emergency of the crisis. This emphasis on topicality seems to be incompatible with the slow momentum of poetic language. Given its reliance on the image and metaphor, how can the language of poetry relate to the “direct existential threat” faced by the Anthropocene (Gutterres 2019)? One of the most prominent voices in Irish poetry today, Ailbhe Darcy touches upon various global issues and offers speculations about the future of the planet. In her ekphrastic poems, centos and “translations” she presents images of a world which is at the same time very much up to date and on the brink of disappearance, and comments on the problematic relationship between art and ethics. My paper reflects on how Darcy’s poetry explores borderlines between genres, cultures, as well as the human and nonhuman, and how she ultimately refutes any clear-cut distinction between ecology and culture (Zapf 2008). Language is shown to be painfully inadequate in face of various crises and catastrophes. But while words are scarce, they are also never the same, as one of the poems proposes. It is in this contradictory sense of deficiency on the one hand and possibility of renewal on the other that Darcy’s language and its ecological work originates. Biographical note:

Daniela Theinová is a senior lecturer at Charles University in Prague. She has contributed to Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish poetry and Selected Poems / Tacar Dánta (both from Wake Forest University Press, 2017 and 2020). Her published Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry with Palgrave Macmillan in 2020.

Naoko Toraiwa (SHE) Meiji University Balancing on the Border: Poems by Sinead Morrissey Reflecting on the postcolonial and so-called globalising conditions of the world since the late 20th century, the practice of connecting to (narrating or reflecting, appropriating, adapting, or referring to) other art work(s) has become more and more active in contemporary literature. While any art work creates the border area (or the form of the artwork itself is the border) between the artist and the audience where the imaginations both sides encounter and interact, those which refer to other works highlight such interactions emphatically. In the 21st century, the period when the importance of parallax views is proposed, those artworks that show connections with other artworks function as portals to convey the different views of the writers or the artists in inviting various views of the audience/reader. The artistic borders with such portals are not rigid, as are the hard-borders often constructed between certain nation states, for example, with different religious denominations. The borders created by artworks transform, grow, metamorphose continuously as the time and space where the audience belongs also changes minute by minute. As the titles of her books – Between Here and There, The States of the Prison, Parallax, or On Balance indicate, one of the main concerns of Sinead Morrissey is ‘space’, or rather, the states of the space which is divided by some kind of border into certain areas. Morrissey, often referring to other artworks, shows rich interactions in the borderlands between her work and other works. This paper will discuss Morrissey’s poems marking the border between the past and the future, here and there, between the artist as the reader and the creator.

Biographical note:

Naoko Toraiwa read English at Waseda University (B.A. 1976), University of Tokyo (M.A. on Virginia Woolf, 1986) and Sussex University (Ph. D. 2005 on Medbh McGuckian). She has been publishing articles on contemporary Irish writings, including Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon and Sinead Morrissey. She teaches at Meiji University in Tokyo and she was the president of IASIL Japan (2015-2018).

Kristina Varade (SHE) Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York Joyce and Sorrentino: Breaking Barriers of Genre and Fiction Through Aesthetic Playfulness This paper will consider the nature of Irish and Italian fiction to disrupt borders of genre and fiction through an emphasis upon visual and written aesthetics of playfulness. This comparative work examines the voyage to self-consciousness of the individual through the city in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza. In analysing Joyce’s novel and Sorrentino’s film, many stylistic, visual and textual similarities arise, including the centrality of flânerie to a voyage of self-awareness; how stylistic and metaphorical experimentation advance the ‘tricks’ of realism and put commonly-held beliefs about modernist and postmodernist works into question; and, most importantly, how urbanism and the city as a protagonist facilitate the growth of self-consciousness through the experiences of Leopold Bloom and Jep Gambardella. Despite linguistic, social, and cultural barriers, I shall demonstrate that early twentieth century text and twenty-first century film can effectively break through spatial and temporal barriers in order to span genres and national identities. In doing so, I refute Calvino’s assertion, in the essay ‘Film and Cinema,’ that ‘Cinema and novel have nothing to teach each other and nothing to learn from each other.’

Biographical note:

Kristina Varade is an Associate Professor in Modern Languages at BMCC, CUNY. She is currently on sabbatical as a Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin’s Long Room Hub and at University College Dublin’s Humanities Institute. Her research interests include contemporary fiction from Ireland and Italy, Anglo-Irish travel writing concerning Italy, and Cultural Studies. She has published in New Hibernia Review, Annali d’Italianistica, and Irish Studies Review, and has been awarded numerous grants for her interdisciplinary research.

Ian R. Walsh (HE) NUI Galway Performing Opening Borders: Productions of W.B Yeats’s Plays 1957-1965 and the Programme for Economic Expansion Between 1957-1965 plays by W.B Yeats enjoyed a frequency of production in Ireland at the Lyric theatre, the Abbey theatre and as part of The Dublin Theatre Festival not to be repeated until the early 1990s. This paper seeks to examine these productions in relation to the changing historical and cultural contexts of this period brought on by a radical change in policy by the Fianna Fáil government, who abandoned their own previous attempts at national self-sufficiency through protectionism in favour of promoting free trade and an open economy. The new plans for trade famously contained within Ken Whitaker’s Programme for Economic Expansion (1958) encouraged foreign investment but also included policies ‘designed to increase livestock output, rather than tillage’ (Daly 23). This was not a plan for industrial revolution in Ireland but one that hoped to show growth and stability in the Irish economy in order to eventually gain membership of the EEC to benefit from the farming subsidies it offered. Thus the often-held notion that Whittaker’s plans, executed by the Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Seán Lemass, sounded ‘a death knell for a traditional Ireland’ (Browne 231) is overstated. A way forward was desired that would allow for modernisation without losing national values and markers of an Irish identity established in the struggle for independence. I will explore how such tensions were registered in productions of Yeats’s plays in the period, which were considered international and modern in their formal experimentalism but national in their subject matter and source material. Biographical note: Dr. Ian R. Walsh is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at NUI Galway. Books include: Experimental Irish Theatre: After W.B Yeats (Palgrave, 2012); The Theatre of Enda Walsh (Carysfort/Peter Lang, 2015) co-edited with Mary P. Caulfield; Cultural Convergence: The Gate Theatre, Dublin 1928-1960 (Palgrave, 2020) co-edited with Ruud van den Beuken and Ondrej Pilny; Staging Europe at The Gate Theatre, Dublin, Review of Irish Studies in Europe, 4.1 (2021) co-edited with Siobhán O’Gorman and Elaine Sisson; Contemporay Irish Theatre and Performance: Histories and Theories (Palgrave, forthcoming 2021) co-written with Charlotte McIvor.

Tom Walker (HE) Trinity College Dublin Yeats and the Writing of Edwardian Portraiture Portraits were important to W.B. Yeats. He sat to a remarkable number of them, including of course those produced by his father. He also consciously presented his writings in relation to them, such as through the different portraits printed as frontispieces to four volumes of his 1908 Collected Works. That same decade saw the wider Revival becoming invested in the painted portrait as well: in 1901 Hugh Lane commissioned John Butler Yeats to paint a series of portraits of prominent Irishmen, such as John O’Leary and George Moore – a task that in the end William Orpen would complete; Lane also underwrote Antonio Mancini’s 1906 trip to Dublin to paint the portrait of Lady Gregory (a trip during which he also sketched Yeats). Yet while the biographical and historical circumstances of this intertwining of Yeats and the Revival with the portrait during the 1900s have received significant attention, such investments have yet to be analysed in relation to the prominence of the portrait more generally at this time, especially within the British art market. This paper undertakes such analysis by exploring the contemporaneous discourses that then surrounded portraiture, both as regards discussion of contemporary art and the burgeoning discourses of art history. It also seeks to link such sources, contexts and discourses to Yeats’s growing textual evocation of the portrait and the self-portrait from the 1900s on through his poetry and prose (autobiographical, critical and speculative).

Biographical note:

Tom Walker teaches in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. His book Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time was published by Oxford University Press in 2015, and was awarded the Robert Rhodes Prize for Literature by the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Loic Wright (HE) University College Dublin “Beggarly City Clerkships:” Breadwinning and Conflicted Masculinity in Twentieth Century Irish Fiction Lee Dunne’s Goodbye to the Hill (1965) follows the career trajectory of Paddy Maguire in the civil service and his growing disillusionment with office work, whereas Anthony Cronin’s The Life of Riley (1964) opens with Riley’s decision to leave his stifling job in the civil service. Employment numbers in the civil service increased from the 1920s onwards and equipped Irish men with the chance to achieve ideals of masculinity by means of breadwinning. There are, however, significant tensions present in the depictions of careers in the Irish civil service hinged on its incongruence with discourses on Irish masculinity. Post-independence discourses surrounding Irish masculinity praised rural agrarian manhood and dismissed sedentary office work as an emasculating career. Recurring segments in Standish O’Grady’s All Ireland Review regularly attacked clerical careers as damaging to Irish masculinity while twentieth century election campaigns and cultural discourses extolled rural, physical masculinity as authentically Irish. Contradictorily, while agrarian work was seen as rugged and masculine, economic and political neglect of rural Ireland meant agrarian careers provided little opportunity to Irish men to achieve financial independence and breadwinning. In this paper I will interrogate the contradictions between emasculating but financially rewarding careers in the civil service and masculine but financially stagnant agrarian careers through the lens of mid-century Irish fiction. I will investigate prominent discourses on Irish masculinity including the idealisation of rural, agrarian manhood and the denigration of office work. My paper will therefore raise questions on the wider contradictions at play within post-independence discourses of Irish masculinity which simultaneously encouraged Irish men to assume the role of masculine breadwinner yet dismissed and undermined how he might achieve these ideals.

Biographical note:

Loic Wright is a PhD candidate in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin (UCD). He holds a joint honours bachelor's degree in English and Spanish and a Master's degree in Anglo-Irish Literature and Culture from UCD. His PhD research interrogates how concepts of masculinity and manhood were measured and promoted in mid-twentieth century Ireland through the lens of Irish fiction and culture between 1931 and 1965. Loic works at the James Joyce Cultural Centre in Dublin where he helps co-ordinate cultural events and workshops, and conducts literary tours of Joyce’s Dublin.

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Yuan Li (SHE) Guangdong University of Foreign Studies Staging Tian Han’s Salome Complex: Romanticism and Revolutionary Spirit in Tian Qinxin’s Hurricane, the Life of Tian Han

Premiered in 2001 and restaged in 2017, Tian Qinxin’s Hurricane, a play about Tian Han’s love relationships and artistic career aims also to delineate the development of China’s modern drama. Owing to his own aesthetic temperament and personality, Tian Han was deeply drawn to Oscar Wilde’s Salome during his early years in Tokyo, Japan. He translated and introduced this work to China in 1921, and went on to stage two productions in Shanghai in 1929. The image of Salome as “Femme Fatale” attracted a generation of young Chinese artists seeking to unleash their frustrated sexual and political desires. Hurricane focuses on Tian Han’s lifelong obsession with Salome, and presents various versions of the character as interpreted and created by the artist via his love affairs with four women. It also employs five plays-within-a-play, including a piece of Japanese Noh theatre, Tian Han’s translated version of Salome, and three plays written by Tian Han to capture the Zeitgeists of different phases in his life. Over the course of the play, Tian Han’s Salome evolves from a woman lost in lust or love, to the embodiment of Neo-Romanticism, to ‘the new woman’ with revolutionary and transgressive power, thus outlining Tian Han’s own love, desire, artistic and revolutionary pursuits.

Biographical note:

Yuan Li is Professor at Faculty of English Language & Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. She is the author of An Aesthetic Dandy: The Study of Oscar Wilde (Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2008) and 20th Century Irish Drama (The Commercial Press, 2019). She has published extensively on contemporary Irish, British and Chinese theatre, and is China's representative member of the IASIL Bibliography Committee.

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Plenary Panels and Roudtables

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Nicholas Grene (HE) Trinity College Dublin José Lanters (SHE) University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Lynne Parker Rough Magic

International Drama on the Irish Stage Although there were Irish productions of Chekhov as far back as 1915, it seems only to have been in 1968 with an Abbey staging of The Cherry Orchard that an affinity between Ireland and Chekhov’s Russia was considered obvious. Thomas Kilroy’s The Seagull (1981), discussed here by José Lanters, set a vogue for Irish Chekhovs that has continued ever since. I will look at Brian Friel’s Three Sisters (also 1981), Tom Murphy’s Cherry Orchard (2004), and Michael West and Annie Ryan’s The Seagull (2016), together with Marina Carr’s Sixteen Possible Glimpses (2011) based round the life of Chekhov, to explore the extent to which the playwrights create specifically Irish readings of the Russian playwright. Nicholas Grene Thomas Kilroy has likened the process of adapting a classic play to having a ‘privileged conversation’ with a dead author. For Kilroy, that means building a bridge between the central concerns and objectives of the original play and the themes and ideas he explores in his own writings. I will explore some of the elements of this two-way conversation in relation to his ‘Irish’ versions of Ibsen’s Ghosts, Chekhov’s The Seagull, and Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, and his non-Irish/neutral adaptation of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. I will also look at the reception of Kilroy’s versions of these plays in Ireland. José Lanters I’d like to discuss the artistic and practical choices – and differences – involved in using an already translated script and commissioning new adaptations. I’ve used existing English language translations in the past – Mike Poulton’s version of Schiller’s Don Carlos for example – and also more bespoke responses from Irish writers such as Hilary Fannin’s version of Racine’s Phèdre. We recently produced Marina Carr’s Hecuba, which is fairly free-form, and have just commissioned Hilary to work on a new version of Gorky’s Children of the Sun. So I’d like to talk about pairing contemporary writers with classic texts. Lynne Parker

Biographical notes: Nicholas Grene is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. His books include: The Politics of Irish

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Drama (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Yeats’s Poetic Codes (Oxford University Press, 2008), Home on the Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre, (co-edited with Chris Morash), (Oxford University Press, 2016), and The Theatre of Tom Murphy: Playwright Adventurer (Bloomsbury, 2017). His next book Farming in Modern Irish Writing will be published by Oxford University Press in August 2021. José Lanters is Emerita Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. She has published widely on Irish drama and fiction. Her books include: The ‘Tinkers’ in Irish Literature (Irish Academic Press, 2008); The Theatre of Thomas Kilroy: No Absolutes (Cork UP, 2018); and Beyond Realism: Experimental and Unconventional Irish Drama since the Revival (Rodopi/Brill, 2015), co-edited with Joan FitzPatrick Dean. She is a former president of the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) and the current vice chair for North America of IASIL. Lynne Parker is Artistic Director and co-founder of Rough Magic. Since its foundation in 1984 Rough Magic has delivered over 50 Irish premieres, the debuts of many theatre-makers, and the pioneering SEEDS programme. Most recently, she directed the world premiere of Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones in a stage adaptation by Michael West, in partnership with the Kilkenny Arts Festival. Her productions for Rough Magic include: Hecuba by Marina Carr, Cleft by Fergal McElherron, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare with Kilkenny Arts Festival (Best Ensemble Irish Times Theatre Awards 2018), Melt by Shane Mac an Bhaird, The Train, The House Keeper (Irish Times Best New Play 2012), Famished Castle, The Critic, Travesties, Peer Gynt, Phaedra, Don Carlos (Irish Times Best Production 2007), The Taming of the Shrew (Best Production 2006), Improbable Frequency (Best Production, Best Director, 2004), Copenhagen (Best Production 2002), Sodome, my love, Three days of Rain, The Sugar Wife, Northern Star, Spokesong, Pentecost (Best Irish Production DTF 1995) Hidden Charges, Down Onto Blue, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Digging for Fire, Love and a Bottle (Bank of Ireland/Arts Show Award), Danti-Dan, New Morning, I Can’t Get Started, The Way of the World, The Country Wife, Decadence, Top Girls. Other Theatre includes – Heavenly Bodies, (Best Director, 2004), The Sanctuary Lamp, Down the Line, The Trojan Women, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Tartuffe, The Shape of Metal (Abbey Theatre); The Drawer Boy (Abbey Theatre/Galway Arts Festival); Lovers (Druid); Bernard Alba, Me and My Friend (Charabanc); Catchpenny Twist (Tinderbox); Bold Girls (7:84 Scotland); The Shadow of a Gunman (Gate Theatre); The Clearing (Bush Theatre); Playboy of the Western World, Silver Tassie (Almeida Theatre); Playhouse Creatures (Old Vic); Importance of Being Earnest (West Yorkshire Playhouse); Love Me?! (Corn Exchange); Comedy of Errors (RSC); Olga, Shimmer (Traverse Theatre); Dancing at Lughnasa, (Teatrul National Bucharest), Only the Lonely (Birmingham Rep); La Voix Humaine (Opera Theatre Company); A Streetcar Named Desire (Opera Ireland); The Drunkard, Benefactors (B*spoke); The Girl Who Forgot to Sing Badly (The Ark/Theatre

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Lovett); Macbeth (Lyric Theatre Belfast); The Cunning Little Vixen, Albert Herring (RIAM). Most recently, Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf (Tron Theatre, Glasgow) Stewart Parker’s Northern Star, The Provoked Wife by John Vanbrugh, Gorky’s Children of the Sun and Schnitzler’s la Ronde, The Merchant of Venice (The Lir Academy). She was an Associate Artist of Charabanc Theatre Company. Lynne was awarded the Irish Times Special Tribute Award in 2008 and an Honorary Doctorate by Trinity College Dublin in 2010.

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Stanley E. Gontarski (HE) Ohio State University Nicholas Johnson (HE) Trinity College Dublin Tomasz Wiśniewski (HE) University of Gdańsk An Imagined Border, or Beckett in Gdańsk An Imagined Border, or Beckett in Gdańsk is a ninety-minute conversation about theatre workshops, as well as other practical and academic activities done in Gdańsk/Sopot during Beckett Seminars in Gdańsk. It includes a presentation of Beckett on the Baltic a short film by SE Gontarski, as an illustration of laboratory environment that characterises the seminars. The panel involves also a discussion of Tomasz Wiśniewski (founder of the Beckett Research Group in Gdańsk), Stanley Gontarski (Honorary Patron of BRGiG), and Nicholas Johnson (its long-term collaborator) about the ways Beckett’s work has been brought to Gdańsk/Sopot for the past dozen of years.

The University of Gdańsk Samuel Beckett Seminars have been organized every year since 2010 by the Beckett Research Group in Gdańsk, led by Tomasz Wiśniewski. They have been attended by scholars and artists from various parts of the world and have resulted in several publications, film documentaries, workshops/laboratories, and theatre productions. Guest speakers have included: Marcello Magni (Complicite), Douglas Rintoul (Transport Theatre), Jon McKenna (UK), Chong Wang (China), Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva (USA) and Diana Zhdanova (Russia), Jarosław Fret (Teatr ZAR), Enoch Brater (USA), Antoni Libera (Poland), H. Porter Abbott (USA), Derek Attridge (United Kingdom), Antonia Rodríguez-Gago (Spain), Nadia Kamel (Egypt), Mark Nixon (UK), Luz Maria Sánchez-Cardona (Mexico), Robson Corrêa de Camargo (Brazil), Octavian Saiu (Romania), and Patricio Orozco (Argentina). Professor S.E. Gontarski is the honorary patron of the research group. For more information see: www.between.org.pl.

Prior to the event please watch the recording of Beckett on the Baltic at https://vimeo.com/412762730/c1806cf305 Research purposes only. Password: Beckett2021

Biographical notes: Stanley E. Gontarski is a Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English, Ph.D., Ohio State. A writer, director and filmmaker who specializes in 20th century Irish Studies, in British, U.S., and European Modernism, performance theory, History of Text Technologies, and Modern(ist) book history. He has been a resident Fellow at the Djerassi Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio, the Bogliasco Foundation, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. He has been awarded four National Endowment for the Humanities research grants, has twice been awarded Fulbright Professorships, and has been Guest Editor of the following: American Book Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies,and most recently Drammaturgia.

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[more: https://www.english.fsu.edu/faculty/s-e-gontarski]

Nicholas Johnson is Associate Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, where he convenes the Creative Arts Practice research theme, and co-founded the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies. His 2020 publications include Experimental Beckett (Cambridge UP), Bertolt Brecht’s “David” Fragments (Bloomsbury), Influencing Beckett/Beckett Influencing (L’Harmattan), and the “Pedagogy Issue” of the Journal of Beckett Studies (29.1, Edinburgh UP). He works as a dramaturg with Pan Pan, Dead Centre, and OT Platform. Recent directing credits include Virtual Play (1st prize, New European Media awards), The David Fragments (after Brecht), and Enemy of the Stars (after Lewis). He has held visiting research positions at FU Berlin and Yale.

Tomasz Wiśniewski is Associate Professor in the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Gdańsk, where he is head of Performing Arts Division. He is the founder of the Beckett Research Group in Gdańsk, and co-founder of the Between.Pomiędzy Festival. He has published Complicite, Theatre and Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), a monograph on Samuel Beckett (Universitas, 2006), (co-)edited several publications, and published articles in Poland, Great Britain, USA, France, Austria, and Brazil. He is in the editorial board of the literary quarterly Tekstualia, a member of the board of the Polish Association for the Study of English (since 2018) and a member of the Progamme Board of the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre (since 2018).

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Kate Costello-Sullivan (SHE) Syracuse University Press Jennika Baines Indiana University Press Deborah Manion Syracuse University Press Emilie Pine (SHE) Irish University Review Publishing in the 21st Century and Age of #MeToo “Publishing in the 21st C and Age of #MeToo.” Representatives from two major Presses (SU Press, Indiana UP) and two journals (IUR, HJEAS) will discuss how their publications are responding to the changing face of Irish Studies/Ireland and trying to address the kinds of implicit biases that can predispose us to publish on certain authors or topics over others. This includes recognizing the expanding footprint of Irish studies and engaging relatively new contributors – e.g., Central Europe – via regional journals that now may have an international audience. We hope to address issues of race, gender, and canon, and to invite a vibrant conversation. Biographical notes: Kate Costello-Sullivan (facilitator) – is Professor of Modern Irish literature and founding director of the Irish literature program at Le Moyne College in Syracuse NY. She is the first female editor of the Syracuse UP Irish line. Author of two critical editions (Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Norah Hoult’s Poor Women!) and author of Mother Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín and Trauma and Recovery in the 21st-century Irish Novel, Kate is the sitting President of the American Conference of Irish Studies. Jennika Baines – is acquiring editor of global and international studies at Indiana University Press. One of the series for which she acquires is the new Irish Culture, Memory, Place series edited by Guy Beiner, Ray Cashman, and Oona Frawley. Baines earned an M.Phil. in Anglo-Irish literature from Trinity College Dublin and a Ph.D. in literature from University College Dublin. She is the editor of ‘Is it about a bicycle?’: Flann O’Brien in the Twenty-First Century (Four Courts Press, 2011) and co-editor of the Flann O’Brien journal, The Parish Review, which will be available open access via the Open Library of Humanities in 2020. Deborah Manion – is the acquiring editor in Irish Studies at Syracuse University Press. She has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa and has published articles in the James Joyce Quarterly, the Victorians Institute Journal, and Genders. She also contributed an essay to Thomas Hardy’s Short Stories: New Perspectives, edited by Juliette Berning Schaeffer and Siobhan Craft Brownson. Emilie Pine (IUR) – is Associate Professor in the School of English, Drama and Film in University College Dublin and Editor of the Irish University Review. Pine is Director of the Irish Memory Studies Network and PI of the major IRC New Horizons

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project Industrial Memories (2015-19). She is the author of The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), The Memory Marketplace: Witnessing Pain in Contemporary Theatre (forthcoming Indiana University Press, 2020), and the multi-award- winning Notes to Self: Personal Essays.

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Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos (SHE) Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil Zsuzsa Csikai (SHE) University of Pécs, Hungary Michal Lachman (HE) University of Lodz, Poland Hiroko Mikami (THEY or SHE) Waseda University, Japan Marianne Ni Chinneide (SHE) NUI Galway, Ireland Ondrej Pilny Charles University, Czech Republic Tom Murphy in Translation Fintan O’Toole once wrote that Tom Murphy’s plays form “a kind of inner history of Ireland” (The Politics of Magic, 1987) but that “in confronting Ireland, Murphy has been able to confront an entire universe”. Likewise, for Christopher Murray, “situating Tom Murphy today involves seeing him within two contexts: Ireland and the world at large” (Alive in Time: The Enduring Drama of Tom Murphy, 2010). Drawing on the notion of the universality of Murphy’s work, this multicultural round table discusses translations of his plays into languages as diverse as Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Japanese and Irish. The speakers come from varying parts of the world and environments, such as South America, Eastern Europe, Japan, and Ireland (considering its fundamental bilingualism), and will discuss technical and cultural aspects and challenges of theatre translation and adaptation, for publication and for the stage. We hope to define how translation processes create the possibility of cultural border-crossings and forge intercultural encounters and exchanges between diverse literary sensibilities, linguistic forms, aesthetics, rhythms, and political contexts.

Biographical notes: Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos is a faculty member in the Postgraduate Programme in English at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, production director of Cia Ludens, and an executive member of IASIL. Her publications, as editor or co-editor, include: the bilingual series Ireland on Film: Screenplays and Critical Contexts (2011- present), with Lance Pettitt; Coleção Brian Friel (2013); Coleção Tom Murphy (2019); Ilha do Desterro 73.2 – The Irish Theatrical Diaspora (2020), with Patrick Lonergan; and Contemporary Irish Documentary Theatre (2020), with Shaun Richards. Zsuzsanna Csikai is assistant professor in the Department of English Literatures and Cultures, Institute of English Studies, University of Pécs, Hungary. She completed her PhD on translations and adaptations of Chekhov’s plays by contemporary Irish

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playwrights and has published articles on related topics in Hungarian and international publications. Her translations of short fiction by Sineád Morrissey and Anne Enright have appeared in Hungarian literary journals, and her translation of Brian Friel’s The Yalta Game will be published in autumn 2021. Her academic interests include Irish culture, Irish drama and short fiction, as well as translation and adaptation studies with a special focus on contemporary Irish dramatists’ adaptations of Russian literature. Marianne Kennedy is a lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at The National University of Ireland, Galway and the Head of Production of The O' Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance. She is also is a theatre-maker and arts manager with 20 years professional experience as a producer and director in the Performing, Irish language and Traditional Arts. Recent directing credits include Cláirseach ina Tost for Galway Theatre Festival, STRINGS, ROPES AND CHAINS: Silencing the Voice of a People for the Abbey 5x5 Award, co-directed Dún na mBan Trí Thine by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne for The National Theatre of the Irish Language and the Galway International Arts Festival. Ní Chinnéide has spent six years as the CEO of Siamsa Tire, Arts Centre in Tralee, Co. Kerry where she programmed the theatre and visual arts spaces as well as being producer of the National Folk Theatre of Ireland performing company for their national and international tours including an nationwide tour of Venezuela. Marianne is the founder and a proud member of the Garraí an Ghiorria collective (http://giorriatheatre.com/ ), a group of Irish language artists’ striving to push new boundaries in the arts scene in Galway and nationwide and will be directing their next show ‘Faoi Scáth, le Chéile’ in West Kerry in August of this year. She is a current board member of Galway Theatre Festival and Áras Éanna Arts Centre, Inis Oirr. Hiroko Mikami is Professor of Irish Studies in the School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan and the director of the Institute for Irish Studies at Waseda. She authored Frank McGuinness and his Theatre of Paradox (Colin Smythe, 2002), and co-edited/authored Ireland on Stage: Beckett and After (Carysfort, 2007) and Irish Theatre and Its Soundscapes (Glasnevin Publishing, 2015). She has translated several Irish plays into Japanese, including Tom Murphy’s Bairegangaire and A Thief of a Christmas. Ondřej Pilný is Professor of English and American Literature and Director of the Centre for Irish Studies at Charles University, Prague. He is the author of The Grotesque in Contemporary Anglophone Drama (Palgrave, 2016) and Irony and Identity in Modern Irish Drama (Litteraria Pragensia, 2006), and editor of an annotated volume of J.M. Synge’s works in Czech translation, seven collections of essays and five journal issues on Anglophone drama and theatre, Irish literature, cultural memory, and structuralist theory. His latest book is the edited collection Cultural Convergence: The Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928-1960 (with Ruud van den Beuken and Ian Walsh, Palgrave 2021). Ondřej Pilný’s translations into Czech include works by J.M. Synge, Flann O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel,

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Martin McDonagh, Enda Walsh, and Mark O’Rowe. He is the current Chairperson of IASIL.

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ARTISTS IN CONVERSATION

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Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi is a writer, editor, performer, and arts facilitator. She co- organized and chaired the panel event “Are We Doing Diversity Justice” 2019 IASIL Conference. Her work is published in Architecture Ireland, Poetry International 125, Poetry Ireland Review 129, RTÉ Poetry Programme, Smithereens Press, The Bohemyth, The Irish Times, Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories (Head of Zeus 2020, editor Sinéad Gleeson), and Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets (Dedalus Press 2019, co-editors Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi & Pat Boran). She was the 2019 recipient of the Poetry Ireland Access Cúirt Bursary. Follow her work on WordPress and her tweets @AmadiEnyi.

Maurice Fitzpatrick Maurice Fitzpatrick is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and he was a recipient of the Japanese Ministry of Education scholarship 2004-2017 and a lecturer at Keio University, Tokyo, 2004-11, a lecturer at Bonn University 2011-2012 and a lecturer at the University of Cologne 2012-2016. He has made two documentary films for the BBC: The Boys of St. Columb’s (also an Irish public television RTÉ production) which tells the story of the first generation of children to receive free secondary education as a result of the ground-breaking 1947 Education Act in Northern Ireland, whose participants included St. Columbs’ Nobelists John Hume and Seamus Heaney; and a second film for the BBC, an examination of Brian Friel’s play, Translations which shows how Translations came to spearhead a cultural movement in both Northern and Southern Ireland, Field Day, which attempted to achieve a measure of cultural pluralism in advance of a political settlement. In 2017, he wrote, directed, and produced a documentary feature film, In the Name of Peace: John Hume in America. Maurice Fitzpatrick is also the author of a book entitled John Hume in America (Irish Academic Press, 2017; University of Notre Dame Press, 2019). He was a Poynter Fellow at Yale University in 2018 and he is the spring 2020 Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University, Philadelphia. Hugo Hamilton Hugo Hamilton is the author of the best-selling memoir, The Speckled People, the story of his German-Irish childhood in Dublin, growing up with his German mother and prohibited by his revolutionary Irish father from speaking English. His work has won many international awards, including the French Prix Femina Etranger and the DAAD scholarship in Berlin, as well as the prestigious Bundesverdienstkreutz, awarded by the German state for his understanding of cultural diversity. Hamilton is a member of the Aosdana and lives in Dublin. His latest novel – The Pages – is published 8th July 2021 by 4th Estate in London and Knopf in the USA.

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Siofra O’Donovan

Siofra O’Donovan is from Wicklow, Ireland. After graduating with a degree in English Literature and History of Art from UCD, Dublin, she started to write novels. She worked in Krakow, Poland in universities and schools from 1994 to 1996 and spent the next nine years traveling back and forth from India to study classical and colloquial Tibetan and to research her travelogue, Pema and the Yak, published by Pilgrims Books in 2007. She was funded by the Arts Council of Ireland for her research. Pema and the Yak, based on the lives of Tibetan Exiles in India, is an insightful travelogue the lives of Tibetan lamas, DJs, Himalayan Kings and Queens, doctors, spies, guerrilla fighters, poets and artists in several Indo-Tibetan border areas. “It’s everything the armchair traveller with spiritual leanings could hope to read about Tibet in exile.” O.R. Melling, author of the Faerie Chronicles. It was republished on Amazon Kindle under the title Lost in Shambhala in 2015.

She studied classical and colloquial Tibetan in the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (2002-3). From 2004-6 she was writer in residence in Co, Louth, Ireland under the Arts Council and Louth County Council. She is on the Writers in Schools Poetry Ireland panel and the Writers in Prisons panel. She published Malinski, a novel, (Lilliput Press, Dublin 2000), and Pema and the Yak, a travelogue (Pilgrims Books, Varanasi and L.A., 2006). Yours Til Hell Freezes is a biography of the Irish martyr Kevin Barry, and will be published in September 2020. For the last ten years she has been writing historical fantasy fiction for Middle Grade and Young Adult readers. The Secret of Pocock Grange is a fantasy that travels through history as a faery tale. Dark Forest is a historical fantasy set in 12th Century France which was funded by the Arts Council of Ireland for research in France. A biography by Siofra with a Professor O’Halpin, on the subject of the Irish martyr Kevin Barry who was executed in 1920, Yours ‘Til Hell Freezes, is expected to be published by Merrion Press in 2020.

Caitríona O’Reilly

Caitríona O’Reilly was born in Wicklow and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where she completed a Ph.D. in American Literature. In 2002 she was awarded the Harper-Wood Studentship in English Literature from King’s College Cambridge. She has published three collections of poetry with Bloodaxe Books. The Nowhere Birds (2001) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was awarded the Rooney Prize in Irish Literature; The Sea Cabinet (2006), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Geis (2015) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and is jointly published by Bloodaxe Books and Wake Forest University Press in the United States. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Pigott Prize and was the winner of the 2016 Irish Times Poetry Now Prize. Her poetry has also been widely translated. Caitríona O’Reilly has written literary criticism for, inter alia, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and The Irish Times. She has taught poetry at institutions including Trinity College, Dublin, the University of York, Wake Forest University, and King’s College, London.

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She is a former editor of Poetry Ireland Review, and currently resides in Lincolnshire, UK.

Enda Walsh Enda Walsh is a Tony and multi award-winning Irish playwright and director. His work has been translated into over 20 languages and has been performed internationally since 1998. His recent plays include Medicine (2021) Landmark Productions and Galway International Arts Festival; Sing Street (2019/2020) NYTW/Broadway; an adaptation of Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2018) for Complicité in association with Landmark Productions and Galway International Arts Festival; The Same (2017), produced by Corcadorca; Lazarus (2016) with David Bowie; Arlington (2016), Ballyturk (2014), Misterman (2012) all co-produced by Landmark Productions and Galway International Arts Festival; and, with Donnacha Dennehy, the operas, The Last Hotel (2015) and The Second Violinist (2017) for Landmark Productions and Irish National Opera. In an ongoing project (now in its eight year) he has made seven installations, called collectively ‘Rooms’, with Paul Fahy and GIAF. In 2014, he received an honorary doctorate from NUI Galway.

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BOOK LAUNCHES

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Contemporary Irish Documentary Theatre, edited and introduced by Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos and Shaun Richards (Bloomsbury, 2020) The first anthology of Irish documentary drama, Contemporary Irish Documentary Theatre features six challenging plays that interrogate and comment on crucial events of Irish history and of the diaspora: No Escape, by Mary Raftery; Guaranteed!, by Colin Murphy; History, by Grace Dyas; Of This Brave Time, by Jimmy Murphy; My English Tongue, My Irish Heart, by Martin Lynch; and The Two Deaths of Roger Casement, by Domingos Nunez. The plays are introduced by established academics in the field of Irish Studies. Join the editors, IASIL members Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos and Shaun Richards, in conversation with some of the contributors to this volume. Join the editors, IASIL members Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos and Shaun Richards, in conversation with some of the contributors to this volume: Emilie Pine, Liam Harte and Colin Murphy. Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos (SHE) is a faculty member in the Postgraduate Programme in English at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, production director of Cia Ludens, and an executive member of IASIL. Her publications, as editor or co-editor, include: the bilingual series Ireland on Film: Screenplays and Critical Contexts (2011-present), with Lance Pettitt; Coleção Brian Friel (2013); Coleção Tom Murphy (2019); Ilha do Desterro 73.2 – The Irish Theatrical Diaspora (2020), with Patrick Lonergan; and Contemporary Irish Documentary Theatre (2020), with Shaun Richards. Liam Harte (HE) is Professor of Irish Literature at the University of Manchester. His recent publications include two large edited volumes, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2020) and A History of Irish Autobiography (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He is currently leading a three- year AHRC-funded project entitled Conflict, Memory and Migration (https://conflictmemorymigration.org/). For Fishamble Theatre Company, Colin Murphy (HE) has written a series of political documentary dramas, two of which, Guaranteed! and Haughey/Gregory, are published by Bloomsbury. He is currently under commission to the Abbey Theatre. As well as stage, he has written for television, film and radio, and has been nominated for an Irish Theatre Award, an Irish Film and Television Academy award and a Celtic Media Award and is an award-winning radio documentary maker. He writes a weekly newspaper column for the Business Post. Emilie Pine (SHE) is Associate Professor in the School of English, Drama and Film in University College Dublin and Editor of the Irish University Review. Pine is Director of the Irish Memory Studies Network and PI of the major IRC New Horizons project Industrial Memories (2015-19). She is the author of The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), The Memory Marketplace: Witnessing Pain in Contemporary Theatre (forthcoming Indiana University Press, 2020), and the multi-award- winning Notes to Self: Personal Essays. Shaun Richards (HE) is Emeritus Professor of Irish Studies at Staffordshire University, UK. He has published on Irish drama in major journals and edited

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collections and is the co-author of Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (1988), the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Irish Drama (2004), the co-author, with Chris Morash, of Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place (2013) and co-editor, with Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos, of Contemporary Irish Documentary Theatre (2020). He is currently editing Fifty Key Irish Plays for Routledge.

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Ireland in the European Eye ed. by Gisela Holfter and Bettina Migge (RIA, 2019) A comprehensive survey of Ireland’s place in Europe, providing a detailed narrative of a cultural relationship that began with Irish missionaries bringing Christianity and learning to the continent. How have Ireland and her people and culture been perceived and represented in Europe? Twenty-two internationally renowned experts address this question through contributions on film, music, art, architecture, media, literature and European Studies. Find out more about the publication in the vlog, in which the editors discuss the origins and content of the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5LFraR9aYY&list=PLD_4i6suzwGX5TgD OAB2y880alElGr8MF&index=1 The book launch will be followed by a discussion panel In this panel, we will look at Ireland from the outside – from the perspectives of different European countries. How have Ireland and her people been perceived and represented by other nations? What can we learn from their observations about the cultural relationship of the island with the continent? We will talk about some aspects of the historical background of Ireland in Europe, the representation and reception of Ireland in European literature and other artistic disciplines and the translation of Irish literature in different European countries. The aim of this panel is to try and determine the place of Ireland in Europe. The panel will consist of both editors and three of the contributors to the volume: Anna Fattori is associate professor of German literature at the Faculty of the Humanities of the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’. Her areas of special interest include the German novel of the eighteenth century, the theory of the novel, Anglo- German studies and literary stylistics. She has recently co-edited (with Corinna Jäger-Trees and Simon Zumsteg) Heinrich Federer, In und um Italien. Plaudereien, Reisebriefe und Erzählungen (Chronos; Zürich, 2015). Joachim Fischer (HE) is Jean Monnet Professor of European Cultural Studies at the University of Limerick, director of the Centre for European Studies and deputy director of the Centre for Irish-German Studies. He has published extensively on Irish-German relations, travel writing and utopian studies; his current main area of research are the cultural and linguistic dimensions of Ireland’s EU membership. Gisela Holfter (SHE) studied in Cologne, Cambridge and St Louis, and worked at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, before coming to Limerick in 1996. She is associate professor in German and director of the Centre for Irish-German Studies. Her research interests include German-Irish relations, German literature, exile studies, migration and intercultural communication. Recent publications include An Irish sanctuary: German-speaking refugees in Ireland 1933–1945 (with H. Dickel, de Gruyter 2017; paperback 2018). Joanna Kosmalska (SHE) works at the University of Łódź where she initiated and led the international project “Polish (E)migration Literature in Ireland and Great Britain since 2004”: www.emigracja.uni.lodz.pl. Her research interests include migrant literature, multiculturalism, multilingualism, transnationalism and translation. She has

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recently published on Polish writing in Ireland and the UK and co-edited an issue of Teksty Drugie on “Migrant Literature”. Bettina Migge (SHE) studied in Hamburg, Yaoundé (Cameroon) and Berlin and received a PhD in Linguistics from Ohio State University. She is professor of linguistics and head of the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at University College Dublin. Her research interests are in the broad area of language contact, language documentation and sociolinguistics. Her publications include edited volumes and book-length studies, such as Exploring language in a multilingual context: variation, interaction and ideology in language documentation (with I. Léglise, 492 Contributors CUP; Cambridge, 2013).

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Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space by James Little (Bloomsbury, 2020) Confinement appears repeatedly in Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre – from the asylums central to Murphy and Watt to the images of confinement that shape plays such as Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Drawing on spatial theory and new archival research, Beckett in Confinement explores these recurring concepts of closed space to cast new light on the ethical and political dimensions of Beckett’s work. Covering the full range of Beckett’s writing career, including two plays he completed for prisoners, Catastrophe and the unpublished ‘Mongrel Mime’, the book shows how this engagement with the ethics of representing prisons and asylums stands at the heart of Beckett’s poetics. The book launch will be followed by a roundtable: ‘Beckett, Politics, Beyond’ While lecturing on the theatre of Jean Racine, Beckett dismissed the idea that these plays were in any way political: ‘Not concerned with politics. […] Politics […] hardly mentioned’. The same cannot be said of recent scholarship on Beckett’s work, which has produced a number of political readings in recent years. ‘Beckett, Politics, Beyond’ will examine various ways we can conceptualise Beckett and politics, the shape of Beckett studies in the wake of the recent ‘political turn’ as well as how such scholarship enters into dialogue with broader disciplinary formations such as Irish studies, modernism and theatre studies. List of participants (in alphabetical order): James Little (HE) is a postdoctoral researcher at Charles University, Prague and Masaryk University, Brno. Author of Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space (Bloomsbury, 2020), his most recent work can be found in Text and Performance Quarterly, the Irish University Review and the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. His monograph The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas is forthcoming with Bloomsbury and University Press Antwerp (2021). James McNaughton (HE) teaches at the University of Alabama. His most recent publication, “Sean Hillen, Conspiracy, and the Ends of Irish Art”, appeared in the Irish Studies Review (2021). His book Samuel Beckett and The Politics of Aftermath appeared with Oxford University Press in 2018. He co-edited a special issue of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, entitled Beckett’s Political Aesthetic on the International Stage (2019). Emilie Morin (SHE) is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of York, UK. She has published widely on Beckett, and her most recent book is Beckett’s Political Imagination (2017), which sets Beckett’s work in its political contexts. Shaun Richards (HE) is Emeritus Professor of Irish Studies at Staffordshire University, UK. He has published on Irish drama in major journals and edited collections and is the co-author of Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (1988), the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Irish Drama (2004), the

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co-author, with Chris Morash, of Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place (2013) and co-editor, with Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos, of Contemporary Irish Documentary Theatre (2020). He is currently editing Fifty Key Irish Plays for Routledge. Dr Hannah Simpson (SHE) is the Rosemary Pountney Junior Research Fellow in Theatre and Performance at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. She has two monographs forthcoming: Witnessing Pain: Samuel Beckett and Postwar Francophone Theatre and Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance. Her most recent work has appeared in the Journal of Beckett Studies, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, the Journal of Modern Literature, and the Journal of Feminist Scholarship. She is also the Theatre Review Editor at The Beckett Circle, and would be delighted to hear from anyone interested in reviewing Beckett productions!

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