News

Sing in the Quiet Places of my Heart, Bairbre O’Hogan’s biography of W.M. Letts (1882-1972) – poet, war poet, dramatist, children’s writer, novelist – will be launched on

Sunday 20th October 2024, at 2pm in the recently-refurbished Old Courthouse, Rathcoole, D24 YP97

as part of the Red Line Book Festival. The book was commissioned by, and is published by, South Dublin Libraries.

Following the launch on 20th October, the book will be available for purchase (€20) from South Dublin Libraries tallaghtlibrary@sdublincoco.ie

News and information about other events in the field of late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century Irish women’s writing.

Irish People in Great Britain (1689-Present):
An Interdisciplinary Symposium
Tues., 12 March 2024 from 9am-6pm
Mary Immaculate College, South Circular Road, Limerick
(Room JHN221 on the John Henry Newman campus)
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Dr. Sonja Lawrenson (Manchester Metropolitan University)

People from Ireland have been settling in the countries of Great Britain throughout recorded history.
Famously, during the fifth and sixth centuries, Irish monks set up important monasteries all over
England, Scotland, and Wales. And, between the twelfth and mid-seventeenth centuries, important
Irish figures, from Isabel de Clare (c. 1172-1220) and poet Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh (c.1180–
c.1250) through scientist Robert Boyle (1627-1691) and Mary Rich (1625-1678), spent much of their
lives in Britain and ultimately died there. During and just after the Williamite War (1689-1691), a
number of Irish Protestants traded turbulent Ireland for “safer” Britain, including celebrated writers
such as Jonathan Swift, William Congreve, George Farquhar, and Mary Davys.

The “Irish People in Great Britain (1689-Today)” Symposium, which is to be held on Tues., 12
March 2024 at Mary Immaculate College, UL, will explore the lives, struggles, and achievements of the
Irish people who have settled in Britain, as well as their descendants, since the time of the Williamite
War. We especially welcome papers concerned with any of the following cohorts of Irish – and Irish
Diasporic – people in Britain:

Special thanks to the Irish Research Council and Mary Immaculate College for financial support.

The deadline for submissions for the “Women Staging and Re-Staging the Nineteenth Century II” Conference (Universitat de València 18-20 October) has been extended to 15 May 2023.

Women Staging and Restaging the Nineteenth Century II
Universitat de València 18-20 October 2023
(Literature, Arts and Performance Research Group)

The relation between women and the entertainment industry throughout the nineteenth
century in Great Britain has been widely studied by Bratton (2011), Davis (2000, 2002),
Donkin (1995), Davis and Donkin (1999), Gale and Gardner (2000), Newey (2005), and
other scholars since the 1990s. Neo-Victorian appropriations of the nineteenth century on
stage were celebrated in the 2016 special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies “Performing the
Neo-Victorian” guest edited by Palmer and Poore, who aptly identify the recent and
growing presence of the Victorians on the British theatrical scene in an ‘increasing variety
of ways’ (1). Some such ways were already scrutinized in Poore’s monograph Heritage,
Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre (2012) and later by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman
(2020) in her approach to the modern American musical. Yet, as demonstrated by the first
Women Staging and Restaging the Nineteenth Century international conference
celebrated in 2022 under the auspices of the Department of English and German (UV),
there are still research avenues in the field to explore.
Connections between contemporary theatrical productions by women who revisit
and re-stage the nineteenth century, or the ways in which Victorian stage practices have
informed Neo-Victorian fiction and theatre written by women were debated at the 2022
conference. As a follow-up to such discussions and funded by the GVA Research Project
(AICO/2021/225), we open the Call for Papers for the Women Staging and Restaging the
Nineteenth Century II international conference to be held at the Universitat de València
between 18 and 20 October 2023. This is the final conference in a series of academic
events organised as part of a three-year funded research project on women and
entrepreneurship in the entertainment industry of the nineteenth century and its afterlives.
The project gathers researchers from the Universities of Valencia, Málaga, Salamanca
and Seville who are working on Victorian and neo-Victorian theatre and fiction.
In the second edition of the conference, it is our intention to broaden the scope of
the discussion by including the following topics. Firstly, we are interested in
reconsidering how women’s theatrical activity is reflected throughout the nineteenth
century in various traditions and cultures and, in terms of its projection towards the
present day, the incorporation of transnational and/or transatlantic perspectives. In
addition, how the plastic arts and other cultural industries, such as cinema, influence
nineteenth-century female theatrical practice and neo-Victorian stagings respectively.
Another major axis of the discussion will be focused on classical receptions of female
cultural production related to the performing arts throughout the nineteenth century, as
well as the forms of such reception today through, for example, the recovery of
productions or texts.
The conference will be held in person at the Universitat de València with the hope
that it will expand our discussion on the relation between women and the nineteenthcentury stage with papers and panels that consider (but are not limited to) the following
range of topics and areas of research:
• Nineteenth-century women staging the nineteenth century worldwide.
• Nineteenth-century women staging the nineteenth century from a transnational
and transatlantic perspective.
• Nineteenth-century women staging the nineteenth century in the colonies.
• Classical receptions and women actresses, playwrights and managers in the
nineteenth century and its afterlives.
• Neo-Victorian re-stagings of the nineteenth century by women.
• Contemporary women playwrights and artistic directors looking at the nineteenth
century.
• Nineteenth-century actresses, women playwrights, and managers at present.
• Fictional recreations of (neo-) Victorian actresses, playwrights, managers, and
producers in novels, in film and on the stage.
• Rewritings of nineteenth-century spectacle in (neo-) Victorian and contemporary
fiction by women writers.
• Rewritings of nineteenth-century spectacle in (neo-) Victorian and contemporary
theatre by women playwrights.
Please use the online form to submit proposals of 250-300 words with a short biography
(100 words) by 5 May 2023. Speakers are expected to present papers of 20 minutes with
Q&A at the end. More info at conference website.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Jim Davis (University of Warwick)
Viv Gardner (University of Manchester)
Fiona Macintosh (University of Oxford)
Kate Newey (University of Exeter)
Benjamin Poore (University of York)
MAIN ORGANIZERS: Laura Monrós-Gaspar (UV), Rosario Arias (UMA), Victoria Puchal
Terol (VIU)
ADVISORY BOARD:
Mireia Aragay (Universitat de Barcelona)
Stefano Evangelista (University of Oxford)
Isobel Hurst (Goldsmith, University of London)
Begoña Lasa Álvarez (Universidade da Coruña)
Janice Norwood (University of Hertfordshire)
Beth Palmer (University of Surrey)
Eugenia Perojo Arronte (Universidad de Valladolid)
Lin Pettersson (Universidad de Málaga)
Antonija Primorac (University of Rijeka)

CFP: Edited Collection – Irish Writers and the Civil Service
Jonathan Foster (Stockholm University), Elliott Mills (Trinity College
Dublin), and Karl O’Hanlon (Maynooth University)

The history of modernism involves a major shift from aristocratic
patronage to technocratic administration (Kindley). In this Irish case, the
scene of art shifted from the Seven Woods of Coole to counters and
desks in bureaucratic Dublin and Belfast. As the writer Richard Power’s
widow Nancy quipped, the Irish Civil Service must have been the biggest
patron of the arts since the Medici (O’Brien). The phenomenon predated
this shift, too, with writers working in the Victorian Irish Civil Service. Irish
writers also found bureaucratic work in an international context. Faced
with the Marriage Bar and other discriminatory regulation, women writers
have helped to forge non-governmental organisations to seek reform of
the state, including the Women Writers’ Club, the League of Nation’s
Society, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
(Brady).
Many major and lesser-known writers honed their pens in officialdom:
Elizabeth Bowen, Suzanne Day, Denis Devlin, Thomas Kinsella, Michael
Longley, Kate O’Brien, Dennis O’Driscoll, Brian O’Nolan (Flann
O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen), Anthony Trollope, Máire Mhac an tSaoi,
Richard Ryan, Bram Stoker, and Mervyn Wall to name just a few.
Ceri Sullivan’s pioneering study of the figure of the “writer-official”
explores how “experience in office produce[s] characteristic and original
modes of writing,” a bureaucratic poetics (6). Following the “institutional
turn” in Irish Studies (Dempsey, Mahony, and O’Neill), attention is
beginning to be paid to the role of the bureaucrat in Irish writing.
Mulreany and O’Brien note that, early in Irish history, “the description
‘scribe’ or ‘poet’ was to a degree interchangeable with ‘public servant’,

albeit of a very rudimentary form. The scribe enshrined, and helped
interpret, law and the poet memorialised events and recalled custom,
procedure, family history and inheritance. Both roles, often combined in
one person, were of importance to the king or local nobility”. They argue
that this overlap has continued in modern times, in so far as aspiring
Irish writers have been “attracted to work in the public sector” and
“develop[ed] their skills and life experience while working there” (xi).
From George O’Brien’s vivid article in The Irish Times on the Civil
Service as a hotbed of Irish writing, Adam Hanna’s work on Kinsella as a
Civil Service poet, to Jonathan Foster and Elliott Mills’s recent special
issue “Brian O’Nolan and the Irish Civil Service”, scholarship in this area
is burgeoning.
This edited collection calls for abstracts considering the Irish writer-
official from a multitude of angles. Topics might include:
● The Irish writer-official and aesthetics/a “bureaucratic poetics”
● The literariness of government institutions (An Gúm and Radio
Éireann, etc.)
● Irish writers and the development of the Northern Irish civil service
after Partition
● relationship of writers in the civil service and the institutions of
state (politicians/Ministers, the Dáil/Senate, judiciary)
● Literature in civil service periodicals (e.g. The Irish Civil Service
Review, Dublin Opinion)
● Critiques of the state
● Scríbhneoireacht Gaeilge/writing in Irish
● Women civil servants and feminism/the Marriage Bar
● State Archives (PRONI, National Archives) and literature
● Theories of labour and Irish literature
● Modernity and bureaucracy in Irish writing

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words and a biography of
50 words to: bureaupoetics@gmail.com

The deadline is: Tuesday 15th November.
Selected contributors will be invited to submit essays, with a view to
producing an edited collection.

Selected Bibliography
Brady, Deirdre F. Literary Coteries and the Irish Women Writers’ Club.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021.
Byrne, Angela et al. All Strangers Here: 100 Years of Personal Writing
from the Irish Foreign Service. Dublin: Arlen House, 2021.
Dempsey, Aoife, Jane Mahony and Stephen O’Neill (eds). ‘Institutions
and Ireland: Transforming Representations’, The Irish University Review,
52.1 (May 2022).
Foster, Jonathan, Elliott Mills (eds). ‘Brian O’Nolan and the Irish Civil
Service’, The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies 6:1
(Spring 2022)
Hanna, Adam. Poetry, Politics, and the Law in Modern Ireland.
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2022.
Kindley, Evan. Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 2017.
Mulreany, Michael, Denis O’Brien (eds.). Lord of the Files: Working for
the Government – An Anthology. Dublin: Institute of Public
Administration, 2011.
O’Brien, George. ‘How the Civil Service Became a Hotbed of Great Irish
Writing’, The Irish Times, 3 February 2018.
Sullivan, Ceri. Literature in the Public Service: Sublime Bureaucracy.
Hampshire: Palgave Macmillan, 2013.

Periodicals also played an important role in the production, mediation, dissemination and reception of Irish literature. Think of the way mid-nineteenth-century magazines like The Dublin Magazine and The Nation fostered the work of William Carleton and Jane Wilde, or how the literature of the Gaelic Revival was disseminated through the Irish Review and The Irish Monthly. Popular story papers, too, have been shown to play a role in the creation of a successful strand of popular Irish fiction in the early-twentieth-century, while the more serious mid-century periodicals like The Bell and The Irish Statesman sought to create an Irish national literature in the decades after independence. Meanwhile, periodicals such as Lagan and Rann carved out a space for writing from the North. In the 1970s, a new generation of poets gathered under the Irish-language magazine Innti and in our own time, magazines such as The Stinging Fly, Gorse and Winter Papers have been instrumental in the current flourishing of Irish short fiction.

By exploring the intersections between Irish writers and the (transnational) periodical press, this conference aims to further scrutinise the ways in which periodical culture in Ireland has impacted writers’ careers, codified the development of literary genres and conventions, and influenced the course of Irish literary history and the canon more generally. We invite papers and panel proposals on subjects related to the connections between Irish literature and the periodical market in the broadest sense: from early miscellanies and nineteenth-century reviews to popular story papers and modernist little magazines, across all genres.

Confirmed plenary speakers
Professor Frank Shovlin (University of Liverpool)
Professor Fionnuala Dillane (University College Dublin)
Professor Stephanie Rains (Maynooth University)

Please send a 250-word abstract along with a short biographical note to phyllis.boumans@kuleuven.be and elke.dhoker@kuleuven.be by 1 May 2022. Papers should not exceed 20 minutes. Please submit your proposal in Word-format only. Contingent on the current health and international travel situation, the conference will be held in the Irish College in Leuven, where accommodation is also available. Further information about the conference will be announced on the website of the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies (https://ghum.kuleuven.be/lcis).

Global Perspectives in Irish Literary Studies: New Series – Call for Proposals

Global Perspectives in Irish Literary Studies will publish monographs and edited collections exploring exciting new critical paths and interventions within Irish studies by showcasing global, comparative and transnational viewpoints on Irish literature and culture.

It will feature established and emerging scholars working on cutting-edge investigations that shed new light on well known authors and discussions, map the global and transnational routes which have produced and disseminated Irish literary culture, and interrogate the concept of the global and ‘Irishness’ – all whilst remaining alert to nuances surrounding global critical debates.

Research will be theoretically informed, offering fresh perspectives on a range of issues, methods and theories including migration, gender, climate justice, world-systems, critical race and postcolonial theories, and intersections between Irish literature and the medical humanities as well as dis/ability, queer and ecocritical studies.

Opening up a critical space for comparative studies of Irish literature beyond the standard transatlantic coordinates, the series will establish a new agenda and new methods for the study of Irish literature, inspiring a fundamental rethink of the grounds of the field and probing the continued relevance of a nationally defined literature in our current age.

Challenging the impulse to return to previous debates about the formation, definition and history of ‘Irish’ literature by complicating the reductive binaries that have at times dominated discourse in Irish literary studies, this series provides the space to expose oversights in critical commonplaces and dynamically complicate the terms of critical debate.

Forthcoming books
Sex, Nation and Transatlantic Literatures by Agata Szczeszak-Brewer

Series editors:

James Little is a postdoctoral researcher at Charles University, Prague and Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia. He is author of Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space (Bloomsbury, 2020) and The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas, published with Bloomsbury and University Press Antwerp (2021) as part of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project.

Christina Morin is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She is the author of The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760-1829 (2018) and Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction (2011). She has also edited, with Marguérite Corporaal, Traveling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century (2017) and, with Niall Gillespie, Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes and Traditions (2014).

Cóilín Parsons is Associate Professor of English and is Director of the Global Irish Studies Initiative at Georgetown University, USA. His publications include The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature, Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa (co-edited with Imraan Coovadia and Alexandra Dodd, 2015) and Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (co-edited with Kathryn Conrad and Julie McCormick Weng, 2019). He also co-edited with Agata Szczeszak-Brewer a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies called “South Africa and Ireland: New Geographies of Comparison.”

Editorial Board:
Lauren Arrington, Maynooth University, Ireland
Ian Campbell Ross, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Claire Connolly, University College Cork, Ireland
Marguérite Corporaal, Radboud University, the    Netherlands
David Dwan, University of Oxford, UK
Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos, Federal Univerity of Santa Catarina, Brazil
Radvan Markus, Charles University, Czechia
Barry McCrea, University of Notre Dame, USA

Have a monograph proposal that would fit this exciting series?

Submissions can be sent to:
Lucy Brown
Commissioning Editor: Literary Studies and Creative Writing
Bloomsbury Publishing
lucy.brown@bloomburypublishing.com

This conversation brings together two novelists who thread the needle between fiction and biography. Nuala O’Connor’s Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce (HarperCollins) and Eibhear Walshe’s The Last Day at Bowen’s Court (Somerville Press) are told from the point of view of two very different Irishwomen—Nora Barnacle and Elizabeth Bowen—and draw from biographical material but are not beholden to it. In this discussion moderated by Heather Bryant Jordan, the authors will consider the relationship between history and fiction, writing writer’s lives, and writing women’s lives.

Dramatists, scholars, and disability activists have started taking an interest in a deaf Irishwoman who was once considered the premiere national playwright of her day: Teresa Deevy. Interest in her life and works has taken different shapes, from those drawn to her representations of women living circumscribed lives in 1930s Ireland to those who want to recover a neglected history of deaf artistry. In a series of panels, we ask what it means to look in the archives for a writer as elusive as Deevy. Where do we find information about Deevy and her work, and how is this quest inflected by the needs of the present moment? This symposium will include discussions between archivists, scholars, theatre historians, disability activists, performance artists, and directors to examine the various ways of finding Deevy in a historical record that has too often blotted her out.

Sarah Harriet Burney (1772–1844), author and translator, a talk presented by Dr Gillian Dow (University of Southampton), followed by a response provided by Prof. Michael Cronin (Trinity College, Dublin). The event will be hosted online by the Institute of English Studies, on Wednesday 25 November, 3-4pm https://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/women-translators-and-authorship-sarah-harriet-burney

George Moore at Home: with Women, Writers, Dramatists, Artists, in France and Ireland, in Salon and at Newgrange.

Saturday 24 April 2021: Online and at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick.

The George Moore conference will definitely take place at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. Circumstances will determine whether it will either be fully virtual, or a blended event that will be both online and with some speakers attending in person. Proposals are welcomed from attending speakers and from online participants.

This one-day event includes the film premiere of a comedic piece, ‘A Question of Style’, penned by playwright Conor Montague and directed by David Clare (MIC). Set in Coole Park, the play is based on the ill-fated collaboration between Moore and Yeats to create a dramatic reimagining of the legend of Diarmuid and Gráinne for the Irish Literary Theatre in 1901.

In April 2021, the writings of Mayo man George Moore (1852-1933) will be honoured once more at the 11^th George Moore International Conference at MIC, University of Limerick. Focusing on the concept of home in the life of Moore (was it Paris, Dublin, Mayo, London, the world of letters?) the event will be an investigation and celebration of the incredible literary legacy of Moore, its ground-breaking patterns, and the utter relevance of his approaches for the 21^st century.

In his lifetime, Moore was honoured by artists and writers – and feared and condemned by a puritanical public for his honesty. Recognised as importer of French modernism into English literature, as the most significant influence in introducing impressionist paintings to England, as trailblazer for modern autobiography and memoir, Moore also excelled in several other genres: Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant ‘borrowed’ from Moore’s A Modern Lover (1883); the structure of his short story collection The Untilled Field was the model for James Joyce’s Dubliners and the conclusion of ‘The Dead’ is reminiscent of Moore’s Vain Fortune (1891). The trail of connections and influences and cultural circles stretches from Mayo to Paris, London and Hollywood (with Glenn Close in Albert Nobbs, the 2012 film of Moore’s atmospheric story).

While Moore faded temporarily from general memory, it was because England viewed him as a little dangerous, too French, too Irish and too Catholic, while bourgeois Ireland also feared him but saw him as insufficiently Irish and Catholic, and Mayo remembered unwelcome disclosures of contemporary unorthodoxy! More recently, Moore is much appreciated for his pertinence and artistry. More than a century ago, Moore identified the perils of clerical dominance, embraced the European novel, supported women, sympathetically understood the multiple complexities of human sexuality, and wove visual art and music into the novel. Those paths are the routes frequently now chosen by writers, and such qualities are appreciated by today’s readers.

In approaching the topic of home, it is timely to remember a wise counsel, that Moore studies should “think through the interlinked intellectual cross-currents between his work and that of his contemporaries both as part of a process of canonical reappraisal and as recognition of the impossibilities of placing the truly individual artist into neat categories or movements.” (Heilman and Lewellyn 2014, 16).

Proposals for short papers are invited from individual speakers and from themed panels. Topics could include, but are not limited to:

Abstracts (200 words) for papers proposed (20 minutes maximum delivery time) should be accompanied by a short biographical note (100 words), plus full address, institutional affiliation and email. Please send abstracts to Kathryn Laing (kathryn.laing@mic.ul.ie) and Mary Pierse (piersemary@gmail.com) by 31 January 2021.

Moving texts: from discovery to delivery

Call for Papers
Romance, Revolution and Reform Virtual Conference
13th January 2021
‘Transnationalism in the Long-Nineteenth Century’

The Long-Nineteenth Century saw immense changes in transport, travel, infrastructure, technology, exploration, journalism, and politics that dramatically transformed the ways in which places and people around the world were connected. Steam trains and telegraph cables, photography and newspapers made the world a smaller, more connected place for some, and alienated others. Yet these technological advancements, and the transnational networks they facilitated, are often viewed from a Euro-centric perspective.

Now, more than ever, it is important to think globally and to challenge these dominant Euro-centric narratives. This interdisciplinary virtual conference aims to create an open forum where transnational research into the Long-Nineteenth Century from around the world, and from across the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, can come together. It aims to challenge our sense of nineteenth-century Britain’s place in the world, and to explore how scrutinising these narratives can contribute to wider ongoing discussions about the ways to challenge racism and prejudice.

We welcome proposals for 10 to 15-minute papers, and 5-minute lightning talks from disciplines across the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and from scholars around the world at any stage in their academic careers, including MA students. We are especially interested in interdisciplinary submissions and encourage papers from archaeological, ethnographical, musical and social sciences perspectives as well as those from literary or historical ones. Potential topics could include: global citizenship, religion, gender and sexuality, black British literature, decolonisation of arts and heritage, slavery and emancipation, imperial studies, political reform, philosophy, transnational print cultures, boundaries and redefining them, mapping, British colonialism in Ireland, international trade and exchange, Orientalism/Occidentalism, and eco studies.

Speakers will have the opportunity to submit their papers for consideration for Issue 4 of RRR, which will also take ‘Transnationalism’ as its theme. Abstracts of up to 250 words and bios of up to 75 words should be submitted to rrr@soton.ac.uk by 17:00 on Monday 2nd November 2020. Submissions should be formatted in a Word file and attached to the email; please also include your full name, subject of study and any institutional affiliations in your submission.

YELLOW NINETIES 2.0 (https://beta.1890s.ca/about) is an open-access scholarly resource for the study of eight British Fin-de-Siècle little magazines in the context of their production and reception. In addition to a searchable digital edition of each magazine, we provide a critical overview of the title and a scholarly introduction for each volume in the series, as well as a historical archive of contemporary promotional materials and critical reviews. Two biographical tools—essays on individual contributors and the Y90s Personography—facilitate discovery of the people and networks that created the artwork and literature in these magazines.

The Y90s Magazine Rack holds the following titles: The Dial, The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The Green Sheaf, The Pagan Review, The Pageant, The Savoy, The Venture, and The Yellow Book.

We are currently looking for specialist scholars—at any career stage and with or without institutional affiliation—who wish to provide biographical essays on persons (e.g. literary or journalistic contributors, illustrators, artists, engravers, printers, publishers, editors) with substantial links to little magazines available from our website. All submissions undergo peer review, and essays are usually published within a month from formal acceptance.

We welcome your own suggestions, but we can also supply you with a list of subjects that we ourselves are particularly looking to commission.

If you are interested, please contact:
Biographies Acquisitions Editor Koenraad Claes (koenraad.claes@anglia.ac.uk) or
General Editor Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (ljanzen@ryerson.ca).

George Moore at Home: with Women, Writers, Dramatists, Artists, in France and Ireland, in Salon and at Newgrange.

December 3rd 2020 (in the current circumstances, the conference may change to online or be postponed to Spring 2021)

This one-day event includes a performance of a comedic piece, ‘A Question of Style’, penned by playwright Conor Montague and directed by David Clare (MIC). Set in Coole Park, the play is based on the ill-fated collaboration between Moore and Yeats to create a dramatic reimagining of the legend of Diarmuid and Graniafor the Irish Literary Theatre in 1901.

In December 2020, the writings of Mayo man George Moore (1852-1933) will be honoured once more at the 11^th George Moore International Conference at MIC, University of Limerick. Focusing on the concept of home in the life of Moore (was it Paris, Dublin, Mayo, London, the world of letters?) the event will be an investigation and celebration of the incredible literary legacy of Moore, its ground-breaking patterns, and the utter relevance of his approaches for the 21^st century.

Proposals for short papers are invited from individual speakers and from themed panels. Topics could include, but are not limited to:

Lady Gregory who helped to shape modern Irish literature is coming into view. The Irish Repertory Theater (NYC) has produced “Lady G: Plays and Whisperings of Lady Gregory,” directed by Ciaran O’Reilly. Una Clancy shines in the role, and two of Gregory’s plays, “Workhouse Ward” and “McDonough’s Wife” are part of the production as well as walk-ons of Yeats, Wilfred Blunt, Mary Sheridan. In addition, the New York Public Library that has the Lady Gregory Collection of Papers (notebooks, letters, journals etc.) will exhibit some of this material in an exhibit, “All This Mine Alone: Lady Gregory and the Irish Literary Revival,” October 1st, 2020 – February 28th, 2021

Exhibition: All This Mine Alone: Lady Gregory and the Irish Literary Revival: https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/lady-gregory

https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/teresa-deevy-and-rte-accessibility-on-the-airwaves-tickets-91592001141

CFP: The School of English, Dublin City University. A symposium on ‘Literature and the Media: Crossings’

EER Press and the Irish Women’s Writing Network are delighted to announce two new series on Irish women’s writing. Titles will reflect the current wealth of innovative critical, biographical, archival, and historical research on writing by Irish women from 1800 onward, considering both under-examined writers and fresh approaches to more familiar bodies of work.

Key Irish Women Writers offers critical introductions to key Irish women writers written by expert scholars. Combining major figures such as Maria Edgeworth, Augusta Gregory and Elizabeth Bowen with lesser-known figures, the series focuses on the long 19th century and the first half of the 20th, and sets out to offer comprehensive accounts of significant individual careers by the foremost critics in the field. Scholarly yet accessible, these studies marry original scholarship and an overview of the often scattered extant critical approaches to an author with considerations of key texts and contexts, biographical outlines and up-to-date bibliographies.

The first four volumes in Key Irish Women Writers are: Maria Edgeworth by Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Elizabeth Bowen by Heather Ingman, Jane Wilde by Eibhear Walshe, and Kate O’Brien by Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka.

Irish Women Writers: Texts and Contexts presents annotated critical editions of forgotten or neglected work by women from the long nineteenth century and early to mid-twentieth century which is out of print, uncollected, unpublished, or unavailable via digital platforms.

Ethel Colburn Mayne (Johnstown 1865 – Torquay 1941) made her debut as a writer with a short story in The Yellow Book in 1895 and would go on to publish novels, story collections, biographies, literary criticism and translations, first from her parents’ home in Cork and, after 1905, from London. Her greatest achievement is within the genre of the short story, where she combines sensitive psychological insight with acute social observation and critique. This collection offers a selection of stories from the six collections Mayne published between 1898 and 1923. The selection showcases various concerns of Mayne’s writing, with a focus on stories that have an Irish setting and/or characters.

Hannah Lynch’s Girl Rebels: ‘A Girl Revolutionist’ and ‘Marjory Maurice’, edited by Kathryn Laing

Hannah Lynch (Dublin 1859 – Paris 1904) was the author of feminist fiction, travel writing and journalism. Her short story for girls, ‘A Girl Revolutionist’ (1899) and serialised novella, ‘Marjory Maurice’ (1884-85), were based on her own experiences as an active member of the Ladies’ Land League (1881-1882). The stories in this volume will be a vital resource for readers and scholars interested in Hannah Lynch, (Irish) New Girl and New Woman fiction, the Ladies’ Land League, literary representations of the land wars, nineteenth century periodical and newspaper culture and history.

Rosa Mulholland (1841-1921), Feminist, Victorian, Catholic and Patriot, edited by James H. Murphy

Sinéad Mooney (De Montfort University) and Kathryn Laing (Mary Immaculate College, UL)

We are hosting a seminar in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick on February 8th, 2019 as part of the FemFest on campus. The day long event features readings and keynotes from Martina Devlin, Donna Gilligan and Lizzie Nunnery.

Follow the hashtag on twitter #FemFestMIC for more details of the events in MIC Limerick.

The conference is set to be held on Monday 1st and Tuesday 2nd July 2019 at the University of Birmingham in collaboration with the Centre for Modernist Cultures. Studies of modernism and the home are wide-ranging; this international conference will reflect the broad scope of research, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue between literary, arts and cultural sectors. The conference invites scholars to interrogate the historical, theoretical and thematic intersections occurring in the domestic sphere in the early twentieth century. Panellists are invited to reconsider and discuss the aesthetic, social, political, technological, artistic, scientific, cultural and textual relationship between modernism and the home, in a global context.

Call for Papers

Irish Women’s Writing at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Alternative Histories,
New Narratives
Co-editors: Kathryn Laing and Sinéad Mooney
This will be one of the first publications to inaugurate a new major Irish Studies Series:
EER Publishers Studies in Irish Literature, Cinema and Culture
General Editor: Pilar Villar Argáiz

The aim of this essay collection is to capitalise on new research and innovative scholarship on Irish women’s writing at the fin de siècle and into the early twentieth century. An array of recent conferences and publications have highlighted the riches of this interdisciplinary and international field in which a diverse range of hitherto neglected Irish women writers have been recovered, their lives, works, networks and other contexts illuminated. The aim is to foreground current scholarship that at once develops existing strands of enquiry further and that also introduces new avenues for exploration. As well as ‘acts of recovery’, we also seek new engagements specifically in relation to Irish women’s cultural economies, particularly literary networks, access to literary production and publication, the long nineteenth century and emergent modernist aesthetics.

^{Call for papers: Gender, Sexuality, and Citizenship: Day Workshop for Postgraduates and Early Career Scholars at the University of Limerick, 21st February 2018}

Professor Jack Halberstam (Columbia University) will deliver a public lecture at the University of Limerick on 21^st February, 2018. Professor Halberstam will address issues arising in the research for his current book, Trans* A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (2018). In conjunction with this event, the University of Limerick Gender ARC will host a day workshop for postgraduate and early career scholars working in the field of Gender & Sexuality studies in / relating to Ireland.

The workshop aims to bring together a community of scholars working at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the fields of Irish studies (including migration and transnational scholarship). Selected postgraduates and early career scholars will be invited to submit a short paper in advance of the workshop, present their research on the day, get responses to their work and, where relevant, teaching practice from senior scholars and peers in the field. The workshop offers scholars an expansive theoretical moment for collaboration and exchange on research topics involving gender and sexuality studies across disciplines and cultures in and/or relating to Ireland. Our panel of respondents include Professor Patricia Coughlan (UCC), Dr Denis Flannery (Leeds), Dr Charlotte McIvor (NUIG), Professor Gerardine Meaney (UCD), Dr Maureen O’Connor (UCC) and Dr Anne Mulhall (UCD), along with faculty members from UL’s Gender ARC.

Postgraduate and early career scholars who wish to apply for a place in the workshop should send an abstract (300 words) outlining your proposed paper (this may derive from an existing thesis chapter or journal article / book chapter in-progress) to the Gender ARC Project Co-Ordinator, Dr Margaret O’Neill: margaret.oneill@ul.ie. Abstracts should be accompanied by a short email (no more than 200 words) explaining how your project will benefit from this workshop; please attach your full name and university affiliation to this. The deadline for applications is 15^th January 2018 at 5pm. Successful applicants will be notified quite soon after that date and full papers (2500-3000 words) will fall due on 31^st January at 5pm so that we may send material to respondents.

Thanks to funding support from the Faculty of Arts, Humanities & Social Science Teaching & Learning Board and the National Forum for Teaching & Learning in Higher Education, we can provide travel funding within Ireland for postgraduates / early career scholars whose papers are accepted. Light refreshments will be provided on the day (thanks to funding from the School of Culture & Communication and the School of Education).

Application for a place in the workshop is open to all postgraduate and early career scholars. The workshop is multidisciplinary but is aimed at scholars working in the following disciplines:

Research projects with a clear basis in Gender and Sexuality studies relating to Ireland and/or Irish migration/transnational studies will be the focus of our exchanges.Given Halberstam’s ground-breaking work in the field of queer theory, thesis research in or relating to that area will be prioritised during the selection process. For further information, please contact margaret.oneill@ul.ie

*Led by Dr Tina O’Toole (School of Culture and Communication), organisers include Dr Breda Gray (Department of Sociology) Mx Alena Kiel (School of Culture and Communication), Dr Aoife Neary (School of Education), and Dr Margaret O’Neill (Gender ARC).

Call for Papers for Transitions: Bridging the Victorian-Modernist Divide. The conference is set to be held on 9th and 10th of April 2018 at the University of Birmingham.

https://midlandsmodernistnetwork.wordpress.com/transitions-bridging-the-victorian-modernist-divide/
The CFP closes December 18th 2017. Decisions will be made in early January.

deadline for submissions: December 20, 2017
University of Toulouse, France
contact email:
catherine.delyfer@univ-tlse2.fr
“Female suffrage in British Art, Literature and History”

A conference organized by Catherine Delyfer and Catherine Puzzo (Univ. Toulouse, CAS, JDG)

When the Abbey Theatre announced its 1916 centenary “Waking the Nation” programme, Irish theatre fans and practitioners were rightly outraged that only one of the ten plays being produced was written by a woman. The outcry over that gender-imbalanced programme led numerous Irish women to take to social media and vent their justified anger. The “Waking the Feminists” (WTF) initiative was born, and this important grassroots movement has done much to highlight the prejudice regularly endured by women working in Irish theatre.

Taking inspiration from WTF and earlier interventions such as “There Are No Irish Women Playwrights!”, scholars based at Limerick’s Mary Immaculate College have decided to mount a conference on 8-10 June 2017 which will highlight the vital, frequently overlooked contributions that women have made to Irish theatrical life from the eighteenth century to the present. The plenary speakers include Co. Clare playwright Ursula Rani Sarma, as well as three highly-regarded academics who have worked in this field for many years: Dr. Cathy Leeney (UCD), Dr. Melissa Sihra (TCD), and Dr. Maria Kurdi (University of Pécs).

The topics that the plenaries and panel speakers have proposed to cover include important Irish playwrights (e.g., Davys, Griffith, Sheridan, Edgeworth, Balfour, Milligan, Gregory, Gore-Booth, Deevy, Manning, ní Ghráda, Reid, Devlin, Carr, Conroy, and numerous others), as well leading directors, scenographers, and contemporary devisers. Irish-language Drama, Theatre for Young Audiences, and the intersection between feminist politics and Irish theatre will also be probed.

In addition to the keynotes and papers, the conference will include rehearsed readings of plays by two Irish women playwrights: one historical (Teresa Deevy) and one contemporary (Dramatist TBC). There will also be a roundtable discussion involving women theatremakers from across the island; this will highlight the challenges facing (and the exciting developments involving) women working in Irish theatre today.

To register for this conference, please email Dr. David Clare (david.clare@mic.ul.ie). For additional information regarding the conference, please write to Aideen Wylde (aideen.wylde@mic.ul.ie), Dr. Fiona McDonagh (fiona.mcdonagh@mic.ul.ie), or Dr. Clare. The full conference fee is €40 (€20 for students and the unwaged).

At NUI Galway, and supported by the Wikimedia Community Ireland, an editathon is taking place during the week of International Women’s Day, in March 2017. The aim is to add overlooked women and women’s work to Wikipedia.

WHAI Annual Conference: Gender and Class in Ireland, 21-22 April 2017, National University of Ireland, Galway

From the 4th to the 6th of May 2017, the KU Leuven department of Literary Studies, research group MDRN and the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies will host the third annual conference of the European Network for Short Fiction Research (ENSFR).

Short Fiction: Co-texts and Contexts – Le Récit Bref: Co-textes et Contexts.

Women on Ireland Research Network Annual Conference: Women and Irishness
Waterford Institute of Technology
1st & 2nd of June 2017

Women’s History in the Digital World will be held July 6-7, 2017 at Maynooth University (Ireland). Call for papers is open.

XVI International Conference of the Spanish Association for Irish Studies (AEDEI)

“Fe/male Challenges in Irish Studies from the 19th to the 21st Centuries”

Single Lives: 200 Years of Independent Women in Literature and Popular Culture (University College Dublin, Oct-2017)

https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/166689/single-lives-200-years-independent-women-literature-and-popular

CONVENTION AND REVOLUTION
Life writing by women in the 1800s and 1900s: archives, critiques and methods
29 November -1 December 2017 Warsaw, Poland

http://www.the-cwwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/CONVENTION-AND-REVOLUTION-call-for-papers.pdf

A two-day conference organised by the Cultural Currents (1870-1930) Research Group at Loughborough University, 7-8 April, 2017

E. Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross: Female Authorship and Literary Collaboration
Anne Jamison

Irish women writers entered the British and international publishing scene in unprecedented numbers in the period between 1878 and 1922. This collection of new essays by leading scholars explores how women writers including Emily Lawless, L. T. Meade, Katharine Tynan, Lady Gregory, Rosa Mulholland, Ella Young and Beatrice Grimshaw used their work to advance their own private and public political concerns through astute manoeuvrings both in the expanding publishing industry and against the partisan expectations of an ever-growing readership.

https://ahssresearch.wordpress.com/2017/01/10/book-launch-of-women-writing-war-ireland-1880-1922/

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/no-longer-forgotten-women-activists-from-the-decade-of-centenaries-1.2889074

Fashion and Material Culture in Victorian Fiction and Periodicals

Edited Collection: Call for Contributors

Abstracts Due: 31^st July 2016

Click here for more.

Gender ARC (Advanced Research Consortium on Gender, Culture and the Knowledge Society) is a research network linking more than fifty academics at the National University of Ireland, Galway and the University of Limerick who are engaged in gender-focused research across diverse disciplines including: Business, Economics, Education, Film Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Geography, History, Health Sciences, Irish Studies, Languages, Law, Literature, Nursing and Midwifery, Politics and Sociology.

This innovative new series will deliver original and transformative feminist research into the work of leading women writers who were widely read in their time, but who have been under-represented in the canon.

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