UCONN IRISH LITERATURE Spring 2019

NICK LAIRD

GERSON READER 2019

APRIL 9 @ 7:00 pm Wilbur Cross North Reading Room

Nick Laird was born in Northern Ireland and currently teaches creative writing at NYU. He has published four poetry collections with Faber and Faber, and his fourth, Feel Free, was shortlisted for the 2018 T.S. Eliot Prize. He has published three novels with Fourth Estate, most recently Modern Gods (2017). His first, Utterly Monkey, won the 2005 Berry Trask Prize for best first novel. He is a recipient of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. A graduate of Cambridge University, he was a lawyer before becoming a full-time writer.

 

 

Heather Corbally Bryant

Feb. 28 @ 12:30 pm, MONT 302

Heather teaches creative writing at Wellesley. She received her Ph.D. in Modern British and Irish Literature from the University of Michigan. She has published two novels and her monograph on Elizabeth Bowen, How Will the Heart Endure (U of Michigan P) won an ACIS prize. She will read from her seventh poetry collection, James Joyce’s Water Closet (Finishing Line Press, 2018).

 

 

Lisa Taylor & Geraldine Mills April 11@12:30pm MONT 302

Lisa C. Taylor has four collections of poetry, and two of fiction, most recently Impossibly Small Spaces. Lisa was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received the Hugo House Fiction Award. Geraldine Mills is the author of three collections of short fiction, four of poetry with Arlen House (with a fifth forthcoming), and children’s novel Gold (2016). She has been awarded the Hennessy New Irish Writer Award, two Irish Arts Council bursaries, and a Kavanagh Fellowship. Mills and Taylor met at a writing conference, and Lisa subsequently travelled to Ireland on a Surdna Arts Fellowship to explore Geraldine’s landscape and culture. Geraldine later traveled to Connecticut, and the resulting joint poetry collection was the 2011 The Other Side of Longing, published the year Mills and Taylor delivered a joint Gerson Reading. Irish government agency Culture Ireland has co-sponsored Mills’s travel.

 

 

All events are Free & open to all

mary.burke@uconn.edu for accommodations

Sponsors: Irish Studies, Gerson Family Fund & Culture Ireland

UConn IRISH STUDIES

Fall 2018 Event Calendar

 

Kate COSTELLO-SULLIVAN talk on Carmilla critical edition

Sept. 27, AUST 216 at 1:00pm

Costello-Sullivan is Professor of Modern Irish Literature and Dean of CAS at Le Moyne College, NY, where she founded the Irish literature program.  She has published widely on contemporary Irish fiction, including the first monograph on Colm Tóibín.  Trauma and Recovery in the 21st-Century Irish Novel was published this spring by Syracuse UP, where she has just been appointed General Editor. She is current VP of the American Conference for Irish Studies. She has edited a critical edition of J.S. Le Fanu’s Carmilla, the challenges of which will be the subject of her talk. mary.burke@uconn.edu to RESERVE A SEAT

 

Talk on DOROTHY MACARDLE (center), Oct. 25, AUST 216 at 1:00pm

Dorothy Macardle (1889-1958) was an Irish novelist, playwright, and popular historian. Her 1942 feminist Gothic novel, The Uninvited, was adapted for the screen by Hollywood in 1944. The editor of two forthcoming reissues of Macardle’s work by Tramp Press, CAROLINE HEAFEY, will speak on the author’s work. mary.burke@uconn.edu to RESERVE A SEAT

The Halloween-appropriate film of The Uninvited will be screened at 11:00am on 10/25 in AUST 202 (prior to Heafey’s talk).

 

MARY MADEC poetry reading, Nov. 13, AUST 202 at 11:00am

Irish poet Mary Madec is a graduate of NUI Galway and the University of Pennsylvania, where she was awarded her doctorate in Linguistics. In 2008 she was the recipient of Ireland’s prestigious Hennessy XO Award for Emerging Poetry. She has published two volumes with Salmon Poetry Press, In Other Words (2010) and Demeter Does Not Remember (2014). She is current Director of the Villanova University Study Abroad Program in Galway.

FREE & OPEN to all but please reserve a seat if indicated–mary.burke@uconn.edu for ACCOMMODATIONS

UConn IRISH STUDIES (Spring 2018)

 

COLUM McCANN, Gerson Irish Reader 2018

April 10, 7:00pm, Alumni Center

New York-resident Colum McCann, one of Ireland’s most internationally prominent contemporary fiction writers, will deliver the 20^th-anniversary Gerson Irish Reading, the culmination of a 2-day Narrative 4 event in which he will participate. N4 details + registration here. Gerson queries: mary.burke@uconn.edu; N4: brendan.kane@uconn.edu /dana.miranda@uconn.edu

————————————————————————————————————————————————-

 

GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE: “Emerging Voices in Irish Studies”

March 3, 10:00-4:00pm, Public Library, 500 Main Street, Hartford CT. Organized by the Irish Studies Alliance. Keynote by Joseph Lennon, Emily C. Riley Director of the Center for Irish Studies, Villanova University. Queries: uconn.irishstudiesalliance@gmail.com or mollie.kervick@uconn.edu

 

RECLAIMING a 1930s PLAYWRIGHT, 11:00am, Mar. 20 & 22, both AUST 102

Dublin’s Abbey staged six plays by Teresa Deevy in the 1930s, work forgotten until Jonathan Bank, artistic director of NYC’s MINT Theatre, revived Deevy. A recording of MINT’s recent Deevy productions to be screened at 11am on 3/20. Follow-up talk at 11am on 3/22 by Deevy scholar and speaker at MINT’s 2017 Deevy public events, TARA HARNEY-MAHAJAN

 

CORMAC O’MALLEY on ERNIE O’MALLEY, 12.30pm, April 3, BUSN 204

A talk on Ernie O’Malley’s classic memoir on the Irish war of independence (1919-21), On Another Man’s Wound (1936),

written while O’Malley was living in New Mexico and New York. Cormac has extensively edited his father’s work.

 

COLM TÓIBíN, 1:00pm, April 5, Multipurpose Rm, Waterbury campus

Reading by Colm Tóibín, one of Ireland’s greatest living writers and the current Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia. Register in advance: 203-236-9924 or 203-236-9925 or by email: Osher@uconn.edu. Queries: rachael.lynch@uconn.edu

 

All events FREE

mary.burke@uconn.edu for details, unless noted otherwise

SPRING 2018

 

IRISH STUDIES EVENT CALENDAR SPRING 2017

KEVIN BARRY, Gerson Reading 2017

7:00pm April 11 (Tues.), Alumni Center, in honor of Louis Gerson*

Kevin Barry (center) is one of Ireland’s most internationally prominent contemporary fiction writers. His novel City of Bohane, winner of the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, was described by the New York Times as “an extraordinary first novel” exhibiting “marvels of language, invention, and surprise.” His 2015 novel Beatlebone won the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize, awarded to British and Irish fiction that extends the possibilities of the novel. Beatlebone is also a nominee for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award, the world’s most valuable annual literary fiction prize for books published in English. Barry has also published two collections of short stories and is co-editor and co-founder of influential annual Irish literary arts anthology, Winter Papers.

* This year’s reading will commemorate the late Louis Gerson, who died in recent months.

 

 

KELLY SULLIVAN, 11:00 am April 13 (Thurs.), BUSN 204

Kelly Sullivan (left) is a poet and fiction writer and Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of Irish Studies at NYU with an expertise in Irish late modernism. Her novel, Winter Bayou (2006) was published by Lilliput Press, Dublin, and her poems and short fiction have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Salmagundi, The Moth, Southword, The Hopkins Review, and UnderWater New York. She has an MA from University College, Dublin, and a PhD in literature from Boston College. She will read from her poetry chapbook, Fell Year, forthcoming with Green Bottle Press (London) in spring 2017. Her poems engage with questions of private experience and public address, and chart dark pastoral landscapes and experiences of loss through human connections to the environment.

 

 

BRENDA MURPHY, 11:00am March 23 (Tues.), BUSN 204

Brenda Murphy (right) is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at UConn.  She is the author of twenty books, the most recent being Eugene O’Neill Remembered (2017), a biography in documents. The subject of her talk will be After the Voyage: An Irish American Story (2016), historical fiction based on the experience of her immigrant family in the Boston area from 1870 until the 1930s.

 

 

FREE AND OPEN TO ALL

Events co-sponsored by ENGLISH DEPTARTMENT SPEAKER FUND, IRISH STUDIES, and the GERSON FUND

mary.burke@uconn.edu for details

 

 

Irish Studies calendar spring 2017

In addition to UConn’s brilliant showing at ACIS 2016, we played host on the evening of April 5 to Northern Irish poet Sinead Morrissey as the Gerson Irish Literature Reader for 2016. The reading, which took place at the William Benton Museum, was a rousing success, and it was featured in UConn’s Daily Campus, in an article written by staff writer Edward Pankowski.

 

Many thanks to the 2016 Gerson Series team: Prof. Rachael Lynch, Matthew Ryan Shelton, and Brian Sneeden who ran the video recording the night of the event.

The American Conference for Irish Studies for 2016 was held this year at the University of Notre Dame, entitled “The Worlding of Irish Studies,” and UConn was very well represented. Thanks to ISA’s Vice President Brian Sneeden, we have a concise map of all the UConn participants culled from the ACIS 2016 Conference Schedule:

#UCONNatACIS Conference Guide.bmp

The ISA also met up with UConn alumns and new friends, too, at O’Rourke’s Public House near campus for a wonderful Irish Studies Alliance Shindig.

Be sure to check out @UConnISA on Twitter, as well as the hashtag #acis2016 for the exciting Twitter coverage of the conference – including poetry readings, secret passageways, snails, keynotes, rain hail and snow, and much much more.

Thanks to everyone who made this year’s ACIS a rousing success, and thanks also to the many UConn participants: Prof. Mary Burke, Prof. Tom Shea, Prof. Rachael Lynch, Tara Harney-Mahajan, Kate Gross, Sarah Berry, Brian Sneeden, and Matthew Ryan Shelton. Maith sibh a chairde!

Irish Masculinity, Fatherhood, and Cinematic Representations of

‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland

UConn-Waterbury Faculty Program Fund and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute 

This program will feature a talk, with illustrative film clips, by Professor Nicole McClure, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Kutztown. Professor McClure will speak on Irish masculinity, fatherhood, and the cinematic representations of ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland.

DATE: Thursday November 12, 2015

TIME: 6:30 – 7:45 p.m.

LOCATION: UConn Waterbury, Room 333

Please RSVP by: Thursday November 5, 2015

Call (203)-236-9924/9925, email osher@uconn.edu

 

*This event is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

*Light refreshments will be served

Nicole McClure is an Assistant Professor of English at Kutztown University, PA. Professor McClure received both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literary & Cultural Studies from UConn. Professor McClure has over seven years of teaching experience on the university level and has been a guest speaker at UConn on many occasions. She is author of “They were only kids: Public reconciliation for misguided youth in Five Minutes of Heaven.” Country of the Young: Interpretations of Youth and Childhood in Irish Culture, published in 2013, and author of “Injured bodies, silenced voices: Reclaiming personal trauma and the narration of pain in Northern Ireland.” Special Issue of Peace and Change: Bodily Pain and Peace and Human Rights: Thirty Years after Elaine Scarry’s, The Body in Pain, forthcoming this fall.

Bidding bon voyage to our very own Christina Wilson (PhD Candidate and Fulbright Scholar) and Colm Mac Fhionnghaile (AY 2015-16 Fulbright FLTA):

Christina will be in Galway for the remainder of 2015, while Colm will be returning to his native Donegal (that’s Dún na nGall for you Gaelic speakers out there).  We wish them both the best of luck!