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Call for papers

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In October 1999, when Babeș-Bolyai University’s MA programme in Irish Studies – initially designed as Irish Writing and Its Contexts – was inaugurated, it was the first and, to this day, is the only postgraduate degree offering a cross-disciplinary perspective on Irish culture, literature and history at any Central/Eastern European university. The time was one of rapid globalising for Irish Studies, backed by Celtic Tiger optimism, at the start of a decade of hopes for deeper European integration and democratisation in the region and worldwide. But it would also bring in far-reaching changes that prompted, in our domains of knowledge and across the humanities, a thorough overhaul of ways of seeing and framing difference. At the start of the Cluj ISMA, global Irish Studies were dominated by postcolonial rehistoricising and recontextualising approaches pivoting on rigorous archival studies. Importantly, the decade saw a definite decline in the understanding of literary culture as part of the anthropological program of “inventing Ireland”, to quote the title of one of Declan Kiberd’s seminal books that to this day underpins our discipline; a transition from culture understood as projecting a shared sense of identity and future, to “after Ireland” (to quote the title of another defining volume by Kiberd), that is, to an understanding of literature as operating in a planetary field, fully enmeshed with other forms and modes of imagining personhood, creaturely life and vulnerability.

Lego, legare: as the Latin etymon of the first word in our title implies, “legacies” translate as chords binding future developments or meshing their potential unfoldings with that which is bequeathed by the past, in the sense of both an alignment with existing lines of research and an opening up of fields of inquiry towards future possibilities. In fact, in the quarter century since the Cluj ISMA started, literary and cultural studies – Irish Studies included – have shown a pervasive preoccupation with questions of ethics and biopolitics that cut across lines of gender, class, ethnicity, human and nonhuman geographies and habitats. Consequently, the curriculum taught today is informed by corporeal studies, trauma studies, new materialism(s), different posthumanisms, animal studies, and ecocriticism, whose investigations as a rule reveal the ontological and ethical tangle of literary phenomena with earthly life.

Celebrating twenty-five years since the founding of ISMA in Cluj, we invite proposals for papers, panels and roundtables on any aspect that taps into reperspectivising these cultural legacies. Like any anniversary moment, this calls for a retrospective and prospective re-threading of our thoughts on Ireland and Irish culture, which has often been forced by history to experiment with modes of being, ways of transmission and aesthetic forms that widely deviated from established norms and genres, received notions of the status and social role of culture, and canonical aesthetics. Given the rapid, dramatic changes Ireland underwent since the millennium turn, from an economic powerhouse in a fully globalised world to the exceptionally progressive post-Celtic Tiger state, Irish culture is again among the “first respondents” to the multiple, intersectional crises affecting all earthlings. Irish culture’s public framing has similarly continued to change. An almost symbolic illustration could be the transition from the “greening” of the towering modernist self-exiles, whose names came to adorn Dublin’s contemporary architectural landmarks (the “James Joyce” and “Samuel Beckett” bridges across the Liffey designed by international star architect Santiago Calatrava) to the naming of an offshore patrol vessel participating in UN humanitarian missions after the latter: the LÉ Samuel Beckett, which rescued around 1,000 refuges in the Mediterranean before the pandemic.

We are looking for papers that explore Irish literature and its modes of questioning and provoking putative certainties, of subverting established norms and forms that corresponded to social, political and cultural structures of power. Proposals related to these and any other aspects of the multifarious “tense future” ahead of us are also welcome.

We will be honoured to welcome His Excellency, Mr. Brendan Ward, Ambassador or Ireland to Romania.

The workshop will feature the following invited speakers:

  • Caitriona Lally, Irish writer
  • Professor Eve Patten (Trinity College Dublin)
  • Professor Declan Kiberd (University of Notre Dame)
  • Professor Sanda Berce (Babes-Bolyai University)
  • Professor Nicholas Allen (University of Georgia)
  • Professor Brian Ó Conchubhair (University of Notre Dame)

Proposals

  • Proposals for 20-minute papers, panels and roundtables should include the speaker’s name, institutional affiliation, title of paper, and a 200-word abstract. 

  • Proposals and any other inquiries should be submitted by e-mail to Erika Mihálycsa (erika.mihalycsa@ubbcluj.ro) and Carmen Borbely (carmen.borbely@ubbcluj.ro) by 10 November 2024

  • Further information to follow.

Programme

    The programme will be available soon.

    The book of abstracts will be available soon.

Keynote speakers

CAITRIONA LALLY

CAITRIONA LALLY has published two novels, Eggshells (2015) and Wunderland (2021). Eggshells was shortlisted for the Newcomer Award at the Irish Book Awards and the Kate O’Brien Debut Novel Award. In 2018, Lally won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction in 2019. She was the inaugural Rooney Writer Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub in 2022, and was named one of the 2024 New Voices 20 Best New Irish Writers at the Irish Book Awards. She works as a cleaner in Trinity College Dublin.

EVE PATTEN, Trinity College Dublin

EVE PATTEN is Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin and Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute. A scholar in modern Irish and British literary history, she is author of a monograph on representations of Ireland’s revolutionary decades in English writing, Ireland, Revolution, and the English Modernist Imagination (2022, Oxford Umiversity Press), and editor of the essay volume, Irish Literature in Transition, 1940-1980 (2020, Cambridge University Press). She writes frequently on Irish fiction and is a contributor to the Oxford Handbook for Modern Irish Fiction, edited by Liam Harte, 2020. She is series editor for the Irish Literary Studies monograph series at Liverpool University Press, and co-PI on the Irish Higher Education Authority-funded Shared Island digital archive project, ‘Ireland’s Border Culture: Literature, Arts, and Policy’. She is co-editor, with Paul Delaney, of the short story anthology, Dublin Tales (2023, Oxford University Press).

DECLAN KIBERD, University College Dublin

DECLAN KIBERD has taught for decades at University College Dublin and at Notre Dame, and been a visiting professor at Cambridge University and the Sorbonne. He is author of Inventing Ireland, Irish Classics, After Ireland, and Ulysses and Us, and has edited Ulysses in a student’s annotated edition for Penguin Modern Classics.  Professor Kiberd has lectured in some 30 countries worldwide and contributes essays and reviews to The Irish Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, and The New York Times. In 2018, Professor Kiberd led the inaugural Keough Global Seminar at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, which also awarded him an honorary degree. In 2022, he co-edited The Book About Everything with Enrico Terrinoni and Catherine Wilsdon. In celebration of the centenary of Ulysses, eighteen artists, writers and thinkers responded to an episode each of the great modernist text.

BRIAN Ó CONCHUBHAIR, University of Notre Dame

BRIAN Ó CONCHUBHAIR is a Professor of Irish Language and Literature at the University of Notre Dame and a fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, and the Center for Social Concerns. He has served as Director of the Center for the Study of Languages & Cultures (2013-2020); Executive Director of the IRISH Seminar (2011-2013), and President of the American Conference for Irish Studies (2015-2017). He has been a Visiting Professor at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, the University of Notre Dame, Dhaka (Bangladesh), and Charles University (Prague).   Professor Ó Conchubhair’s writings include an award-winning monograph on the intellectual history of the Irish Revival entitled Fin de Siècle na Gaeilge: Darwin, An Athbheochan agus Smaointeoireacht na hEorpa (The Irish Fin de Siècle: Darwin, the Revival and European Thought).  Recent publications include chapters in The Cambridge History of Ireland, The Oxford History of Ireland, The Oxford History of the Irish Book, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre and The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction.

NICHOLAS ALLEN, Willson Center

NICHOLAS ALLEN is the director of the Willson Center and the Baldwin Professor in the Humanities. His latest book, Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled, was published in December 2020 by Oxford University Press. He has been the Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College and has received many grants and awards, including from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Irish Research Council.  He is currently working on a study of the late poetry of Seamus Heaney. Selected Publications include: Archipelago: A Reader, eds. Nicholas Allen and Fiona Stafford (Lilliput Press, September 2021); Ireland, Literature and the Coast: Seatangled (Oxford UP, 2020); Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge, eds. Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom and Jos Smith (Oxford UP, 2017); Broken Landscapes: Selected Letters of Ernie O’Malley, 1924-1957, eds. Nicholas Allen and Cormac O’Malley (Lilliput Press, 2011); Modernism, Ireland and Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2009); That Island Never Found, eds. Nicholas Allen and Eve Patten (Four Courts Press, 2007); The Proper WordIreland, Poetry, Politics, ed. Nicholas Allen (Creighton UP, 2007); George Russell (Æ) and the New Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2003); The Cities of Belfast, eds. Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly (Four Courts Press, 2003).

SANDA BERCE, Babeș-Bolyai University

One of the members of the founding team of the Irish Studies programme at Babeș-Bolyai University, Professor SANDA BERCE is a Senior Research Fellow of Babeș-Bolyai University and the founding director of the Centre for the Study of the Modern Anglophone Novel. Her research interests include English and Irish literature (modernism and postmodernism), modernist and contemporary British fiction, the literary canon, literary theory (literary forms and genres, poetics, narratology, reception theory, literary anthropology), and Anglo-American critical theory. Selected publications include: Interfață, Limes, Cluj-Napoca, 2015; Hot Spots. Essays in British and Irish Literature, EdLimes, Cluj-Napoca, 2008; Modernity in Contemporary English Fiction, Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 2002; Forms of Attention (Essays in Criticism), Napoca Star, Cluj-Napoca, 2001; Nostalgia prezentului și modernitatea romanului românesc, Echinox, Cluj-Napoca, 2000.

 

Organisers

The Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University, the Irish Studies Master Programme, in partnership with:

  • The Department of English Language and Literature
  • The Centre for the Study of the Modern Anglophone Novel
  • European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies -IVZW (EFACIS)

Organising Committee:

  • Dr. Carmen Borbely
  • Dr. Erika Mihálycsa
  • Dr. Petronia Popa-Petrar
  • Dr. Rareş Moldovan
  • Dr. Elena Păcurar

Location