Haunted Hibernia: Conjuring the Contemporary Irish Gothic  

Time and Venue: 28th -29th October (Friday and Saturday), Carlow College, St Patricks. Ireland  

Plenary Speaker: Sorcha Ní Fhlainn (Senior Lecturer and founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University)  

In the period following the collapse of the Celtic Tiger in 2008, Irish society and culture began to take on a distinctly Gothic hue. In popular discourse, the landscapes of recessionary Ireland were figured as uncanny, gothicized spaces, haunted by ‘ghost estates’ and ‘zombie banks’, and preyed upon by vampiric ‘vulture funds’. At the same time, deeply disturbing aspects of Ireland’s history were further exposed in a plethora of government commissions documenting the shocking scale and extent of the abuses committed by the church and state, including: the 2009 Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (the ‘Ryan Report’), the 2013 Magdalen Commission Report (the ‘Quirke Report’), and (the more problematic) 2021 Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes. These profoundly disturbing revelations regarding the country’s past have resonated, in a deeply troubling manner, with more recent societal crises, such as the ongoing issue of homelessness and child poverty, the inhumane treatment of individuals in direct provision, the fight for reproductive autonomy, and the rise of domestic violence in the wake of the ongoing Covid pandemic. Given the psychologically discomfiting and socially unsettling effect of these overlapping contexts and anxieties, it is unsurprising that the Gothic has proved an especially apposite prism for the artistic representation of Ireland’s post-Celtic-Tiger dispensation.  

This conference seeks to explore the myriad ways that the Gothic has been deployed to interrogate the social, economic, and political transformations that have occurred in Ireland since the end of the Celtic Tiger, and to exhume the associated historical trauma engendered by these changes. It will also examine how the contemporary scene has generated and precipitated new variations and hybridizations of Gothic literature and media in Ireland. We welcome papers that engage with the Gothic in a wide variety of forms and media, including: fiction, poetry, drama, film, tv, visual art, music, digital media and storytelling, and the broader field of popular culture.  

Potential topics include but are not limited to:  

Proposals (300words) and a brief biography should be sent to Hauntedhibernia@gmail.com by 30th June 2022.  

Conference Organisers: Eva Burke, Karmel Knipprath, Jack Phelan, Simon Workman  

Confirmed Plenary Speakers, Writers and Artists: 

Dr Linnie Blake, who has published extensively on the ‘neoliberal gothic’, will be one of our keynote speakers. Dr Blake founded the Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her recent work includes ‘Burning Down the House: Get Out, Signifying, and the Female Gothic’ in Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, and ‘The Gothic Text in the Age of Neo-Liberalism, 1990‒Present’ in The Cambridge History of the Gothic: Volume 3: The Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries. You can check out some of her work here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000p6fq 

Writer and podcaster Sophie White has garnered critical acclaim in recent years for her candid and thought-provoking writing on mental illness and the female body. She has published both fiction and non-fiction, and will release her fifth book, Where I End, in October 2022. She will join us for a reading and Q&A. Check out Sophie’s work here: http://www.sophiewhite.info/ 

Actor, writer, and director Noelle Brown, has channelled her own experience as a child of an Irish mother and baby home into creative work that is unflinching, funny, and sad in equal measure. Her play Postscript, co-written with Michèle Forbes, and in which Noelle performs, was part of the Dublin Fringe Festival 2013 and was nominated for the Fishamble New Writing Award and the Bewleys Little Gem Award.  It had a sold out run at the Abbey Theatre (Peacock) in June 2017. Noelle will act out a short excerpt from Postscript, followed by a Q&A. See a clip from Noelle’s appearance on the Late Late Show here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2mkZLZK8zU 

Artist Vukašin Nedeljkovic came to Ireland as an asylum seeker and has experienced the Direct Provision system. His work seeks to shed light on this space. Having initiated the multidisciplinary project Asylum Archive, which provides a platform for displaced peoples to share their own experiences with institutional violence, trauma, and exile, he has emerged as a powerful voice for the disempowered in Irish society and beyond. Vukašin 

 will share some of his photographic work and discuss its politic, cultural, and artistic significance in contemporary Ireland. You can follow Vukašin’s work here: https://twitter.com/Asylumarchive?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor