Call for participation: 2016 ACIS Roundtables on Northern Irish Poetry
The upcoming ACIS Conference at Notre Dame will feature a series of four roundtables on contemporary Northern Irish poetry. Each roundtable will be led by a distinguished scholar, and each will focus on the recent work of a major poet. The roundtables will be conversational, free flowing, and exploratory. While the roundtables are—of course—open to everyone, there will be 4-6 participants chosen for each panel who will be named in the program. If you would like to take part in any of the four roundtables, simply write a couple of sentences about why you are interested in participating and what kinds of issues you’d like to discuss, and e-mail them to Eric Falci (efalci@berkeley.edu). Really, just a few sentences is great—no need for a full proposal. The only things that will be asked of participants are they attend the panel having read the text and prepared to talk. The moderator of each panel will help to get discussion started and to keep it going, but the aim is for each roundtable to be fully conversational. Listed below are the topics for each roundtable, and a bit of information about each of the moderators:
1) Medbh McGuckian, Blaris Moor (2015), moderated by Adam Hanna
Adam Hanna is an IRC Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Cork. He is the author of Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space (2015).
2) Ciaran Carson, Until Before After (2010), moderated by Julia Obert
Julia Obert is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wyoming. Her first book, Postcolonial Overtures: The Politics of Sound in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry, appeared in 2015.
3) Derek Mahon, An Autumn Wind (2010), moderated by Richard Rankin Russell
Richard Rankin Russell is Professor of English at Baylor University and the Director of the Beall Poetry Festival. Along with several other books and edited collections, he is the author of Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland (2010), Seamus Heaney’s Regions (2014), and the forthcoming Seamus Heaney: A Critical Introduction.
4) Paul Muldoon, A Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015), moderated by Clair Wills
Clair Wills is the Leonard L. Milberg Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton University. She has published widely on modern and contemporary Irish literature and culture. Her most recent books are That Neutral Island: A History of Ireland during the Second World War (2007), Dublin 1916: The Siege of the GPO (2009), and The Best Are Leaving: Emigration and Post-War Irish Culture (2015).