irish studies – NORSES

EFACIS 2025: “Attending to Ireland”

European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies ConferenceÅbo / Turku, Finland, 8–11 May 2025

In an ever bustling, ever hurrying world, the concept of “attention” has become increasingly important. As Jonathan Crary observed in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, the “contemporary experience […] requires that we effectively cancel out or exclude from consciousness much of our immediate environment”.[1] At the same time, the contemporary society, in Ireland and elsewhere, has been shaped by seemingly conflicting forces and paradoxical processes of attention and distraction in various institutional, cultural, and technological contexts. The focus of this conference will be on any of the many ways in which the field of Irish Studies – and disciplinary perspectives from literature, culture, and history to linguistics and education – addresses and is shaped by various aspects of attention. These range from tensions between mediated experience and phenomenal perception to how political and cultural narratives direct our attention to some aspects of society while creating blind spots elsewhere.

Themes for discussion include, but are not limited to, the following:

Attending to Ireland as/and island(s): culture, geography, and the state
Surveillance, control, and the politics of attention
Technology and the media: forms of attention and inattention
Borders, surveys, and mappings and the 100th anniversary of The Irish Boundary Commission
Irish Studies and attention in education
Local, global, and transnational attention – place, mobility, and migration
Hotspots and blind spots: geography and the environment
Attention, crisis, and catastrophe: personal and social perspectives
Attention and the phenomenology of perception
The aesthetics and poetics of attention in literature and the arts; authorship, narrative, perspective
Generational and societal changes in attention
Religion, politics, and social groups
Ageing and attention in Ireland
Attending to language: linguistics, translation, and the multilingual society
Diachronic and/or synchronic approaches and methods

Proposals for individual 20-minute presentations or panels/roundtables (3 speakers) should be sent by email to info-efacis@abo.fi by 16 December 2024.

Proposals should include: name(s), institutional affiliation(s), paper title(s), a 250-word abstract and a brief biographical note of up to 50 words for each participant. (Three speaker panels may allow 200 words for the overall proposal, 200 words for each speaker’s abstract, and 50 words for each individual biography.) Panel/roundtable proposals should also identify the contact person for the entire session. Speakers should be fully paid-up members of EFACIS.

The organisers accept proposals and papers in either the Irish or English language./ Cuirtear fáilte roimh pháipéir i nGaeilge nó i mBéarla.

Hosted by Åbo Akademi University and the University of Turku, the conference is organized in collaboration with the Nordic Association for English Studies (NAES) whose concurrent annual conference in Åbo / Turku is titled “Attending to the Islands: Archipelagic Perspectives on Anglophonia”.

Conference Web page: https://blogs2.abo.fi/naes-efacis2025/

Åbo / Turku (the former capital of Finland) is usually very pleasant at the beginning of May. And as the city is situated on the edge of the Finnish archipelago, we envisage that the conference programme will include an optional boat trip through the islands, a visit to Turku Castle, poetry readings, a musical entertainment, and more …

– KEYNOTE SPEAKERS –

Fiona Farr

Christopher Morash

Lorna Hutson

Andrew Newby

Invited Poet: Desmond Egan

Information on Werner Huber grants for EFACIS PhD students may be found at: https://www.efacis.eu/content/werner-huber-grants.

[1] Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (The MIT Press, 1999), p. 1.

Nordic Irish Studies Network Conference

Recirculations: Transmissions and Transits in Irish history, literature, and culture
Háskóli Íslands/University of Iceland, Reykjavík, 25-26 May 2023

Ireland’s geographical position as an island at the western edge of Europe has made it, in turns, a marginal or central location for various forms of material, social, and cultural transmission. Rather than novelty,
such encounters in literature, culture, and art have often emerged as instances of revision, rediscovery, or recirculation of texts, languages, narratives, and images. Similarly, people, goods, and documents travel
along familiar or revised routes in the North Atlantic and North Sea region; information and ideas are received and transmitted within networked infrastructures connecting Ireland and other parts of the globe.
Ireland’s history, culture, and geography thus demonstrate how stories of origin and authenticity can gloss over entangled cartographies of exchange. These recirculations highlight Ireland as situated at the intersection of diverse cultural and material flows within and outside its borders. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake reflected this idea by embodying the manner in which, as David Earle has observed, “history recirculates, water recirculates, [and] the cultural debris of Dublin recirculates”, as do commodities of various kinds in and outside the capital, and the island itself [David Earle, “Popular Joyce, for Better or Worse” in Catherine Earle (ed.), The New Joyce Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2022), p. 173.]

Literary texts and narratives appear, disappear, and reappear, often without clear sense of origins or originals, from medieval re-tellings and translations of classical Greek and Roman literature to Doireann
Ní Ghríofa’s prose rendering and interweaving of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. Irish writers have drawn on stories and imagery of previous eras, from the imagined pagan past in Táin Bó Cúailgne to narratives
providing the historical backdrop for discussions on the Good Friday Agreement. In the nineteenth century, medieval Irish formed the bulk of European philological research, and antiquarian activity was
largely centred around translations of medieval and early modern texts, both Irish and Latin. The constant return of past images and ideas both sustains and complicates relations between social groups and informs
responses to changing society, including newcomers seeking to make Ireland their home. Historically and in the present, personal and collective pasts are re-used and revised to suit present circumstances, in
literature, the arts, everyday life, or political rhetoric.

To address the above themes, the forthcoming Nordic Irish Studies Network conference explores the idea of recirculations in Irish culture through themes including, but not restricted to

Exchanges between Ireland and other cultures
Uses of the past in literature, culture, and society
The manuscript trade in Ireland and beyond
Antiquarianism
Renderings of foreign literature into an Irish form
Translations to and from Irish, and interface between Irish and English
Medieval literature in the early/modern era, and beyond
Ireland, material culture and travel in the North Atlantic and North Sea region
Old and new media

As always, the organisers also accept submissions on topics related to Irish Studies but not directly connected to the conference theme.

We are delighted to welcome Dr Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh, University of Edinburgh as a keynote speaker and Dr Kathy D’Arcy as artistic performer and speaker.

Abstracts of 200-300 words should be sent by 28 February to nisn2023@gmail.com, with a short biographical note. For any queries related to the CFP or the conference, please contact Ciaran McDonough
at mcdonough@hi.is.

Please note that all speakers must be paid members of NISN at the time of the conference.