ACIS Panel at the 137th Meeting of the American Historical Association January 4-7, 2024 San Francisco, CA The American Conference for Irish Studies is seeking session proposals for the 137th meeting of the American Historical Association to be held in San Francisco, CA. Session proposals on any aspect of Irish history are to be comprised of three individual presentations. All individual contributors must be current members of the American Conference for Irish Studies. Complete session proposals must follow the guidelines set forth by the AHA. Incomplete proposals and individual paper proposals will not be considered. Proposals are due to ACIS History Representative Dr. Kenneth Shonk (kshonk@uwlax.edu) by February 1, 2023. |
Roundtable: “Irish Literature and Global Crisis” Guaranteed ACIS Panel at the MLA Annual Convention January 4-7, 2024 Philadelphia, PA
We live in an era of accelerating global crises in which events such as climate change, the war in Ukraine, and the COVID-19 pandemic have exposed and widened economic, health, and social inequalities across the globe. How has Irish literature registered global crises in ways that offer models of radical transformation, recovery, or care? Novels such as Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones, Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World Where Are You?, and Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know, explicitly deal with the themes of environmental and economic crisis and their social repercussions, but these themes can also be seen in earlier nineteenth-century writing such as Emily Lawless’s novels Grania and Hurrish, or James Clarence Mangan’s Famine poem “The Funerals” as well as “Siberia.” This roundtable seeks to address current crises through Irish literary engagement with themes such as apocalypse, migration, economic and health inequalities in a broad historical context. Thus, we welcome papers that not only interrogate the theme of global crisis in contemporary literature, but particularly encourage those that seek to widen the literary-historical scope to include texts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that offer insight into the contemporary moment through literary depictions of the Famine, political violence, colonial oppression, institutional abuse, and emigration, as well as papers that make intercultural connections.
We invite proposals of 150 words on any topic pertaining to Irish literature and global crisis for this roundtable discussion at MLA 2024. Submit proposals by February 1 to ACIS Literature Representative Dr. Bridget English, benglish@uic.edu |
Kelly Matthews, President, American Conference for Irish Studies