CALL FOR PAPERS
The Ernie O’Malley Symposium
on Modern Ireland and Revolution, 25-26 April 2014
New York University’s Glucksman Ireland House invites 250-word proposals for 20-minute papers on social, cultural, and political revolution in modern Ireland and its intersections with the life and times of Ernie O’Malley. The inaugural Ernie O’Malley Symposium on 25-26 April 2014 will address topics as wide ranging as Irish republican intellectual history, feminism & guerilla war, postcolonial approaches to Irish literature, history, and culture, the visual arts, music history, the history of the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, Irish autobiography, queer historiography, folklore, oral history and others.
Confirmed Plenary speakers:
Luke Gibbons (NUI Maynooth)
R.F. Foster (Oxford University)
David Lloyd (UC Davis)
Clair Wills (London University)
Nicholas Allen (University of Georgia)
While the keynotes will all speak on O’Malley directly, the symposium is open to, and seeks to raise, a broad range of questions in the fields of Irish cultural, political, aesthetic, and historical studies. Among them are:
• What is the relation of Irish republican political action to republican intellectual traditions?
• What voices in the revolutionary tradition have been dropped from the official histories? How do we recover them? And what do they have to tell us today?
• What is the relation of fiction to Irish autobiography / memoir? Where do the two overlap and where part ways?
• What contributions to visual art, music, and literature did revolutionaries make to Ireland’s culture after the founding of the Irish Free State?
• What continuities exist between pre- and post- revolutionary Irish cultural expression? What characterizes the discontinuities?
• How do literary and artistic renderings of the Irish War of Independence and Civil War differ from those of the 1916 Easter Rising and other revolutionary moments?
• How does Ernie O’Malley’s work compare with that of the canonical modern Irish authors like Joyce, Yeats, O’Casey, etc.? How does it compare with the non-canonical?
• How has oral history been thought, re-thought, and practiced in the post-revolutionary state and beyond?
• How do we define the relationship between revolution and exile? Cultural production and emigration? National belonging and migrancy?
• In what ways have advances in Irish archival access and research fundamentally changed the way we relate to modern Irish history.
• What does Irish revolutionary thinking and cultural production of the past have to offer us today? What lessons, and what examples?
Complete 3-4 member panel proposals of 500 words will be considered as well as individual paper proposals. Partial funding of up to $300 will be provided for graduate students whose papers are accepted. It is recommended that proposed papers address Ernie O’Malley’s work directly, but it is not required.
For more information about the symposium, contact:
Spurgeon Thompson
Áras Glucksman na hÉireann Ollscoil Nua Eabhrac
Glucksman Ireland House
New York University
One Washington Mews
New York, NY 10003 U.S.A.
swt1@nyu.edu
Send 250-word individual proposals or 500-word panel proposals plus a 100-word biographical note via email by January 20, 2014 to:
Spurgeon Thompson at swt1@nyu.edu & Greg Londe at greg.londe@nyu.edu