Maynooth University Department of English

October 8 | "War and the destabilising effect of Black girlhood in Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones and Danzy Senna's Caucasia": research talk.

Recording available shortly

October 15 | 'Writing and Righting: Literature in the Endtimes (?) of Human Rights': a research seminar delivered by Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge

November 12 | Dr Claire Gallien (University of Montpellier 3) in conversation with Dr Rita Sakr (Coordinator, MA in Literatures of Engagement, MU English)

November 26 | Dr Zalfa Feghali "Archiving Vunerability:Children's Crisis Text at the US-Mexican Border"

 

November 5 | A poetry reading and discussion with award-winning poet, Carolyn Forché

December 8 | A poetry reading and conversation with Philip Metres

Recording available shortly

About this Event

Join MU English for a conversation with Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell on their critically acclaimed film GAZA and McConnell's “Gaza Surf Club” photo-series.

Hosted by Dr Rita Sakr and Dr Denis Condon (MU English).

From the Directors’ Note: ‘There are few places in the world that evoke such a strong visceral response as Gaza… How do you tell the story of such a place?...This is Gaza as you have never seen it before. Far from being a place of misery, it is a land of smiles, joy and even brief moments of hope. We weave these elements with threads of despair, frustration and fatigue, allowing the audience to look deeper and ultimately to understand that life in Gaza moves in cycles, with the weight of the past bearing down on any hope for the future.’

Biogs

GARRY KEANE DIRECTOR/PRODUCER Garry Keane studied film at the London College of Communication and at the Irish National Film School. After graduating in 1992, he worked as a DOP in New York and London, before finally settling in Ireland, where he has been a documentary filmmaker for the last 25 years. In that time Garry has directed over 100 hours of TV documentaries for European and American broadcasters in over 20 countries worldwide. In 2011 he set up Real Films and since then Keane’s documentaries have been nominated for 11 Irish Film & Television Academy Awards; of these, his films have won four, including two in the “Best Director TV” category in 2013 and 2018.

ANDREW McCONNELL DIRECTOR/DOP Andrew McConnell is an award-winning photographer who has been covering world events for over 15 years. His work often focuses on themes of conflict and displacement and has appeared in many of the world’s top publications. Andrew has worked in-depth on issues such as the Syrian refugee crisis, conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the forgotten Sahrawi people of Western Sahara, for which he was awarded 1st place at the World Press Photo awards. Based in Beirut, Andrew has worked throughout the Middle East for the past 8 years. GAZA is his first work as a filmmaker and follows on from his photographic projects in the besieged territory that began in 2010. https://www.andrewmcconnell.com/Gaza-Surf-Club/2. Among numerous honours, Andrew has won two 1st place prizes at the World Press Photo Awards, 4 National Press Photographers Association awards, including the prestigious Best of Show, 1st place in the Pictures of the Year International, and 2 Sony World Photography Awards.

Women and the Decade of Commemorations: An All-Island Perspective' was generously funded by the Irish Research Council and by the Maynooth University Commemorations Committee.

Tuesday 19 January 2016: Roundtable discussions

Talks by:
Dr Mary McCauliffe, Women’s Studies, University College Dublin;
Dr Roísin Higgins, Department of History, Teeside University;
Dr Sinéad Kennedy, Department of English, Maynooth University;
Dr Emilie Pine, School of English and Drama, University College Dublin.
Listen to podcasts of this event by clicking on these links:

 

   

Friday 19 February 2016: Dr Diane Urquhart, Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool,
‘Unity of unionism? Gender, covenant and commemoration'.

 

The 77 Women Project

Wednesday 27 April

Further information can be found at this link: https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/english/events/77-women-project

Roundtable discussions

Wednesday April 6th
Talks by:
Catriona Crowe, National Archives (TBC);
Martina Devlin, Writer, Journalist and Broadcaster;
Professor Gerardine Meaney, Director of Global Irish Studies, University College Dublin;
Professor Margaret Ward, Department of History, Queen’s University Belfast.
 

 podcast.

Comparative Perspectives from Memory Studies

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012), Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, co-authored with Leo Spitzer (2010), Rites of Return: Diaspora, Poetics and the Politics of Memory, co-edited with Nancy K. Miller (2011) and Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (1997). .
 

Commemoration after 2016

Thursday, November 3, 2016
Professor Anna Reading, King's College London
Roundtable: Commemorating the Civil War/ the Troubles

• Sinead McCoole
• Dr Stefanie Lehner
• Dr Laura McAtackney

Dr Conor Mulvagh
Professor Graham Dawson, University of Brighton
 

 

Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet as well as an editor, critic, and translator. He is the author of twelve major collections of poetry including New Weather (1973), Meeting the British (1987), Hay (1998), Horse Latitudes (2006) and One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015). His poetry has been translated into twenty languages.
 
Muldoon served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and since 1987 has taught at Princeton University, where he occupies the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 chair in the Humanities. He has been poetry editor of The New Yorker since 2007.
 
A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, Paul Muldoon has won countless other awards, from the T.S. Eliot Prize to the European Prize for Poetry. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War."
 
Roger Rosenblatt, writing in The New York Times Book Review, described Paul Muldoon as "one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems - word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy. And angry. Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury."
 
This event was hosted by Maynooth University’s Writer-in-Residence Eoin McNamee.
Listen to the podcast at this link:

 

The Great Famine and its Impacts: Visual and Material Culture
Maynooth University, 14-16 March 2016
The Great Famine of 1840s Ireland left a profound impact on Irish culture, as recent groundbreaking historical and literary research has revealed. Less well documented and explored, however, is the relationship of the Famine and its related experiences (migration, eviction, poverty, institutionalization and urbanization) to the visual and material cultures of Ireland. This conference, which was hosted by Maynooth University and organised as part of the NWO-funded International Network of Irish Famine Studies, aimed to consider broadly how the material and visual cultures of Ireland and its diaspora (including painting, sculpture, photography, drama, architecture, film, dance, ritual, musealisation, heritage, archaeology) intersect with the multiple impacts and experiences of the Famine.Taking a broad approach to the impact of the Famine on visual and material cultures, the conference bought together scholars from various fields to promote new, cross-disciplinary dialogues to deepen our understanding of the Famine’s cultural history.

Plenary speakers:

Professor Fintan Cullen, University of NottinghamFamine

Dr Jason King, NUI GalwayFamine

Dr Emily Mark-FitzGerald, University College Dublin

Professor Chris Morash, Trinity College Dublin

Professor Niamh O’Sullivan, Curator, Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, Quinnipiac University

https://visualmaterialfamine.wordpress.com