Turning Sunderland Green

The University of Sunderland continually grows and Irish Studies, culture, music and as the dynamics of Sunderland grows to incoporate this growth of 'Irishness,' then is it a surprise that Sunderland is almost reaching out across the Irish sea, is it any wonder then that Ireland is doing the same.

One of Ireland's leading ambassadors travelled to Sunderland to celebrate the city's links with the emerald isle - and his first stop was the University of Sunderland's Media Centre. David Cooney is Ireland's Ambassador to the United Nations. During his visit to Wearside he toured the University's state-of-the-art Media Centre, the National Glass Centre and the Stadium of Light. Sunderland has close links with Ireland, both through Roy Keane's team at the Stadium of Light, and the University's annual Irish Conference and Festival, hosted by NEICN. The Festival, now in its sixth year, is the largest independent Irish conference in the UK and has grown so much in stature that it is now sponsored by the Irish Government.

Ambassador Cooney said: 'I was very impressed with the quality of the facilities at the University of Sunderland.' Professor Peter Fidler, Vice-Chancellor at the University of Sunderland, said: 'We were delighted to welcome Ambassador Cooney to the university.'

Dr Alison O’Malley-Younger, director of the North East Irish Culture Network, added: 'We feel it particularly appropriate that the Ambassador visited the University and SAFC, two organisations which have a close partnership and are linked to the developing Irish culture in the region.'

The Irish Embassy has offered great support to our endeavours in promoting Irish culture in the North East.

NEICN Event: Readings and Risings

It is my pleasure to announce the next NEICN seminar will be held on 17th March 2008, St Patrick's Night. This NEICN events takes a new form, in comparison to previous St. Patrick's day events in that we are hosting a seminar entilted Readings and Rising. This event will take place in Priestman Bulding, Green Terrace, Sunderland at 6:00pm, in room C21

The fabulous guest speakers are Willey Maley, Paddy Lyons and Claire Nalley, as well as Alison O'Malley- Younger-

Professor Willy Maley- University of Glasgow – The Rising of the Moon and the Reading of the Riot Act.

Dr Alison O’Malley-Younger – University of Sunderland –Unhappy the Land that Has No Heroes: Heroic Masculinity in the Patriotic Melodramas of Boucicault and Whitbread.

Paddy Lyons – University of Glasgow – Ireland versus Scotland – pleasure, lies, money.

Dr Claire Nally – University of Hull – Yeats's Dreaming of the Bones: a critique of nationalist memory.

From 8:00pm there is a wine reception and St Patrick’s Day celebration at the Bonded Warehouse, Low Street, Sunderland. This event includes a live music from Aos Dana, Emma Callaghan and other local musicians.

Everyone is welcome to come and enjoy themselves.

Cultural Events- Putting the 'mick' into Mi [Mick]ry: Brian Friel's Postcolonial Drama

Alison O'Malley- Younger and Putting the 'mick' into Mi [Mick]ry: Brian Friel's Postcolonial Drama

Following in the foot step of the Irish poet Eavan Boland, the Indian critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, to name but a few, as part of the Critical and Cultural Theory season at the University of Glasgow, Alison O’Malley- Younger of the University of Sunderland returns to the work of Brian Friel and the field of postcolonial studies.

In her paper entitled Putting the ‘Mick’ into Mi[Mick]ry: Brian Friel’s Postcolonial Drama. Alison O’Malley- Younger offers an insightful and detailed exploration, analysis and commentary of mimicry and liminality, hybridity and conceptual third spaces within Brian Friel’s drama, in this instant The London Vertigo. The London Vertigo is based upon The True Born Irishman, by Charles Macklin Brian Friel comments that ‘My reason for renaming the play The London Vertigo is that this title both signposts the play’s theme and hints as the fate the author himself eagerly embraced.’

Alison argues that The London Vertigo is a mediation of non- realist dramatic genre which is highly artificial in its contrived plots, characterisation and settings, and which capitalises on wit, satire, and verbal brilliance to explore the ludicrous discrepancy between the surface veneer of decorum in modish, middle class London society and the unabashed debauchery beneath it. Friel translates this canonical genre into an Irish context, and through the discourses of mimicry highlights identity as a complex, theatricalised, citational process something that is peripatetic and prosthetic; a mobile, transferable, enacted, theatrical event based on role-play, costume and ritual. In effect mirroring Friel’s own comment regarding The London Vertigo.

One of the most significant strengths and joys of Alison’s paper will be the reconceptualisation of the applicability of a postcolonial paradigm to Ireland, and particularly Friel’s. Exploring Friel’s position at the fulcrum of various exclusivist and essentialist foundational myths of identity based on static binarisms such as ‘us’ and ‘them.’

The Return

Hi everyone, I would like to thank this chance to say welcome back and sorry it has been such a long time since.

Although this weblog has not been updated recently, things for NEICN have been ticking along fantastically.

As the year progresses NEICN is looking forward to hosting a series of public lectures, events and of course our sixth Irish studies conference- which we have begun to plan already. So keep and eye out for details of our various events.

Slainte

Call for Papers- Visual, material and print culture in Nineteenth-century Ireland

The Society for the Study of Nineteenth Century Ireland began its annual conferences in the early 1990s - firstly in Ireland, and then rotating between Ireland, Europe and North America.

The University of Limerick is running a two-day international conference exploring the nature and extent of Visual, material and print culture in Nineteenth-century Ireland. Taking a broad view of the nineteenth century, panels are being constituted from, but not limited to, the following areas: history; art history; English literature; geography; architecture; politics; folklore; urban and rural development; photographic images; film; Litríocht na Gaeilge; Gaeltacht; cultural nationalism; poetry; the Irish novel; diaries; letters; newspapers; demography; diaspora; gender; childhood; landscape; maps; settlement; education; work; religion; travel writing; the stage Irishman; music.

Confirmed Plenary speakers include
Prof. Liam Kennedy, QUB
Catherine Marshall, IMMA
Prof. Niamh O’ Sullivan, NCAD
Dr Neil Buttimer, UCC

For further details check out the following link:
http://www.ssnci.com/

Call for Papers- Home and Elsewhere: the Spaces of Irish Writing

Home and Elsewhere: the Spaces of Irish Writing
Oporto , Portugal , 28 July – 1 August 2008
Conference Website: http://web.letras.up.pt/iasil08/

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS
Deadline 14 January 2008

The International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures invites you to attend its 2008 conference at Universidade doPorto, in Portugal.
The conference will take place at the Faculties of Letters and Architecture (Faculdade de Letras / Faculdade de Arquitectura), close to the city centre and overlooking the river Douro. Accommodation will be available in hotels within walking distance of the conference venue, at a special rate to delegates.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Academics: Edna Longley , Professor Emerita, Queen’s University Belfast; Chris Morash , NUI Maynooth; Claire Connolly , Cardiff University
Writers: Michael Longley, Hugo Hamilton

The conference theme, Home and Elsewhere: the Spaces of Irish Writing, reflects the currency that notions of space, place, and territory – in a variety of acceptations, from physical to virtual – have gained within literary and cultural studies. Suggested topics include:

• Irish locales, Irish identities;
• Irish writing and “other places” (utopias, dystopias, heterotopias);
• local and global, parochial and cosmopolitan in Irish writing;
• enabling elsewheres: texts and selves in transit; travel and/or translation in/of Irish writing;
• spaces of performance: Irish texts on stage and on screen;
• intermedial territories: Irish writing and other arts;
• versions of textual space: page, screen, cyberwriting.

Proposals for twenty-minute papers are welcome on these and other aspects of the literatures of Ireland, within the range of interests of IASIL members.

For futher details check out the following link:
http://web.letras.up.pt/iasil08/