Keynote Speakers
Prof Bríona Nic Dhiarmada
A professor in the Department of Irish Language and Literature at the University of Notre Dame, Professor Nic Dhiarmada teaches "Screening the Irish Troubles" as a concurrent FTT and Irish Studies course. She has won numerous awards including the 2007 Best Documentary/Non Fiction Film National Oireachtas Media Awards for Ar Lorg Shorcha/Searching for Sorcha which she directed and wrote. She has also won the 2007 Merriman Book of the Year for her academic book, Teacs Baineann, Teacs Mna. As contributor to The Cambridge History of Irish Literature and Section Editor for Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Nic Dhiarmada has written a large collection of book chapters, journal articles and reviews and has presented numerous keynote and plenary speeches.
Prof Luke Gibbons
Luke Gibbons is Professor of Irish Literary and Cultural Studies at the School of English, Drama and Media Studies, National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He formerly taught at the University of Notre Dame, U.S.A., and Dublin City University. His publications include Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonialism and Irish Culture (2004), Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime (2003), The Quiet Man (2002), Transformations in Irish Culture (1996), and co-wrote (with Kevin Rockett and John Hill) Cinema and Ireland (1988), the pioneering study of Irish cinema. He was a contributing editor to Seamus Deane, ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991), and has edited two recent collections, Re-Inventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy (with Peadar Kirby and Michael Cronin, 2002), and 'The Theatre of Irish Cinema' (with Dudley Andrew), a special issue of The Yale Journal of Criticism (2002).
Prof Marjorie Howes
Marjorie Howes is an Associate Professor of English and Co-director of the Irish Studies Program at Boston College, Dublin. She holds a B.A. from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her research interests include Yeats, Joyce, Modernism, writing by women, 19th- and 20th-century Irish and Anglophone writing, postcolonial studies, feminism, migration, and transatlantic cultural history. She is the author of Yeats's Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness (1996), co-editor of Semicolonial Joyce (2000) and contributor to The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Volume 4 (2002). Her recent publications include Colonial Crossings: Essays in Irish Literary History (2006) and The Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats (2006), co-edited with John Kelly.
Claire Keegan
Claire Keegan is the author of Antarctica, a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, and Walk the Blue Fields which won the 2008 Edge Hill Prize for the finest book of stories published in the British Isles. Her stories have won numerous awards including The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, The William Trevor Prize (judged by William Trevor), The Macaulay Fellowship, The Martin Healy Prize, The Tom Gallon Award, The Kilkenny Prize, The Olive Cook Award and The Hugh Leonard Bursary. Twice the winner of The Francis MacManus Award, Keegan's story "Foster" was recently announced as the winner of The Davy Byrne's Award – the world's largest prize for a single short story. It was judged by Richard Ford. She has taught at The University of Wales; Dublin City University; University College, Dublin; University College, Cork; was Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University, Pennsylvania in 2007 and was writer in residence at the Celtic Studies Department at the University of Toronto. Once a Wingate scholar she is now a member of Aosdana. Her stories have been published in many journals and anthologies including Granta, The Paris Review and The New Yorker. She lives in rural Ireland.
Dr Patrick Lonergan
Patrick Lonergan lectures in English at the School of Humanities N.U.I. Galway and is a graduate of University College Dublin and the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research interests include globalization and theatre; theatre and the creative industries; modern Irish drama; the works of John Millington Synge; Shakespeare and Ireland. In 2008, he won the Theatre Book Prize for his work Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (2008). He has also edited and co-edited several volumes including The Methuen Drama Anthology of Irish Plays (2008), Interactions: A History of the Dublin Theatre Festival (2008), and Echoes Down the Corridor: Irish Theatre – Past, Present and Future (2007). His current research projects include The Internationalisation of Irish Drama (1975-2005), funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences; this project runs from 2007 to 2010.
Dr Sinéad Morrissey
Sinéad has previously worked as Poet-in-Residence at the Royal Festival Hall, and as Writer-in-Residence at Queen's University between 2002 and 2005. She has recently been appointed Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Queen's and is convenor of the MA. Dr Morrissey is the author of four poetry collections: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002), The State of the Prisons (PBS Recommendation, 2005), and Through the Square Window (PBS Choice, 2009). Her awards include the Patrick Kavanagh Award, an Eric Gregory Award, the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award, and the Michael Hartnett Poetry Prize. In 2007 she was the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She took first place in the UK National Poetry Competition the same year. In March 2010, Sinéad won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award for her latest collection of poems, Through the Square Window.
Prof Clair Wills
Professor Clair Wills teaches at Queen Mary College, University of London. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Irish literature and culture, post-war British Cultural History and contemporary English, Irish and American poetry. Her most recent book, That Neutral Island (2007), is a social and cultural history of Ireland during the Second World and was awarded the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History. She edited the Contemporary Writing section of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volumes IV and V (Cork University Press, 2002) and is the author of Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (1993), and Reading Paul Muldoon (1998). Her current research, for which she has been awarded a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship, looks at cultural relations between Britain and Ireland in the 1950s.
