KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Anne Marie D’Arcy is Visiting Research Fellow at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin and formerly Associate Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature and Language at the University of Leicester. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, and has held lectureships in University College Dublin, and National University of Ireland, Maynooth. She has published a number of articles on Joyce’s treatment of such topics as libel law, Freemasonry, medieval Irish placelore, Dublin’s water supply, anti-Semitism, medieval Irish manuscripts (most notably the Book of Kells), the Eucharistic Congress of 1932, and ‘Araby’ as a grail quest. She was the Principal Investigator of an exhibition in Marsh’s Library, Dublin: ‘James Joyce: Apocalypse and Exile’ (2014 -15), now online. She is currently completing Joyce and the Irish Middle Ages: Saints, Sages, and Insular Culture, which is the first monograph devoted to Joyce’s engagement with the Insular period, specifically the influence of Irish learning and artistry on Britain and the Continent from the sixth to the twelfth centuries. She is the author of Wisdom and the Grail: The Image of the Vessel in the Queste del Saint Graal and Malory's Tale of the Sankgreal (2000), and another monograph, The Artifice of Eternity: Mariology in the English Poetic Tradition, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Katherine O’Callaghan lectures on James Joyce, modernism, Irish literature, and the role of music in novels in the English department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She grew up in Dublin and currently lives in Western Massachusetts. She received her PhD on the topic of Joyce and Music from University College Dublin. She is an elected member of the Board of Trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation. She is the editor of Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature: Musical Modernism (Routledge, 2018, paperback edition 2020), and the co-editor, with Oona Frawley, of Memory Ireland Volume IV: James Joyce and Cultural Memory (Syracuse University Press, 2014). She is completing a monograph on Music and Soundscape in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Recent publications include “The Riddle of the Brocken Spectre: Reading Finnegans Wake on the top of Croagh Patrick,” James Joyce Quarterly, 56.1-2 (Fall 2018-Winter 2019), and “The Art of Reading a Musical Novel: Literary Audiation and the Case of James Joyce,” European Joyce Studies, 29 (Amsterdam: Brill/ Rodopi, 2020). Forthcoming publications include the chapter on “Sirens” in The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes edited by Catherine Flynn (Cambridge UP), and “‘The time had come to set out on his journey westward’: Solastalgic Modernism and the West in Irish Literature (1900-1950)” in A History of Irish Literature and the Environment edited by Malcolm Sen (Cambridge UP).
Eimear McBride is the author of three novels: Strange Hotel, The Lesser Bohemians and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. She was the inaugural Creative Fellow at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading which resulted in the performance work Mouthpieces. Her first work of non-fiction, Something Out of Place: Women & Disgust, was published in 2021. She is the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Goldsmiths Prize, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award. She lives in London.
Mark O'Connell is a writer living in Dublin. His first book, To Be a Machine, was awarded the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Baillie Gifford Prize. In 2019, he was the first author to be awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for a work of non-fiction. In 2020, he published Notes from an Apocalypse. His books have been published in fourteen languages. His work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The New York Times Magazine. He has written essays on Game of Thrones tourism in Northern Ireland, the practice of wilderness soloing, the collected works of Jeff Bezos, and the cult of Amanda McKittrick Ros.
Nuala O'Connor is a short story writer and novelist. Her fifth novel NORA, about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, was a Top 10 historical novel in the New York Times and is the One Dublin One Book choice for 2022. Nuala has curated the current exhibition at MoLI, –Love, Says Bloom. She is editor at flash fiction e-journal Splonk. See her website: www.nualaoconnor.com Twitter: @NualaNiC
Mary Morrissey is a journalist and teacher of creative writing and was until recently the Associate Director of Creative Writing at University College Cork. She is the author of three novels, Mother of Pearl, The Pretender and The Rising of Bella Casey and two collections of stories, A Lazy Eye and Prosperity Drive. Penelope Unbound, a speculative novel about Nora Barnacle, is forthcoming in 2023. Her essays have appeared in The Stinging Fly and Winter Pages and most recently in Look!, It’s a Woman Writer: Irish Literary Feminisms 1970-2020 (Arlen House). For more information/reviews and to view her blog see: https://marymorrissy.com/
In memoriam, Frank Callanan (1956–2021): https://drb.ie/frank-callanan-1956-2021/