25th Annual Meeting of the Southern Region, American Conference for Irish Studies
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25th Annual Meeting of the Southern Region, American Conference for Irish Studies Ireland and the Supernatural Embassy Suites, Ft. Lauderdale, FL February 14-15, 2014 8_5x5_5 Booklet - Portrait.indd 1 1/17/14 9:32 PM
Transcript of 25th Annual Meeting of the Southern Region, American Conference for Irish Studies
25th Annual Meeting of the Southern Region, American Conference for Irish Studies
Ireland and the Supernatural
Embassy Suites, Ft. Lauderdale, FL
February 14-15, 2014
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Friday, February 14
9:00 – 10:00 Conference Registration - Lobby
Session One
10:00 – 12:00 Causeway 1: The Gothic, Orphans and Travellers in “Irish” Literature. Chair: John Countryman (Berry College)
Renée Fox (U of Miami), “The Irish Gothic Library”
Robert A. Smart (Quinnipiac Univ.) “Orphan Diaries: Orphan Characters as Cultural Locus in Irish Gothic Literature”
Casey Bunch (Georgia Southern Univ.), “’[P]repared for fl ight’: Susan the Tomcat and Metempsychosis in The Real Charlotte”
Claire Cowart (SE LA Univ.), “Is Edith Somerville’s Big House of Inver a Gothic Novel?”
Howard Keeley (Georgia Southern Univ.), “’[V]ague doings’: Gayness and the Supernatural in Somerset Maugham’s ‘Irish’ Short Story, ‘P & O’”
Caroline Miller (UNC Chapel Hill), “Play Poor: Images of Irish Travellers in Settled People’s Narratives”
Causeway 2: W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Sean O’Casey. Chair: Je� erson Holdridge (Wake Forest Univ.)
Je� erson Holdridge (Wake Forest Univ.), “The Sterner Eye: Faith, Nature and the Irishman in W. B. Yeats”
Margaret Mauk (Coll. of Charleston). “Woman Possessed: W. B. Yeats and the Re-inscription of the Celtic Woman”
Stephanie M. Scott (Penn. State Univ.), “The Polymorphous Sidhe: Revision and Adaptation in Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland”
Martin Kearney (SE LA Univ.), “Seachran Sí: Set Astray by ‘Dubbllinnbbayyates’”
Michael Brillman (FIU), “Sean O’Casey, Art and Ideology”
Ireland and the Supernatural
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Jacob Bender (Univ. of Iowa), “Colonized Island Poets: W.B. Yeats, Julia de Burgos, and the Revolutionary Potential of Romance”
12:00 – 1:30 Lunch – Grand Salon A. Sandra Sprayberry (Birmingham-Southern College), “The Stolen Child and Four Spirits in Birmingham, Alabama.” Chair: James E. Doan (NSU)
Session Two
1:30 – 3:15 Causeway 1: James Joyce, Jamie O’Neill, Sean Dunne, Truth and Spirituality. Chair: Patrick A. McCarthy (Univ. of Miami)
Cóilín D. Owens (Emeritus, George Mason Univ.), “James Joyce’s Gnomon: An Irish Modernist’s Adaptation of a Christian and Native Symbol”
Chad Brodbeck (Florida Gulf Coast Univ.), “Music, Myth and Existential Martyrdom: The Spirit of Stephen Dedalus”
Oliver S. Wallis (U of Miami), “Ghosts of Dubliners: The Supernatural and the Self in Joyce’s Dubliners”
Julieann Veronica Ulin (FAU), “Banishing Ireland’s Medieval Ghosts in Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys”
James S. Rogers (Univ. of St Thomas), “Sean Dunne’s Road to Silence: An Anomalous Spiritual Autobiography”
Causeway 2: The Supernatural in Contemporary Irish Fiction and Drama. Chair: Barbara Brodman (NSU)
Kristina Varade (CUNY), “The Fragmented Storyteller: Myth and Fairytale as a Response to Postmodernity in the Novels of Patrick McCabe”
Karen O’Brien (UNC-Chapel Hill), “The Irish Vampire: Becoming Human in Conor McPherson’s St. Nicholas”
C. Austin Hill (Tenn. Wesleyan Univ.), “Of Angels and Demons: Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus as Celtic Tiger Allegory”
John Countryman (Berry College), “The Burden of Special Powers: Su� ering the Supernatural in Jim Nolan’s Blackwater Angel”
Wanda Balzano (Wake Forest Univ.), “Beginning History Again: Gendering the Foreigner in Emer Martin’s Baby Zero”
3:15 - 3:30 Co� ee/tea break – Causeway Foyer
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Session Three
3:30 - 5:00 Causeway 1: The Supernatural in Irish Tradition. Chair: James E. Doan (NSU)
Audrey Robitaillié (Queen’s Univ., Belfast, and Univ. de Basse-Normandie, Caen), “Folklore on the Edge: Liminality and Otherness in Irish Changeling Tales”
Je� rey A. Tolbert (Indiana Univ.), “Of Forts and Fairies: The Supernatural in Co. Tipperary”
Emmett Gilles (UNC-Chapel Hill), “Ghosts and Muses: The Poetic Inspiration of Michael Longley”
Anne Goarzin (Univ. Rennes), “Ghosted Images: from Comforting Analogy to the Disembodied Eye in Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008)”
Carl Purdy and Debra Reddin van Tuyll (Georgia Regents Univ.), “Representations of the Supernatural in Traditional Irish Music”
Causeway 2: Politics and Policy in 19th-century Ireland. Chair: Michael Brillman (FIU)
Douglas Kanter (FAU), “The Politics of Irish Expenditure: The Case of the Galway Mail Contract, 1859-1863”
Jill Bender (UNC, Greensboro), “Applying the Lessons of Empire: Sir Hugh Rose in India and Ireland”
James H. Murphy (DePaul Univ.), “Style of Gladstonian
Government in Ireland”
5:30 - 7:30 Manager’s Reception (Bar) Entertainment: The Roaring Kelly Band (6:00-6:55) and Drake Irish Dancers, (7:00 - 7:25) Terra Ballroom
7:30 - 10:30 Opening Remarks and Dinner, followed by Dramatic Reading of James E. Doan’s The Irish Dracula and Talk-Back, Terra Ballroom
Synopsis of The Irish Dracula: Set in 1888, in London and Co. Sligo, Ireland, The Irish Dracula deals with the Irish author/theatre manager, Bram Stoker, and the imperious actor/director Henry Irving of the Lyceum Theatre for whom Bram works. The remaining characters are adapted from those found in Dracula. Seán Haircéar, the fi ancé of Bram’s typist, Mina Murray, is en route to Markree Castle in Ireland to deliver a deed for a London house to the mysterious Lord Edward Cooper. Also featured are the ageing diva, Lucilla Desmond, her suitor, Dr. John Seward, and the Irish servant, Tadhg.
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Saturday, February 158:30 - 9:30 Conference Registration - Lobby
Session Four
9:30 - 11:00 Causeway 1: Medieval and Early Modern Irish Views of the Supernatural. Chair: David Kilroy (NSU)
Marti D. Lee (Georgia Southern Univ.), “Supernatural Elements in ‘The Ulster Cycle’”
Andrew Sneddon (Univ. of Ulster), “Witchcraft Trials and Belief in Early Modern Ireland”
Karen Holland (Providence College), “God in His Providence as the Hero of Londonderry 1689”
Emer O’Toole (Concordia Univ.), “Haunted Canons and the Preternatural Other: Language, Superstition and Religiosity in Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s Playboy of the Western World”
Causeway 2: Early Irish Traditions and Their Adaptations. Chair: Howard Keeley (Georgia Southern Univ.)
Bridgette Slavin (Canisius College), “Perceptions of Magic in Old Irish Literature”
Joseph Greenwell (Penn. State Univ.), “’back-chat and funny cracks’: Epistemologies of the Celtic Afterlife in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman”
Masaya Shimokusu (Doshisha Univ.), “Dullahan in Anime: An Adaptation of the Irish Death Messenger in Japanese Popular Culture”
11:00 - 12:00 Keynote Address: Causeway 1-2
Michael Patrick Gillespie (FIU), “A Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Accepting the Picture’s Changes in Dorian Gray.” Chair: James S. Rogers, Univ. of St. Thomas
Abstract: If someone had nothing more than the plot outline of The Picture of Dorian Gray, one might assume that it was structured as a Gothic novel, much like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published six years later. That is not the case, and the reasons for reading it as we do strike me as important as the readings that we produce. Most critical responses—whether grounded in any of a range of epistemologies from psychoanalytic to queer theory—generate interpretations that seem to assume that the narrative is grounded in a realistic milieu.
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Although not much attention has been given to our tendencies as readers simply to accept the change in the picture as a donné, pushing on the consequences of that assumption will clarify how we come to understand Wilde’s novel, no matter what theoretical framework we adopt for out interpretation. I will use this talk to anatomize what it means to read the novel as if the change in the picture were a normal consequence in Dorian’s life and press on ideas of how accepting too readily the change as a fait accompli limits our awareness of the complexity of the work.
12:00 - 1:30 Business Lunch, Grand Salon A
Session Five
1:30 - 3:30 Causeway 1: The Famine and Its Legacy. Chair: Cóilín D. Owens (Emeritus, George Mason Univ.)
More Matheson (St. John’s Univ., NY), “The Irish Jane Eyre”
Audrey Ruark (Georgia Southern Univ.), “How the Ladies’ Land League Shaped Irish-American Identity in the American South”
Ian LaPlante (York Univ., Toronto) “Gender, Superstition and the Tragedy of Bridget Cleary”
Susan Cahill (Concordia Univ.), “Ghostly Girls: Rosa Mulholland and Irish Girls in Fiction at the Turn of the Century”
Catherine Gorman (Florida Gulf Coast Univ.), “The Great Hunger: A Determined Fate”
Causeway 2: Sacrifi ce, Myth, Nationalism and Commemoration of the Dead. Chair: Paul Townend (UNC-Wilmington)
Patrick J. Mahoney (NUI Galway), “Death, Displacement, and Diaspora: The Transatlantic Irish Nationalist Cult of Commemoration in the 19th Century”
Susan Rosenkranz (Ind. Scholar), “Baying at the British: Gri� th, Cuchulain, and the Power of Irish Myth”
Andrew Sanders (UCD), “The IRA Hunger Strikes and the Role of Mythology and Sacrifi ce in Contemporary Irish Studies”
David Kilroy (NSU), “The Dead and the Departed: U.S. Presidential Visits to Ireland and Transatlantic Identity “
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Session Six
3:30 - 5:00 Causeway 1: Open-Eyed, Full-Throated: A Showcase of ACIS Poets. Chair: Nathalie F. Anderson (Swarthmore College) - includes book-signing
Nathalie F. Anderson, Heather Jordan, David Lloyd, and James S. Rogers
Causeway 2: Visions of the Otherworld/Underworld. Chair: Michael Patrick Gillespie (FIU)
Maureen E. Mulvihill (Princeton Research Forum, NJ), ”The ‘Witching Tales’ of an Irish Poetess: Supernatural as Agency in the Poetry and Persona of Mary Tighe (1772-1810)” – with exhibits
Carljohn X. Veraja (Florida Gulf Coast Univ.), “Tír na nÓg and the Concept of Hell in James Joyce’s Works”
Barry Devine (U of Miami), “Bloom’s Inferno: James Joyce’s Hidden Dantean Landscape”
Kurt Voss-Hoynes (U of Miami), “Tradition and Commitment: Roddy Doyle’s Alternative Ireland”
5:00-7:00 Happy Hour at Waxy O’Connors Pub and Grill, 17th St. Causeway, Ft. Lauderdale
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25th Annual Meeting of the Southern Region, American Conference for Irish Studies
The cover design is based on D. H. Friston’s illustration of J. S. Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (The Dark Blue, 1872)
Our thanks for the support of the American Conference for Irish
Studies, Nova Southeastern University, the South Florida Irish
Studies Consortium, Inc., Irish Studies Review, the Irish Film
Institute and Classport Inc.
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