Graduate Student Conference at Notre Dame

Here is the call for papers for a new graduate student conference at Notre Dame:

"Hybrid Irelands: At Culture’s Edge
(Abstracts due November 15th, 2011)

A Graduate-Student Conference Exploring the Relationship between Hybridity and Irish Literature

Place:  University of Notre Dame
Date:   March 29-31, 2012
Keynote Speakers: Terry Eagleton (University of Lancaster, University of Notre Dame), David Lloyd (University of Southern California), Clair Wills (Queen Mary, University of London)

Poetry Reading: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Medbh McGuckian (tentative) (Queen’s University, Belfast)

In recent literary and cultural analyses, Ireland’s unique relation to various notions of hybridity has been given preliminary consideration. Whether pertaining to genres and styles, discourses and disciplines, or identities and influences, it has become apparent that a defining feature of many Irish works is their resistance to traditional, narrow categorization. In an attempt to expand upon these earlier approaches, the Keough-Naughton Institute at the University of Notre Dame will be holding a three-day graduate-student conference to address the relationship between hybridity and Irish literature, with a special focus on texts from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Submissions might interrogate past engagements with the concept of hybridity—a term itself which has no clear definition—as well as posit possible new understandings of “the hybrid” that are specific to Ireland. We invite criticism that focuses on conventionally understood literary genres (poetry, fiction, drama, memoir) as well as work from related fields, including but not limited to history, art, theory, folklore, material culture, and film studies. Furthermore, because the nature of hybridity suggests a coming-together of different elements, one of our goals is to cultivate a critical approach that is itself hybrid; in other words, we very much encourage interdisciplinary approaches to the topic. Our hope is to facilitate a critical conversation that envisions a hybrid Ireland—or, more appropriately, hybrid Irelands—and its literature.

Suggested topics:
Transnational Poetics
Generic Crossovers
Contemporary Engagements with Folklore
Transatlantic Fictions
Culture and Immigration
Ireland in Translation
Evolving Images in Film and Art
Recontextualizing “Literary Ireland”
Dialects and Language Change
Dislocated Spaces
Print Culture and Textual Authorship

Abstracts should be no longer than 150 words. The deadline for submissions is November 15, 2011. Please email your abstracts to hybridIE@nd.edu.

For questions or concerns, please contact John Dillon and Nathaniel Myers at hybridIE@nd.edu, or look us up on Facebook (search: Hybrid Irelands)."