IASIL 2024 Tokyo

Aftermaths

The 2024 Conference of
the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures

5-9 August 2024, Gakushuin University

Keynote Speakers

Keynote Speakers

Michael Cronin

is 1776 Professor of French (Chair) at Trinity College Dublin. He is an elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy and the Academia Europaea, an Officer in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques and a Senior Researcher in the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation. Among his published works are Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation (2000), Translation and Globalization (2006), Translation and Identity (2006), The Expanding World: Towards a Politics of Microspection (2012), Translation in the Digital Age (2013), Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (2017) and Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Anthropocene (2022). His research interests are in the areas of eco-criticism, travel writing, translation theory and history, Franco-Irish cultural relationships and Quebec and Acadian Studies.

Mitsuko Ohno

is Professor Emerita of Aichi Shukutoku University. She is the author of Yeats and the Tradition of Anglo-Irish Literature (1999) and Women’s Ireland (1998), both in Japanese. Her Pharaoh’s Daughter: Selected Poems of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (2001), a bilingual edition of the original Irish and Japanese translation with CD was published in Tokyo, while her English translations include On Two Shores, New and Selected Poems, Mutsuo Takahashi (Dedalus, 2006, 2019) and Sky Navigation Homeward: New and Selected Poems, Mikiro Sasaki (Dedalus, 2019). She is a founding member of IASIL Japan and served as its President in 2006-2008, and has frequently lectured at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo. She was recognised with the honour of the Presidential Distinguished Service Award for the Irish Abroad in 2020.

Tina O’Toole

is an associate professor at the School of English, Irish, and Communication, University of Limerick. Her scholarship focuses on British and Irish Literature; she is an expert on Irish women’s writing of the late nineteenth / early twentieth centuries, and on gender and sexuality studies. She has published two monographs and four edited collections including The Irish New Woman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Reading Gender and Space: Essays for Patricia Coughlan (Cork University Press, 2023; co-edited with Anne Fogarty). As guest editor, she has produced three journal special issues including one on Elizabeth Bowen (Irish University Review 2021, co-edited with Anna Teekell) and a multidisciplinary issue of Éire-Ireland on ‘New Approaches to Irish Migration’ (2012, co-edited with Piaras Mac Éinrí). She served as an elected board member of the Royal Irish Academy Committee for Literatures in English (2009-2013) and as an executive member of the IASIL (2013-2017); she was IASIL Treasurer for four years, and served as an editorial board member of the Irish University Review during the same period.

Moynagh Sullivan

is a Professor of English at Maynooth University, with specialties in Gender, Intersectionality, Motherhood, and Irish Studies. She edited (with Anne Mulhall and Wanda Balzano) Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and (with Borbola Farago Ed.) Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies in Race, Gender and Social Justice in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishers 2009). Her study Mama/L: Maternal Imaginaries in Contemporary Irish Culture is forthcoming. Her work has focused on diversifying culture by examining cultural gender gaps, ableism, and by mapping the overlooked and unseen maternal imaginaries, and has examined intersections of these areas in the fields of Irish writing, as well as contemporary poetry, fiction, art, and popular culture. She has been Visiting Fellow in Irish Studies at the Centre for Irish Studies/Moore Institute at NUIG, and Visiting Professor in Irish Studies at the Centre for Irish Studies at Boston College.

Clair Wills (attending remotely)

is the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at University of Cambridge. She previously taught at Queen Mary University of London, and at Princeton in the United States. She was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2016. She writes about the social, cultural and literary history of Britain and Ireland in the twentieth century. She is particularly interested in: migration in post-war Europe and the ways in which it gets represented, by migrants and by others; literature and culture in Northern Ireland; contemporary British fiction; feminism and women’s writing; and the history and experiences of coercive confinement in institutions (including psychiatric institutions) in Britain and Ireland in the twentieth century. Her monographs include: Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain (2017), The Best Are Leaving: Emigration and Post-War Irish Culture (2015), Dublin 1916: The Siege of the GPO (2009) and That Neutral Island: A History of Ireland during the Second World War (2007).

Guest Artists

Lucy Caldwell

is a Northern Irish novelist and playwright. She is the author of four novels, Where They Were Missed (Viking, 2006); The Meeting Point (Faber, 2011); All the Beggars Riding (Faber, 2013), which was chosen for Belfast’s One City, One Book initiative; and These Days (Faber, 2022), winner of the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Her short story collections are Multitudes, (Faber, 2016); Intimacies (Faber, 2021); and the forthcoming Openings (Faber, 2024). She is the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber, 2019). Her published stage plays include Leaves (Faber, 2007); Notes to Future Self (Faber, 2011); and Three Sisters (after Chekhov) (Faber, 2016). Her awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. In 2018 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The Sunday Times proclaimed her ‘One of Ireland’s most essential writers’, and Joseph O’Connor, writing in the Guardian, called her ‘one of Northern Ireland’s most accomplished contemporary writers.’

Stephen Sexton

is a poet from Northern Ireland. His first book, If All the World and Love Were Young, was the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.  He was awarded the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2020. He was the winner of the National Poetry Competition in 2016 and the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. Cheryl’s Destinies was published in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Both collections are published in the US by Wake Forest University Press in 2024. In 2023, he was commissioned by the Northern Ireland Office to write a poem in acknowledgement of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. He teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast.

STANO

is an Irish composer and artist. He has sixteen albums, numerous singles and film soundtracks to his credit. In his innovative work, Stano collaborates with musicians from various genres. His first exhibition was at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, in 1982, which coincided with the release of his first solo single ‘Room’. The visual side of his performances utilise backing tracks, film and performance art. In Between Silence, where we really exist is an ongoing collection of intimate personal stories by diverse participants, including many leading Irish and International writers and artists and was launched at the International Literature Festival Dublin in May 2016. Theo Dorgan has described it as “a total experience . . . a multidimensional world in sound . . . the way the soundscape travels you into the story, is really quite uncanny”. The stories are told by some of Ireland’s finest writers and artists, including Dermot Bolger, Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle, Paula Meehan, Joseph O’Connor and Robert Ballagh.