Jessica Bundschuh (University of Stuttgart)
Coming of Age Queer in Ireland in Rosamund Taylor's Verse Novel of Tactility
“All tactile stimulation marks the boundary between self and other,
between inside and out. Touch carves out our presence in the world
through the ever-present reminder of the skin’s limit.”
—David Le Breton, Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses
Regarded as a literary misfit for its rejection of stable genre boundaries, the verse novel instead adopts a posture of self-conscious hybridity. In mixed-genre narration that draws attention to its own messy and provisional ‘becoming,’ it is no surprise that the verse novel has flourished in Anglophone nations most among a young adult readership, themselves engrossed in the process of identity shapeshifting. Ireland, too, has had a surge in publications of YA verse novels in the past decade. One such example is Rosamund Taylor’s Filly (2025), a queer coming-of-age tale that incorporates a variety of genres – book reviews, MSN message chat logs, and text messages – to co-exist alongside its lyric prose. In this way, Filly leans into its formal indeterminacy to transgress normative parameters, even as it localises touch and skin as a charged and vital border between self and other.
In a Bildungsroman of abuse and domination, Filly illustrates that touch, always reciprocal and multilateral by nature, is the most democratic of the senses. Breton contends that skin “denotes separation, enclosing the individual, but it is simultaneously a site of exchange with the world, transmitting warmth, light, pleasure and pain.” This holds true for Filly, set in Dublin 2008 with a protagonist, Orla, who, in response to being cruelly bullied at school, self-harms and engages in a lesbian sexual relationship with a teacher. For Orla, touch triggers an immediate and vulnerable transformation, such that she often morphs into nonhuman subjects: “We joined hand – sticky, lingering. Foxes / schrieked from the walls; midges swarmed / around our warm skin.” Ulimately, this narrative of self-awakening situates skin as the surface to reimagine new forms of queer intimacy in Ireland, especially when told in the hybrid genre of the verse novel.
Dr. Jessica Bundschuh is a Lecturer in English Literatures & Cultures at the University of Stuttgart with recent publications in Review of Irish Studies in Europe, Journal for the Study of British Culture, Ecozon@, Poetics Today, The Paris Review, Literary Matters, and Études irlandaises. She is co-editor of Handbook of Poetic Forms (De Gruyter 2025), on the executive board of EFACIS, and host of the first Poetry Jukebox in Germany, a Culture Ireland funded initiative.
Michael G Cronin (Maynooth University)
Coming-out Romance: Resistance and Complicity in Neoliberal Ireland
We can identify the Irish coming-out romance as a historically-specific genre, rising and falling in tandem with the economic boom and bust of the 1990s and 2000s. As the literary form, or political unconscious, of the Irish lesbian and gay (latterly LGBTQ+) social movement that emerged in the 1970s, this queer variation on the traditional bildungsroman gave narrative form to profound tensions around gender, class and political vision within that movement; tensions which subsequently shaped the campaign for marriage equality in the 2010s. At the same time, the genre gave narrative expression to conflicting ideas about identity, self-formation and subjectivity; conflicting visions not confined to debates about sexual identity, but extending beyond to encompass the ascendance of neoliberal models of selfhood more generally. As such, the trajectory of the Irish coming-out romance rewards analysis, capturing as it does a complex web of ideas and debates about sexuality, selfhood and historical development in late twentieth-century Ireland. In this paper I will evaluate the literary, historical and political significance of this genre, referencing novels by a range of authors such as Colm Toibin, Emma Donoghue, Mary Dorcey, Jamie O’Neill and Keith Ridgway, among others.
Michael G Cronin is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Maynooth University, Ireland. He is the author of Impure Thoughts: sexuality, Catholicism and literature in twentieth-century Ireland (Manchester UP, 2012), Revolutionary Bodies: homoeroticism and the political imagination in Irish writing (MUP, 2022) and Sexual/Liberation (Síreacht/UCC Press, 2022). In 2023, Revolutionary Bodies won the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Irish Literature, awarded by the American Conference of Irish Studies (ACIS). His current research project examines contested and contradictory ideas about literature and the literary circulating in contemporary Irish culture.
Seán Crosson (University of Galway)
“Ar son an Náisiúin”: Examining the Role of Depictions of Gaelic Games on Film in the Articulation and Deconstruction of Irish Identity in the Mid-Twentieth Century
This paper will examine the place of filmic depictions of Gaelic games in the articulation, popularisation and subsequent deconstruction of conceptions of Irishness in the mid-20th century. It will be informed by and feature material from a recent documentary mini-series written and co-produced by the author: Iománaíocht Hollywood: Cluichí Gaelacha ar Scannán / Hollywood Hurling: Gaelic Games on Film (TG4 2025). As scholars of both media and cultural studies have contended, film plays a critical role as a mediator of social relations through the naturalization of cultural norms including understandings of national and cultural identity. Sport has also been recognised as playing a crucial and comparable role in this respect. This paper will examine productions of the National Film Institute of Ireland (established in 1943) between the late 1940s and 1970s and their articulation, affirmation and popularisation of conceptions of Irish identity. The paper will also consider Peter Lennon’s Rocky Road to Dublin (1968) as one of the first cinematic ripostes to, and deconstruction of, hegemonic articulations of Irishness, including through a focus on Gaelic games.
Dr. Seán Crosson is Associate Professor and Head of Discipline of the Huston School of Film & Digital Media, University of Galway. He has published (as either author, editor, or co-editor) widely on aspects of Irish cinema and literature and on the depiction of sport, including his award-winning monographs Sport and Film (Routledge 2013; 2026 2nd Edn.) and Gaelic Games on Film (Cork University Press, 2019). He is Project Leader of the Sport in European Cinema initiative, a research and education platform and database capturing the extraordinary story of how sport has featured across the history of European cinema.
Deirdre Flynn (MIC Limerick)
The Irish Campus Novel and Social Transformation in the Twenty-First Century
In the 20th Century only a handful of books had the university campus at their centre, however since the turn of the 21st Century university life is featuring much more in Irish fiction. While the definitions of campus fiction are contested, the Irish version has a number of specific styles that combine tropes of Irish fiction with the campus, for a uniquely Irish take on the popular genre.
Central to the campus novel trend in Ireland, is the history of Irish University enrolments. In 1950 the number of full-time students at university was 7,900, but by the 1970’s this had increased to 25,000 (Redmond and CSO 2000, 49–50). The biggest change to enrolments happened in 1996, as a result of a government policy to abolish tuition fees in order to build Ireland’s knowledge economy. Enrolments increase by 89% in the 10 years that followed (Walsh 2018, 353). The university has become central to many contemporary Irish texts, just as it has become so central to Irish life, with Ireland having a 20 percentage point difference in all age categories from 25-54 for tertiary level attainment over the EU 27 average in 2023 (CSO 2024).
While the abolition of tuition fees played a major role in the numbers attending university, and has a direct correlation to the number of campus novels that emerged in the subsequent years, Ireland also underwent what Eoin O’Malley calls “a remarkable transformation” from the 1990s onwards (O’Malley 2021, 96). From unprecedented economic growth to social change the 1990s to the present decade have seen huge changes in Ireland. These changes are reflected in the Irish campus novel, with a range of novels dealing with homosexuality, which was decriminalised in 1993. Ireland was also the first country to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote in 2015, divorce was introduced in 1996, and abortion, eventually decriminalised in 2018. However, inward migration and issues of race, which featured so prominently during the Celtic Tiger and our Citizenship referendum, removing birthright citizenship in 2004, and now in the growth of the far right, have not materialised in the majority of Irish campus novels, which are acutely white.
This talk will discuss how 21st campus novels, such as Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting (2023) Eimear Ryan’s Holding her Breath (2021) Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident (2023), Jo Spain’s The Trial (2024) incorporate and critique social change.
Dr Deirdre Flynn is a lecturer in 21st-century literature at MIC Limerick. She is a member of the inaugural Young Academy of Ireland at the Royal Irish Academy. She has published widely on Precarity, Contemporary literature, Irish Studies, Migration, and Literary Urban Studies. Her newest co-edited collection, Irish Digital Cultures: Identity, Contexts, Space with Dr Mary McGill was published with Routledge in December 2025. Deirdre is the secretary of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL) and edits the blog, www.irishwomenswritingnetwork.com. She has worked in University of Galway, UL and UCD.
Anne Fogarty (University College Dublin)
“All we are is a boundary event”: Political and Psychosocial Change in the Contemporary Irish Sibling Novel
The sibling novel, including Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015), Michael Magee’s Close to Home (2023) and Niamh Ní Mhaoleoin’s Ordinary Saints, forms a significant strand in contemporary Irish fiction. But it has largely been ignored as a phenomenon. This paper sets out to explore two recent fictions about siblings Caoilinn Hughes’s The Alternatives (2024) about a quartet of sisters and Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (2024) about a pair of brothers. It will examine how age gaps and the friction and contrasts between siblings are deployed in these works to reflect on changes in Irish society, altered notions of selfhood and of relationality, and the dominant social and political issues of twenty-first century Ireland. Some of the formal aspects of the sibling novel will be investigated along with its symbolic properties. Lateral relations between siblings largely displace vertical relations with parents and forebears in these fictions. The trauma of siblinghood is treated as of greater consequence than oedipal struggles with parents. The problem of being a sibling rather than a child, it will be argued, more closely reflects the crises and lived intricacies of the present moment as well as its aspirations and hopes.
Anne Fogarty is Professor Emerita of James Joyce Studies at University College Dublin. She has co-edited several collections of essays on Joyce and recently co-edited with Tina O’Toole, Reading Gender and Space: Essays for Patricia Coughlan (Cork University Press, 2023), and with Eugene O’Brien, The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First-Century Irish Writing (Routledge, 2025). Her edition of Dubliners is forthcoming from Penguin in June 2026 and a collection co-edited with Erika Mihálycsa and Scott Eric Hamilton, Flann O’Brien: Palimpsests, Translations, and Intertexts is forthcoming from Cork University Press in October 2026. She has published widely on the Revival period and on aspects of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish writing, especially women authors.
Joachim Frenk (Universität des Saarlandes)
Darker Green: Gothic Visions of Ireland since the 1990s
The Irish Gothic, which has been a seminal element of the anglophone Gothic, is a rich field of cultural exploration as it questions and subverts optimistic Irish narratives of modernisation and amelioration. In this paper, I propose to analyse ways in which twenty-first-century Irish Gothic stories and a film offer new attempts at narrating Ireland and at reconfiguring trajectories of individual development amid far-reaching social transformations. In the twenty-first century, Irish writers, illustrators and filmmakers return to Gothic aesthetics and poetics to probe cultural fault lines. They create darker green imaginaries, Ireland appears as a multifaceted culture in which unresolved historical traumas persist within—and unsettle—the narratives of transformation.
I will discuss two novels, Patrick McCabe’s Winterwood and Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know, Deirdre Sullivan’s young adult fiction Savage Her Reply, and Neil Jordan’s film Byzantium. They all construct diverse narratives of Ireland through, e.g., Irish land- and cityscapes, claustrophobic interiors and an unresolved past that threatens the present. Elements such as ‘Irish’ vampirism, a demonic pact, and an Irish gothic intertextuality register the uncanny afterlives / presences of colonial subjection, Catholic and patriarchal authority, and an unfettered capitalism.
Joachim Frenk is professor and chair of British Literary and Cultural Studies at Universität des Saarlandes, Germany. His main areas of research are early modern studies, including Shakespeare, Victorian literary and cultural studies and the history of British popular cultures. At the Universität des Saarlandes, he has (co-)organised an ‘Irish semester’ (2011), the ‘Irland-Tage’, a meeting of German-Irish societies from all over Germany (2013; with Eva Michely and Bruno von Lutz), and the international symposium ‘Irish Studies in a Changing Europe’ (2025; with Nadja Freier, Éamonn Ó Ciardha, and Victoria Pearson). He is also a co-organiser of the ‘Irish Itinerary’, an annual performance cycle of Irish artists in Germany (since 2015).
Ralf Haekel (Leipzig)
“I want you to know that she was”: Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat
The manifold social transformations that Ireland has undergone in recent decades have also given rise to a much broader range of concepts relating to authorship, writing and literature. Irish literary history has been dominated by patriarchal structures and male voices, but the social transformation in the 21st century has given rise to new female and feminist forms of writing literature. Contemporary literature in the wake of the Celtic Tiger, the abuse scandal and the crisis of the Catholic church is not only much more characterised by female voices, but it is also still dominated by patriarchal structures. Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, giving voice to an individual and decidedly female conception of authorship, can be read as a profound criticism of these structures.
Through its autobiographical approach, A Ghost in the Throat establishes a continuous dialogue between past and present. Placing the individual voice of Ní Ghríofa next to that of 18th-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, female authorship is enacted as a decidedly bodily activity set in contrast to still dominant patriarchal modes. The voices of Ní Ghríofa and Ní Chonaill represent an individual and remarkable physical conception of authorship and poetry, rejecting a purely intellectual and dualistic patriarchal approach to literary history.
Ralf Haekel is Professor and Chair of English Literature at Leipzig University, Germany. His main research interests lie in the fields of Romanticism, Irish Studies, and Media Theory. He received his PhD from FU Berlin in 2003 and his habilitation from the University of Göttingen in 2013. His current research project examines the media ecology of contemporary Irish literature. He is the president of the German Society for English Romanticism. He is the author of The Soul in British Romanticism (wvt, 2014), editor of the Handbook of British Romanticism (De Gruyter, 2017) and co-editor of Media Ecologies of Literature (Bloomsbury, 2023).
Stefanie Lehner (Queen’s University Belfast)
Rejecting Traditional Depictions of Female Victimhood in Two Recent Northern Fictions
This paper examines social transformations in post-Agreement Northern Ireland through the lens of depictions of female victimhood. In the North, much of the focus of discussions of victimhood had been on the men involved in the protracted period of conflict, known as The Troubles. One consequence of this has been that the experiences and voices of victim-survivors of sexual violence and domestic abuse has been marginalised or sidelined. If the recently published ‘Domestic and Sexual Abuse Strategy 2024–2031’ for Northern Ireland has helped to somewhat address this, various organisation have highlighted concerns about how institutionalised misogyny and rape culture as well as class issues, amongst others, lead to insufficient support services as well as well as inadequate avenues of attaining justice, in which abusers would be held to account.
There has been a notable trend in recent Irish literature exploring issues of domestic violence and sexual abuse. However, some of these works problematically reiterate historical stereotypes of female abuse victims by portraying them as innately good and therefore deserving of support and justice, as for instance exemplified by the protagonist of Roisín O’Donnell’s novel, Nesting (2025), Ciara, who has suffered from prolonged domestic abuse despite being the perfect wife and mother. By contrast, this paper explores how two recent works by Northern women writers – Aimée Walsh’s Exile (2024) and Wendy Erskine’s The Benefactors (2025) – challenge, revise, and reject such unhelpful depictions of female abuse victims by foregrounding the complex ways in their young adult female protagonists have to negotiate and act within a complex yet realistic matrix of class, power, loyalty, and misogyny.
Dr Stefanie Lehner (s.lehner@qub.ac.uk) is Senior Lecturer in Irish Literature and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast, and Fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice (QUB). Her research explores the role of the arts, specifically performance, in conflict transformation processes, with a focus on the Northern Irish context. She also researches and teaches on representations of trauma and memory in (Northern) Irish drama, fiction, film, and photography. She is author of Subaltern Ethics in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Literature (Palgrave, 2011) and co-author of Sounding Conflict: From Resistance to Reconciliation (Bloomsbury, 2023).
Caroline Lusin (University of Mannheim)
The Connected Vulnerability of Being: Post-Celtic Tiger Identities in Sheila Armstrong’s Falling Animals (2023)
In the 21st century, British and Irish fiction has seen a remarkable proliferation of ‘composite novels’ (D’hoker), from Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (2012) and John Lanchester’s Capital (2012) to Evie Wyld’s The Echoes (2024) and Ryan’s Heart, Be at Peace (2024). In Falling Animals, Sheila Armstrong appropriates this narrative form to explore the ‘permanent liminality’ (Szakolczai) of Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, a condition marked by exceptional economic, social, and psychological vulnerability. Drawing on the framework of material ecocriticism, this paper will explore how Falling Animals alleviates the ruptures of a globalised Irish community by showcasing the shared vulnerability of being. Not least in view of the novel’s composite form, its human and more-than-human agents can be conceptualised as “knots in a vast network of agencies, which can be ‘read’ and interpreted as forming narratives, stories” (Iovino and Oppermann 1). In foregrounding these entangled human and more-than-human networks, Falling Animals transcends the pessimism associated with Ireland’s ‘permanent liminality’ to create a sense of coherence and connection beyond the fissures of Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.
Caroline Lusin holds the Chair of English Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Mannheim. In her research, she chiefly focuses on 21st-century British and Irish fiction. Her major publications include a study on Virginia Woolf and Anton Chekhov, a monograph on autobiographical documents written by the British in India (Imperial Selves: Negotiating Collectivity in Anglo-Indian Life-Writing, 2018), and edited collections on South Asian and Caribbean poetry, on empathy, sympathy and narration, contemporary drama as well as British and Irish TV series.
Diane Negra (University College Dublin)
Expository Irishness, Garron Noone and the Politics of Irish Differentiation in the 2020s
Social media spaces, and influencers, have come to play a central role in the recalibrating of Irishness following the Covid-19 pandemic. In this talk I analyse the social media celebrity of Garron Noone whose (for the most part) non-threatening, de-sexualised likeability works in service of an “expository Irishness” that interpellates viewers at home and abroad. Noone’s signature element is the comic identification of national affective norms and cultural traits in short-form videos. I map Noone’s ability to humorously translate hyper-local aspects of Irish culture to national and international audiences, thus contributing to a national subjectivity distinguishable from what may be read as the disordered and dysfunctional whiteness of Brexit Britain and Trump’s America. I situate Noone within a crop of emerging Irish celebrities who exert considerable influence over the meanings of Irish nationality and ethnicity, often highlighting a perceived capacity to retain an innate Irishness alongside transnational intelligibility and commercial appeal.
Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, she is the author, editor or co-editor of fourteen books including The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity and Popular Culture (Duke, 2006), The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (Routledge, 2017) and I’m Sorry You Feel That Way: The New Cultures of Customer Service (Stanford, 2026).
Stephen O’Neill (Trinity College Dublin)
Nostalgia and Narrative in Polly Devlin’s All of Us There (1983) and Ciaran Carson’s The Star Factory (1997)
This paper will interrogate the relationship between narrative and nostalgia in two memoirs from the north of Ireland which were published during the conflict known as ‘the troubles’: Polly Devlin’s All of Us There, published in 1983, and Ciaran Carson’s 1997 The Star Factory. While both texts were written and at least partially set during the conflict, there is a constant turn towards nostalgia as a mood in their narratives which means that they reveal little about the historical context that shadowed their lives. Using Martin Mühlheim’s reading of nostalgia as counter to bildung in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) as a jumping point, and Richard Kirkland’s account of nostalgia as mode of survival in a partitioned Ireland for the Belfast writer Cathal O’Byrne, the paper will argue that both Devlin and Carson extend this communal defence mechanism when writing in and about the conflict. For all its use as a means of psychological survival, this nostalgia has fatal consequences for the narratives of development in each memoir.
Stephen O’Neill is Teaching Fellow in Twentieth Century Writing at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. His Irish Culture and Partition, 1920-1955 has just been published by Liverpool University Press.
Christoph Reinfandt (University of Tübingen)
Historical Landmarks and Social Transformations: Reconfiguring the Easter Rising in Mary O’Donnell’s Empire (2018)
Mary O’Donnell’s volume of interconnected stories Empire (2018) provides episodes from Irish lives around the time of the Easter Rising without ever touching upon the historical landmark event directly. The closest the reader gets to it is in a story “The Black Church,” set on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916 in Dublin city centre, but focalised through young Ann Jane Gleeson, who does not know or understand what is going on, and in the next story “The Unchosen,” which focuses on the nightly ruminations of a participant in the rising in Kilmainham Gaol in May 1916 who is not one of the main protagonists whose historical importance rests partly on the fact that they were ruthlessly killed by the British. In the remaining stories it is mostly press reports and hearsay. Nevertheless, the stories – two framing novellas of 50-60 pages plus five embedded short stories – provide a wide-ranging panorama of lives lived at the time in Dublin, Monaghan, Clongowes Castle, a convent near Edenmore and even as far away as Mandalay in Burma, subtly letting readers appreciate that decisive developments in history were taking place as social transformation in the shadows beyond the historical landmark event. As a close reading of Empire will show, these developments were predicated on new opportunities for individual development especially in terms of gender. Empire subtly engages with the ways of narrating history and Ireland available at the time of its own gestation, and as such provides an interesting case study for the symposium ‘Narrating Ireland: Social Transformation and Individual Development (1950-2025)’.
Christoph Reinfandt studied English, German and Musicology at the University of Kiel, Germany, where he also submitted his doctoral thesis on the meaning of fictional worlds in the English novel from the 18th century to the present (published with Winter in Heidelberg in 1997) and his postdoctoral thesis (Habilitation) on the persistence of Romantic modes of communication in modern culture (Winter, 2003). He was first appointed Professor of English Literature at Darmstadt University in 2003 and in 2004 moved on to the Chair of English Literature from the 18th century to the present at the University of Tuebingen, which he currently holds. Since 2008, he has been the General Editor of ZAA (Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik). Christoph Reinfandt’s main areas of research are the history and theory of the novel, Romanticism, contemporary literature and culture (including popular culture), literary and cultural theory, Indian literature in English, and Irish Studies. He has (co-)edited numerous books such Theory Matters: The Place of Theory in Literary and Cultural Studies Today (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2017), Romantic Ambiguities: Abodes of the Modern (Trier: WVT, 2017) and Literary Materialisations and Interferential Reading: Making Matter Matter on Page, Stage and Screen (New York: Routledge, 2025). He is currently working on a monograph called The Singer-Songwriter Paradigm: Performances and Media Textures.
Katharina Rennhak (University of Wuppertal)
Narrating Social Transformation and Individual Development in the Contemporary Irish Family Novel
The Irish family novel is a key site for exploring the relationship between collective and personal traumatic experiences, social change, and storytelling. Focusing on Helen Cullen’s The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually (2020), Elaine Feeney’s Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way (2025), and Claire Airey’s Confessions (2025), and situating these works within the broader tradition of the Irish family novel, my analysis will demonstrate that generational and individual experiences of trauma are not merely thematic concerns but are produced and mediated through narrative design. Multiple focalisation, shifting narrative voices and the representation of time and space (particularly depictions of home and exile, and the contrast between rural and urban areas) serve as formal strategies through which inherited and personal traumas (and their interconnection) are articulated and, in some cases, resolved. In short, my comparison of the three novels contends that narrative configurations of the experience of generational and personal trauma actively shape its intelligibility, thereby enabling divergent imaginaries of social transformation and individual development.
Katharina Rennhak is professor of English Literature at the University of Wuppertal. Her main research areas are British and Irish Romanticism and contemporary fiction, narrative theory and gender studies. Among her co-edited collections is Walter Macken: Critical Perspectives (Cork UP, 2022). She also co-edited Perspectives on the Irish Border, vol. 6.2 of RISE: Review of Irish Studies in Europe (2023). She was president of EFACIS (2019-2025) and is a member of the executives of IASIL: The International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures and the Center for Narrative Research at the University of Wuppertal. She is a co-editor of DIEGESIS: Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research; and the general editor of the EFACIS Irish Itinerary Podcast.
Sarah L. Townsend (University of New Mexico)
Perpetual Children: Celtic Tiger Irish Drama and the Refusal to Grow Up
A strand of Irish drama produced during the 1990s interrogated the very possibility of attaining successful maturation through the portrayal of children and adolescents who cannot, or do not want to, grow up. In Patrick McCabe’s Frank Pig Says Hello (1992), Gina Moxley’s Danti-Dan (1995), Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs (1996), and Owen McCafferty’s Mojo Mickybo (1998), youthful protagonists insulate themselves from the adult world through imaginative, often delusional, and delinquent child’s play, to predictably tragic ends. The characters’ defiance and pessimism cuts against the triumphant public discourses surrounding the Celtic Tiger economy and the culmination of the Northern Irish Troubles, revealing instead the stunted and tragic development that persists amid peace and prosperity. The staging and casting choices highlight the plays’ insularity and metatheatricality. Because the characters reject an adult world that they love play-acting but refuse to actually engage, let alone aspire to, it is tempting to read these works as anti-Bildung narratives. Yet, I argue that they retain a weak but determined faith in the ideal of Bildung. By setting much of the action a generation prior to the 1990s, these plays hope for a Celtic Tiger-era, post-conflict society capable of nurturing even the most stunted and marginalized youth.
Sarah L. Townsend is Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of Irish Studies at the University of New Mexico, where she also serves as a Faculty Fellow for Strategic Recruitment in the Graduate Studies division. She is co-editor, with Gregory Castle and Matthew Reznicek, of The Irish Bildungsroman (Syracuse University Press, 2025), and her monograph Irish Drama and Coming of Age in the Periphery will be published by Edinburgh University Press early next year. She is currently President Elect of the American Conference for Irish Studies.
Tony Tracy (University of Galway)
Familiar Faces: Character Actors, Lalor Roddy and Irish Cinema
While a small number of Irish male actors achieved visibility in Hollywood during cinema’s first century—often by either suppressing their origins or conforming to stereotyped identities within the studio system—the early decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed an explosion of screen celebrities who explicitly foreground their Irishness within transnational production contexts. Performers such as Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell, Cillian Murphy, Barry Keoghan, and Paul Mescal now circulate as both Irish and global stars, moving fluidly across national registers and, at times, embodying Irish identity within otherwise non-Irish settings (e.g. Eternals (2021), The Lost Daughter (2021), Mr Mercedes (2022), Ballad of a Small Player (2025)). While this marks a notable expansion in the international visibility of Irish acting talent, it also risks obscuring—or implicitly devaluing—the labour and significance of character actors whose work remains largely confined to lower-budget, indigenous productions with limited distribution. This paper argues that the contemporary headline visibility of Irish actors in international [and often non-Irish] productions have a distorting effect on a national cinema and culture, mistaking visibility for value and potentially depleting a native acting company.
Lalor Roddy offers a particularly valuable case study to reconsider the role of character actors within Irish national cinema. Across a range of independent and arthouse films, the actor has accumulated a dispersed screen persona that offers diverse perspectives on masculinity on the margins that may be overshadowed by a focus on younger, leading men. Roles as supporting characters, ageing bachelors and father figures of one kind or another stabilise the social worlds of Irish cinema. At the same time, Roddy’s frequent collaboration with emerging directors in short films suggests a professional ethos oriented less toward star visibility than toward craft labour and industry support. This paper considers the circulating presence of Roddy in contemporary Irish film and argues that though frequently cast as a supporting character player, he offers an exemplary, but potentially transferable, example of actors who helps produce continuity within a relatively small screen culture while also contributing to the industrial ecology—and sustainability—of Irish filmmaking itself.
Tony Tracy is Lecturer in Film and Media Studies and co-founder of the Huston School of Film & Digital Media at the University of Galway. His research spans film education, American and Irish film history, and the study of masculinities and ageing in visual culture. He is the author of White Cottage, White House: Irish American Masculinities in Classical Hollywood Cinema (SUNY, 2023), and has published widely in peer-reviewed journals. His edited volumes include Ageing Masculinities in Contemporary European and Anglophone Cinemas (Routledge 2023), Ageing Masculinities in Irish Literature and Visual Culture (Routledge, 2022), Irish Masculinity and Popular Culture: Tiger Tales (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and John Huston: Essays on a Restless Director (McFarland, 2010). He is also co-author of The Historical Dictionary of Irish Cinema (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
Michelle Witen (Europa University Flensburg)
“Always looking for a master”: Transformations in Murdoch’s A Severed Head
Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head presents its reader with established transgressions ranging from adultery to incest as well as purportedly softer transgressions such as incompetence, hypocrisy, abjection, addiction, etc., making it a veritable smorgasbord for psychoanalytical study. Indeed, the mythological complexes and Freudian slippages of the novel essentially form its plot, with Palmer Anderson, one of the main characters even being a psychiatrist. This paper moves through a feminist, psychoanalytic and Irish Gothic reading of A Severed Head. It begins by examining the mythological and psychological transformations of Georgie, Honor, and Antonia, with the goal of showing how their permutations of womanhood contribute to Martin Lynch-Gibbons’ social development. It then takes these principles regarding mythological women and applies the lens of the Irish Gothic to the novel, paying particular attention to the Anglo-Irish Martin Lynch-Gibbon’s familial, social, and emotional alterity. This alterity is then read through Martin’s obsession with particular forms of military history and the master/servant dynamic of Martin’s mythological reading; thus, demonstrating that Georgie’s penetrating remark that Martin is “always looking for a master” (3) becomes part of a larger discourse around his personal and political disenfranchisement and eventual transformation.
Michelle Witen is Professor of British and Irish Literature and Director of the EUF Centre for Irish Studies at the Europa-Universität Flensburg. Her research areas focus on the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and she is the author of James Joyce and Absolute Music (Bloomsbury 2018), and co-editor of the James Joyce Quarterly Special Issue, “James Joyce and the Nonhuman” (with Katherine Ebury 2020/21); Shakespeare and Space (with Ina Habermann, Palgrave 2016), and Modernism in Wonderland (with John Morgenstern, Bloomsbury 2024). She has also published on modernism and music, Darby O’Gill and the Little People, the Ladybird books, Lewis Carroll, Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelley. She is currently working on a monograph on Victorian periodicals from the 1890s.
Loic Wright (Visiting Professor at the University of Wuppertal)
Technology, Narrative Voice, and the Stunted Bildungsroman of Modernity
Patrick McCabe’s 1993 novel, The Butcher Boy, outlines the incremental spread of technology across all facets of the mundanities of daily life in rural Ireland. Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, the novel’s protagonist, Francis Brady, wrestles with the challenges of boyhood, the alluring arrival of American popular culture, and the imposing presence of industrialisation. As his vocabulary becomes gradually tinged with American idioms, his own understanding of his role in the world is derailed, often with violent consequences. Published nearly thirty years later, Catherine Prasifka’s None of This is Serious (2021) chronicles the suffocating and stifling omnipresence of technology in the life of its protagonist, Sophie. Despite the surrounding climate crisis, characters in Prasifka’s novel prioritise their online lives, borrowing from internet culture and failing to engage in meaningful relationships around them.
In this paper I will investigate how two novels from different periods in recent Irish history chronicle the effects of vast social transformation and technological advancements on the development of the individual in two stunted Bildungsromane. By considering how social change is reflected in the development of two protagonists, I consider the role of globalisation and technology on traditional narratives of individual development and coming-of-age narratives.
Dr. Loic Wright is the Visiting Professor of Irish Studies at University of Wuppertal. He has lectured at University College Dublin and the International Learning Academy Dublin and has worked at the James Joyce Cultural Centre and as an Irish Cultural Ambassador for Fáilte Ireland (Irish Tourism Board). His research focuses on the construction of national identity in literature and culture, and has been published widely in Estudios Irlandeses, Irish Studies Review, and Review of Irish Studies Europe (RISE). His monograph Masculinities in Mid-Twentieth-Century Irish Fiction and Culture, 1931-1965 was published by Routledge in 2025.
