The weekend of March 29-31, 2012 promises to be an exciting one for students and faculty interested in Irish Studies at Notre Dame. “Hybrid Irelands: At Culture’s Edge,” a conference organized by John Dillon and Nathaniel Meyers, will take place at the Notre Dame Conference Center with plenary lectures by Terry Eagleton (University of Notre Dame), Clair Wills (Queen Mary, University of London), and David Lloyd (University of Southern California). All panels and lectures are open for Notre Dame Students to attend, and the schedule can be accessed at the conference’s website: http://hybridie.nd.edu/.
The official conference description reads:
“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.”