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Thursday, July 31st, 2008Second Conference of the Society for Irish Latin American Studies (SILAS)
“Heroes, victims or villains? Irish Presentations and Representations in Latin America and the Caribbean”
Morelia, Mexico
15-18 July 2009
Organised by the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo
Call for Papers
The time has come for SILAS to convene its first conference in the Americas. The Second SILAS Conference will be held in colonial Morelia, with the local support of the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas of the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. Researchers, students and independent scholars will share their work and experience on different aspects of Irish-Latin American relations.
Under the general title “Heroes, victims or villains? Irish Presentations and Representations in Latin America and the Caribbean”, this meeting proposes to foster international and multidisciplinary approaches to the study of connections between Ireland, Latin America, the Caribbean and Iberia.
SILAS was founded in July 2003 to promote the study of relations between Ireland and Latin America. The range of interest of the Society spans the settlement, lives and achievements of Irish migrants to Latin America and their descendants, the contemporary presence of Ireland in the life and culture of Latin America and the presence of Latin Americans in Ireland.
The Society invites papers on any aspect of Irish-Latin American links from scholars and students in disciplines such as humanities and social sciences, including for example history, literature, geography, politics, economy and the arts. The aim of the conference is to promote the exchange of views and research findings on a diverse range of issues and on an inter-disciplinary basis. For further details and updates, please see the conference pages.
Abstracts in English, Portuguese or Spanish (c.300 words) should be sent by email to the conference organisers, to arrive no later than 1 November 2008. Should you wish to attend the conference without presenting a paper, please register by sending your details to the organisers by 1 April 2009.
Organising Committee
Lourdes de Ita, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo
MartÃn Pérez Acevedo, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo
Miguel �ngel Sánchez de Armas, Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla
Laura Izarra, Universidade de São Paulo
Edmundo Murray, University of Zurich
Send Paper Proposals to: mexico2009@irlandeses.org
Conference Pages: www.irlandeses.org/mexico2009.htm
“Coming home? Conflict and return migration”. Southampton, April 2009
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008Call for papers: Coming home? Conflict and return migration in
twentieth-century Europe.
1-3 April 2009, University of Southampton.
The question of return has long been thought to be central to an exilic discourse and yet relatively little is known about how return migration is actually experienced and subsequently remembered by exiles and also by migrants more widely. In order to mark the 70th anniversary of the ‘official’ end of the Spanish Civil War and the start of the Second World War, events which led to the mass displacement of refugees, this conference seeks contributions for papers on the broad theme of conflict and return migration in twentieth-century Europe. We welcome individual papers or panels in English that focus on any exile, refuge or migrant return episode that has Europe as its point of arrival or departure. We are particularly interested in addressing the experiences, memories and conceptual issues of return in relation to the following questions:
- What were the motivations for returning? How did institutions, political and social networks influence return? How was return organised?
- What strategies did migrants adopt to deal with the impossibility of return?
- How were migrants received, perceived and represented by the authorities and communities upon their return?
- To what extent were attitudes and post-return daily practices (e.g. rituals, cultural practices, language etc.) influenced by the experience of migration? In what ways, if at all, did migrants re-construct questions of home and homeland upon their return?
- How does return relate to the wider migratory process? To what extent does return signify the end of exile, diaspora, and the closure of the migration cycle?
- How has return been remembered at an individual and group level? Does this vary between different categories of migrants?
- How has return been represented in literature, art and film? What are the epistemological and ontological implications of these representations? Does an adequate representation or performance of return exist?
Keynote speakers:
- Alicia Alted Vigil, Professor of History, UNED, Madrid
- Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand, Historian and Director of the BDIC, Paris
- Franziska Meyer, Associate Professor of German Studies, University
- of Nottingham
Organised with The Exilio Network: Research into Refugees and other Migrations, which is supported by the AHRC, and Outcast Europe.
A selection of papers will be considered for publication after the conference. Please send abstracts (250 words) before 01/08/08 to:
- Dr Alicia Pozo Gutiérrez   apg@soton.ac.uk
- Dr Scott Soo ssoo@soton.ac.uk
Conference website:Â Â http://www.soton.ac.uk/ml/research/cominghome.html
Bronwen Walter, Inaugural lecture: 9 Sept, 2008
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008Professor Bronwen Walter, Professor of Irish Diaspora Studies at Anglia Ruskin University, will give her inaugural lecture on 9 September.
The lecture is entitled “Close to home: Irish/English entanglements�. Professor Walter says,
How Irish are the English? The English have had an ambivalent relationship with the Irish for centuries. Constructions of the Irish as the uncivilized and violent ‘other’, which defines the boundaries of Englishness, are well-recognised. But hybridities between the two – mixing, borrowing, overlaps, exchanges, incorporations – are often overlooked or misread. Novels may provide unexpected routes into these private worlds which are often beyond the reach of social research. In this inaugural lecture I explore some ways in which these identities constitute shared ‘diaspora spaces’, both in England and more distantly.
Professor Walter is internationally recognised for her research on Irish migration to Britain and the wider experiences of the Irish diaspora. She may be best known to Ean members for her work on the report, “Irish emigrants and Irish communities abroad: a study of existing sources of information and analysis for the Task Force on Policy Regarding Emigrants�.
The September 9 lecture will take place at 5 pm in Mumford Theatre, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.
Ireland: Arrivals and Departures. ACIS: Minnesota, October 2008.
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008Call for Papers: Midwest American Conference: Ireland: Arrivals and Departures
From the organisers:
This year’s Midwest American Conference for Irish Studies will be held at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota. The conference will open with a reception on the evening of Thursday, October 9.
The conference theme is IRELAND: ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES. We encourage attendees to think of these concepts in the broadest possible way — not merely as the migration of individuals and groups, but as of the arrival of new ideas and new critical perspectives, and concomitantly, as the departure of received wisdom. We note the arrival of new literary voices, and the arrival of new conceptions of Ireland. And we believe all papers are best conceived as a “point of departure” for further research and discussion.
This conference hopes to explore the movements of ideas, peoples, and more in Irish art, history, music, literature, cinema, and culture in Ireland from earliest times to the present. We welcome papers on any aspect of Irish studies from new or present ACIS members.
Please propose 20-minute papers in 250-300-word abstracts in .pdf or .doc format to Professor Thomas O’Connell at Thomas.OConnell@metrostate.edu by midnight on August 1, 2008 (Early submissions encouraged.). Include your name, institutional affiliation, and contact information in document, as well as in the body of your email.
Neither Here Nor There: Writing the Irish Diaspora. University of Limerick, 31 Oct – 1 Nov 2008
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008The organisers of “Neither Here Nor There: Writing the Irish Diaspora” have issued a call for papers. The text in full:
Emigration has been central to modern Irish history and society, yet the writing of emigrant experiences over the past two centuries is only beginning to be constituted as a vitally important field of enquiry within Irish Studies. This conference, specifically convened to discuss literary and cultural constructions of the Irish diaspora, marks a milestone in this process.
Plenary Speakers include:
- Prof. Marjorie Howes, Boston College
- Dr. Breda Gray, University of Limerick
- Prof. Eithne Luibhéid, University of Arizona
Conference panels will address the rich heritage of creative expressions of, and responses to, Irish emigrant lives, including those found in fiction, poetry, drama, autobiography, and memoir, as well as popular forms and visual culture. We shall also attend to the theoretical frameworks within which diaspora has to date been framed and discussed, focusing in particular on Irish diasporic theory and criticism. Some panels will develop critical and/or literary-historical discussions of Irish writers and writings of emigration and diaspora; others may concentrate on theoretical approaches and on the many other methodological questions arising in this field, where primary source material can itself be formally and/or thematically disparate.
Specific questions such as the following might be addressed:
- How has the Irish diaspora been constructed and imagined within Irish literature?
- How has it appeared in the received canonical texts of Irish literary history?
- How have homeland/diaspora relations been reflected in or shaped by this literature?
- In what ways has Irish cultural production more generally been influenced by emigrant texts and discourses?
- How has women’s writing reconfigured received ideas about the Irish emigrant experience?
- How have Irish emigration writings been gendered?
- How have textual constructions of the ‘Irish diaspora’ changed in more recent times, with growing and altering transnational and global connnections?
- Queer Migrations: how might recent work by and about LGBTQ migrants challenge traditional textual constructions of the Irish diasporic subject?
- How do concepts of migration, diaspora and the transnational move between political/social science discourses and literary/cultural texts?
Conference Organisers:
Dr. Tina O’Toole, University of Limerick
Dr. Kathryn Laing, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick
Deadline for abstracts:
30th June 2008
Abstracts should be approximately 250-300 words. Abstracts and queries to:
Yvonne O’Keeffe, Department of Languages & Cultural Studies, University of Limerick. e:yvonne.okeeffe@ul.ie
Ulster-American Heritage Symposium: Omagh, 25-28 June 2008
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008‘Changing Perspectives, 1607-2007’ will be the theme of this year’s Ulster-American Heritage Symposium, which is being held in June at the Centre for Migration Studies at the Ulster-American Folk Park. The event will explore recent research challenging habitual ways of thinking about the historical relationship between Ulster and North America over the last four hundred years. The symposium meets every two years, alternating between Ulster and North America, and takes an interdisciplinary approach, including history, language, literature, geography, anthropology, religion, folklife, archaeology and music.
The keynote speaker will be Professor David Cannadine, Director of the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London and author of Mellon: An American Life (2006).
For more information, visit the Centre for Migration Studies website.
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