Speakers

IRISH STUDIES:

GEOGRAPHIES AND GENDERS

February 23-26, 2006

Eavan Boland

Born in Dublin in 1944, Dr. Eavan Boland has published many volumes of poetry, among them An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987, The Lost Land (1998) and a 1995 memoir, Object Lessons: The Life of a Poet in Our Time. Boland is universally acknowledged as the preeminent female poet of her native Ireland. The Boston Globe notes that Boland “has long since established herself as a poet in firm command of a delicate formal music.” Reviewing In a Time of Violence (1995), Booklist said: “We can call Boland Ireland’s premier woman poet, but that does not do her justice. She is one of Ireland’s finest contemporary writers.” She has received many honors and awards, among them a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award. Currently Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, she lives in Dublin with her husband and two daughters when not in residence at Stanford.

Vona Groarke

Vona Groarke, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and University College, Cork, has worked in the U.K., the United States, and Norway. She was Writer-in-Residence at University College, Galway in 1997 and at NUI, Maynooth, in 1998. In the spring and fall of 2004, she and her husband, poet Conor O’Callaghan, co-held the Heimbold Chair in Irish Studies at Villanova University, Philadelphia, and for the academic years of 2005-2006 and 2006-2007, they are teaching at Wake Forest University.
Her first collection of poetry, Shale, was published in 1994. Her second book, Other People’s Houses, followed in 1999 and was reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement as a remarkable collection. In 2002, Flight was published in Ireland by The Gallery Press, was short-listed for the U.K.’s premier poetry award—the Forward Prize—and was awarded the Michael Hartnett Prize in Ireland in 2003. In 2004, Wake Forest University Press published Flight and Earlier Poems, and will publish her upcoming volume, Juniper Street, in 2006.

Conor O'Callaghan

Conor O'Callaghan is the recipient of numerous awards, including The Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1993, The Rooney Prize Special Award in 1996, The Times Educational Fellowship in 1997, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 1994. He has regularly participated in the Arts Council Writers-in-Schools programs, has taught creative writing courses, and in 1999-2000 was Writer-in-Residence at University College, Dublin. He is currently director of Poetry Now in Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, one of the biggest annual poetry festivals in the British Isles. In 2004, he and his wife, poet Vona Groarke, co-held the Heimbold Chair in Irish Studies at Villanova University, Philadelphia, and for the academic years of 2005-2006 and 2006-2007, they are teaching at Wake Forest University. His books include The History of Rain (1993), Seatown (1999), and Seatown and Earlier Poems (2000). A pamphlet, A History of 'Hello', was published in limited edition monograph by Phoenix Press (London) in 2003. His third collection of poems, Fiction, is forthcoming in November 2005. O'Callaghan's prose memoir of the public furor surrounding Ireland's involvement in the 2002 World Cup, Red Mist: Roy Keane and the Football Civil War, is on the bestseller lists in Ireland and the UK.  

Margot Backus

Margot Backus’s first book The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order won the coveted ACIS Donald Murphy Prize for a Distinguished First Book and has already become a standard in Irish Studies criticism everywhere. Backus, Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston, has also contributed heavily to feminist, gender theory and Irish Studies scholarship in the form of articles and essays and has several more works in progress. Her plenary session “‘We Can Have Her Put Away’”: Magdalene Laundries, Transnational Trauma Culture and the Interrelationship of Irish and Northern Irish Feminisms” will explore the relationship of public and private trauma in both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. She will discuss the ways in which Irish feminist responses to the invisibility of gendered, domestic trauma on either side of the border, and in the United States, have increased the visibility of these conventionally “private” experiences, creating new discursive spaces and new public discourses.