Keynote Speakers

Professor Rióna Ní Fhrighil

Keynote Title: Writing Wrongs: Human Rights and Modern Poetry in Irish

Professor Rióna Ní Fhrighil lectures in Modern Irish at NUI Galway and is Principal Investigator of the research project Republic of Conscience: Human Rights and Modern Irish Poetry, funded by the Irish Research Council.  She has published extensively on twentieth-century Irish poetry and literary translation, and is the author of Briathra, Béithe agus Banfhilí (2008), a monograph on the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eavan Boland. Rióna was the principal Irish-language researcher on the AHRC-funded project The Representation of Jews in Irish Literature (2014-2016). She is co-director of the interdisciplinary project Aistriú: crossing territories, languages, and artforms, which formed part of the European Capital of Culture 2020 programme.

Professor Patricia Palmer

Keynote Title: We Need to Think About Early Modern Ireland.

Patricia Palmer is Professor of Renaissance Literature in Maynooth University and Principal Investigator of the MACMORRIS Project. She works on cultures in contact, principally in early modern Ireland – on the conflictual exchange between English colonists and the Gaelic world; linguistic colonisation; the aesthetics of violence; and the politics of translation. She is the author of Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabeth Imperial Expansion (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Translating Violence in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2014). There is a strong comparative element to her work: she has written on translations of Ariosto, Ercilla, and Virgil, and on bardic poetry. She has published with English Literary Renaissance, Translation Studies, Renaissance Quarterly, Irish Historical Studies, and Literature Compass and in various edited collections, on subjects as diverse as the body in pain, subalterns in the historical record, occluded interpreters, the Flight of the Earls, writing from exile, Edmund Spenser in Ireland, Richard Stanihurst and translation, and colonial rhetoric. Her current book project studies the polyphonic and intersecting literary cultures of early modern Ireland, Darkness Echoing, or Did Ireland Have a Renaissance?

Professor Fiona McCann

Keynote Title: Forms of Care in Irish Literature 2012-2022: Shifting Agencies and Decolonial Poetics.

Fiona McCann is Professor of Postcolonial Literatures and current Director of the interdisciplinary research unit CECILLE at the Université de Lille. Her research interests include 20th and 21st century South African, Zimbabwean and Irish literatures on which she has published over 30 articles and book chapters, notably on the aesthetics of violence and on representations of carceral institutions. She is the author of A Poetics of Dissensus: Confronting Violence in Contemporary Prose Writing from the North of Ireland (Peter Lang, 2014) and the editor of the collective work The Carceral Network in Ireland: History, Agency and Resistance (Palgrave, 2020). Her more recent research focuses on the aesthetics of care in contemporary Irish literature and on decolonial pedagogies and she is working on two book projects, one on each of these questions.

Dr Zélie Asava

Keynote Title: Multiraciality, Intersectionality and Homophily in Irish Screen Narratives.

Dr Zélie Asava is the author of Mixed Race Cinemas: Multiracial Dynamics in America and France (Bloomsbury, 2017) and The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television (Peter Lang, 2013). Her research attends to the intersections of race, gender and sexuality in Irish, French, Senegalese, Burkinabé and US screen media. She is the co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Scandinavian Cinema on race and ethnicity (2022), and a contributor to several edited collections, including Austerity and Irish Women’s Writing, 1980-2020 (Routledge, 2022) and Innovations in Black European Studies (Peter Lang, 2022). Zélie has taught extensively at University College Dublin and Dundalk Institute of Technology (where she was Programme Director of the degrees in Film Production and Creative Multimedia), and at Dún Laoghaire’s Institute of Art, Design and Technology. She sits on the Boards of Screen Ireland, the Irish Film Institute, the Catalyst International Film Festival and the digital journal Unapologetic.