Speakers

Anne Fogarty is Professor Emerita of James Joyce Studies at University College Dublin. She was Associate Director of the Yeats International Summer School 1995-7 and Director of the Dublin James Joyce Summer School 2017-2023. She was editor of the Irish University Review 2002-2009 and co-editor with Luca Crispi of the Dublin James Joyce Journal 2008-2023. Currently, she is editor for the Irish Writers series for Bucknell University Press. She has co-edited several collections of essays on Joyce and recently co-edited  with Marisol Morales-Ladrón, Deirdre Madden: New Critical Perspectives (2022) and with Tina O’Toole, Reading Gender and Space (2023). She has published widely on aspects of twentieth- and twenty-first century Irish writing, especially on the Revival period and on women authors. Her new edition of Dubliners is forthcoming from Penguin in 2024 and a collection co-edited with Eugene O’Brien, The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Irish Writing is forthcoming in 2025.

Hedwig Schwall is emerita professor with formal duties at the University of Leuven. She publishes on Irish literature, psychoanalysis and art. Recently she edited The Danger and the Glory (Arlen House 2019), an anthology of 60 contributions from Irish fiction writers about the art of writing (also available at https://kaleidoscope.efacis.eu/); its second instalment was About Europe in Ireland | Kaleidoscope II (efacis.eu). She was director of the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies from its foundation (2010) till 2021. She has been on the advisory board of several major journals in Irish literature and has published mainly on Irish fiction but also on poetry and drama in the 20-21^st centuries. She is also series editor of Irish Studies in Europe. After having led three international translation projects she is now preparing a book on parent-child relations in contemporary Irish fiction. She runs the EFACIS Book club and is co-organizer of the international EFACIS PhD seminar. Being a believer in interdisciplinarity she teaches a course on “Art in Europe: a History of Emotions” in which literature, psychoanalysis and art history are combined.

Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of four novels, most recently These Days, which won the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, several stage plays and radio dramas, three collections of short stories, Multitudes, Intimacies, and most recently Openings (Faber, May 2024) and is the editor of Being Various, the latest volume in the ongoing Faber series of New Irish Short Stories. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright, and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In 2021 she won the BBC National Short Story Award for “All the People Were Mean and Bad” and in 2022 she was the recipient of the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. The Sunday Times has proclaimed her “One of Ireland’s most essential writers”, whilst the Irish Independent said of Intimacies: “There is a stunning, original talent at work here: a sharp political mind, a precise observational eye, and an extraordinary capacity for empathy”. Her website is www.lucycaldwell.com and she tweets @beingvarious 

Denis Rafter is actor, theatre director, writer, master of actors and a distinguished personality in the world of theatre. A founder member of the Spanish Academy of Scenic Arts, he was Delegate of the speciality of directors for many years. He trained as an actor at the Abbey Theatre, the National Theatre of Ireland, and at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London from which he holds a Teacher’s Licentiate in Speech and Drama. He also holds a Doctorate in Philosophy and Letters (in “Theory, History and Practice of Theatre”) from the University of Alcalá, where he was awarded the Premio Extraordinario for his doctoral thesis entitled, Hamlet y el Actor.

He has written and performed a number of his own one-man shows on Oscar Wilde, William Shakespeare and Cervantes. Recently he enjoyed great success with a new solo show on the life and works of Elio Antonio de Nebrija, the renowned 15^th century Spanish humanist and founding father of the Spanish language. He has published books of short stories for children and regularly performs his own works for young audiences. His most recent book is El secreto del Rey Lowry Lynch, which is based on an old Irish legend. He has given lectures, workshops and master classes on acting and directing throughout Spain and overseas: he is currently performing his monologue, Actor Busca Trabajo, a play in Spanish based on his own life and experience in theatre. The Irish Govt. appointed him Commissioner General for Ireland during Seville Expo 92, after which he was nominated for the European of the Year Award.

Guest musician:

Nora Moroney’s research spans nineteenth-century Irish writing, periodical studies and Irish book history. She was the 2022-23 Munby Fellow in Bibliography and Book History at the University of Cambridge, and has previously held postdoctoral positions at Trinity College Dublin, Marsh’s Library and the National Library of Ireland. Her work has appeared in Irish University Review, Victorian Periodicals Review, English Studies and Éire-Ireland. She is currently completing a monograph on Irish writers in the Victorian periodical press.