National Library of Ireland - Blog Post on French journalist Simone Téry (1897-1967)

I was recently invited to contribute a blog post about my research on the official blog of the National Library of Ireland (NLI). I wrote about how invaluable primary source material held in the NLI helped me in my research. 

 
The subject of my post was a most unique individual named Simone Téry (1897-1967). She was a French journalist who worked for the newspaper L'Oeuvre and visited Ireland many times during the 1920s. At an important time in modern Irish history, she interviewed key people in the political and artistic spheres and her lengthy descriptive articles appeared on L'Oeuvre's front page.

Click here to view the blog post on the NLI's Official Blog.

 

Photograph of Simone Téry. Image source.

AFIS, Association of Franco Irish Studies, 2012 Annual Conference

I attended the 2012 AFIS, Annual Conference of the Association of Franco Irish Studies, which took place in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick on the 25th & 26th of May 2012.

Photo of King John's Castle on the River Shannon in Limerick.

The conference theme was France and Ireland in the Public Imagination. Speakers from universities in Ireland, Italy, Poland, Macedonia, the United Kingdom and France presented papers on various aspects of how Ireland is and was presented in the French public imagination and vice versa. These included the media, literature, food & drink, politics, music and poetry.

I presented a paper on French newspaper cartoons that I came across while researching articles written by French journalists who visited Ireland during the 20th century. The cartoons, which cast a wry look on how Ireland was being treated by Britain during the early 1920s, are unbelievable in their honesty. I'm sure I'll be talking about them again here sometime soon.

Here's the conference website: http://afislimerick2012.com/

Franco-Irish Literary Festival 2012

The Franco-Irish Literary Festival (which usually takes place in Dublin in April each year) is a great occasion where French and Irish writers, poets and similarly creative people, get together to discuss how they incorporate a particular theme into their work. The theme changes every year. In 2012  the theme was pleasure / plaisir / pléisiúir.

 

I attended some of the panel discussions and enjoyed hearing how writers differed in their responses to the questions from the audience as regards their motivation to write. It's always refreshing to hear someone speak their mind and not just follow along with the consensus, because they think they have to.

 

 

Photo of the gardens at Dublin Castle in Dublin city centre, where the festival usually takes place. The Chester Beatty Library is to the left of this photo (out of shot). A lovely calm atmosphere pervades this art museum and library, which houses amazing examples of Islamic and Western art collected by the mining magnate Alfred Chester Beatty. Entry is free and it's well worth a visit if you are in Dublin.

This is the 2012 festival website: http://francoirishliteraryfestival.com/2012/