EFACIS PhD Seminar in Irish Studies, September 2012

I attended the EFACIS (European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies) PhD Seminar in Irish Studies which took place in the Belgian city of Louvain or Leuven, between 3-7 September 2012.
The links between Leuven and Ireland go back over four hundred years. Those links are being developed further as the historic Irish College in Leuven is now home to The Leuven Institute for Ireland in Europe, which plays host to many different groups from the island of Ireland around the common area of Ireland in Europe.

23 PhD students from universities all over Europe came to talk about their research in many different fields of Irish Studies. We were allowed 20 minutes to make a short presentation about our work. This was a great opportunity for me to think about what's important about my research and answer questions from others working in similar areas. We also attended plenary lectures by academics working in Irish Studies and workshops on themes such as narratology, historiography and publishing.

I want to thank EFACIS for providing a scholarship that paid the registration and accommodation fees and also the UCC College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences Graduate School, who paid my travel costs to Leuven.

ADEFFI 2012 Annual Conference

The annual ADEFFI (Association des Études Françaises et Francophones d'Irlande) conference took place in Galway City from 19-21 October 2012. The theme of the conference was deceleration / décélération and speakers from all over Ireland, as well as Europe and North America contributed to a very successful couple of days. The plenary speech was delivered by the award winning French born author Phillipe Djian.

As the Postgraduate representative of the organisation, I was asked to chair one of the sessions during the conference. This was the first time I chaired a session at a an academic conference and really enjoyed it.

Conference poster below, conference programme here

The Flâneur Abroad International Conference, July 2012

I presented a paper at The Flâneur Abroad conference which took place on 6 & 7 July 2012, in The University of Nottingham, England. Speakers came from many European countries including the UK, Spain, Belgium, France, Germany, as well as the USA and Canada. The flâneur is often associated with the French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire and the German writer Walter Benjamin. They are also associated with, almost exclusively with large, modern, cosmopolitan cities such as Paris or London.

My paper was based on Henri Béraud's visit to Ireland in 1920. Henri Béraud (1885-1958) was a French journalist who coined the term flâneur salarié, or paid flâneur, to describe his job of being paid to wander the streets in search of a news story. Béraud is an interesting character, who was very well known and well thought of in France, during the 1920s and 1930s for his lively reportage from around the world, but fell out of favour when he was writing anti British articles during the Second World War. He was sentenced to death (for the crime of intelligence avec l'ennemi / contact with the enemy) when France was liberated, but this sentence was subsequently commuted to life in prison by General de Gaulle.

Here is a report on the conference: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/art-history/documents/ucn-flaneur-report.pdf

I would like to thank the conference organiser, Prof Richard Wrigley, for providing assistance with my travel and accommodation costs for this conference.