News from Dr. Jessica Martell:
The theme of the 2018 American Conference on Irish Studies was “Environments of Irish Studies” at University College Cork, Ireland, which spotlighted our shared interests in Irish literature, the environment, and sustainability. I chaired our panel, “The Ecosystems of James Joyce’s Ulysses: Machinery, Adultery, Identity,” which provided several ways of reading Joyce’s modernist classic using the tools of ecocritical literary study. Suarez’s paper, "Memes, Machines, and Multiplicity: Linguistic Ecosystems inUlysses,” analyzed the ecosystems of language created by the early twentieth-century printing press, which she presented as analogous to today’s viral meme culture. In “The Ecosystems of Adultery and Hospitality in Ulysses,” Hunter’s original reading of Molly Bloom positioned adultery as an alternative economy of hospitality, an arrangement that permits an ecosystem of new relations that challenged the era's repressive social norms.
These papers began as seminar papers at ASU in 2017. Over the past year, both students performed significant revisions in order to polish and deliver their work to an international scholarly audience. Because both students will write and defend M.A. theses featuring Irish literature and/or ecocriticism in AY 2018-2019, the trip to Cork was a chance to receive feedback from the global Irish Studies community and generate new ideas before the thesis itself begins to take shape."
In addition to our panel, the attached photos include our trip to the James Joyce Centre in Dublin as well as our Leopold Bloom-inspired lunch at Davy Byrne's pub.
ACIS 2018 Conference thumb1
ACIS 2018 Conference thumb1