Staff and Postgraduate Events

Both the staff and the graduate students of the Department of English are committed to sharing and furthering their research through activities such as conferences, symposia and workshops.  Staff regularly organise conferences which reflect their ongoing research interests, and the Department's graduate students are also active in organising events, including the Annual Bookends Postgraduate Conference.

Call for Papers: Byron and Ink

51st International Association of Byron Societies Conference

University College Cork

5th-8th July 2027

But words are things, and a small drop of ink

Falling like dew upon a thought produces

That which makes thousands—perhaps millions think;

’Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses

Instead of speech may form a lasting link

Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces

Frail man, when paper—even a rag like this—

Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.

(Don Juan, Canto 3, Stanza 88.)

Byron’s meditations on ink were not always so philosophical. In Beppo he writes with disdain of the author who is ‘all Author; fellows / In foolscap Uniforms turned up with Ink’ (593-4). The Alexander Pope inspired satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers describes ‘inky streams’ flowing down streets strewn with ‘milk-white reams’ (484-5). As a bestselling poet, Byron’s career was made and shaped by a vibrant literary marketplace. Byron and Ink invites papers that explore the poet’s place in and attitude towards print culture.

We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers and for panels on topics including, but not limited to:

· Byron and the publishing trade, copyright, piracy

· Byron and the economics of authorship

· Representations of writing and authorship in Byron’s poetry

· Byron’s satirical portrayals of the literary marketplace

· Byron’s manuscripts, proofs, corrections

· Reviews, periodicals, visual print culture

· Byron’s correspondence and journals

· Editing Byron

· The materiality of Byron’s work

· Depictions of Byron as a writer

Keynote speakers:

Professor Caroline Franklin, University of Swansea

Professor Jonathan Gross, DePaul University

Dr Christine Kenyon-Jones, King’s College London

Submissions: Please send an abstract of 250-300 words and a short biography (100 words) to byronandink@gmail.com by 19th February 2027. Queries about the conference should be sent to mary.oconnell@ucc.ie Panel proposals are also invited, and these should include the theme of the panel, abstracts for each paper and short biographies for each speaker. We warmly invite and encourage submissions from early-career researchers, doctoral students, and independent scholars.

Organising Committee:

Dr Madeleine Callaghan

Dr Peter Francev

Dr Mary O'Connell

Dr Emily Paterson-Morgan

Dr Maria Schoina

Dr Edel Semple

Professor Jane Stabler

Research Seminar series

The department’s research seminars offer an opportunity for our postgraduate students to explore and investigate state-of-the-art international scholarship.

2026-27 Research seminar programme

2025-26 Research seminar programme

1 October 2025

Breandán MacSuibhne, University of Galway

“ ‘What has happened to this house?: Brian Friel and His Mother’s People, c. 1690–1960”

15 October

Heather Laird, University College Cork

“ ‘Leave as little trace as possible’: Ethical Non-Consumption in Cathy Sweeney’s Breakdown and Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples”

29 October

Jane Degenhardt and Henry S. Turner, University of Massachusetts at Amherst/ Rutgers University

“Shakespeare’s Dark Cosmologies”

12 November

Alan Gibbs, University College Cork

“Exonerative Determinism and the Beset White Male: Naturalism in the Novels of Paul Auster”

26 November

Zachary Leader, University of London Roehampton

“The Biographer’s Wife: Mary Ellmann and James Joyce”

21 January 2026

Morgan Ndlovu,  University of Johannesburg

“Decolonising Knowledge: a reflection from the Africa Decolonial Research Network in South Africa”

4 February

Adam Hanna, University College Cork

“ ‘Shaped by the Pressure...of What Has Been Withheld’: Seamus Heaney’s North Notebooks and Manuscript Drafts”

18 February

 Francesca Brooks, University College Cork

“’Caedmon on the shell tip’: Reading Old English Poetry with Lynette Roberts in Wales”

4 March

Patricia Coughlan, University College Cork

“Eibhear Walshe, Cissie's Abattoir, and Dissident Autobiography”

1 April

Bahriye Kemal, University College Cork

“Ji kerema xwe, RojAva ( Kobanî ) ji bîra neke | رجاء لا تنسي روج آفا (كوباني )| Please Don’t Forget Rojava (Kobani): Women Writing Syria against Displacement, War and Genocide”

15 April

Elizabeth Hale, University of New England, Australia

“ ‘Our Mythical Childhood’: Uses of Classical Antiquity in Children’s Literature”

Bookends

Bookends is a postgraduate conference created and developed by the students of the  Department of English of UCC in 2005.

This event gives all postgraduates (MA, MPhil, PhD (Track), PhD) in English the opportunity to present a short paper based on their own research.

It is a testament to the vitality and richness of our students’ research appetites and competence.

2026 conference, 1 May 2026

PANEL ONE ADAPTATIONS AND NARRATOLOGY: RETHINKING RETELLINGS

Chair: Gabrielle Dufrene

Anna Gotsch – Encountering Medieval Works in the Comics Medium

Elise Fashimpaur – The Ideal Dystopia: Using Philosophy for Societal Structuring in Speculative Fiction

Kevin Fylan – Moralised, Sanitised, Canonised: The Taming of the Norse Gods in Victorian Retellings

Siria Manini – Edward Cullen, Hardin Scott, Rhysand: The Contemporary Byronic Hero as a Popular Existentialist Figure

Cethan Leahy – “Name’s Burton, Arthur Burton”: The Fictional Lives of Sidney Reilly

PLENARY ONE

Ailish Brassil  - Domestic Fictions of Monstrous Maternal Relations in Rebecca (1938), We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1959), Carrie (1974), and Sharp Objects (2006)

PANEL TWO MARGINALISED SPACES AND TEMPORAL REALITIES

Chair: Hanke Kelber

Laura Mulcahy – “No one who dies in Derry ever really dies”: Hauntology and Cycles of Othering in It: Welcome to Derry

Rosemary Kelly – The Old English "Mere" as a Site of Gendered Folk Horror in Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre and Danielle Giles’s Mere

Jessica White – Economies of Intimacy in Maria Edgeworth’s Juvenile Fiction

Charlotte Troy – “You're not leaving me here! I'M NOT STAYIN' ON THIS FARM!”: Femininity and Fearsome Farmlands in Pearl (2022)

EARLY CAREER RESEARCHER ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION, led by UCC lecturers

PANEL THREE ANTHROPOGENESIS: HUMAN AND NONHUMAN BINARIES IN STATES OF CHANGE

Chair: Laura Mulcahy

Hanke Kelber – Nonhuman Agency and the Entanglements of the Anthropocene in the Post- Apocalyptic Tradition

Adrian Scanlan – Using Narrative as a Tool to Communicate Climate Change: A New Framework

Donatas Rondomanskas – Galaxia — an Uneasy Compromise between Collective Harmony and Individual Freedom in Issac Asimov's Foundation's Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986)

Eleanor Lynch – The Human/Animal Boundary in the Sagas of the Icelanders

PLENARY TWO

Hope Noonan Stoner -

“Electric Currents of Life”: The Power of Redefinition in the Poetry of Lola Ridge and Julia de Burgos

2025 conference, 2 May 2025

Organisers:  Ailish Brassil, Gabrielle Dufrene, Laura Mulcahy, Hope Noonan-Stoner and Charlotte Troy

Panel One: Challenging Confinement and Marginality

Chair: Gabrielle Dufrene

Ailish Brassil: Alternate depictions of Motherhood particularly in the novel and film, Matilda (1988) and (1998).

Charlotte Troy: “It’s good luck, or anyway it’s supposed to be” Sowing Satan’s Seed in Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin.

Laura Mulcahy: “Derry is It”: The Intersection of Monstrosity and the Atrocities of American History in Stephen King’s It.

Hope Noonan Stoner: “Here and there a woman...”: Redefining “We the People” from the Margins in Lola Ridge’s and Julia de Burgos’s Modernist Writing.

Plenary One, Chaired by Charlotte Troy

Beth Aherne: Queering the Family in Science Fiction: An Overview of my Thesis.

Panel Two: Trauma and the Body

Chair: Laura Mulcahy

Gabrielle Dufrene: Beyond Brevity: Small Things Like These and the Novella as Trauma Narrative

Luca Cavallo: “Two Time-worn Notes”: Postcolonial Memory in the Poetry of Ciaran Carson

Cathie Cowhig: Dying for Love: Death, Desire, and Necrophilic Devotion in The Book of Margery Kempe.

Chiara Valcelli: Digesting Dante: Cannibalism, Appetite, and the Esophagus in Joyce’s

Ulysses.

Panel Three: Creating and Critiquing Masculinity

Chair: Ailish Brassil

Rosemary Kelly: How Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Repurposes the Narratives Structures of Old Norse-Icelandic Sagas.

Tess O’Regan: Saddle for his cradle’: A gendered sign of extinction in Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing.

Kevin Fylan: From God of Mischief to God of Stories: how Marvel put Loki at the heart of a new creation myth.

Textualities Annual Conference

2026 programme

Panel 1: Binaries, Bodies, Bodies, Binaries

Francis Wierzbicka - Beyond the Veil of Flesh: Contemporary Reclamations of Body Horror

Marie Moore - Life’s a Drag: Queerness and Multiplicity of Identity in Orlando

Sally Roche - “The Wife’s Lament” and “Aldarion and Erendis: The Mariner’s Wife”: Gender and Nature

Jessie Carroll - Great Circulations: Expansions of the Vampire

Panel 2: Hidden Narratives

Adrian Scanlan - “What’s the Story, Really?” Searching for a Definition of Narrative

Emma Raaijmakers - Mobilising Literature: How We Move Words and Words Move Us

Sophie French - Playthrough of the End of the World: The Anthropocene and Reaction to Extinction in the video game “The Last of Us”.

Panel 3: Beyond Thresholds

Agata Azul Pinana - For Delayed Birth: Christian and Pagan Traditions in an Old English Metrical Charm

Ben O’Connor - Uncanny Intersexuality in Ring

Luke O’Sullivan - “This Is Not for You.” Hostility and Unheimlich in the House

Venus O’Brien O’Driscoll - Do You Want the [Haunted] House Tour: Psychoanalysis and the Female-Authored Haunted House

Panel 4: Transgressive Heroes?

Whitney Ramsaran - Monstrous Identity in Sir Gowther
Megan Ferreira Fitzgerald - Satan, Death, and Sin: A Satire of the

Holy Trinity in Paradise Lost

Siria Manini - A Theoretical Framework for Contemporary Byronic Heroes: Heathcliff

2025 programme

Panel 1: Narrating Nature

Tess O’Regan - 'Saddle For His Cradle': A Gendered Sign of Extinction in Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing
Oscar Hickey - Mearc Stepper: Monstrous or Heroic?

Isabella Heredia Campos Bastos - Folklore and the Land

Panel 2: Political Liminalities

Luca Cavallo - “This Dilapidated Present”: Temporality in the Poetry of Ciaran Carson And Medbh Mcguckian
Marlee Bossert - Elizabethan National Identity and Travel Writings

Junshan Long - Disadvantaged Ones in The Grass Is Singing in a Post Colonial Context

Panel 3: Mediated Bodies

Jack Conroy - Let The Canvas Sing
Chiara De Santis - An Introduction to Feminist Disability Theory
Juice Walsh- Hybrid Humans: Modern and Old

Julian Di Prima - Work In Progress: How To Build A Gendered Body

Panel 4: Adapting and Surviving

Alice Simon Forns - Precarious Violence in Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend (2018, HBO)

Ella Shiel - Gender and Femininity in Shakespeare Adaptations and Romcoms

Dante Michaela Kunc - Dandyism as a Form of Survival in AMC’s Interview With The Vampire

Ciarán Grimes - Game of Thrones and the Inevitable Inescapability of Themes

Panel 5: Writing Women

Xueyu Wu - Virginia Woolf’s Feminism

Jessica White - Object Economics in Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Waste Not, Want Not’

Rosemarie O’Byrne - Gender, Power, and Sexual Politics in the Works of Virginia Woolf
Evelyn George - Eldest Daughter Syndrome in Howl's Moving Castle

Uses of Romanticism

School of English and Digital Humanities | Future Humanities Institute

18-19 February 2026

Daniel Macdonald (1820-1853), Sídhe Gaoithe/The Fairy Blast (1842). Courtesy of the National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin

As a convenient way to organise knowledge — to describe a historical period, to address questions of cultural style, to open up comparative debates —  romanticism remains a useful term. But what does it mean to think about romanticism as useful? What kinds of knowledge, in which languages and from what places, does the term collect and organise? 

What work does romanticism do in the present and can its critical utility outlast our growing understanding of its alliance with historical injustices? The symposium will consider the relevance of romanticism for a discussion of literature created in a range of British, Irish and imperial locations and consider the extent to which use itself is a concept that is imprinted by colonialism.

Among the topics to be discussed will be:

• Geographies of romanticism
• Comparative romanticisms
• Romanticism across media
• Decolonising romanticism: colonial and imperial histories
• Use, usefulness and utility as critical categories
• The present uses of literary history
• Romanticism and its relation to political activism: sedative or spur?

Contributions from: Prof Mary-Ann Constantine (University of Wales Trinity St David), Dr Elisa Cozzi (University of Notre Dame), Prof Porscha Fermanis (University College Dublin), Prof Penny Fielding  (University of Edinburgh), Prof Nigel Leask (Glasgow University), Prof Omar Miranda (University of San Francisco), Dr Jane Moore (Cardiff University), Prof Tina Morin (University of Limerick), Prof Tríona Ní Shíocháin (University of Galway), Dr Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh (University of Edinburgh), Prof Diego Saglia (Università degli studi di Parma), Dr Brandon Yen (Independent Scholar).  

Responses from:  James Chandler (University of Chicago), Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Pádraig Ó Macháin, Mary O’Connell (UCC).

Reading:  By acclaimed poet and critic Maureen McLane

Conference Information:

Programme:                    Event Description and Programme - Uses of Romanticism               

Abstracts and Bios:          Uses of Romanticism. Abstracts and Bios.