Conference Schedule

NEACIS Conference Schedule
Friday, November 21st
2pm-ongoing
Registration, Watson Haas Concourse
3:00-4.15pm
Session I Panels
Meneely 102, Renegotiating Tradition
Chair: Margo Shea
Joel Relihan, Wheaton College, “Flann O'Brien and the History of Menippean Satire”
June-Ann Greeley, Sacred Heart University, “The Tradition of St. Brendan the Navigator and
His Angels”
Megan Crotty, Boston College “Swift’s pamphlets: Remix and renegotiation in colonial Ireland”
Meneely 105, Redefining Irishness
Chair: Jim Byrne
Beth O’Leary Anish, Community College of Rhode Island, “Alienated from Irishness by Time
and Distance: Third Generation Irish Americans in Post-World War II Fiction”
Maureen Reddy, Rhode Island College, “Redefining Irishness in the hardboiled”
Edward Hagan, Western Connecticut State University, “Re-Imagining Ireland (and America) in
Roddy Doyle’s The Guts and Colum McCann’s Transatlantic”
Meneely 201, Gender Performance and Irish Identity
Chair: Rachel Lynch
Daniel M. Shea, Mount Saint Mary College, “The Widow’s Laugh: The Widowhood and Female
Agency in Mary Lavin’s Fiction”
Sheila McAvey, Becker College, “Uncertain Masculinity in Dorothy Macardle’s The Uninvited
and Maeve Brennan’s Marriage Stories”
Camilla Dacey-Groth, CUNY Bronx Community College, “Gender as Masquerade: Neil
Jordan's The Crying Game and Queer Feminist Theory”
4.15pm
Coffee Break, Meneely Lobby, First Floor
4.30-5.45pm
Session II Panels
Meneely 102, Easter 1916: History, Myth, Legacy (Roundtable Discussion)
Chair: J J Lee
This panel discussion will address the historical legacy of the 1916 Rising in light of the current
debate surrounding its role in securing Irish independence and its upcoming centenary
commemoration.
Participants: John Roney, Sacred Heart University; Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Massachusetts
Maritime Academy; Irene Whelan, Manhattanville College; J J Lee, Glucksman Ireland House,
NYU.
Meneely 105, Joyce and the Irish Self
Chair: Thomas O’Grady
Sean Clifford, Boston College, “Gabriel Conroy’s Mental Stroll: The Connection Between the
Flaneur, Irish Nationalism, the Celtic Revival and Sexual Failure in ‘The Dead’”
Ellen Scheible, Bridgewater State University, “Gretta and Mirrors in ‘The Dead’”
Storm Pillof, University of North Carolina Wilmington, “Alienation, Resistance, and Disability:
Cripping ‘Nausicaa’ in James Joyce’s Ulysses”
Meneely 201, Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Contexts and Afterlives
Sponsored by The Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Legend Area of the Northeast Popular
Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA)
Chair Michael A. Torregrossa
Nicole Salomone, Independent Scholar, “Using Dracula to Explore 19th-Century Reactions to
Medical Theories from the Preceding Century”
Marijana Stojkovic, East Tennessee State University, “My Revenge is Just Begun—The
Evolution of Superstition and Science from Stoker’s Dracula to NBC’s Primetime
Series Dracula”
Kirstin Bidoshi, Union College, “Re-fashioning Dracula: Psychic Vampires in Postwar American
Culture”
Michael A. Torregrossa, Independent Scholar, “A Transylvanian Count in Camelot?
Investigating the Draculas of the Modern Matter of Britain”
6:00pm
Reception, Emerson Faculty Dining Room.
Sponsored by the Consulate General of Ireland, Boston.
6.30pm
Dinner, Emerson Faculty Dining Room
7.30pm
“An Evening with Seán O Sé”, Mary Lyon Hall
In this special event famed Cork singer Seán Ó Sé will give a concert performance of Irish songs
and stories. The evening will begin with a 30 minute screening of a new documentary film on his
life and career, “Seán Ó Sé: A Life in Song and Story / Saol Caite le hAmhráin agus Scéalta.”
Seán Ó Sé was enlisted in 1962 by composer Seán Ó Riada for the group Ceoltóirí Chualann, a
visionary project which catapulted Irish traditional music onto the concert stage and into the
international arena. Seán's recordings of Do Bhi Bean Uasal (Carrickfergus) and Mna na
hEireann (Women of Ireland) are some of the most loved and listened to recordings of that era.
Following the work with Ó Riada in the 1960s for which he is best known, Seán has continued to
sing and entertain across Ireland and the UK, while simultaneously pursuing his career as a
teacher. In recent years he has toured the Americas, Asia, and Europe with Comhaltas Ceoltóirí
Éireann.
Seán will be accompanied by Wheaton Professor of Music and guitarist Matthew Allen.
Seán Ó Sé's residency and concert at Wheaton College have been made possible by the Evelyn
Danzig Haas '39 Visiting Artists Program.
Saturday, November 22nd
8.30am-ongoing
Registration, Watson Haas Concourse
8.30-9:00am
Breakfast, Watson Haas Concourse
9:00-10.15am
Session III Panels
Meneely 102, Women of Color and Colorful Women in Ireland and Beyond
Chair Tom Shea
Rachael Sealy Lynch, University of Connecticut, “Irish Heterosexuals Abroad: Stunted Psyches
and Failure to Thrive in Brooklyn, ‘The Greek Trip’ and ‘Villa Marta.’”
Tara Harney Mahajan, University of Connecticut, “Queering Inheritance and Family in Edna
O’Brien and Shashi Deshpande”
E. Moore Quinn, College of Charleston, “‘That he may never thrive . . . but rot away alive’: The
Widow's Voice in Ireland”
Meneely 105, “Not Long After the War”
Chair: Ellen Scheible
Thomas O’Grady, University of Massachusetts Boston, “Fear Itself: Patrick MacGill, Gabriel
Chevallier, and the Great War”
Matthew Brown, University of Massachusetts Boston, “Treason Plots: Barry, Bowen, and the
War at Home”
Shaun O’Connell, University of Massachusetts Boston, “Lost Erin in Alice McDermott’s
Someone”
Meneely 207, Irish Poets Below the Radar: Three O’Shaughnessy Honorees Panel
Chair: James Silas Rogers
Erin C. Mitchell, State University of New York, Plattsburgh, “Ambivalence about Home:
Leontia Flynn’s Belfast”
Kelly Matthews, Framingham State University, “‘I say this calmly’: Personal and Political
Resistance in the Poetry of Theo Dorgan”
James Silas Rogers, University of St. Thomas, “Kerry Hardie’s Skies”
10.15am
Coffee Break, Meneely Lobby, First Floor
10.30-11.45am
Session IV Panels
Meneely 102, Figures of Resistance and Redemption
Chair: Mary Burke
Tom Shea, University of Connecticut, “The Great Blasket’s Tomás O’Crohan as Storyteller and
Singer”
John Roney, Sacred Heart University, “Between Famine and Parnell: Isaac Butt’s Forgotten
Arguments for Irish Land”
Patrick J. Mahoney, Sacred Heart University, “Reversing his conditions of exile: The repatriation
and redemption of John O’Mahony”
Meneely 105, NEACIS Poets Read Their Poems
Daniel Tobin, Emerson College
Christine Casson, Emerson College
Aidan Rooney, Thayer Academy
Thomas O’Grady, University of Massachusetts Boston
Meneely 207, Sites of Resistance
Chair: Maureen Reddy
Geraldine Rossiter, Union Institute and University, and Natania Friesen, University of British
Columbia, “‘Unhomely’ Homes: Domestic spaces as sites of resistance in The Last September
and Pillars of Salt”
Charles Kell, University of Rhode Island “‘You could see through without seeing’: Sites of
Resistance in Private/Public Selves in Medbh McGuckian’s Marconi’s Cottage and Drawing
Ballerinas and Paul Muldoon’s The Annals of Chile”
Brendan Flanagan, Boston College, “From Kate O’Brien to Colm Tóibín: Bursting the Irish
Family Cell”
Meneely 209, Resistance and Writing in the Borderlands
Chair: Beth O’Leary Anish
Maureen Fadem, City University of New York, Kingsborough, “The Spectral Borderlands of
Northern Irish Literature”
Margo Shea, Salem State University, Rethinking Civil Rights in Derry: Memory as Resistance in
the Partitioned North 1922-1969
Elizabeth Chase, Stonehill College, “A new commemoration of resistance: writing and
remembering in Northern Ireland”
12.00-12.45pm
Lunch, Emerson Faculty Dining Room
12.30-12.45pm
NEACIS Business Meeting,
1-2pm
Plenary Lecture, Watson 102
Cormac O’Malley, Visiting Scholar, Glucksman Ireland House, NYU, and Research Associate,
TCD Center for Contemporary History.
"Ernie O'Malley (1897-1957): Republican - A life spent fighting against the Pale."
2.15-3.30pm
Session V
Meneely 102, The bilocations of Irish theatre
Chair: Matthew Brown
Mary Burke, University of Connecticut, “The Riot of Spring: Synge, Stravinsky, and the Stages
of Dublin and Paris”
Christina Wilson, University of Connecticut, “Querying the Wests: Sam Shepard and Irish
Theatre”
John Matthew Barlow, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, “Performing Ireland in
Griffintown, Montreal: The Plays of James L. Martin and the St. Ann's Young Men’s Society,
1898-1914.”
Meneely 105, Challenging the constructs of Irish nationality and identity
Chair: John Roney
Patricia Fanning, Bridgewater State University, “‘A Roadside Harp’: Ireland and the Irish
Identity in the Writings of Louise Imogen Guiney”
Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Massachusetts Maritime Academy, "Eugene O'Neill and the Irish
Canon."
Irene Martyniuk, Fitchburg State University, “The Benefits of Empire?: The Great War and the
Irish”
Meneely 207, Readings in Creative Nonfiction
Beth O’Leary Anish , Community College of Rhode Island.
Aine Greaney, author, Newburyport, MA.
Charles Kell, University of Rhode Island.
James Silas Rogers, University of St Thomas.
3.45-5pm
Session VI
Meneely 102, Performing Irishness
Chair: Kelly Matthews
Fiona Coffey, Tufts University, “Blurring Boundaries and Collapsing Genres with Shannon Yee:
Immersive Theatre, Pastiche, and Radical Openness in the North”
Kady Anne D’Addario, University of St. Thomas, “‘I can nor bend, nor sell’: Field Day’s The
Riot Act”
Kathryn Boschmann, Carleton University, “Looking For Ways to ‘Be Irish’: Performance and
the Irish Community in Winnipeg in the Post-War Period”
Meneely 105, Art as Resistance
Chair: Charles Kell
Sarah Churchill, Quinnipiac University, “From Ballsbridge to Bogman, Robert Ballagh and An
Gorta Mor”
Jeanne I. Lakatos, Western Connecticut State, “The Application of Iconic Realism: An
Examination of Cultural Dissonance in the Artistry of 19th Century Frederick William Burton
and 21st Century Anne Cleary and Denis Connolly”
Susie Monagan, Ithaca College, “How do the artist-entrepreneurs in the West of Ireland’s
creative enterprises make sense of their role and value their remote location?”
Meneely 209, Absence, Attenuation, Abortion
Chair: Nelson Ritschel
Cara Delay, The College of Charleston, “Mamie Cadden and the Politics of Motherhood in Mid
Twentieth-Century”
Pamela Floyd, Rockland Community College, “‘Ever paler twilight’: Attenuated Conviction in
William Trevor’s ‘Of the Cloth’”
Terry Byrne, The College of New Jersey, “Absence in Irish Cinema: Theme and Defining
Feature”
5pm
Conference Ends