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The design history of Ulysses is no less interesting than its publication history. James Joyce himself was involved in the design of the Shakespeare and Company Ulysses. Some of the most creative minds of the twentieth century, including Ernst Reichl, Henri Matisse, Edward McKnight Kauffer, and Carin Goldberg, worked on subsequent editions. Just as Ulysses the novel has inspired generations of readers and writers, Ulysses the book has inspired generations of artists and designers.

Glenn Johnston is Treasurer of the James Joyce Society, a patron of the Museum of Literature Ireland, and a collector of books by and about Joyce. He has had a varied career, including stints in journalism, public affairs, and consulting. He studied Law at Trinity College Dublin.

This is a remote event. RSVP and Zoom link here.

In this presentation, Associate Curator Alison Fraser and Curator James Maynard will discuss the history and holdings of the University at Buffalo James Joyce Collection and present a virtual tour of highlights. Part of the University Libraries’ Poetry Collection, the library of record for 20th- and 21st-century Anglophone poetry, the UB James Joyce Collection is the world’s largest and most comprehensive compilation of manuscripts and other materials related to the renowned Irish author. It comprises more than 10,000 pages of Joyce’s working papers, notebooks, manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, portraits, publishing records, important memorabilia, and ephemeral material, as well as Joyce’s Paris library. Supplementing the archive is a complete set of first editions including most issues and states of every book published by Joyce, translations, a large number of his magazine appearances, and virtually all significant criticism. Together, these materials thoroughly document Joyce’s artistic life and provide unmatched glimpses into his writing process and literary relationships. For Bloomsday 2021 the Poetry Collection launched a James Joyce mural in downtown Buffalo and they are currently designing a UB James Joyce Museum for which they received $10 million in New York State funding.

Damien Keane is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of Ireland and the Problem of Information (Penn State UP, 2014), as well as articles on radio broadcasting, intelligence monitoring, and literary recordings. He is currently working on two projects: in the shorter term, one on the afterlives of James Joyce's recordings in the LP era; and in the longer term, one that centers on record keeping and so-called grey literature.

The James Joyce Society presents:

Vicki Mahaffey, online book launch for The Joyce of Everyday Life

in conversation with Jonathan Goldman, JJS president

This is a remote event. RSVP here (required) to receive the remote link

Vicki Mahaffey is Kirkpatrick Professor of English and Gender and Women's Studies, emerita, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Professor of English, emerita, at the University of Pennsylvania. A Guggenheim fellow, she has written and edited several books on Joyce, Yeats, Wilde, Modernist Literature, and Irish Literature. She is currently editing a special issue for the James Joyce Quarterly on Joyce and Women. 

Please RSVP here.

Few works of literature are as closely linked to specific physical space as Ulysses is linked to Dublin. Throughout Ulysses, named characters often stand at or walk past a clearly specified, mappable point: an intersection, address, or business. In response, the novel is mapped, guidebooks to Joyce’s Dublin are published, and Bloomsday celebrants reenact scenes at the locations where they are set. Analyses of this aspect of Ulysses often characterize Joyce or the reader as city surveyor, census taker, or local. In contrast, I consider this mappable detail in relation to the network of informants and police that appears throughout Ulysses. Contrasting the Dublin of Ulysses with the London of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, I argue that Joyce’s representation of Dublin and many of its residents interpellates readers into the novel’s intelligence subplot. By framing readers as complicit in this source of conflict in the novel, Ulysses models a decolonial method of reader manipulation and (dis)identification.

Eric A. Lewis is a lecturer in the Department of English at Georgia State University. His research focuses on readers' relationships with characters in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Global Anglophone fiction, especially out of Ireland and South Africa. His work has been published in Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. His book manuscript, Complicit Reading, argues that postcolonial novels use a variety of narrative techniques to complicate reader-character relationships and frame readers as complicit in conflicts in the novel and in the novel's real historical context. He also cohosts the Ulysses discussion podcast tipsyturvy Ulysses with Shinjini Chattopadhyay and Wendy Truran.

Alison Armstrong’s talk will explore Jolas’s transition magazine as a modernist vehicle for experiments with language and in the other arts. Joyce’s “Work in Progress” would become Finnegans Wake and was arguably the most important and interesting of all the linguistic experiments. 

Alison Armstrong is a writer and visual artist. Her book-length publications include the literary cookbook, The Joyce of Cooking (Station Hill 1986) and “The Herne’s Egg” by W.B. Yeats: The Manuscript Materials (Cornell UP 1993), as well as works of fiction, memoir, and criticism. Her criticism and reviews have appeared in the Irish Literary Supplement, the James Joyce Broadsheet, and American Arts Quarterly, among other venues. She is currently developing a series of large pastel drawings of prehistoric stones found at sites in Ireland, including the Boyne Valley.   

The James Joyce Society announces its annual Joyce birthday event at the Morgan Library and Museum featuring Mary Burke

Free for Joyce Society and Morgan Library members. Joyce Society members and guests, RSVP (required) here: https://forms.gle/r5FibyPFqcnuynMV8

Long excluded from Ireland’s internationally recognized modernist canon, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s 1949 novel, Cré na Cille (usually translated as Graveyard Soil) is a late modernist western seaboard rejoinder to Ulysses in the Irish (Gaelic) language. Cré na Cille is set in Connemara, fetishized since Joyce’s lifetime as the linguistically and racially “pure” western heart of Gaelic Ireland. Joyce’s “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages” inadvertently implies that the avant-garde was alien to a native language that was increasingly being hitched to the fantasy of a culturally, racially, and linguistically sealed West. However, Cré na Cille’s neologisms, French and English loan words, and mixed-race returned emigrant Connemara residents acknowledge the exchanges that arose from Ireland’s history of emigration and Empire. Altogether, Ó Cadhain continues the debate initiated by Joyce’s creation of a Jewish Irishman, extending it to prophetically ask if Irish culture can create imaginative and linguistic room - in either of its official languages - for Irish citizens of minority identity. This talk will close by considering issues of race, immigration, and the teaching and speaking of the Irish language in contemporary Ireland and Irish America.

Mary Burke, Professor of English at UConn, is the author of Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History (2023) as well as a cultural history of Irish Travellers (both Oxford University Press). She collaborated with Tramp Press on the 2022 reissue of Traveller-Romany Juanita Casey’s cult novel, The Horse of Selene. Her work has placed with JJQ, NPR, the Irish Times, Irish national broadcaster RTÉ, and Faber. A former University of Notre Dame NEH Irish Fellow, she was a 2022 LRH Fellow at her alma mater, Trinity College Dublin. 

James Joyce's Ulysses has given way to various ways of reading the text. Some prefer to read it privately on their own, most enjoy reading it collaboratively in reading groups. Both private and public ways of reading Ulysses employ various modes of reading among which close reading and genetic reading have emerged to be particularly suitable for grappling with the compendious text. Is close reading, despite its shortcomings (suppression of historical context, singular attention to form over content), still relevant for reading Ulysses? Does genetic reading help with reading Ulysses in its expansive socio-historical context? Is there any merit to combining close and genetic readings of Ulysses? In my talk I will argue that in Ulysses close and genetic readings complement one another and can create a decolonial mode of reading.

Shinjini Chattopadhyay (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literatures at Berry College, Mount Berry, GA. She completed her PhD at the Department of English, University of Notre Dame, IN, and earned her MPhil and MA in English Literature from Jadavpur University, India. She works on British and Irish modernisms and global Anglophone literatures. Her monograph-in-progress, “Plurabilities of the City,” investigates the construction of metropolitan cosmopolitanism in modernist and contemporary novels. She is the author of several book chapters and journal articles which have been published in James Joyce Quarterly, European Joyce Studies, Joyce Studies in Italy, and Modernism/Modernity Print+. She is an elected member of the board of trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation and she co-hosts a podcast titled TipsyTurvy Ulysses. 

Led by Joyce Society Treasurer, Glenn Johnston, the JJS presents its second walking tour on Joyce and New York City.

No RSVP necessary; just show up!

Many people associated with James Joyce lived on the Upper West Side or in Morningside Heights, including composer George Antheil, who once lived above Shakespeare & Co in Paris; Padraic and Mary Colum, who co-wrote Our Friend James Joyce; Morris Ernst, the lawyer who won the 1933 Ulysses case; F. Scott Fitzgerald, who greatly admired Joyce; BW Huebsch, who first published A Portrait; Helen Kastor, wife of Giorgio and mother of Stephen Joyce; patron John Quinn, who briefly owned the Ulysses manuscript; Ulysses pirate Samuel Roth; and artist Patrick Tuohy, who did portraits of Joyce and his father. The tour will explore their relationships with Joyce and with each other, and some related events that took place in the neighborhood.

Meet at The Hungarian Pastry Shop (1030 Amsterdam Ave.) at 4:30 pm for a 5 pm departure.

Glenn Johnston was educated at Trinity College Dublin and has had a varied career, including stints with the United Nations and in the fields of intelligence and risk consulting. He has been an avid collector of works by and about Joyce for 25 years.

In her study, The Last Eminent Victorian, Julia Taddeo describes Virginia Woolf experiencing sex/gender euphoria in response to an anecdote of Lytton Strachey’s that turned on a particular male/male sexual escapade. Woolf was vastly well-read, and she belonged to circles that took pride in their sexual outspokenness, yet Strachey’s explicit description of sex between men clearly opened new vistas previously outside the young artist’s ken.

This Woolfian anecdote suggests the two key issues I will explore in this talk: the distinctive conventional license the anecdote affords, and the lack of concepts and vocabulary in patriarchal societies relating to sexual and gendered desires, acts and identities that exclude or “misuse” the penis. James Joyce, I will argue, with his encyclopedic literary inclusion of sex/gender desires and experiences of all kinds, afforded queer AFAB modernists (an anachronistic term I am adopting with impunity since lesbian is also anachronistic, and simultaneously overdetermined in unhelpful ways), drew on the license afforded by the conventions of Irish storytelling to disseminate a huge array of sexual possibilities, and drew the courageous support of many queer intellectuals who found in his literary “stories” the potential for self-invention through their own anecdotes, which formed new, affectively and erotically-bonded counterpublics.

Margot Gayle Backus is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English at the University of Houston. She was 2014-15 Queens University Fulbright Scholar of Anglophone Irish Writing, and 2015 James Joyce Scholar in residence at the University of Buffalo. Her books include The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Duke University Press, 1999), Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), and, with Joseph Valente, The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (Indiana University Press, 2020).

The James Joyce Society will hold a remote roundtable and open forum on the subject of "Making Joyce Studies Safe for All." Friday, September 15th, 12 noon-2pm Eastern US time (1700hr in Dublin, 9am in Los Angeles, etc. etc.). We planned this event in response to ongoing problems of sexual harassment plaguing Joyce studies. These problems were strongly articulated in the “Open Letter to the James Joyce Community” and have persisted since the letter’s 2018 publication.

Participants will include Katherine Ebury, Zoë Henry, Casey Lawrence, and Sam Slote, with JJS ombudsperson Celia Marshik moderating.

All are invited to attend and discuss the Joyce scholarly community's longtime and ongoing insufficient attention to the safety of women and emerging scholars, and to propose solutions. Other forms of harassment and marginalization may also emerge in the session.

To RSVP, please click here.

Please note that the $10 suggested donation is waived for this event.

In partnership with the Irish American Writers and Artists, the James Joyce Society invites you to attend Bloomsday at Dive 106 on Amsterdam Avenue and 106th St., outdoors, on the street. Our friends from Elevator Repair Service will be performing two scenes from the stage adaptation of Ulysses that they debuted at last year’s “Bloomsday on Broadway.” We will have readings (including YOU reading your favorite passage, max. 3-minutes), trivia, t-shirt giveaways, food/drink specials, and more, ending with music by Liz Hanly.

Ulysses

Created by Elevator Repair Service

Directed by John Collins

Co-Direction and Dramaturgy by Scott Shepherd

Text by James Joyce

James Joyce’s Ulysses has fascinated, perplexed, scandalized, and/or defeated readers for over a century. Building on a rich history of staging modernist works—Gatz, The Sound and the Fury, The Select (The Sun Also Rises)—Elevator Repair Service now takes on this Mount Everest of 20th Century literature. Seven performers sit down for a sober reading but soon find themselves careening on a fast-forward tour through Joyce’s funhouse of styles, guzzling pints, getting in brawls, philosophizing, and committing debaucheries. With madcap antics and a densely layered sound design, ERS presents an eclectic sampling from Joyce’s life-affirming masterpiece. Ulysses will premiere at Fisher Center at Bard in September 2023.

Elevator Repair Service (ERS) is a New York City–based company that creates original works for live theater with an ongoing ensemble. The company’s shows are created from a wide range of texts that include found transcripts of trials and debates, literature, classical dramas, and new plays. Founded in 1991, ERS has created an extensive body of work that includes upwards of 20 original pieces. These have earned the company a loyal following and made it one of New York’s most highly acclaimed experimental theater companies. The company is best known for Gatz, its award-winning verbatim staging of the entire text of The Great Gatsby. ERS has received numerous awards and distinctions, including Lortel awards, a Bessie award, and an OBIE award for Sustained Excellence, as well as a Guggengheim Fellowship and Doris Duke Performing Artist Award for Artistic Director John Collins.

Ulysses was commissioned by and developed at Symphony Space.

Ulysses will be commissioned by and receive its world premiere at the Fisher Center at Bard in September 2023.

This performance is made possible, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Elevator Repair Service is also supported with funds from The Dorothy Strelsin Foundation, Edward T. Cone Foundation, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, Howard Gilman Foundation, The J.M. Kaplan Fund, Jockey Hollow Foundation, Lucille Lortel Foundation, The New York Community Trust, The O’Grady Foundation, Scherman Foundation, Select Equity Group Foundation, and The Shubert Foundation.

Elevator Repair Service is a member of the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York.

RSVP Here.

Led by James Joyce Society Treasurer, Glenn Johnston.

There are autobiographical elements and innumerable references to Dublin in James Joyce’s work, but even Joyceans may not know what an important role New York played in his own story. A Portrait of the Artist and Exiles were first published in book form and Ulysses was first published in serial form in New York. Exiles received its first English language production in New York. Joyce's son Giorgio married a New Yorker and spent time in the city. The walking tour will take in important sites such as the home of the Little Review in 1918, the building where Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap lived, and the courthouse where they were tried for obscenity. It will also touch on a range of writers and artists associated with Joyce—and perhaps even a bit of Beckett and Behan. 

Glenn Johnston was educated at Trinity College Dublin and has had a varied career, including stints with the United Nations and in the fields of intelligence and risk consulting. He has been an avid collector of works by and about Joyce for 25 years.

This event is in-person only.

Tour will begin at 5:30 pm at Birch Coffee (56 Seventh Ave). Set-off is at 6:00 pm and will last for approximately 90 minutes. At 7:30 pm, we will likely retire to a nearby watering hole.

Rain date: Thursday, June 8.

Book Launch: Reading James Joyce 

A conversation between co-authors Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie, moderated by James Joyce Society President, Jonathan Goldman.

Preceded by “A Tribute to Nicholas Fargnoli,” featuring remarks about the former Joyce Society President by Alison Armstrong, Heyward Ehrlich, and and Michael Patrick Gillespie

Reading James Joyce is a ready-at-hand compendium and all-encompassing interpretive guide designed for teachers and students approaching Joyce’s writings for the first time, guiding readers to better understand Joyce’s works and the background from which they emerged. Meticulously organized, this text situates readers within the world of Joyce including biographical exploration, discussion of Joyce’s innovations and prominent works such as Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, surveys of significant critical approaches to Joyce’s writings, and examples of alternative readings and contemporary responses. Each chapter will provide interpretive approaches to contemporary literary theories and key issues, including end-of-chapter strategies and extended readings for further engagement. This book also includes shorter assessments of Joyce’s lesser-known works—critical writings, drama, poetry, letters, epiphanies, and personal recollections—to contextualize the creative and social environments from which his most notable publications arose. This uniquely comprehensive guide to Joyce will be an invaluable and comprehensive resource for readers exploring the influential world of Joyce studies.

This talk considers how Nella Larsen and James Joyce, modernist authors rarely put into conversation with one another, critiqued reigning ideologies of race and nationhood via complementary formal methods. Joyce’s work often offered a scathing critique of colonialism, but his ambivalence to the Celtic Revival—and the blind patriotism this encouraged—finds an analogue in Larsen’s relationship to the tenets of “racial uplift.” Her novel Quicksand (1928) is unafraid to query the terms of its legibility, with a heroine that responds to demands she be ‘representative’ by fleeing all available subject positions. Moments of textual equivocation and withholding—what I call a subversive blankness—refuse monolithic conceptions of race, place and gender, as they do in the final episode of Joyce’s Ulysses. By focusing on depictions of interiority and the built environment, this talk suggests that literary “Blackness” and “Irishness” have much to say to one another, and that this was particularly so in a historical moment which saw both groups dealing with disillusion and disenfranchisement, at times from the very places (Dublin, Harlem) that sustained their art.

Zoë Henry is a writer and doctoral candidate in English at Indiana University, where she researches global modernism and Black studies. Her dissertation-in-progress examines an interracial modernist archive of novels, poems and dances, arguing that women figures of the twentieth century negotiated new forms of urban and racial visibility by remaining ‘private in public,’ at once performing and withholding their inner workings across the liminal spaces of the metropolis. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, and the edited collection Teaching Joyce in the 21st Century. She received her BA from Brown University, and her public-facing writing has been featured in venues such as Slate, HuffPost, Insider and CNBC.

 Twitter: @ZoeLaHenry

Website: www.zoelhenry.com

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From Prof. Kelleher’s book project about Mary and Padraic Colum, a chapter of which is dedicated to the relationship between the Joyces and the Colums. Padraic Colum was president of the James Joyce Society for over two decades.

Professor Margaret Kelleher is Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin and UCD Academic Lead on the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI), a collaboration between the National Library of Ireland and UCD which opened recently at Newman House, Stephen's Green, Dublin. Her publications include The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (2006) and The Maamtrasna Murders: Language, Life and Death in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (2018, UCD Press and University of Chicago Press) for which she was awarded the American Conference of Irish Studies prize for Books on Language and Culture and shortlisted for the Michel Déon Prize. Her current book project is a joint biography of Mary and Padraic Colum.

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Presented with support from the Consulate General of Ireland in New York,

And, in partnership with The Center for Fiction.

When Nora Barnacle, a twenty-year-old from Galway working as a maid at Finn’s Hotel, meets young James Joyce on a summer’s day in Dublin, she is instantly attracted to him, natural and daring in his company. But she cannot yet imagine the extraordinary life they will share together. All Nora knows is she likes her Jim enough to leave behind family and home, in search of a bigger, more exciting life.

As their family grows, they ricochet from European city to city, making fast friends amongst the greatest artists and writers of their age as well as their wives, and are brought high and low by Jim’s ferocious ambition. But time and time again, Nora is torn between their intense and unwavering desire for each other and the constant anxiety of living hand-to-mouth, often made worse by Jim’s compulsion for company and attention. So, while Jim writes and drinks his way to literary acclaim, Nora provides unflinching support and inspiration, sometimes at the expense of her own happiness, and especially at that of their children, Giorgio and Lucia. Eventually, together, they achieve some longed-for security and stability, but it is hard-won and imperfect to the end.

In sensuous, resonant prose, Nuala O’Connor has conjured the definitive portrait of this strong, passionate and loyal Irishwoman. Nora is a tour de force, an earthy and authentic love letter to Irish literature’s greatest muse.

Nuala O’Connor, born in Dublin in 1970, lives in Co. Galway. Her fifth novel NORA (Harper Perennial/New Island, 2021), about Nora Barnacle, wife and muse to James Joyce, was recently published to critical acclaim in the USA, Ireland, the UK, and Germany, and is forthcoming in other languages. NORA was named as a Top 10 2021 historical novel by the NewYork Times and was the One Dublin One Book choice for 2022. Nuala curated the Love, Says Bloom exhibition at MoLI (Museum of Literature Ireland), on the Joyce family, for #Ulysses100. She is editor at flash fiction e-zine Splonk. Website: www.nualaoconnor.com Twitter: @NualaNiC

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Prof. Gregory Erickson will talk about his book, which narrates reading 2,000 years of Christian heresy through the works of James Joyce. Through passages in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, we will move from the ancient Gnostics to Reformation iconoclasm to Book of Mormon to Joyce celebrations on the streets of New York City and Antwerp.

Gregory Erickson is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at New York University’s Gallatin School, where he teaches courses on modern literature, James Joyce, popular culture, and religion. He is the author of The Absence of God in Modernist Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), the co-author, with Richard Santana, of Religion and Popular Culture: Rescripting the Sacred (McFarland, 2008; 2016), and the co-editor of the collection Reading Heresy: Religion and Dissent in Literature and Art (De Gruyter 2017). His two most recent books are Christian Heresy, James Joyce and the Modernist Literary Imagination (Bloomsbury 2022) and Speculative Television and the Doing and Undoing of Religion (Routledge 2022). He is a founding member and former president of the International Society for Heresy Studies. He is also a part time professional trombone player.

Please RSVP here.

Derived from my forthcoming monograph, Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health, in this paper I examine how figurations of venereal disease, accounts of its aetiology, and campaigns for its regulation were used by Joyce and his literary and political contemporaries to construct and contest models of Irish identity in the first decades of the twentieth century. Surveying the political culture of early twentieth-century Ireland in conversation with Dubliners and Ulysses, I trace the ways in which references to venereal disease were employed in the anti-enlisting campaigns of groups such as the Irish Transvaal Committee, Inghinidhe na hÉireann, and Sinn Féin to offer an explanatory metaphor for the malign impact of British imperial rule in Ireland, and illustrate the ways in which authors such as Joyce and Oliver Gogarty echoed these positions in their literary critiques of British militarism. At the same time, focussing on the “Cyclops” and “Circe” episodes of Ulysses, I also demonstrate the ways in which Joyce was to distance himself from the more chauvinistic deployments of this rhetoric, particularly where they concerned Ireland’s Jewish population. Ultimately, turning my attention to “Eumaeus”, I trace the contours of an emerging weariness in Joyce’s rendering of the entire question of sexual health as the grounds for conceptualizing Irish national identity, and sketch its influence on later authors such as Flann O’Brien.

A non-binary academic, writer, and activist from the North of Ireland, Dr Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston is SSHRC – CIHR Banting Post-Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of Alberta in Canada. Their research explores the cultural politics of sexual health, queer history and culture, and the history of erotica and obscenity, and has appeared in publications such as the Review of English Studies, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Irish Times. Their first monograph, Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

You can access their writing here or follow them on Twitter here.

In partnership with the Consulate General of Ireland in New York.

Registration required here.

Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet and professor of poetry, as well as an editor, critic, playwright, lyricist, and translator.

After studying at Queen’s University, Belfast, he published his first book, New Weather in 1973, at the age of 21. From 1973 he worked as a producer for the BBC in Belfast until, in the mid-1980’s, he gave up his job to become a freelance writer. Muldoon is the author of fourteen full-length collections of poetry, including the most recent Howdie-Skelp (2021), Frolic and Detour (2019), and One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015). He has published innumerable smaller collections, works of criticism, opera libretti, books for children, song lyrics, and radio and television drama. His poetry has been translated into twenty languages.

Muldoon served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1999 to 2004 and as poetry editor of The New Yorker from 2007 to 2017. He has taught at Princeton University since 1987 and currently occupies the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 chair in the Humanities. He was the Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. Muldoon is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his awards are the 1972 Eric Gregory Award, the 1980 Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2006 European Prize for Poetry, the 2015 Pigott Poetry Prize, the 2017 Spirit of Ireland Award from the Irish Arts Center (NYC), the 2017 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, the 2018 Seamus Heaney Award for Arts & Letters, and the 2020 Michael Marks Award. He is the recipient of honorary doctorates from ten universities.

Online Event via Zoom. Link below.

Tekla Mecsnóber, lecturer in the Department of English Language and Culture at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, is coeditor of Publishing in Joyce's "Ulysses": Newspapers, Advertising and Printing.

Mecsnóber’s new monograph, Rewriting Joyce's Europe, sheds light on how the text and physical design of James Joyce's two most challenging works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, reflect changes that transformed Europe between World Wars I and 11. Looking beyond the commonly studied Irish historical context of these works, Tekla Mecsnóber calls for more attention to their place among broader cultural and political processes of the interwar era.

Published in 1922 and 1939, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake display Joyce's keen interest in naming, language choice, and visual aspects of writing. Mecsnóber shows the connections between these literary explorations and the real-world remapping of national borders that was often accompanied by the imposition of new place­ names, languages, and alphabets. In addition to drawing on extensive research in newspaper archives as well as genetic criticism, Mecsnóber provides the first comprehensive analysis of meanings suggested by the typographic design of early editions of Joyce's texts.

Mecsnóber argues that Joyce's fascination with the visual nature of writing not only shows up as a motif in his books but also can be seen in the writer's active role within European and North American print culture as he influenced the design of his published works. This illuminating study highlights the enduring-and often surprising-political stakes in choices regarding the use and visual representation of languages.

Join Zoom Meeting Here.

Meeting ID: 959 6093 6757 / Password: bearing

With the the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.

Co-sponsored by the Dublin James Joyce Summer School; Edward Everett Root Press; The Groden, Helper-Morris, Reisman, and Schwartz-James Families; International James Joyce Foundation; James Joyce Literary Supplement; James Joyce Quarterly; Unterberg Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y; Western Libraries; Western University; and the Zurich James Joyce Foundation.

Poetry Collection Event Page available here.

Register here.

Program:

Welcome and opening remarks, James Maynard, Curator of the Poetry Collection

Video excerpt: LET US ReJOYCE: The Michael Groden Papers at the University at Buffalo by Godfrey Jordan, Filmmaker

Remembrances of and tributes to Michael Groden and his legacy by colleagues and former students:

William (Bill) Brockman
Librarian Emeritus, Penn State University Libraries

Ronan Crowley
Vice President and President-Elect, International James Joyce Foundation

Manina Jones
Professor, Department of English and Writing Studies, Western University

Terence Killeen
James Joyce Centre, Dublin

Vicki Mahaffy
Clayton and Thelma Kirkpatrick Professor, Department of English, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Sam Slote
Associate Professor, Co-director of M.Phil. in Irish Writing, School of English, Trinity College Dublin

Miriam Silver Verga
Former M.A. English Language and Literature/Letters Student, University of Western Ontario

Closing remarks, Molly Peacock, Poet, Memoirist, and Biographer

Register for this event by clicking here.

Robert Spoo, “Ulysses in New York: Everything But 1922.”

Professor Robert Spoo received his MA and PhD in English from Princeton University and taught for more than ten years as a tenured faculty member in the English Department at The University of Tulsa, where he was also Editor of the James Joyce Quarterly. He has published numerous books and articles on James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and other modern literary figures. His teaching interests include copyrights and intellectual property, forms of piracy and theories of the public domain, law and literature, and the copyright-related needs of scholars. Professor Spoo's book, Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain (New York: Oxford University Press, July 2013), offers a legal and cultural history of the impact on non-US authors of the protectionist and isolationists features of US copyright laws from 1790 on. His book, Modernism and the Law (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), surveys the legal regimes—obscenity, copyright, defamation, privacy, and publicity—that shaped modernist literature, and was written with the support of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Professor Spoo is a copyright advisor to numerous academic journals and projects, and acts as general counsel for the International James Joyce Foundation.

Professor Spoo earned his JD from the Yale Law School, where he was Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal. As an attorney, Professor Spoo has represented authors, scholars, documentary filmmakers, record companies, and other creators and users of intellectual property. His litigation work has included serving as co-counsel, with the Stanford Center for Internet & Society and other attorneys, for Professor Carol Shloss of Stanford against the Estate of James Joyce.

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Kerri Maher, presenting her new novel, The Paris Bookseller

Clare Hutton, “Women and the Making of Ulysses: Highlights from the Ransom Center Exhibition”

A Dublin native, and the third of six children, Dr. Clare Hutton is now Reader in English and Digital Humanities at Loughborough University in the UK. She is curator of Women and the Making of Ulysses, a centenary exhibition on display at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas from January 29 through July 17 2022. Her monograph, Serial Encounters: Ulysses and the Little Review, appeared with Oxford in 2019, and has been described as “nuanced and engaging”, “indispensable” and “one of the major works of Joyce scholarship so far this century”. Serial Encounters is due out in paperback in Spring 2022.

(In association with the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas)

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Jonathan Goldman, JJS President, “Brief Notes from the History of the James Joyce Society”

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