Please join the James Joyce Society for our latest installment in our Lunchtime Launch Series:
Teaching James Joyce in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Barry Devine and Ellen Scheible.
A roundtable featuring the editors and contributors to the volume.
This event will meet over Zoom. RSVP (required) at this link for Zoom information.
Teaching James Joyce in the Twenty-First Century presents examples of bold, innovative pedagogical techniques instructors have used to adapt the study of Joyce’s work for the contemporary classroom. Leading Joyce scholars share approaches that go beyond the traditional university lecture hall to include experiences teaching high school students, senior citizens, art students, book club members, and people in prisons.
The strategies in this inspirational volume range from class discussions to creating art and music to walking city streets. Works examined include the complex Finnegans Wake and the influential modernist milestones Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. While Joyce is often viewed as an essential and foundational author of Irish literature, contributors to this volume argue that the spirit of Joyce’s writing is global, and they offer suggestions for teaching these works in an international context.
Students are often daunted by the perceived difficulty and inaccessibility of Joyce, but this volume helps both new and experienced teachers of Joyce make the writer’s texts understandable, relatable, and even fun. These authors argue that reading Joyce helps develop skills in holding and interrogating opposing ideas, skills that are essential in navigating the modern academic and political landscape. In grappling with Joyce, students will recognize his writing as relevant and urgent.
Barry Devine is an Associate Professor of English at Heidelberg University. He teaches British and Irish literature, Women's Literature, LGBTQ+ Literature, and Literary Theory. His research primarily involves the manuscripts and other pre-publication materials of James Joyce. His work has appeared in The Irish Bildungsroman (Syracuse UP 2025) and The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses (2022).
Ellen Scheible is Professor of English and founder of the Irish Studies program at Bridgewater State University. She is the author of Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction: The Literary Legacy of Mother Ireland (Bloomsbury 2025). She is co-editor of The Dark: A Critical Edition (Syracuse UP 2025) with Anna Teekell; Teaching James Joyce in the 21st Century (UP of Florida 2025) with Barry Devine; and Rethinking Joyce’s Dubliners (Palgrave 2017) with Claire Culleton. Her work has appeared in various journals including New Hibernia Review, James Joyce Quarterly, Criticism, Irish University Review, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. She is currently coediting a special issue of LIT on Irish women's genre fiction with Tina Morin.
In conversation with Teaching James Joyce contributors…
Talia Abu is an early career researcher, lecturing at Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She teaches mostly modernist and postmodernist texts, with special attention to the intersections between literature and cultural studies. She is the author of Guilt and “Finnegans Wake”: From Original Sin to the Irredeemable Body. This project, as well as her previously published work on defecation in Finnegans Wake, intertwine three prominent topics in literary research: the material body, the materiality of language, and affect theory.
Robert Berry, trained as a painter and cartoonist, has spent sixteen years of his life studying Joyce for ULYSSES “seen,” his adaptation of the text into a (very) long-form graphic novel. He publishes his work regularly in the James Joyce Quarterly and has taught the book, in a variety of venues, for nearly ten years. Occasionally he still gets the opportunity to paint pretty pictures that have nothing to do with any of that.
Mary M. Burke, professor of English at the University of Connecticut, is the author of Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History. Her first book was a cultural history of Irish Travellers, and she collaborated on the reissue edition of Juanita Casey’s The Horse of Selene. A former NEH Irish Institute Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, she is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and Queen’s University Belfast.
Zoë Henry is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she is also affiliated with the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department. Her first book project, The Public Interior: Modernism, Theatricality, and Interracial Aesthetics, explores how women across a mixed-race modernist archive used the resources of the city to remain “private in public,” thus desegregating the historiography of modernist literature. It develops a notion of privacy that moves beyond the domestic to intertwine with law, eros, and the psyche, arguing that privacy’s denial to Black and mixed-race women can be understood as an afterlife of slavery, unfolding in the twentieth-century metropolis as in our own, post-Roe moment. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Feminist Modernist Studies, the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and the Oxford Handbook of Queer Modernisms, as well as in edited volumes on such authors as Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf.
Barbara M. Hoffman teaches in the Department of Writing Studies at the University of Miami. Before returning to higher education in 2011, she taught high school English for a decade in the Boston area, including teaching Joyce in her AP Literature classes. As a PhD student, she served as the managing editor of the James Joyce Literary Supplement from 2014 to 2016 and has published on Portrait in various media. Her main interests are Joyce, Irish convicts in Australia, and contemporary Australian fiction. She is currently the vice president of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies.