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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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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