RECENT ACHIEVEMENTS by

Dr Lionel Pilkington

Dr Tom Duddy— book of poetry short-listed for prizes

This newsletter highlights some of the big achievements that have taken place in the School of Humanities over the last few months: these include Professor Dan Carey’s success in winning a Senior Research Fellowship from the IRCHSS, Dr Neasa Cronin’s innovative ‘Mapping Spectral Spaces’ international network, and the production of the DVD version of Tony Tracy’s 90 minute documentary film Blazing the Trail: The O’Kalems in Ireland. There is also the usual impressive body of publications from all quarters. In addition to these notable individual achievements, it is also the case that the School as a collective deserves to congratulate itself in delivering an additional con-tact hour per week, mostly dedicated

IRCHSS Senior Research Fellowship award

2

Performing Irishness Seminar

2

Creative Writing Winners

4 & 6

Guest Speakers at Huston School of Film & Digial Media

6

Mapping Spectral Traces

7

John McGahern News

9

Catholicism in a time of crisis

10

Centre for Irish Studies IACI Fellow

11

And more….

NAIRTL Teaching Award

2

Inside this issue:

November 2011

School of Humanities, National University of Ireland, Galway

Issue 10

Humanities Update

The Hiding Place, has recently been shortlisted for both the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry, which is also for first collections.

to first years and small-group teaching, as part of the Croke Park agreement. This was done in less than ideal circumstances—at short notice and without adequate time for discussion and syllabus planning. Nevertheless, this School—along with each of the other Schools in the College—has managed to deliver this additional hour in a manner that is fair and transparent to all members. We hope that it makes a substantial improvement to the atmosphere and morale of first year students.

Other positive developments include a recent and badly-needed (continued page 3)

This project concentrates on

developing an edition of Richard

Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations,

Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries…

of the English Nation (1598‐1600), the

most important early modern

compilation of English writings on

travel, trade, and colonial settlement.

No critical edition has ever been

produced. The edition is under contract

with Oxford University Press in 14

volumes and Dan Carey, as co‐general

editor, will be working on the editing of

the first four volumes in the series,

which include the general and textual

introduction and Hakluyt’s important

letters of letters and epistles to the

reader. The IRCHSS grant runs for 15

months and provides for a postdoctoral

fellow to assist the project, especially in

creating a project website and

outreach.

visits, and outings. The group also

attended the Synge Summer School

in Wicklow from 30 June to 3 July.

Neasa O’Callaghan, final year, BA

CONNECT (Creative Writing)

student attended the Seminar.

This Summer 2011, Professor Jill

Dolan and Professor Stacy Wolf of

Princeton University brought a

group of students to Galway to

participate in the seminar. It

included daily classes, workshops,

visits by theatre professionals, a

programme of volunteering with

the Galway Arts Festival, theatre

She writes “Those six weeks are

preserved in my memory as

among the most challenging,

rewarding and enjoyable weeks

of my academic life.”

Read full article..

Seminar ‘Performing Irishness’ attended by students of NUIG and Princeton University

Dr Ó Murchadha (Philosophy) has recently been appointed Series Editor of "Violence Stud-ies" with Peter Lang Publishing.

He has also been appointed a Committee member of the Irish Phenomenology Circle.

DR FELIX Ó MURCHADHA APPOINTMENTS

Professor Daniel Carey awarded IRCHSS Senior Research Fellowship

Page 2 Humanities Update

CONGRATULATIONS TO

DR FRANCES MCCORMACK

who won the NAIRTL

National Award for

Excellence in Teaching.

The award was presented

on

Monday 7th November in

Dublin.

Press Release

Dr. Seán Crosson of the Huston School of Film & Digital Media has co-edited, with Professor Werner Huber of the University of Austria, a major new collection on Irish cinema, Contemporary Irish Film: New Perspectives on a National Cinema. Bringing together scholars from Ireland and abroad, this collection provides insiders’ as well as outsiders’ perspectives on the situation of Irish film in a period of a socio-economic sea change: the years of the so-called Celtic Tiger. The unprecedented economic growth and immigration that Ireland experienced between 1995 and 2007 did not only challenge national but also ethnic, social and gender identities. The contributions to this volume explore how films tackle these challenges and help to make sense of Ireland’s altered position in a globalised world. Among the films discussed are some of the most

critically acclaimed Irish films of recent years, including Once (2006), Adam &

Paul (2004), Garage (2007), and The Secret of Kells (2009), as well as the work of Oscar-winning director and writer Neil Jordan. The volume is completed by an interview with award-winning director Lenny Abrahamson, and his

collaborator, screenwriter and actor Mark O’Halloran. Contributors to the collection include Tony Tracy (Huston School of Film), Eduardo Barros Grela (Univ. A Coruña, Galicia,

Spain), Zélie Asava (University College Dublin), Neasa Hardiman (Trinity College Dublin), Agnes Kakasi (Dublin Institute of Technology), Mark Schreiber (Univ. Siegen, Germany), Díóg O’Connell (Institute of Art, Design, Technology, Dun Laoghaire), Thomas Walsh (Loughborough University) and Ruth Barton (Trinity College Dublin).

Contemporary Irish Film: New Perspectives on a National Cinema will be launched by Lenny Abrahamson on Thursday November 24th at 5pm in the Huston School of Film and all are welcome.

NEW COLLECTION ON IRISH FILM

Theatre and Performance, based in the School of Humanities, with the first stage consisting of a BA in Drama, Theatre and Performance beginning in September 2012. There are many reasons to think positively about the years ahead.

series of recruitments (in History and in English), the imminent un-freezing of the Senior Lecturer promotion scheme, an opening up of the Personal Professorship Promotion scheme, the announcement that construction work on the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Building will resume before Christmas and (also of relevance to our School) the recruitment by the Library of a second full time archivist. Planning work has also begun on a Centre for

Page 3 Issue 10

RECENT ACHIEVEMENTS (Continued from page 1)

Last Spring I booked my return to Berkhamsted in England for the Graham Greene International Festival. I had had an amazing experience there in 2010 when I travelled to receive the award for prose and, whether I ever won anything there again, I knew I would always look forward to the festival as a place to immerse myself in the literary world. Although I adore some of his works, I am no Greene aficionado; rather, it’s the shared passion for great literature and the life of the writer that I wallow in. Not to mention the craic to be had at the post-talk meals and drinks, and the Greene films enjoyed at the stunning art-deco Rex Cinema.

On September 1st of this year, I was told that I had won the screenplay award. This fantastic news came as I packed up for my return from my hometown of Kilkenny to Galway, and it was the perfect start to my final year in the BA CONNECT with Crea-tive Writing. Apart from meeting friends from last year in Berkhamsted and making new ones, an amount of networking (whether intentional or accidental) within the industry also happens, and this can be invaluable. But I’m mainly looking forward to the pilgrimage to Berkhamsted in 2012 as a way of balancing my worlds of creativity and academia. (more on student awards page 6)

Dr Sinead Mooney (ENGLISH) had a book published in June A Tongue not Mine: Beckett and Translation (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Prof Dan Carey (ENGLISH) co-edited a book The Empire of

Credit. The Financial Revolution in Britain, Ireland

and America, 1688—1815 (Irish Academic Press)

This volume explores crucial questions arising

from the creation of public debt for the first

time and new forms of credit in late seventeenth and

eighteenth-century Ireland, Britain, and America.

Publications

Congratulations to Cathy Hogan—Winner of the Graham Greene International Festival Creative Writing Award for Screenplay

Page 4 Humanities Update

Cathy Hogan (L) receiving the award from Lee Langley (R) (award‐winning novelist and travel‐writer who wrote the screen adaptation of Greene’s The Tenth Man) on Saturday, October 1st 2011.

Dr Conn Holohan (HUSTON) ‘Disturbing types: gender stereotypes and the short film’ Short Film Studies 1.2 (2011)

‘‘Wrong Turns: radical spaces in the road movies of Tony Gatlif’, Transnational Cinemas, 1.3 (2011).

Dr Felix Ó Murchadha (PHILOSOPHY) “Religion and Theology” in Luft, S. and Over-gaard, S.: Routledge Companion to Phenomenol-ogy, London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 473-482

Prof Steven G Ellis (HISTORY) as part of a CLIOHWORLD project co- edited a Reader Regioinal and Transnational History in Europe (Cliohworld)

Edited by Dr Fiona Bateman (Huston) and Dr Lionel Pilk-ington (English) Studies in Set-tler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture

offers an accessible overview of settler colonialism as a globally

important cultural and political phenomenon within

a range of historical and geographical contexts,

including Palestine, Hawai’i, Canada,

southern Africa, Ireland, and Australasia. Seventeen

essays by leading scholars in the field argue that while different episodes of setter colonialism vary in different ways due to circumstances of time and place, they share a pervasive genocidal agenda for indigenous peoples. With its useful definitions and in-sights as well as its account of the opportunities that settler colonialism presents for resistance, this is a provocative study of a relatively unexplored topic of immense importance.

PUBLICATIONS

Festival and the prestigious Pordonone Silent Film Festival, as well as to a packed house in the Beaufort Bar on the centenary of the Kalem's first visit there. The DVD is on sale from the Irish Film Insitute.

Tony Tracy (Huston School of Film & Digital Media) co-produced the 2-DVD set 'The O'Kalem Collection 1910-1915' (and wrote the accompanying booklet), part-funded by the Ireland Funds and published by the Irish Film Institute. The DVD was launched at the Galway Film Fleadh in July and by Minister Jimmy Dinehan in Killarney. The DVD contains the surviving seven films (digitally restored) made by the New York based Kalem Film Company over four summer visits to Ireland before WWI during which they made over 25 films. The films are of significance for several reasons, notably as the first fiction films shot in Ireland and the first films produced by an American company here. Their influence on cinematic representations of Ireland is therefore immense. The DVD also contains a new 90 min documentary on the company and their visits, 'Blazing the Trail: The O'Kalems in Ireland', also produced by Tony Tracy and written/directed by Peter Flynn (Emerson College Boston). The documentary has screened at eleven festivals including the Galway Film Fleadh, Docfest New York, Rome Irish Film

NEW DVDs— ‘BLAZING THE TRAIL FILM’

...the first fiction films shot in Ireland and the first films produced by an American

company here…

Page 5 Issue 10

Niall Culligan, a second-year student on the BA with Creative Writing programme who won the English Department’s Peel Prize for his essay writing in first year, has been awarded second place in the H.H. Stewart Prize of the National University of Ireland for his entire first-year portfolio of work for English.

Cathy Hogan, a final-year student, has won the Best Screenplay Award at the Graham Greene International Festival 2011. This is Cathy’s second Greene award – she was awarded the prize for Best Fiction in 2010. The awards are adjudicated annually by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. Many of the students of the undergraduate creative writing

programme have a keen interest in the professional possibilities of creative nonfiction, and Móna Wise, a third-year student, has recently enjoyed major

success in this regard in her award of a Bord Bía fellowship to a food-writers’ workshop in Germany during the Summer. Móna worked on food-writing

for her ‘Exploring Nonfiction’ module in first year and is currently writing a full-length food book for her third-year Independent Project. She recounts her experiences in Germany:

Will write for food Earlier this year Bord Bía decided to take the bull by the horns, so to speak, and increase their already very serious efforts in (continued page 9)

Photo: by Tony Tracy

On 27th October Noel Burch presented The Forgotten Space, a film essay about globalisation and the sea. An argumentative visual documentary about the most important processes that affect us today, it follows container cargo aboard ships, barges, trains and trucks, listening to workers, engineers, planners, politicians, and those marginalised by the global transport system. The sea is forgotten until disaster strikes. But perhaps the biggest seagoing disaster is the global supply chain, which – maybe in a more fundamental way than financial speculation – is leading the world to the abyss.

Noel Burch also discussed

GUEST SPEAKERS AT HUSTON SCHOOL OF FILM & DIGITAL MEDIA

CREATIVE WRITING STUDENT AWARDS

Page 6 Humanities Update

his contributions to film theory, film scholarship. He is well known for books such as Theory of Film Practice, one of the key works in the canon of Western film criticism, To The Distant Observer on Japanese cinema and Life to those Shadows about early film.

Photo: by Tony Tracy

On 20th October Christopher Frayling presented ONCE UPON A TIME IN ITALY - the Westerns of Sergio Leone.

Leone has been called "the first post-modernist film-maker" and the lecture located Leone's Westerns in a variety of contexts and look closely at one particular sequence of 'West...' which has proved especially influential...

On Friday 21st October he presented THE HOLLYWOOD HISTORY OF ART.

Since the beginning of the sound era, Hollywood has produced a succession of feature films based on the lives of real-life visual artists. This lecture explored some of them, with help from Frederic March as Cellini, Charles Laughton as Rembrandt, Jose Ferrer as Toulouse Lautrec, Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh, Charlton Heston as

Michelangelo - and many others since.

Sir Christopher Frayling was until recently Rector of the Royal College of Art in London and Chairman of Arts Council England. An historian, a critic and an award-winning broadcaster on network radio and television, he has written eighteen books on art, design, film and contemporary culture - including Spaghetti Westerns, Sergio Leone - some-thing to do with death and Once Upon a Time in Italy. He is currently a Governor of the British Film Institute.

Pictured at Cooks Academy, Dublin on the night Móna was announced as the Bord Bía winning writer (left to right): Maeve Desmond, Bord Bía; Caroline Hennessy, Irish Food Bloggers Association; David Tiernan, Cooks Academy; Móna Wise; Kristen Jensen, Irish Food Bloggers Association; Vanessa Greenwood, Cooks Academy

Following on from the success of Mapping Spectral Traces IV international symposium, co-convened by Dr Nessa Cronin (Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway) and Dr Karen Till (Department of Geography, NUI Maynooth) in April 2011, we are delighted to announce the international launch of the Mapping Spectral Traces Network website: www.mappingspectraltraces.org

Mapping Spectral Traces is a trans-disciplinary, international group of scholars, practitioners, community leaders and artists who work with and in communities, contested lands and diverse environments. As part of a commitment to socially engaged creative and scholarly practice, network members have worked collaboratively and individually on projects that ‘map’ the unseen and unacknowledged difficult pasts that continue to structure present-day social relations.

The network is linked through its members (artists, landscape architects, architects, scholars, urban professionals, curators, media experts, local historians and community-based practitioners), and to a number of related initiatives and research groupings across its partner collaboratives and institutions across the humanities, social sciences, and visual, conceptual and

performing arts.

Further details available here or contact Dr Nessa Cronin, Centre for Irish Studies. nessa.cronin@nuigalway.ie

MAPPING SPECTRAL TRACES—NEW WEBSITE

Student PrizesStudent PrizesStudent Prizes

Page 7 Issue 10

Congratulations to Dara Folan who was awarded the

2011 NUI Mansion House Prize for the best

undergraduate essay in Ireland on the subject of Irish

History. Dara was also awarded Scoláireacht Chiste

Theach an Ard Mhéara sa Ghaeilge. Dara is also one of

the first group to receive a fellowship to pursue the

newly established PhD in Digital Arts and Humanities.

Dara is based in the Moore Institute. His topic is “Revival,

Revolution and Independence: Galway city c.1891‐1922"

which will probe the impact of the Gaelic Revival and

cultural nationalism on urban Galway and provide a

comparative study of the town during the War of

Independence and Civil War era. “I hope to probe the

impact of cultural nationalism and the Irish Revolution

on Galway city during this period and to initiate a

digitization project of An Taibhdhearc collection, held in

the James Hardiman Library archives.” (Dara)

Congratulations to Cristina Folsom who was the first recipient of the Huxley Prize. The prize was awarded to the best undergraduate essay on a subject relating to early Irish history, utilizing primary sources. The Huxley Prize was established with a very generous benefaction from Prof G. L. Huxley, MRIA. Dara Folan

Graduation 2011

PhD GRADUATIONS

Page 8 Humanities Update

English Staff and graduands 2011

Dr Felix Ó Murchadha (Philosophy) and

Dr Erin Flynn

Drs Sheila McCormick, Katrin Urschel, Liam

Burke (Film), Julia Walther, Lisa Padden (English)

Prof Sean Ryder(centre),with Drs Tim Keane and Anne Sofia Karhio (English)

Congratulations too to our History graduates Drs:

Jackie Uí Chionna, Orla Power, Laura Kelly

Irish Studies Graduands Dr Méabh Ní Fhuartháin and Dr Leo Keohane pictured with

Prof Tadhg Foley, Dr Nessa Cronin and Dr Louis De Paor

(Continued from page 6) improving the overall notion and image of what Irish food is all about. They decided to enlist a few devotees from the highly active world of food-blogging and turned immediately to the Irish Food Bloggers Association. A food-writer’s dream competition was born. ‘Interested in working on your writing style?’ Bord Bía asked: ‘Think you could do with a few tips on food photography? Fancy winning a place on a residential food bloggers’ photogra-phy and writing workshop in Weimar, Germany?’ The competition, aimed at already active bloggers (mine is at wisewords.ie ), required the entrants firstly to write a piece about Irish beef and post it on their respective blogs. Once our written pieces had been submitted and went live, the list was whittled down to four entrants based on the bloggers’ writing skills and

photographic eye. I was chosen as one of the four finalists. The second part of the competition was to compete against the other finalists in a good old cook-off. Being married to a chef for sixteen years gives one something of an upper hand when it comes to cooking a steak – my work in the kitchen thankfully matched what I’d done at the desk, and I was the overall winner. I was thereby presented with a unique opportunity to work closely with Bord Bía on promotional materials and help spread awareness of Irish food and drink across Europe. In essence, I was Bord Bía on that Weimar trip. I was sent as their single representative and had to educate the other international participants in the beauty of all things Irish food-wise. The ‘Plate 2 Page’ organization ran the workshop and it was led by some of the major names in food media across the world: Jamie

Schler, a food-writer for The Huffington Post; Jeanne Horak-Druiff, a food-writer from South Africa based in London’; Meeta Woolf, a food photographer from Weimar; and Ilva Beretta, an Italian food photographer who does high-profile shoots for Bon Appetit and Gourmet. My time spent at the workshop allowed me, as a writer, to engage and build relationships with twelve other food-writers and photographers from all over the world. We spent four days in very close quarters, fiddling with camera lenses, looking for the perfect light, and warbling with sentences, looking for the perfect words. It was here that I finally placed my feet solidly in the food-writing field. As a consequence of my newly acquired experience I was offered a spot as a food-writer for the Galway Now Magazine to which I currently contribute monthly articles.

Creative Writing Student Awards

At the same time, on the occasion of her final official visit to the area, copies of the four volumes of the Yearbook to date were also officially presented to outgoing President Mary McAleese by Cootehall Parish, where McGahern spent much of his childhood and where McAleese has her paternal roots.

The fourth volume of the University’s John McGahern Yearbook was launched in July during the fifth annual International Seminar and Summer School on John McGahern in County Leitrim. The new volume has an exclusive visual focus on the city of Dublin during the formational period McGahern spent there – as he insisted himself: ‘I came to whatever intellectual age I am in the Dublin of the late 1950s and early 1960s’. The Digital Projects section of Dublin City Public Libraries sourced the images, and in keeping with this contribution and Dublin’s status as the fourth UNESCO City of Literature, a copy of the Yearbook, together with the preceding three volumes, was officially presented to the Libraries and Dublin UNESCO City of Literature in September.

John McGahern News

The new volume has an exclusive visual focus on the city of

Dublin during the formational period McGahern spent there

Page 9 Issue 10

Pictured at the Dublin presentation, which was held at the City Library and Archive, were (left to right): Dr Enda Leaney, Digital Projects, Dublin City Public Libraries; Dr John Kenny, Yearbook editor; Margaret Hayes, Dublin City Librarian; Jane Alger, Director, Dublin UNESCO City of Literature; Michael Molloy, Digital Projects.

In this job, ‘civic engagment’ is of course its own reward. However, a recent invitation I accepted to reflect upon current issues in light of my own research into the past was both a challenge and an opportunity for me. When the audience was to be a gathering of three-score venerable missionary priests and I was to speak on Catholicism in the modern world and in modern Ireland, you can imagine how my trepidation increased as I prepared to go to Dalgan Park, Co. Meath, on 11 October last. Dalgan Park is the home of the Irish Columbans. Founded in 1918 the Columbans are a missionary society of priests (mainly Irish) destined for foreign missions: their founding title was that of the Maynooth Mission to China. The Far East magazine propagated their work and that of their Columban Sisters: from the be-ginning the Colum-bans were not imperial but in tune with local culture, living out faith and justice from Latin America to the Philip-pines, where the late Fr. Niall O’Brien, one-time hostage and long-time pastor, was but one of many Columban missionaries.

Anyone, irrespective of beliefs, would be a little awed by such an audience. Suitably tremulous, I set off for Co. Meath with two talks in my satchel. At the request of rector Pat Raleigh, I spoke first about France at the turn of the twentieth century, and

the dramatic clash of Catholicism and secularism in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair. Marked by scandal, and a radical clash of

religious and political identities, the period also saw the growth of a distinguished lay Catholic intellectual tradition: my historical talk put in context one such lay activist, Marc Sangnier (1873-1950). Founder in 1900 of

the Social Catholic movement Le Sillon (‘The Furrow’), Sangnier espoused staunch Catholicism alongside a democratic and socially progressive economic programme. Overcoming anticlericalism and church scepticism, Sangnier founded an influential Christian Democratic strand in French politics. Sangnier’s subsequent pioneering role in the European peace movement forms the mainstay of my book The Disarmament of Hatred which is currently in press with Palgrave Macmillan (to appear in 2012).

After tea, my second talk considered Irish Catholicism today. Drawing on church historians and contemporary writers, I reflected on recent scandals and also on the generational shift towards ‘believing without belonging.’ My hospitable hosts at Navan reminded me that it is the healthy tension between heritage and horizon that has often sustained Christianity. The meeting was hopeful rather than cynical. Recent international church initiatives, such as the Courtyard of the Gentiles – held in the past year in Notre-Dame de Paris and

in Rome – have attempted to bring believers and unbelievers together in respectful dialogue for a new global ethic, a common concern of the sparring twins of Catholic theology, Pope Benedict XVI and Hans Kung. I hope my visit to the Columbans, in own its modest way, was a stitch in such a broader design: a fruitful exchange between the realms of faith, culture (and the university), without suspicion but rather a mutual appreciation for the power of words and the service of ideas in the civic sphere.

“...it is the healthy tension between heritage and horizon that has often

sustained Christianity.”

‘Catholicism in a time of crisis: some perspectives from history.’ Dialogue with the Irish Columbans, Dalgan Park, October 2011

by Dr Gearóid Barry

Page 10 Humanities Update

“SELECTED allows you to experience Galway Arts Festival up close in its intermingling of local and international art. Furthermore, whether you’re an arts practitioner or a fan, it’ll give you the tools and inspiration to satisfy and drive your own creativity.” Student participant Christopher McCormack describes the experience. Full article here.

Internship programme with NUI Galway and Galway Arts Festival

Page 11 Issue 10

Centre for Irish Studies IACI—NUI Galway Fellow 2011—12

We are delighted to announce that the IACI-NUI Galway Fellow for 2011-12 is Professor Donna L. Potts from Kansas State University. While doing research for her book, The Pastoral Tradition in Contemporary Irish Poetry (Missouri, 2011), she became interested in the impact of the environmental movement on contemporary Irish literature and culture. During her research stay in Galway, she plans to visit sites of recent environmental protests, interview writers whose work responds to these protests, and work with sociologists who have documented Ireland's environmental movement.

Professor Potts will also give a lecture as part of the Irish Studies Seminar Series 2011-12 at the Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway on 8th December 2011, entitled ‘The Wearing of the Deep Green’: Environmentalism in Irish Literature and Culture’. Beidh fáilte roimh chách. All are welcome to attend.

Donna L. Potts IACI—NUI Galway Fellow

SUMMER INTERNSHIP SCHEME FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

The School of Humanities was delighted to be able to offer five students placements during the Summer 2011 under this new Scheme. Funding was provided by the Research Office and enabled students to conduct research at archives and libraries in Dublin and Galway as well as to attend conferences in Ireland and the UK.

Dr John Cunningham and Dr Daniel Carey acted as mentors for these students.

The Vice-Dean for Research Dr Marie Mahon and the Research Office are anxious to continue the

Scheme next year and they hope to be able to approve the funding for this in the coming weeks.

The Research Office is open to the idea of changes being made to the format of the scheme, to best suit the needs of the School and to maximize the benefits from the Scheme . One of the issues raised by a number of colleagues who were disappointed at the late announcement of the scheme this year relates to attracting international students. The Research Office has also indicated that we could change the condition

restricting the scheme to students who are not in their final year, if it better suited our needs.

These changes to the scheme will allow Disciplines to raise student awareness of the Scheme, and attract more applicants. Broadening the cohort who may apply will also present opportunities for the best possible candidates to be recruited.

If you wish to make your views known on this matter please contact Dr Marie Mahon marie.mahon@nuigalway.ie

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT CORNER

VOLUMES OF CHARACTER The past and future of the printed book

LINENHALL ARTS CENTRE CASTLEBAR, CO MAYO

Saturday, November 12, 2—5pm

Dr Elizabeth Tilley of the English Department at NUIG will discuss the golden age of the Irish publishing trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a time when print was unquestionably the dominant medium for the dissemination of ideas. Issues that are of increasing concern today, such as intellectual property rights in a new medium, were faced then in the struggle against ‘piratical’ publishers. Full details.

National University of Ireland, Galway

In September Tony Tracy and Conn Holohan of the Huston school of Film & Digital Media organised a two day

conference exploring the changing representations of masculinity in Irish popular culture over the past 20 years.

The conference attracted academics across a wide‐range of disciplines from both Ireland and abroad, with over

thirty papers being presented during the two days. The keynote speakers were Professor Diane Negra from UCD,

who addressed the gendered nature of media discourse around the economic recession, and Dr Sean Campbell of

Anglia University, who discussed second‐generation Irish musicians in the UK.

FROM JACK’S ARMY TO JEDWARD… Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture 1990-2011

CONFERENCE

Please send contributions for the newsletter to:

Karen Walsh

Room 309, Level 1

Tower 1

Email: karenm.walsh@nuigalway.ie

Phone: 091 495689

CONGRATULATIONS to Dr Patrick Lonergan on the publication of his recent book Synge and his Influences launched at the Synge Summer School by Dr Riana O’Dwyer in July 2011.

Pictured in Dublin with Mr Jimmy Deenihan, Minister for Tourism, Sport and Culture, at a celebration at the Gaiety Theatre in September 2011 to mark the publication.