1. IASIL Japan Conference 2014, Waseda University
As has been announced, IASIL Japan Conference 2014 will meet on Saturday 11 and Sunday 12October at Waseda University. Please find enclosed the programme, the synopses, as well as thereply postcard, which we ask you to fill in and return to us. The poster of the conference
designed by a member is available at the IASIL Japan website. Students who arenon-members are eligible for free attendance to the conference by showing their ID andregistering their name at the reception.
The reply postcard must reach the office no later than 27 September 2014.
2. Waseda University Symposium
The IASIL Japan Conference 2014 is organized in coordination with Waseda University, where
the symposium "The Age of Centenaries: a Century of Irish History and Literature" will be held
on Friday 10 October. All members are welcome.
Venue: 4th floor, Building 11, Waseda Campus
Time: 14:50 - 17:30
Chair: Kazuo Oikawa
Panelists: Shigeo Shimizu, Fintan O'Toole, Anne Fogarty, Hiroko Mikami
3. Payment of annual membership fees
If you have not already paid your membership fees for 2014, please do so by the end ofSeptember, as the journals will be distributed to paid-up members at the conference.
course applies to non-paid fees for past years as well.

This ofPayment details are available at theIASIL Japan website.

4. Report of IASIL 2014, University of Lille, France
The 2014 IASIL Conference took place in Lille, at the Université Sciences Humaine et Sociales– Lille 3 from 14-18 July. The theme of the conference, ‘Embodying/disembodying Ireland’,
was taken in varied directions by speakers over the packed five day series of panels andplenaries. Clíona Ní Ríordáin’s opening Plenary Lecture on Monday 14 July concerned ‘How

anthologies of Irish poetry constitute and embody the nation’, and this was followed on Tuesday
15 July with two intense morning sessions, with panels on ‘Early Modern Ireland’, ‘StagingRevolution’, and ‘Visual Arts and Oral Testimony’, and a roundtable discussion on ‘The Bodyin Pain in Irish Culture’, featuring Fionnula Dillane, Margaret Kelleher and Emilie Pine, who
discussed ‘the trans-historical aesthetics that inform representations of trauma and the body inpain in Irish culture across genres from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, and how thesedebates inform research-based teaching.’ The second set of morning sessions covered ‘Ireland& Modernism’, ‘Contemporary Theatre’, ‘Trauma & Traces’, and the first panel devoted to themain thread running through the entire conference, ‘Remembering WW1’. The location of thisyear’s conference so near to some of the battlefields brought a special charge to proceedings
throughout the week.
The theme of the body was prominent in the plenary lecture by Lisa Fitzpatrick, ‘The
Vulnerable Body on the Irish Stage’, and in the afternoon sessions, which included a panel on‘Prison Narratives’ chaired by guest speaker Declan Kiberd, and which had particular focus on
imprisoned women (Louise Henaff) and on hunger striker, Bobby Sands, with the bodyexamined as site of resistance (Stephen John Dilks; Fiona McCann). A very full day ended withwell-received poetry readings by the special guests Paula Meehan and Theo Dorgan, who went
on to provide a lively and engaged presence throughout the conference.
The morning sessions on Wednesday 16 July continued to probe the breadth and depthof the conference theme, with sessions devoted to James Clarence Mangan, ‘Gender and theNorth’, ‘Intercultural Exchanges’, and ‘Irish-English Exchanges’, featuring papers on Patrick
McCabe, Paul Muldoon, Translation, Heinrich Böll’s Irish Journal, Trollope, and Thackeray,among others. The day’s session ended with a fascinating look at ‘Old age, old gaze: shreds ofsympathy for the ageing body in contemporary Irish literature’ by Carle Bonafous-Murat.
The afternoon was taken up with organised visits to the marvellous Piscine de Roubaix museum,the Palais des Beaux-Arts, and ‘Vieux Lille’, part of the splendid series of activities provided bythe organisers throughout the conference.
The panels on Thursday 17 July were equally wide-ranging: ‘The Theatricalities of Irish
Cruelties’, ‘Gothic and Fantastic’, and sessions devoted to Sebastian Barry, Joyce, Friel andCarr, and Yeats. Lucy McDiarmid’s plenary lecture presented moving accounts of theexperiences of women involved in the 1916 Rising, and examined how the physical anxietiesand discomforts related in these accounts reflected the larger social world of women in earlytwentieth century Ireland. The afternoon panels featured the second devoted to ‘Remembering

World War 1’, and also the second panel of the conference devoted to Yeats, which was chairedby IASIL Japan member Andrew Fitzsimons. There were also panels on ‘Contemporary Poetry’,with a Japanese contributor, Tetsuya Suzuki, who looked in his paper at the work of Heaney andLongley, ‘Modern Theatre’ and the ‘Contemporary Novel’. The playwright Colin Teevan ended
the day’s sessions with an hour-long talk in which he reflected on his relations with ‘Irishness’.
The evening’s social event was a trip to Gare St. Sauveur to see a concert by the band Lame
Squid who played a lively set of traditional Irish music.
The final day opened with panels on Sinéad Morrissey, featuring IASIL Japan member
Naoko Toraiwa, Beckett, ‘Masculinities’, Famine Narratives, and ‘Violence, Trauma andTroubles’, which featured papers on Kevin Barry (Joanne O’Sullivan), Child Abuse (NiamhCampbell), and the Aftermath Project (Anne Goarzin). The late morning session saw panels
devoted to ‘Irish Drama Outside Ireland’, including Peter Kuch’s wonderful examination of The
Hibernian Father and nineteenth century Irish Australia, and to ‘Disappearing Bodies on theStage’, which was principally devoted to Beckett. Due to a change in the programme two panels
had to be combined and so Ciaran O’Neill’s splendid examination of ‘Conflict in Poetry
Beyond Ireland’ which focused on Ciaran Carson’s Breaking News and its treatment of theCrimean War, featured alongside Anne Cormican’s fascinating work on ‘Bodies at War’ inWilliam Orpen and Sean O’Casey, and Michael Pierse’s paper on ‘Class in Irish Writing of theFirst World War’. After the splendid open-air lunch, there was a magnificent, funny and moving
re-rendering of The Brother, a one-act play based on the work of Flann O’Brien, adapted andperformed by Gerry Smyth and David Llewellyn. The day and the conference itself came to anend with Declan Kiberd’s lecture ‘War Mysticism: Samuel Beckett, Simone Weil and C.S.
Lewis’, which covered a wide field with Professor Kiberd’s typical sweep and verve.
The conference banquet was held in the small town of Lens, an hour’s bus journey fromLille, and amid the wonderful food and drink there was time for poems and songs from, amongothers, Declan Kiberd, Matthew Campbell, Andrew Fitzsimons, Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos, and ashow-stopping performance by Alexandra Poulain, one of the organisers of the whole event.
After the conference many members went on the post-conference tour of the Somme and Paris.
Unfortunately, due to scheduling, only three representatives from Japan could attend thisyear’s conference, but the IASIL Executive expressed the hope that the return to a later date fornext year’s event will mean many more members from Japan will be able to attend. IASIL 2015
will be held at the University of York 20-24 July 2015, when the theme will be ‘Reconciliations’and the plenary speakers Maire Ni Mhaonaigh, James Chandler, Eve Patten, and HughHaughton.

Andrew Fitzsimons
Gakushuin University

5. IASIL 2015, University of York, UKIASIL will hold its annual conference at the University of York on Monday 20 to Friday 24 July2015.

IASIL Japan officec/o Prof. Kumiko YamadaCollege of Intercultural Communication, Rikkyo University
3-34-1 Nishi-Ikebukuro, Toshima-ku, Tokyo 171-8501, Japan
Tel: +81-(0)3-3985-4229

E-mail: <secretary@iasil.jp>

Website: <http://iasil.jp/>