IASIL Japan Newsletter2022 No. 2The Japan Branch of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures
September 2022

1. IASIL Japan Conference 2022 (online)
The IASIL Japan Conference 2022 will be held online in the form of a Zoom Meeting on Saturday 8thand Sunday 9th October, with the theme of ‘Ulysses and Beyond’. Please go to our Conference
website <http://iasil.jp/conference.html> and register by 30 September 2022. Access informationand the Zoom meeting details will be sent to your registered email address no later than 4 October. Theconference programme and book of abstracts are downloadable from the IASIL Japan website<http://iasil.jp/conference.html>. We hope to meet you all online.
About the Guest Speakers
Eimear McBride was born in Liverpool in 1976 to Irish parents. The family moved back to Irelandwhen she was three. She spent her childhood in Tubbercurry, Sligo, and Mayo. At the age of 17, she
moved to London to begin her studies at The Drama Centre.
McBride wrote her first novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, in six months but it took nine years to get
it published. Galley Beggar Press of Norwich eventually published it in 2013. A Girl Is a Half-formed
Thing won the inaugural 2013 Goldsmiths Prize and the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction,amongst others.
Her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians (2016), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, andwas shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the RSL Encore Award and the International Dublin
Literary Award. In 2017 she was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship of the Beckett ResearchCentre, University of Reading. In a 2018 Times Literary Supplement poll of 200 critics, academics, andfiction writers, McBride was named one of the ten best British and Irish novelists writing today. Her
third novel Strange Hotel was published by Faber in 2020.
She has contributed forewords to the Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova (Folio Society), Sundog:
the lyrics of Scott Walker (Faber & Faber) and Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy. Her shortstories have appeared in The Guardian, Prospect, The Long Gaze Back (Little Island Press), Dubliners
100 (Tramp Press), Winter Papers (Curlew Editions) and on BBC Radio 4.
Critics on both sides of the Atlantic have praised A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing as a bold and daringdebut. Anne Enright called McBride a “genius”; Joshua Cohen in the New York Times thought it “afuture classic”, and James Wood in the New Yorker hailed it as a “blazingly original novel … fuelled by1

fractured, adventurous language and raw emotion.” This acclaim, combined with the story of McBride’s
almost decade-long search for a publisher, made the book one of the most celebrated literary debuts ofrecent years.
John McCourt was born in Dublin in 1965 and educated at Belvedere College and University College
Dublin. He is Professor English at the University of Macerata. He previously taught at the Universitiesof Trieste and Roma Tre. He is the author of The Years of Bloom: Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920 (LilliputPress, 2001), which has been published in Italian, Hungarian, Spanish, and Japanese. He is also theauthor of Writing the Frontier: Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press,2015). He has edited many volumes, including Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce andCinema (Cork University Press), and James Joyce in Context (Cambridge University Press). He coedited Problems

withAuthority: New

EssaysonFlannO’Brien,with Ruben BorgandPaul Fagan (Cork University Press, 2017). An edited collection entitled Reading Brendan Behan waspublished by Cork University Press in 2019. His study of the reception of Joyce’s Ulysses in Ireland
Consuming Joyce: One Hundred Years of Ulysses in Ireland was published by Bloomsbury in 2022, tomark the centenary of the novel’s publication.
He is co-director of the Trieste Joyce School and President of the International James Joyce
Foundation. In June 2022 he was elected, on the first count, Rector of the University of Macerata.

2. New IASIL Executive Committee for 2022-2025
Rui Carvalho Homem, IASIL Returning Officer, reported in April that the nomination process for theIASIL Executive was complete, and that the list of duly nominated members for the period 2022-2025
is as follows:
Christina Morin – Chairperson

Andrew Fitzsimons – Vice-Chairperson for Japan

Deirdre Flynn – Secretary

Naoko Toraiwa – Representative for Japan

Ailbhe McDaid – Treasurer

Yuri Yoshino – Representative for Japan

Rui Carvalho Homem – Returning Officer

Tetsuko Nakamura – Representative for JapanAll positions were filled and were uncontested. Under the applicable regulations, an election was notnecessary, and the nominations were validated at the AGM at the University of Limerick.

3. Payment of Annual Membership Fees
If you have not already paid your membership fees for the fiscal year of 2022 (April 2022-March2023), please do so by the end of September, as Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 36 (and IUR for those
subscribing) will be distributed to paid-up members after the conference. This of course applies to nonpaid fees for past years, as well. Late payments will be accepted, but your journal(s) will be delivered2

in April 2023. If you are applying for a Student membership, please provide the office with a copy of avalid student ID with your payment.
Membership with JIS
Membership with JIS & IUR¥ 7,000¥ 10,000

Student with JIS*

¥ 5,000

Couple membership with JIS
Couple membership with JIS &IUR

¥ 10,000¥ 13,000

If you live abroad, you can use PayPal. Please follow the instruction shown in the email you havereceiveed from Treasurer Tetsuko Nakamura <treasurer@iasil.jp>. Or you can transfer your membershipfee to the following account:
Bank Name: MUFG Bank, Ltd.
SWIFT Code: BOTKJPJT (in 8 digits); BOTKJPJTXXX (in 11 digits)
Branch Name: Okurayama Branch (Branch No. 308)
Branch Address (new address from 26th September, 2022): 3-7-17 Shin-Yokohama,Kohoku-ku, Yokohama City, Kanagawa Prefecture, 222-0033, Japan
Tel: +81(0)45-475-3822(Current address): 1-17-8 Okurayama, Kohoku-ku, Yokohama City, Kanagawa
Prefecture, 222-0037, Japan. Tel: +81(0)45-544-1011
Account Name: IASIL Japan Treasurer Tetsuko Nakamura
Account No: 0688983 (Savings Account)
The membership fee for overseas members does not include the transfer charge, so please make surethat the exact amount reaches us. Please add the overseas postal charge to mail you the copies of Journalof Irish Studies and Irish University Review for which you have paid, according to the table below.
International postal
Oceania, North America, CentralAsia
South America, Africa
rates for JIS & IUR
America, Europe, Middle East
JIS
¥ 750
¥ 1,000¥ 1,300
JIS & IUR
¥ 1,500¥ 2,000¥ 2,600

4. Report of IASIL 2022 Conference, University of Limerick, Ireland
The IASIL 2022 Conference was held from the 25-29 July 2022, hosted by the School of English, Irishand Communication at the University of Limerick, Ireland. The conference theme was bold, innovative,challenging, important and timely: ‘Intersectional Irelands’. As the organizers put it in the conference
programme: ‘Irish studies scholarship has recently begun to draw on critical race and anti-colonial theory,
migration and diaspora studies, disability studies, feminist and queer theory, and class studies, among
other critical perspectives, to broaden the critical discourse beyond the somewhat static literaryhistorical categories of the past and forge new understandings of Irish literary cultures. […] As Irish
society becomes increasingly multicultural and multilingual, it is timely for us to address theconstruction and representation of intersectionality in our literary culture.’
3The theme facilitated some fascinating keynote addresses, panels, and papers. Professor Patricia
Palmer of Maynooth University, in the address which opened the conference, ‘We Need to Think about
Early Modern Ireland’, reminded us of the importance of the past, not as that which made us what weare, but as a realm of possibilities which, though they never came about, remain as potential sources ofrenewal. The plenary was followed by the opening reception and a reading by the Irish-language poets
Celia de Fréine, Louis de Paor, and Ciara Ní É. An eye-opening element of the conference was theprominence of the Irish language, in readings, but also in plenary addresses and papers, and how lively,
innovative, youthful, and humorous current writing, and indeed scholarship, in the Irish language
appears to be. A special mention must also go to the much-appreciated IASIL PhD forum, presided overby Adam Hanna.
The inclusive and adventurous theme was reflected in the range of panel sessions: ‘Irish TravellerWriting’, ‘Black Irish Representations’, ‘Anticolonial Movements’, ‘“Civilizing” Process’; and theroundtable sessions devoted to ‘Irish Women Writers in London 1880-1940’, and ‘Writing While Trans’,
and all on just the first morning. Such range, as well as reach, continued into the week, with almost
every session and panel providing encounters with new work or new insights into the well-known. Withso much going on, and with so many interesting sessions clashing with each other, one of the difficultiesof the conference was choosing which to attend.
Unfortunately, Japanese representation at the conference was sparse, due partly, and as ever, to thetiming of the conference, but also to the lingering complications of the coronavirus pandemic, as wellas the effect on air travel of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Naoko Toraiwa gave a persuasive anddetailed ecological reading of Sinead Morrissey and Fuyuji Tanigawa offered a ‘transnational’ anecdote
on Seamus Heaney and senryu, while Andrew Fitzsimons gave a paper on the context within Bashō’s
own work of the episode related in Derek Mahon’s ‘The Snow Party’.
Being the first face-to-face IASIL Conference since 2019 meant that the social aspects of the week
were relished, and old and new friendships celebrated. At the Belltable Theatre in Limerick on thesecond day of the conference, there was a wine reception for the launch of the magazine Holy Show,
followed by a performance of that collective’s ‘The Alphabet of Birds’, an audio-visual essay by Sara
Baume, featuring the work of artists Natalia Beylis, Gary Coyle, Laura Fitzgerald, and Baume herself,
who performed the spoken sections of the piece. On the Wednesday evening, there was a Spoken Wordevent at Dolan’s, hosted by Eoin Devereux, featuring poets in Irish and English, including a funny andpowerful performance by Sarah Clancy, and a powerful rendition by Felispeaks, the subject of a paper
during the conference, of her well-known poem ‘They’, as well as a boisterous performance in Irish byDubhán Ó Longáin, which mixed to hilarious, bawdy effect, the mythological and the contemporary.
The event was preceded and followed by traditional music performed by Aileen Dilane and friends. Theconference’s readings and recitals came to an end in the wonderful setting of King John’s Castle on theThursday evening, where writers connected with the University of Limerick, including Lia Mills, Donal4Ryan, Sheila Killian, Helena Close, William Keohane and Lauren Preston, read from their work,
interspersed with music from Sandra Joyce and Niall Keegan.
A sincere thank you to the organisers of the conference, Tina O’Toole, Sorcha De Brun, and theAdministrators, Tracy McAvinue, Tara Giddens and Niamh O’Sullivan, and to our incoming President,
Tina Morin, for putting on such a splendid conference in the spectacular setting of the University ofLimerick.
Andrew Fitzsimons (Gakushuin University)

5. IASIL Annual Conference, 17-21 July 2023
The IASIL 2023 conference will be hosted by The British University in Egypt, with the theme of“Sustainability”. The deadline for CFP has been scheduled for 20th March 2023. For further details,
please visit the following link: https://www.bue.edu.eg/iasil/. If you wish to present a paper at theconference, please renew your membership by the end of November 2022 so that IASIL Japan Officecan register you as eligible for application. IASIL Japan continues to offer a scholarship for a
postgraduate student to attend the IASIL conference. Details will be uploaded in November onour website.

6. Announcement: Seamus Heaney Award, Japan
Nominations, to be received by 30 November 2022, can be sent by email using the subject line ‘Seamus
Heaney Award Japan Nomination’ to: IASIL Japan Office: <secretary@iasil.jp> or Embassy of Ireland,
Japan: <TokyoEmbassy@dfa.ie>. More information can be found on the IASIL Japan website:
http://iasil.jp/news/?p=795.

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IASIL Japan

c/o Yuri Yoshino
Department of English Language and Cultures, Faculty of Letters, Gakushuin University
1-5-1 Mejiro, Toshima-ku, Tokyo 171-8588, Japan
Email: secretary@iasil.jp

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