IASIL Japan Newsletter2015 No. 2
The Japan Branch of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures
September 2015

1. IASIL Japan Conference 2015, Prefectural University of Hiroshima
IASIL Japan Conference 2015 will meet on Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 October at Prefectural
University of Hiroshima with the theme of "Commemorations: Marking Time in Ireland". Please findenclosed the programme, the abstracts, as well as the reply postcard, which we ask you to fill in andreturn to us.

The poster of the conference is downloadable at the IASIL Japan website.

and guests are welcome to attend.

Students

We hope to meet you all there, and that you will find time to visit

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in this year of commemorations.
The reply postcard must reach Professor Yoko Kubo, treasurer, no later than 19 September
2015.
About the Guest Speakers
Patrick Crotty is Professor of Scottish and Irish Literature at the University of Aberdeen and a
regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. He served as Director of the Yeats International
Summer School from 2006-2008.

In addition to editing The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry (2010),

with a preface by Seamus Heaney, Professor Crotty contributed some sixty translations to theanthology. In the Financial Times Roy Foster described the book: ‘Much more than an anthology, thisis an alternative history of Ireland, in poems that burn into the mind – the newly minted no less thanthe canonical.’ Recent publications include essays on Seamus Heaney, Hugh MacDiarmid and W. B.
Yeats, and review articles on Edwin Morgan and Sorley MacLean.
Moya Cannon was born in Co. Donegal, spent most of her adult life in Galway and now lives inDublin. She is a winner of the Brendan Behan Award and the O Shaughnessy Award. Her previous
collections of poems are Oar (1990), The Parchment Boat (1997), Carrying the Songs (2007) andHands (2011), which was nominated for the Irish Times / Poetry Now Award. Her poems reflect
preoccupations with landscape and seascape, with archaeology, with music, with language itself andwith our visceral attachment to the beauty of the earth. Her forthcoming collection, Keats Lives is duefrom Carcanet Press in 2015. She enjoys working with musicians and has collaborated with The Con
Tempo String Quartet as well as with harper Kathleen Loughnane and traditional singers Maighréadand Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill, amongst others.
12. Election of New Executive Committee Members
The ballot sheets were opened on 6 June by the secretariat with Hiroko Mikami and Masami Nakao
serving as Election Officers.

The results will be announced at the Annual General Meeting on 4

October during the conference at Prefectural University of Hiroshima.

3. Payment of annual membership fees
If you have not already paid your membership fees for 2015, please do so by the end of September, as
the journals will be distributed to paid-up members at the conference.
non-paid fees for past years as well.

This of course applies toPayment details are available at the IASIL Japan website.

4. Report of IASIL 2015, University of York, UK
On July 20-24, 2015, the annual conference of the IASIL was hosted by the University of York,England. Themed ‘Reconciliations,’ the five-day event which took place in the beautiful medieval cityof York comprised of enthralling plenary sessions, panels, and social programmes.
The four thought-provoking plenary talks were given by Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Professors James
Chandler, Eve Patten, and Hugh Haughton. Unanimously praised by the audience was Professor
Patten’s lecture which explored the ideological connections between Irish and English literary figures
active in the 1930s in terms of affinity rather than conflicting views. The lectures were fleshed out bya variety of fascinating individual papers. Delegates from Japan who read their papers (along withmore than 120 other speakers) include Professors Kumiko Yamada, Iain Twiddy, Naoko Toraiwa,
Eishiro Ito, Tetsuya Suzuki, Yoko Sato, as well as two Ph.D. candidates So Onose and myself.
The intensive academic programme of the week was partly offset on the third day when the wholeafternoon was devoted to social programmes including a literary excursion to Shandy Hall and a booklaunch by Bernard O’Donoghue in King’s Manor Refectory, concluding with a traditional music
session, a prerequisite for every Irish gathering. The conference banquet in the historic Merchant
Adventurer’s Hall, which I sadly had to miss, was also reportedly rewarding.
A form of reconciliation was also to be seen in the three panels mostly conducted in the Irish
language set up this year. The significance of Irish language literature was emphasised by papers bothin Irish and English, justifying the idea that lay behind the renaming of the organisation from the‘Anglo-centric’ International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature (IASAIL) to its more
inclusive current name in 1998. It is hoped that the reconciliatory atmosphere that was prevalentthroughout the conference will be carried on to next year when the annual gathering takes place underthe heading ‘Change’ from 25 to 29 July at the University of Cork, Ireland.
Kaori Hirashige
PhD Candidate, University College Dublin2

5. IASIL Annual Conference, 25-29 July 2016
The IASIL conference will be hosted by University College Cork, Ireland, next year with the theme of"Change".

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IASIL Japan
c/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/>4