IASIL JAPAN Newsletter2012 No. 1
International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures
April 2012

1. Election of New Executive Committee Members
As the term of the present Executive Committee Members is to be over at the end of
December 31, 2012, the election for the new members is scheduled from the end ofApril to the middle of May and the ballot counting will be in late May. If you are a goodstanding member of IASIL Japan, namely, a member who has paid the 2011
membership fee by the end of February of 2012, you will receive your ballot sheet by
the end of April. Please return it to the office by May 15.
Ballot Counting Members are as follows: Mitsuko Ohno, Beverly Curran,Sachiyo Yamada, and Kazuhiro Doki
2. Plans for IASIL JAPAN 2012 Conference
At the Committee Meeting held on March 17, plans for the 29th Conference ofIASIL-JAPAN have been confirmed.
Dates: Oct. 6 (Sat.) & Oct 7(Sun)
Venue: Meiji University
Theme: “Irish Voyages”
Guest Speakers: Dr. Sinead Morrissey (Poet) and Dr. Irene de Angelis (Undernegotiation. See more details in the item 6 at the end of this letter)
Symposium1: “Between Islands”
Chair: Ken’ichi Matsumura (Chuo University)
Panelists: Masaaki Takeda (The University of Tokyo)
Hiroko Ikeda (Hiroshima City University)1

Ken’ichi Matsumura (Chuo University)
Symposium2: “Taking Wings: Birds and Flight in Irish Writing”
Chair: (to be fixed)
Panelists: Beverly Curran (Aichi Shukutoku University)
Mitsuko Ohno (Aichi Shukutoku University)
Others (to be fixed)
3. Call for Papers!
1) Applicants for the paper reading are requested to send the office below 250–300
words synopsis as an MS Word attachment. Besides the synopsis itself, please
send details of the author’s affiliation, full postal and e-mail addresses, andtelephone and fax numbers by the end of May.
2) The length of the paper to be read at the conference should be within 20minutes.
IASIL JAPAN Officec/o Dr. Kazuhiro Doki
Aichi University of Education
1 Hirosawa, Igaya-cho, Kariya-city
Aichi 448-8542
Tel & Fax: 0566-26-2244
E-mail: kdoki@auecc.aichi-edu.ac.jp

4. New IASIL Japan Website
Our website is renewed on April 1(This is not a joke!). Thanks to the great effortsof Ms. Sachiyo Yamada, our treasurer, the new IASIL Japan website has obtained a newaddress. The new address is as follows: http://iasil.jp; so please look into thisfashionable and user-friendly site! Also we would like to express our hearty
gratitude to Prof. Peter O’ Connor and Ms. Miyuki Kyotani, who have beenkindly in charge of the former website for more than ten years.
5. Cosponsoring Yeats' Exhibition with the University of Tokyo
The Yeats Exhibition will be held at the Komaba Museum, University of Tokyo,
May 12 - July 1. Some precious books and historical items related to Yeats will be2

exhibited. A new production of The Dreaming of the Bones (May 19) and a lecture by
Prof. Terence Brown (June 6) are also scheduled. (Details to be announced later.)Everybody is welcome; admission free.
6. About Guests invited to 2012 IASIL Japan Conference
Dr. Sinéad Morrissey was born on 24 April 1972 in Portadown,County Armagh, Northern Ireland. She has published four collections ofpoetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996); Between Here and There(2002); The State of the Prisons (2005); and Through the Square Window(2009). Three of these collections have been shortlisted for the T. S. EliotPrize. She was the 2002 Poetry International Writer in Residence at theRoyal Festival Hall and is currently Lecturer at the Seamus Heaney Centrefor Poetry, Queen's University, Belfast. Having lived and worked in Japan
and New Zealand, she now lives in Northern Ireland. She was selected by
the British Council to take part in the Writers' Train Project in China in2003. In 2007 she was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Dr.
Morrissey was the winner of the UK National Poetry Competition of thesame year, and in 2010, Through The Square Window was shortlisted for theForward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year).
Dr. Irene de Angelis holds a Research Fellowship in English
Literature at the University of Turin, Italy. With Joseph Woods she isco-editor of Our Shared Japan: An Anthology of Contemporary Irish Poetry(2007), and has published numerous articles on contemporary Irish poetry.
Her most recent work, The Japanese Effect in Contemporary Irish Poetry(2012) provides a stimulating, original and lively analysis of theIrish-Japanese literary connection from the early 1960s to 2006. Drawing on
unpublished new sources, Dr. De Angelis includes poets from a broad rangeof cultural backgrounds with richly varied styles: Seamus Heaney, Derek
Mahon, Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon, together with younger poets suchas Sinéad Morrissey and Joseph Woods.

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