IASIL Japan Newsletter
2021 No. 2The Japan Branch of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures
September 2021

1. IASIL Japan Conference 2021
The IASIL Japan Conference 2021 will be held online in the form of a Zoom Meeting on Saturday 9and 10 October, with the theme of ‘Revolutions/Resolutions’. Please go to our Conference website<http://iasil.jp/conference.html> and register by 30 September 2021. Access information and theZoom meeting details will be sent to your registered email address no later than 4 October. The
conference 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
Matthew Campbell has been Professor of Modern Literature at the [University of] York since 2011. Hestudied at Trinity College Dublin and Cambridge University Authors to which his criticism returns
include Wordsworth, Moore, Tennyson, Browning, Mangan, Hopkins, Yeats, Joyce, Heaney andMuldoon.
Professor Campbell’s Irish Poetry Under the Union, 1801-1924 was published in 2013. Hecontributed the chapter on poetry from 1830-1890 in the Cambridge History of Irish Literature, and achapter on ‘Davis, Mangan, Ferguson’ is in the first volume of the Blackwell Companion to Irish
Literature.
As part of his ongoing work on a ‘four-nations’ British poetry inflected with Celticism, Professor
Campbell gave the 2008 Warton Lecture on English Poetry to the British Academy, on ‘Wordsworthand the Druids’. ‘Recovering Ancient Ireland’ has appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Irish Poetry.
Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry, a study of prosody and agency in Tennyson, Browning,
Hopkins and Hardy, was published in 1999, and he was the editor of the Tennyson Research
Bulletin from 1999 to 2004. A chapter on the Victorian sonnet was published in 2011 in The Cambridge
Companion to the Sonnet, and the chapter on ‘Rhyme’ in the Oxford Handbook to Victorian Poetry(2013).
Professor Campbell also writes on modern and contemporary poetry, and an edited collection, TheCambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry was published in 2003. He has written articles
and reviews on contemporary Irish poetry, most notably on Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, butalso on war poetry and metaphor in the modern Irish poem. His next major project has been1

commissioned by Cambridge University Press and is a History of Irish Poetry from 1789 to the presentday. An edited volume Irish Literature in Transition, 1830-1880 appeared in 2020.
Leontia Flynn is Reader at School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen’s University, Belfast. Shewas born in County Down in 1974, and completed a PhD at Queen’s University, Belfast. In 2001 she
won an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, These Days (2004), won the Forward Poetry Prize(Best First Collection of the Year) in 2004, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. In thesame year, she was named as one of the Poetry Book Society’s 'Next Generation' poets.
Three further collections of poetry have been published: Drives (2008); Profit and Loss (2011), aPoetry Book Society Choice; and The Radio (2017). Profit and Loss and The Radio were both
shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She has also received the Rooney Prize for Irish Writing, a Major
Individual Artist’s Award from the Arts Council NI, The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Prize for Irish
Literature, the AWB Vincent Literary Award and The Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Her work has
appeared in contemporary poetry journals, including Poetry Review, Poetry London, Granta, PoetryIreland Review and Poetry (Chicago), and has been collected in anthologies of contemporary poetry,among others The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry (2010) and Poesie Irlandais Contemporaine (2013).
In her time as a Research Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University,
Belfast, she published a monograph Reading Medbh McGuckian with Irish Academic Press, about
trying to make sense of Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian in light of feminist theory. She also
contributed a chapter on Medbh McGuckian to The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2010).
She edited five issues of the poetry journal The Yellow Nib with Frank Ormsby.
In a 2008 review of Drives for The Guardian, Frances Leviston praises the “currents of difficult
feeling, beneath the wise, glittering fronts of her poems.”

2. Election of New Executive Committee Members
The ballot counting was conducted and observed by the secretariat with Beverly Curran and Haruko

Takakuwa serving as Election Officers, from 7 to 14 June in the form of e-mail discussion.
The results will be announced at the Annual General Meeting on 10 October during the online
conference.

3. Payment of Annual Membership Fees
If you have not already paid your membership fees for 2021, please do so by the end of September, as
the journals will be distributed to paid-up members after the conference. This of course applies tonon-paid fees for past years, as well. If you are applying for a Student membership, please provide theoffice with a copy of a valid student ID with your payment.

2Membership with JIS
Membership with JIS & IUR
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Couple membership with JIS¥10,000
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If you live abroad, you can use PayPal from April 2021. Please follow the instruction shown in theemail send to you by Treasurer Hironao Kobayashi <treasurer@iasil.jp>. Or you can transfer yourmembership fee to the following account:
Bank Name: Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, LTD.
SWIFT CODE: BOTKJPJT
Branch Name: Kawagoe Branch (Branch No. 382)
Branch Address: 1-2-7 Shintomi-cho, Kawagoe City, Saitama Prefecture, 350-0043, Japan
Tel: +81 (0)49-222-2351
Account Name: IASIL Japan Treasurer Hironao Kobayashi
Account No: 0343056

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 ofJournal of Irish Studies and Irish University Review for which you have paid, according to the tablebelow.
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rates for JIS & IUR
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4. Report of IASIL 2021, University of Łódź, Poland
The IASIL 2021 Conference, postponed from last year because of the coronavirus, was held onlinefrom the 19-23, July 2021, with the host venue the Faculty of Philology at the University of Łódź,Poland, conducting the conference through the medium of Microsoft Teams. The conference theme,‘Creative Borders’, was rousingly established by the excellent keynote lecture, ‘Borderation: Fictions ofthe Northern Irish Border’ by Maud Ellmann of the University of Chicago.
The time difference between Japan and Poland, however, meant that it was difficult for Japanese
members to attend panels and papers held later in the central European day, but the organizers had madesure that Japanese participants read their own papers at convenient times. So, in one of the first panels,‘Tom Murphy in Translation’, Hiroko Mikami of Waseda University offered her observations on
productions of Murphy in Japan, including an account of a wonderful amateur production of ‘The
Gigli Concert’. Other participants in this illuminating panel included Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos, thechair of the session, who spoke of Murphy as adapted to Brazilian conditions, Zsuzsa Csikai of theUniversity of Pécs, in Hungary, our host, Michal Lachman and Marianne Ni Chinneide of NUI Galway,3

Ireland, who spoke about translating Murphy into Irish, and IASIL President, Ondrej Pilny (CharlesUniversity, Prague) who gave us insights into the difficulties of translating Murphy into Czech, alanguage with less variety in dialect than Murphy’s plays demand. The panel was one of a number
devoted to theatre, and one of the surprising features of this year’s conference was the prominence ofboth papers and panel sessions devoted to theatre in its various forms, and from various perspectives.
Perhaps the most enthusiastic reception was that given to Patrick Lonergan’s ‘Irish Theatres for theAnthropocene: Druid Theatre, Lady Gregory and Coole Park’, a view of theatre from the longperspective of the Anthropocene and the challenging perspective of eco-criticism.
Another interesting feature of the conference was the prominence of ‘Artists in Conversation’sessions, featuring practitioners in various fields discussing their work, including Enda Walsh,
Caitríona O’Reilly, Siofra O’Donovan, Hugo Hamilton and Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi. Occasionally,
technical difficulties with participants’ wifi connections meant that these events didn’t quite proceed
according to plan, but the sessions were among the best-attended and appreciated of the conference.
The conference ended with a provocative and informative panel entitled “Publishing in the21st Century and Age of #MeToo” featuring Kate Costello-Sullivan and Deborah Manion of Syracuse
UP, Jennika Baines (Indiana University Press), Emilie Pine, outgoing editor of the IUR and Donald E.
Morse of the University of Debrecen.
Unfortunately, contributions from Japan were fewer this year than usual. In addition to Professor
Mikami’s contribution, Hiroko Ikeda gave a lively paper on Derek Mahon, Sweeney and Bashō in
Mahon’s The Snow Party, Andrew Fitzsimons spoke about Thomas Kinsella’s poem ‘Baggot StreetDeserta’, and in a session on ‘Poetry and Art’, Naoko Toraiwa, keeping to the theme of the conference,
gave a paper on Sinéad Morrissey entitled ‘Balancing on the Border.’ It’s a great pity we did not havemore contributions and attendees from Japan, but the circumstances this year and last have been
exceptional, and members have faced great personal and professional difficulties.
A final word must go to the organizers of the conference, Joanna Kruczkowska, Michal Lachman,
Katarzyna Ojrzyńska, and Wit Pietrzak whose enormous efforts under very difficult conditions madethis conference possible. Throughout the conference they were on hand to offer technical assistance andhelp to participants and attendees, and that the conference happened at all, but particularly that it went sowell, is entirely down to their hard work, skill, talent, and patient attention.
Andrew Fitzsimons (Gakushuin University)

5. IASIL Annual Conference, 25-29 July 2022
The IASIL conference will be hosted by The University of Limerick. IASIL Japan continues to offer ascholarship for a postgraduate student to attend the IASIL conference. Details will be uploaded in
November on our website.

4IASIL Japan
c/o Toshiki Tatara
Department of English, Faculty of Letters, Yasuda Women’s University
6-13-1 Yasuhigashi, Asaminami-ku, Hiroshima 731-0153, Japan
Tel: +81-(0)80-3701-0547

Email: secretary@iasil.jp

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