The Philip and Linda ARMSTRONG VISITING SCHOLAR
Celtic Studies welcomes two Visiting Professors, Liam Harte and Yvonne Whelan, in the
Fall term of 2008. They are teaching SMC 348Y1 Modern Irish History. Liam is based at
the University of Manchester and Yvonne at University of Bristol.
Here is more
information taken from their web pages:
Liam Harte
Lecturer in Irish and Modern Literature, English and American Studies, University of Manchester
Specific research interests: As my job title suggests, my main research interests are in the field of modern Irish literature, with particular emphasis on twentieth-century fiction and autobiography. My research in these areas has yielded two collections of essays, Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories (2000; co-edited with Michael Parker) and Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation and Society (2007), both published by Palgrave Macmillan. I have also published essays and articles on the postcolonial dimensions of Irish fiction after Joyce, focusing on novelists such as Liam O'Flaherty, Seamus Deane, William Trevor and Colm Toibin. These works form part of my ongoing attempts to elaborate a critical application of postcolonial perspectives to Irish writing, and to explore the ways in which the discourses of imperialism, nationalism and revisionism have been represented and contested by writers from different backgrounds and generations.
I also have a strong interest in the literature of the Irish diaspora, with a particular focus on Irish writers in Britain. My publications in this area include an analysis of the aesthetics of migrancy and displacement in the work of Walter Macken and Tom Murphy and a discussion of the poetics of performativity in Irish migrant autobiography from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The themes of migration, memory and creativity will be further explored in my next book, The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725-2001.
I am a member of the Editorial Boards of two international journals, New Hibernia Review and Irish Studies Review, and I belong to both the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures and the British Association of Irish Studies. I was a Visiting Scholar on the Irish Studies Programme at Boston College in 2002.
Yvonne Whelan
Senior Lecturer, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. Previously a Lecturer in Cultural Geography at the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages, University of Ulster, also taught at the Department of Geography, University College Dublin and was the O'Brien Visiting Professor of Irish Studies at the Centre for Canadian-Irish Studies, Concordia University, Montréal in 2004.
Research Interests: My research straddle the boundaries of cultural and historical geography and seeks to tease out the complex relations between culture, landscape, memory and identity in different cultural contexts. My key publications in this area include a monograph, Reinventing Modern Dublin (Dublin: UCD Press, 2003); a co-edited volume, Heritage Memory and the Politics of Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate: 2007), and numerous articles and essays in journals such as Environment and Planning, Irish Geography and The Journal of Historical Geography.