We are happy to report that Salford is well-represented at this year’s American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS), held at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick on 17 – 21 June. The theme of the conference is ‘Embracing Change, Navigating Uncertainty: Ireland and New Beginnings’.\u00a0Caroline Magennis will be presenting a plenary talk entitled ‘Writing the Body and “Body Work” in new writing from the North of Ireland’ and Katie Barnes will present a paper on the topic of ‘Writing Neurodivergence in the Contemporary Irish Women\u2019s Novel’. Please find the abstracts of these papers below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Caroline Magennis<\/strong>: This paper seeks to reflect on the representational history of the body in writing from the North, with a focus on contemporary texts which take embodied experiences as their narrative catalysts. It will also reflect on the physical work of writing in our discipline, and particularly in writing which borders on life writing and autoethnography. Irish feminist thought has, for decades, thought meticulously through the symbolic potential and representational lacunae that beset Irish ‘body texts’ — I want to claim kinship with this rich lineage and draw attention to the bright future of emerging scholars in this field. We will think about the ways in which twenty-first century texts have offered a more expansive approach both to the representation of the body and also what it means to be a writing body that attends to this work, particularly in the age of the unequal academic workplace. For this, I want to draw on writerly bodies critical, creative and hybrid to consider the work of putting the embodied self back into writing and the potentials and vulnerabilities of a complex, embodied ontology. It will reflect on my own relationship to this ‘body work’, following Judith Butler: \u2018I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations.’ I will use examples from recent fiction, including Louise Kennedy and Michael Magee, alongside my own creative-critical practice to think through how we might bring our bodies with us instead of pretending they don’t exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n