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An Unhealthy Intersection?
Cultural Politics and the Politics of Culture in Ireland, 1789 to the Present
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28-29 March 2019
Woolf Institute, Cambridge, England
ABOUT the conference
The conference will interrogate both the planning of culture by politicians (‘cultural politics’) and how men and women of culture have mobilised in its defence (‘politics of culture’), particularly apposite theme in the current climate of commemoration and reflection on the intersections between culture and politics in modern Ireland.
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The conference has 15 speakers over two days and will engage with topics as wide-ranging as the Irish Diaspora.The organising committee believes that interdisciplinary approaches can often yield the most interesting results, and as such we especially welcomed proposals from graduate students across a broad range of disciplines such as English Literature, Political Science, International Relations, Divinity, and Sociology. The full schedule can be seen here.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Professor R.F. Foster
Professor Foster was Carroll professor of Irish History at Hertford College, Oxford
from 1996 to 2016. Prior to his appointment to the Carroll professorship, he was
Professor of Modern British History at Birkbeck, University of London, and held visiting fellowships at St Antony's College, Oxford, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Princeton University.
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He has written early biographies of Charles Stewart Parnell and Lord Randolph Churchill, edited The Oxford History of Ireland (1989), and wrote Modern Ireland: 1600–1972 (1988) and several books of essays. Foster produced a much-acclaimed two-part biography of William Butler Yeats which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and collaborated with Fintan Cullen on a National Portrait Gallery exhibition, 'Conquering England: the Irish in Victorian London'.
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In 1989, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). He is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL), and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS).
In 2015, he was awarded the British Academy Medal for his book Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890–1923.
CONFERENCE COMMITTEE
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Venue
Woolf Institute,
Westminster College, Madingley Road,
Cambridge CB3 0UB
