Irish Studies Würzburg - ISWÜ

🆕️📚 Publications

The Animal in Ireland — Real and Imagined
Review of Irish Studies in Europe (RISE) 8.2 (2025) https://risejournal.eu/index.php/rise/issue/view/214
&
The Animal in Ireland — Real and Imagined
Review of Irish Studies in Europe (RISE) 9.1 (2026)
https://risejournal.eu/index.php/rise/issue/view/217

Bergmann, Ina, Maria Eisenmann, Maureen O’Connor and Kirsten Sandrock (eds.)

📺 Videos of the two EFACIS Roundtable Discussion Launches are also available to watch:
Part 1 (11.12.2025): https://youtu.be/bSmmBZ5VmR4?si=WTg6TWw2Pjw9MQIY

Part 2 (11.05.2026):
https://youtu.be/J37orB5UjDg?si=_g1n-IijhpZ6TMa5

New Videocast

Guest Lecture:Dr. Maryam Najafibabanazar (Haliç University in Istanbul, Turkiye),
„Negotiating Female Identity and Feminist Movements in 19th- and 20th-Century Irish and Iranian Society and Literature: A Comparative Perspective“

📺Watch here: https://youtu.be/N568RdhSu4E?is=xVjNTv768Fg6zOlm

More info and videocasts on the ISWÜ website: https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/irish-studies/video-podcasts/

Register for the ISWÜ Guest Lecture

"Negotiating Female Identity and Feminist Movements in 19th- and 20th-Century Irish and Iranian Society and Literature: A Comparative Perspective" by Dr. Maryam Najafibabanazar

⏰️ 30.06.2026, 4-6 pm (online via Zoom)

Registration and more info:
https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/irish-studies/aktuelles/single/news/guest-lecture-maryam-najafibabanazar/

ℹ️ This lecture examines the construction and transformation of female identity in 19th- and 20thcentury Ireland and Iran through a comparative literary and socio-historical lens. By situating women’s experiences within the broader contexts of colonialism, nationalism, religion, and modernization, the talk explores how feminist consciousness emerges in parallel yet distinct ways across these two cultures. In Ireland, the rise of nationalist movements and the legacy of British colonialism shaped gender roles, often positioning women as symbolic bearers of cultural identity while restricting their social agency. Literary texts—from the late 19th century to modernist works such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—reveal tensions between domestic confinement and emerging female autonomy. Similarly, in Iran, the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911) and later modernization efforts under the Pahlavi era contributed to new discourses on women’s education, visibility, and rights, while also generating ideological tensions between tradition and reform. Drawing on key feminist frameworks and comparative literary analysis, this lecture places Irish and Iranian women writers and representations in dialogue, highlighting how female identity is negotiated at the intersection of patriarchy, nationalism, and modernity. The lecture ultimately argues that despite differing cultural and religious contexts, both societies reveal strikingly similar patterns of resistance, negotiation, and redefinition of womanhood.

Register for our upcoming ISWÜ Guest Lecture
"English and Irish in Contact: Sociophonetic Perspectives" by Dr. Kate Tallon (University of Oxford, UK)

📆02.06.2026, 6 till 8 pm
Online via Zoom

More information and registration: on our website
https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/irish-studies/aktuelles/single/news/guest-lecture-kate-tallon

ℹ This talk presents a sociophonetic analysis of Connemara English, comparing bilingual Irish–English speakers with local monolingual English speakers. Using quantitative acoustic methods, it examines variation in key Irish English features, including vowel contrasts and consonantal variation. The results show systematic differences between bilingual and monolingual speakers that vary by social factors such as age, gender, linguistic background, and attachment to local area. This reveals ongoing change in the Gaeltacht. These findings challenge accounts that characterise Gaeltacht English as straightforwardly influenced by L1 Irish and instead suggest a more complex interaction between bilingualism, conservatism, and language change.

New Videocast

J. M. Synge Lecture by Prof. Nicholas Grene (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland),
"Synge and Wicklow: Places to Plays"

📺Watch here: https://youtu.be/S9eG7IevAsA

More info and videocasts on the ISWÜ website: https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/irish-studies/video-podcasts/

Join the editors and contributors of issue 9.1 of the Review of Irish Studies in Europe for the online launch of The Animal in Ireland - Real and Imagined, Part 2, on Monday 11 May at 7pm CET!

More information and registration at: https://www.efacis.eu/content/efacis-roundtable-discussions

Newsletter Summer Term 2026

📰Read here: https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/irish-studies/aktuelles/single/news/newsletter-iswue-summerterm-2026/

Register for our upcoming events:
- 21.04.2026: J. M. Synge Lecture, Nicholas Grene
- 02.06.2026: Guest Lecture, Kate Tallon
- 30.06.2026: Guest Lecture, Maryam Najafibabanazar
👉https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/irish-studies/activities/event-registration/

‼ Register now for the ISWÜ J. M. Synge Lecture ➡️ "Synge and Wicklow: Places to Plays" by Prof. Nicholas Grene (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)

📆 21.04.2026, 6-8 pm, online

More info and registration on our website: https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/irish-studies/aktuelles/single/news/jm-synge-lecture-2026/

ℹ "I grew up in the area of rural Wicklow where Synge set three of his plays: The Shadow of the Glen, The Tinker’s Wedding and The Well of the Saints. For me, encountering them for the first time as a child, these were local plays, featuring familiar places in my own home ground. The aim of this lecture will be to explore how Synge came to shape these places into an imaginative geography, drawing not only on his experience of the Wicklow hills and valleys, which were to him also to some extent home territory, but combining that experience with very different elements such as a story heard on the Aran Islands, or a medieval French play studied in Paris."

🆕🎞 New Videocast
Guest Lecture: "Post-Tiger Ireland“ by PD Dr. Raphael Zähringer

👉📺Watch here: https://youtu.be/X0QesE5eLNQ

More videocasts and info on the ISWÜ website: https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/irish-studies/video-podcasts/

📩 Register now ❗️

Guest Lecture "Post Tiger Ireland" by
Dr. Raphael Zähringer (University of Tübingen, Germany)

22.01.2026, 10-12 o' clock
Hybrid: Z6, 1.010 & online

ℹ️ This talk explores the shifting contours of Irish literature in the wake of two transformative moments in contemporary Irish history: the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (1998) and the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy (2008). The peace process opened up new political and imaginative spaces for writers to grapple with identity, memory, and belonging beyond the binaries of conflict, while the end of the economic boom forced a re-evaluation of Ireland’s social values, aspirations, and fractures. Against this backdrop, the talk examines how contemporary Irish short fiction reflects, interrogates, and reshapes these national transitions. Focusing on selected stories from Lucy Caldwell’s Being Various: New Irish Short Stories, it will be discussed how writers respond to the complexities of post-Tiger Ireland—negotiating themes of precarity, migration, queerness, and fractured community - while also participating in the evolving project of reimagining Irishness in a post-conflict, post-boom era.


More information on the ISWÜ website: https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/irish-studies/aktuelles/single/news/guest-lecture-dr-raphael-zaehringer/