Why Ireland?

Award-winning scholars Mary Mullen and Shirley Lau Wong present studies of Ireland that address pressing questions in literary and cultural studies
Side by side head and shoulder photos of two people
Event Date & Time
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Event Location
Pillsbury 412

310 Pillsbury Dr. SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455

The Department of English and the Celtic Studies Fund present an occasion to explore how studying Ireland’s past and present can help to address pressing questions in literary and cultural studies. The event will start by showing what we learn by understanding labor, liberalism, and neoliberalism from the vantage point of Ireland in the nineteenth century and in the twenty-first century, respectively. Then, drawing upon individual research, the two speakers will provide more contextualized case studies. Mary Mullen (above left) will consider how understanding labor and liberalism in Famine Ireland illuminates the afterlives of slavery in the West Indies. Shirley Lau Wong (right) will examine how contemporary Irish literature provides a unique site for understanding the concept of human capital and its effects on literary and cultural production. Together, the speakers will trace historical continuities and ruptures as they demonstrate how attention to Ireland can elucidate global structures. 

The event is free and open to the public. No reservations or tickets necessary. For questions about accessibility services and the venue, please email [email protected] or call 612-626-1528.

Mary Mullen is Associate Professor of English at Villanova University. She is the author of Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism (‎Edinburgh University Press), which in 2020 won the ACIS Rhodes Prize for Best Book on Irish Literature, and co-editor, with Renée Fox, of the forthcoming collection Race, Violence, and Form: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Liverpool UP). She has published articles on English and Irish writing, settler colonialism, public humanities, and the politics of time.

Shirley Lau Wong is Assistant Professor of English at the US Naval Academy. She is the author of Poetics of the Local: Globalization, Place, and Contemporary Irish Poetry (SUNY Press), which won the 2024 ACIS Rhodes Prize for Best Book on Irish Literature, and co-editor, with Jennifer Spitzer, of Modern Language Quarterly’s special issue on “The Detail, Revisited” (2023). Her other scholarship has appeared in the edited collection Race in Irish Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP, 2023), The Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and The Global South.

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