EFACIS (European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies) travels to Belfast for the first time in 2023, during a pivotal time for Northern Ireland.

The ‘Decade of Centenaries’ (2012-22) in the north has demonstrated that public memories of Ireland’s partition and the creation of the successor states remain raw, highly contested and potentially explosive. Changing demographics and political instability now render the future of that 1920-22 settlement highly uncertain. The impact of the UK’s Brexit on Ireland, north and south, continues to complicate Northern Ireland’s engagement with the European Union as well as the United Kingdom.

The conference takes place on 24-27 August at Queen’s University Belfast and offers the opportunity to reflect on the political, social and cultural implications of this rolling crisis, and its historical antecedents in the constitutional unions and partitions of the past.  It also invites reflection on profound cultural questions about Irish identities on what remains a partitioned island.  This has and continues to play out in the cultural politics of language, and in rich seams of writing addressing the Irish border and partitions of culture, religion, class, and sexualities, north and south. At the same time, as Irish society in both parts of the island becomes increasingly diversified as a consequence of cultural and social change and migration, the dominance of older binaries of unitary identity has become increasingly challenged.

The conference theme is Unions and Partitions in Ireland.

Full details of the conference can be found here.

Registration is open until 3^rd July and further information can be found here.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Prof. Guy Beiner

Guy Beiner is the Sullivan Chair in Irish Studies at Boston College, USA

Dr Elizabeth Boyle

Dr Elizabeth Boyle lectures in the Department of Early Irish (Sean-Ghaeilge) at Maynooth University, Ireland

Prof. Diane Urquhart

Diane Urquhart is Professor of Gender History at Queen's University Belfast

Dr Zélie Asava

Dr Zélie Asava is an independent researcher and film classifier at Irish Film Classification Board

ACTIVITIES

The Conference will include a number of events including:

• A reception at City Hall on 24 August
• A showcase of new writing from the north of Ireland hosted at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Creative Writing at QUB on 25 August
• A curators tour of the Array Collective’s Turner-Prize winning installation and Q&A with the artists at the Ulster Museum on 26 August.

Read the draft programme here.

The conference is hosted by the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s, in collaboration with the Seamus Heaney Centre and the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, and with the support of the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics (HAPP) and the School of Arts, English and Languages (AEL).