IASIL offers warm congratulations to Declan Kiberd on his appointment to the Chair of Anglo-Irish at University College Dublin, in succession to Professor Augustine Martin. Professor Kiberd had previously been successful in competition for the chair of English at Galway but had been unable to take up this post due to family illness.
His recent tour-de-force Inventing Ireland-which caused such excitement among Irish cultural debaters-has comfortably inserted itself among the essential tools of Irish literary scholarship for teachers and for students alike and gone into paperback. Denis Donoghue, W. J. McCormack, and David Krause are among those who have fired off salvoes aimed at sinking his post-colonial (or is it merely nationalist?) barque. Sublimity does not sink so easily, however, even if a few touches of bathos have been discerned here and there among the boilerplates of this titanic work.
The IASIL Secretary, who remonstrated loudly at the Inventing Ireland session in Göteborg (IASIL 1997), has made good his undertakings by publishing a critique in the April issue of the Irish Studies Review, edited by Neil Sammells and others at Bath HE-which is appearing in a 'new, improved' format. A longer version will appear as a pamphlet later on, perhaps in time for the Limerick Conference.