Workshop on Comparative Coastal Topographies

Co-organised by Prof Claire Connolly (University College Cork) and Dr Finola O’Kane (University College Dublin)

Funded by the Irish Research Councilwith support from the Wales-Ireland Research Network and the School of English, UCC

The workshop will take place in the Lecture Theatre, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, on 6th and 7th November.

The workshop is free and open to all. To register please email claireconnolly@ucc.ie

What are the visual and literary codes and conventions that shaped the representation of coastal landscapes in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries and how did these emerge in the context of Britain’s overseas empire? Despite Ireland’s island status, we have a relatively limited understanding of the ways in which our distinctive coastal topographies have been represented in art and in literature.

Comparisons between Ireland, Wales, Scotland and the West Indies are also underdeveloped, despite these cultures being joined both by marine links and by the British empire itself. The limitations of our knowledge may be to do with relative cultural invisibility of these busy working coastlines, connected via the hidden logic of empire, and intimately associated with the everyday facts of imperial economic exchange.

How can we develop a critical, political and aesthetic vocabulary that is able to further the discussion of coastal landscapes? How can these landscapes be brought into view, addressed and compared?

For further details: https://www.ucc.ie/en/english/coast/