CONFERENCE 2025: University of Galway – 21-25 July, 2025

Call for Papers, Conference 2025, IASIL News

Call for Papers: IASIL Galway 2025

21-25 July 2025

Technology and Ireland  

2025 marks a hundred years since the Shannon Electricity Bill was passed in Dáil Eireann, a moment that would eventually lead to the electrification of Ireland, ushering an age of rapid technological advancement.  In the contemporary digital age, technology is ubiquitous and has become central to Irish life and culture.

Ireland has of course been engaged with technology since long before electricity arrived, as Margaret Kelleher and James O’Sullivan in their recent collection on this subject observe: “Technological opportunity is a subject plumbed and probed in the earliest of Irish literary works, just as techno- logical inventions themselves have enabled Irish literature and its creative practitioners to adapt, diversify, experiment, and flourish, both in their choice of subject and in their public reach.’  

Technological change has also become an important theme in contemporary Irish writing, whether through its use as a narrative device (as seen, for example, in the inclusion of emails in the novels of Sally Rooney), the integration of digital technologies into contemporary playwriting (in such recent examples as Marina Carr’s I-Girl and Enda Walsh’s Arlington), the impact of social media on interpersonal relationships (as seen in the short fiction of Yan Ge), or the poetic exploration of older technologies (as in Sinead Morrissey’s poems about photography or Caitríona O’Reilly on airships).  

Technology is also having a profound impact upon academic research and teaching, whether through the impact of digital tools and databases, the influence of artificial intelligence, or in other ways.  Ireland is also home to the European headquarters of multinational companies such as Google and Facebook, with the economic fortunes of the country closely tied to these operations.  

The IASIL 2025 conference aims not only to explore discourse on technology in Irish literature and culture but also to consider how technology offers fresh modes in which literature is written, performed, received, and understood. It builds on the developing scholarship on technology and Irish culture in collections including Kelleher and O’Sullivan’s Technology in Irish Literature and Culture and Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (2019) edited by Kathryn Conrad, ‎Cóilín Parsons, ‎Julie McCormick Weng, as well as in recent individual monographs and articles on Irish literature and digital culture.   

Principal themes and topics addressed by the conference might include: 

  • New Literary Technologies and Irish Writing 
  • Printing and publishing technologies 
  • Irish literature and social media 
  • Digital Archives 
  • Online Databases and Irish Literature 
  • Digital surveillance and its literary representations 
  • Irish Modernism and Technology  
  • Technologies of sound in Ireland 
  • Irish fiction, poetry and drama on radio  
  • Irish literature and drama on television  
  • Dystopia and technology in Irish fiction 
  • Translation and technology in Ireland 
  • Technology in Irish theatre, drama and performance 
  • Irish film-poetry 
  • AI writing and Ireland 
  • Big Data and imaginative Irish literature 
  • Technology’s impact on the Irish language and minority languages  
  • Unreliable narration in the digital age 
  • Precarity, technology and Irish literature 
  • Sustainability and technology in Irish literature 
  • Critical frameworks (national, postcolonial, revisionist, neo-Marxist etc) and technology 
  • Technological Irish futures 
  • Big Tech in Irish Literature 

In keeping with IASIL’s general practice, papers are also invited in other areas of Irish literary studies.  

Please send 300 word proposals to iasilgalway@gmail.com by the deadlines below. Please include with your proposal the following information:

  • Paper title
  • Paper proposal (300 words)
  • Your name, title (if desired), and institutional affiliation
  • Email contact address
  • Short biographical note (50 words max)

TIMELINES, REGISTRATION, ACCOMMODATION

The conference runs in Galway from 21-25 July 2025, coinciding with the second week of the Galway International Arts Festival. Delegates to the conference will thus be able to enjoy a very wide range of live performances, talks, exhibitions, and more during the conference – but should also note that accommodation options are likely to be in high demand. We are also aware that some IASIL members will need to have a response to their proposal before the end of 2024 in order to avail of travel funding at their home institutions. With those factors in mind, the following timelines will be in operation:

  • First deadline for proposals: Wednesday 27 November
  • Responses to first call for proposals will be issued by Monday 2 December
  • Registration, including the option to book on-campus accommodation, will open on Monday 2 December 2024.
  • The second deadline for proposals will fall on Wednesday 19 March 2025.
  • Responses to the second call for proposals will be issued by 28 March 2025.
  • Online registration will close in June 2025.

The Galway organising committee will give equal consideration to all proposals, whether submitted before the first or second deadline. We are simply using two deadlines so that IASIL members who wish to do so can make their arrangements before the end of 2024.

Prospective delegates are reminded that you must be a member of IASIL in order to present a paper at the conference.

Full details of registration fees and on-campus accommodation costs will be posted online by the middle of November 2024.

Galway Organising Committee

Seán Crosson, Ann-Marie Hanlon, Barry Houlihan, Patrick Lonergan (organising committee co-chair), Frances McCormack, Finian O’Gorman, Ian Walsh (organising committee co-chair)

IASIL Postgraduate Conference scholarship

Details of the postgraduate scholarship will open soon!