CLASSICAL ASSOCIATION OF IRELAND attended the conference also generously led seminar sessions for the Irish Seminar, both in the week preceding the conference at Notre Dame’s Dublin Centre, O’Connell House on Merrion Square, and in the week after the conference at Notre Dame’s new education centre at Kylemore Abbey in Connemara.2 Seminar sessions in O’Connell House included Virgil and Heaney, Ireland and Greek tragedy, an Irish-Canadian Odyssey, Bishop Berkeley the Crypto-Platonist, classical influences on Eavan Boland, Sophocles and Yeats, Ovid and exile in Irish poetry, Joyce and the Classics, and the history of teaching Classics in Irish schools. Topics addressed at the Kylemore Centre included the use of Latin in Irish Benedictine prayer, the Irish as mediators of Latin Classics in the early middle ages, the Classics and Renaissance women’s writing, Sappho and early modern women writers, classical influences in Irish heroic literature and their 18th- and 19th-century reception, Cicero and Cassian on friendship and the Irish anam cara, and the Persephone myth in Irish poetry.
Marina Carr. (Photo: Mary McGraw)
July 2016 Highlights of the week at Kylemore included a public lecture and seminar session with Marina Carr on classical influences in her work, a screening of Gerry Gregg’s film George Thomson: Eighty Years A-Growing introduced by the filmmaker, a guided tour of Inis Mór led by archaeologist Michael Gibbons, and a poetry reading by Mary Madec in the Kylemore Gothic Chapel. Isabelle Torrance e.g. M. Bradley (2010) (ed.) Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire (Oxford), B. Goff (2005) (ed.) Classics and Colonialism (London), L. Hardwick and C. Gillespie (2007) (eds) Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds (Oxford), E. Hall and P. Vasunia (2010) (eds) India, Greece and Rome 1757-2007 (London), S. Stephens and P. Vasunia (2010) (eds) Classics and National Cultures (Oxford), P. Vasunia (2013) The Classics and Colonial India (2013). 2 This stunning new facility, within the St. Joseph wing of Kylemore House, is an ideal location for a small conference, seminar or retreat, and can be reserved for academic activities through the Director of Notre Dame at Kylemore, Lisa Caulfield lcaulfield@nd.edu. 1
Mary Madec in the Gothic Chapel, Kylemore Abbey. (Photo: Claire Brown)
Some of the seminar group members exploring the West country. (Photo: Beth Kiberd)
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