This is a past event
Theme
The AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen will host a conference in 2009 on the topic “Migrating Minds: Imagined Journeys – Imagined Homecomings”. The conference will take place on the 14 and 15 May 2009 alongside the Aberdeen WORD Festival. Literature (both fiction and non-fiction), personal journals and correspondence, and art enable us to explore the impact that journeys and homecomings have had on Irish and Scottish imaginations. Irish and Scottish migrants, as well as those who sought to understand, interpret and exploit the experience of migration, participated in the production and circulation of these accounts and images both at home and abroad. As such, they form an important dimension to any understanding of the Irish and Scottish diasporas. With this in mind, we seek to investigate the idea of migration as a series of narratives and rhetorical tropes that develop over time.
Further information and registration
Registration is essential. If you intend to attend please contact Dr. Paul Shanks p.f.shanks@abdn.ac.uk by Thursday 7 May 09.
Programme
Thursday 14th May (Humanity Manse, HMG1)
9.00 WelcomePaul Shanks, Conference Coordinator and Michael Brown, Director of the Irish and Scottish Diasporas project
9.10– 10.30 Narratives of Migration
Jill Harland (Otago) ‘The Persuasive and Promotional Voices of Presbyterian Ministers in the emigration of Orkney and Shetland Islanders in the mid- nineteenth century’
Michael Newton (St Francis Xavier University)‘Macs and Micmacs: First Encounter Narratives in Scottish Gaelic from Nova Scotia’
Tea and Coffee
10.50 - 12.10 Between Cultures: the literature of migrationJendele Hungbo (University of the Witwatersrand)‘Othering Identities and the Conflicts of Migration in Jameela Siddiqi’s The Feast of the Nine Virgins’
Busuyi Mekusi (University of the Witwatersrand)‘Dislocation within and without: Migration, Exilic Restlessness and Peripatetic Imagination in Fugard’s Sorrows and Rejoicings’
12.10 - 1.10 Lunch
1.10 – 2.30 Hybrid Identities: Scotland, Ireland and BritainNeil McGinniss (Stirling)‘Andrew O’Hagan: Diaspora writer?’
Tony Murray (London Metropolitan University)‘A Diasporic Vernacular?: The Narrativization of Identity in Second Generation Irish Memoir’
Tea and Coffee
2.50 – 4.10 Irish and Scots in CanadaDaniel O’Leary (Concordia University)‘Irish-Canadian Print Culture and Imagined Identities in British North America: Britons in a New Dominion, 1837 – 1922’
Jenni Calder (South Queensferry)‘Lost in the Backwoods’
5.15 – 6.15 Special Evening EventJames Kelman
7.30 Wine Reception and Buffet Dinner
Friday 15th May (Humanity Manse, HMG1)
9.00. – 10.20 Hybrid Landscapes: the (re)construction of place Jennifer Way (University of North Texas), ‘Here nor there, here as there: the hybrid landscape of Irelantis, place, and Irish national identity’
Sally Newsome (Aberdeen) ‘Imagining India in the Waverley Novels’
Tea and Coffee
10.40 – 12.00 Irish and Scottish perspectives on Europe and the USAFlorian Gassner (University of British Columbia)‘Imagining Russia: A Scottish Perspective’
Claire Crabtree (University of Detroit-Mercy)‘Innocence and Irishness in Alice McDermott’s At Weddings and Wakes and Charming Billy’
12.00 – 1.00 Lunch
1.00 – 2.20 Between Cultures: The Literature of HomecomingMáire Ní Annracháin (University College Dublin)‘Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Stories of Homecoming’
Sumit Chakrabarti (Rabindra Bharati University)‘Exiled at Home: Revisiting Palestine in Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah’
Tea and Coffee2.40 – 4.00 Reimagining the HomelandEmilia Salvanou (Metropolitan College, Greece)‘From Expatriation to Utopia: how did memory and narration affect the identity formation of Edirne refugees in Greece during the early 1920s’Elizabeth Carnegie (Sheffield)‘More an emotion than a country? Scottish Identity, Nationhood and the New World Diaspora’
4.15 – 5.30 Plenary Lecture
Liam Harte (Manchester)‘Colm Tóibín's Liminal Poetics’
7.30 Conference Dinner, The Square
- Venue
- University of Aberdeen, Humanity Manse