News

The School of Arts is delighted to have established a Cooperation Agreement with Wallonie-Bruxelles International (WBI) to host Simon Lambert as Academic and Cultural Liaison Officer for the UK. In this new role Simon Lambert will work towards creating and enhancing academic and cultural partnerships between the UK and French-speaking Belgium, both at the level of the School and the University and across the UK. The new agreement builds on the School’s prior successful links with Wallonie-Bruxelles International and will initially run for a period of two years.

Simon Lambert’s staff page can be found here.

Dr Anne Marie D’Arcy (English) will give the Annual Bloomsday lecture at the Irish Jewish Museum, on 12 June 2019. It will explore previously overlooked references to the Kishinev massacre in Ulysses, on 12 June 2019. Her lecture will examine Joyce’s treatment of that most pernicious of medieval myths, the accusation of ritual murder, which sparked the pogrom in Dubossary, as well as Ireland's response to the massacre – most notably the work of Michael Davitt. Anne Marie will also be giving the inaugural Bloomsweek lecture for the Irish National Museum of Childhood, on the depiction of Joyce's upbringing in his work (15 June), a keynote lecture on her forthcoming monograph, James Joyce and the Irish Middle Ages, at the Trieste Joyce School (23-29 June).

Further information is available here.

Dr Anne Marie D’Arcy (English) has written a blog exploring the foundation and construction of Notre-Dame cathedral for the Irish Humanities Alliance. You can find out more about the history of the cathedral and the related construction of Saint-Denis here.

To mark the 50th anniversary of Joe Orton's play What the Butler Saw, Dr Emma Parker hosted an event at The British Library featuring actor Timothy West (Rance in the 1987 BBC version of the play) and Hayward Morse (who played Nick in the original 1969 production) plus Tony Award-winning director John Tillinger and Nikolai Foster, Artistic Director at Curve, Leicester.

The evening produced startling revelations and some rude stories about the original production of the play, in a typically Ortonesque manner.