Thursday, June 18, 2009

Apocalypse and Utopia

The 2009 Irish Seminar, a series of lectures for scholars of Irish Studies is currently underway at the Keough Naughton Notre Dame Centre in Merrion Square and runs to July 3rd.

While most of the lectures are limited to students participating in the Seminar, each week contains one lecture open to the public held in the National Gallery of Ireland on Thursday at 7pm.

This year's theme is Apocalypse and Utopia and deals with:
"complex histories, present disturbances, and imagined futures...the rhetorics of progress and catastrophe, apocalypse and utopia, millenarianism and anti-millenarianism, in Irish culture from the early modern period to the twenty-first century."

The lectures open to the public are:

Elizabeth Butler Cullingford - Catholicism in Crisis: Representing the Abuse Scandals in Ireland and Irish-America (June 18)

Declan Kiberd - After Ireland: The Death of a National Literature? (June 25)

Paul Bové - Misprisions of Utopia—Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory (July 2)