Online Conference: The Road Less Travelled? Irish-European Lives and Multi-Modal Approaches to Life-Writing

Conference Theme: The Road Less Travelled? Irish-European Lives and Multi-Modal Approaches to Life-Writing

Keynote Speakers: Prof. Liam Harte, University of Manchester, and Prof. Marie Schröer, University of Potsdam.

• When: 25-26 June 2026
• Where: Online

Life-writing, the purposeful recording of one’s own or of someone else’s life experience, is now seen as inherently multi-genre and multi-modal, well beyond the narrower parameters of memoir and autobiography. Literary Irish Studies has engaged greatly with both memoir and autobiography, not least that of Irish migrants. However, the study of Irish migrant memoir and autobiography has, understandably, been dominated by Irish-American, Irish-British and, more recently, Irish-Australian migrants.

The publishing of Belfast-born artist Elizabeth Shaw’s Irish-British-East German memoir, How I Came to Berlin, for the first time in English in 2025, and current research suggest that there may indeed be a hidden reservoir of Irish-European life-writing that has still to be investigated by scholars. This online conference, therefore, aims to explore life-writing by those Irish who have found themselves in various parts of Europe as migrants, exiles or travellers; in person, in imagination and in the digital world. Furthermore, we are interested in a broad range of modes of life-writing, for example by women and members of marginalised groups that may have found it difficult to position themselves to narrate their own life histories in the sustained, authoritative style associated with the classic forms of autobiography, but also by others transcending generic and medial boundaries. For more, download the Call for Papers here.

The conference is free and open to all and will be hosted online by the University of Jena. Online participation by a wider audience is explicitly encouraged. To receive the Zoom link, please send an email to: fergal.lenehan@uni-jena.de.

Funding for the publication of outcomes of the conference has already been secured for a peer-reviewed open-access e-book with a renowned publisher. Presenters will be asked to turn their conference papers into a written chapter, to be handed in by September 2026. Further details and timelines to be discussed at the end of the conference. Contributors to the publication will also include Dragana Jurisič, Adrian Duncan, Michael Cronin, Aine McGillicuddy, Gudrun Heidemann, and Alicia Castillo Villanueva.

Conference Organisers

• Sabine Egger, Associate Professor, Mary Immaculate College
• Fergal Lenehan, Apl. Professor, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

Conference Programme

Keynotes

Liam Harte (University of Manchester)

Questions of Art, Questions of Travel: The Autobiografiction of John Banville

This paper’s premise is that John Banville is both a slyly self-referential novelist and a playfully evasive self-portraitist who, in his autobiographical and travel writings, blurs the lines between fiction, autobiography, memoir, travelogue, history and biography. The first part of the paper will highlight how, in spite of Banville’s professed aversion to confessional art, many of his novels are as self-revealing as they are self-deflecting. His science tetralogy exemplifies this paradox insofar as it can be read as a veiled aesthetic autobiography in which Banville uses his characters as mouthpieces for the elaboration of some of his key artistic principles and beliefs. The paper will go on to argue that Banville’s two putatively autobiographical works to date, Prague Pictures (2003) and Time Pieces (2016), are exercises in autobiografiction that combine life writing and travel writing with fragments of fiction, passages of philosophical reflection and swathes of social, cultural and urban history. In both works, Banville creatively unsettles the inherited conventions of autobiographical and travel narratives in order to facilitate explorations of some of his abiding aesthetic and philosophical concerns, including his insistent probing of the phenomenology of memory, vision and imagination, and their mysteriously entwined roles in artistic creation.

Liam Harte is Professor of Irish Literature at the University of Manchester. His research interests lie in the fields of modern and contemporary Irish literature and Irish migrant writing. He is the author or editor of over ten books, including The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2020), A History of Irish Autobiography (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2007 (Wiley Blackwell, 2014) and The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Marie Schröer (Universität Potsdam)

Border Crossings: Autofictional Life Writing in Comics

The presentation examines comics as a particularly productive medium for autofictional life writing in the context of migration and border experiences. It first offers a brief overview of autobiographical practices in comics before focusing on migration as a central lens. It argues that comics do not simply represent borders as thematic content but actively perform and destabilize them through their formal and narrative structures. In doing so, they bring multiple forms of crossing into relation: between image and text, autobiography and fiction, memory and imagination, as well as between different cultural, linguistic, and spatial positions.

Marie Schröer is Junior Professor of Cultural Semiotics and Studies at the Institute of Romance Studies at Potsdam University. Her research focuses on cultural and literary semiotics as well as comics studies, particularly in francophone contexts. In her dissertation Terrain de Je, she examined autobiographical and autofictional comics in relation to self-representation and literary coming-of-age narratives. She has since published extensively on comics, with particular interest in comics and (auto)biography, as well as comics and Food Studies.

Roundtable

Hugo Hamilton

Hugo Hamilton is the best-selling author of The Speckled People – a memoir of his German-Irish childhood in Dublin, growing up with his German mother and prohibited by his revolutionary Irish father from speaking English. The Speckled People has been translated into twenty languages. It was adapted for the stage and performed at the Gate Theatre, followed by a second memoir-based play called The Mariner. He has published two memoirs, ten novels and a collection of short stories. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker. He has won numerous literary awards for his work including the Prix Femina in France and the Bundesverdienstkreuz order of merit, awarded by the German state. Hamilton is a member of the Aosdana and lives in Dublin. 

His lates novel is Conversation with the Sea. His play Nuala will he staged in October 2026.

Evgeny Shtorn

Evgeny Shtorn is a writer, researcher, and human rights advocate whose work explores the intersections of migration, sexuality, memory, and displacement. Based in Ireland, he completed his doctoral studies at the University of Helsinki, where his research examines representations of violence against LGBTIQ+ people in Russian media and public discourse.

Alongside his academic work, Shtorn has developed a substantial artistic and literary practice. He is the author of The Refugee Chronicles, an autofictional account of migration, asylum, and queer life, first published in Russian and forthcoming in English in Ireland in 2026. His writing combines personal narrative with social and political reflection, drawing on experiences of exile, statelessness, and belonging. His essays and commentary have appeared in outlets including openDemocracy and the Irish Independent, and he has contributed to public discussions through podcasts and media appearances, including for The New Yorker.

His artistic work frequently engages with questions of memory, objects, archives, and mobility. Recent projects include Something Else from There, at the National Gallery of Ireland, an exploration of migration, museums, and material culture, as well as collaborative initiatives bringing together art, activism, and lived experiences of displacement. Across his creative and scholarly work, Shtorn is interested in how stories, bodies, and objects travel across borders and how people reconstruct meaning, identity, and community in conditions of uncertainty and exile.

Research Papers

Mary M. Burke (University of Connecticut)

Irish Traveller Life Writing, 1972-2009

The recent re/publication of Irish Travellers Juanita Casey and Rosaleen McDonagh has been heralded as the arrival of Travellers into print. However, that history goes back to 1970s and 1980s Traveller life writing. After politicization in the 1960s, Traveller women’s self-expression was channelled and even published through support organizations, albeit in “low status” collectives and community project ephemera. From such the transcribed Traveller memoir emerged, mediated due to the subject’s non-literacy. Sean Maher’s semi-fictionalized The Road to God Knows Where (1972) was the first such memoir issued by a mainstream publisher. Nan Donohoe’s 1987 Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman, was a collaboration with anthropologist Sharon Gmelch, while Nan Joyce’s 1985 Traveller, shaped from taped interviews conducted by publisher-editor Anna Farmar, celebrates Travellers’ independence from Belfast’s sectarian divide. A late iteration is Mary Warde’s 2009 account of Traveller life (with Michael Hayes). Although such stories conveyed much regarding Traveller culture, they were often self-conscious regarding negative stereotypes, sometimes leading to an overemphasis on the virtues of life on the road. As such, McDonagh’s Unsettled (2021), with its clear-eyed analysis of systemic racism, denotes an important pivot in the tradition.

Mary M. Burke is a Professor of English at UConn. A scholar of Irish and Irish-American identities and cultures, she is the author of the award-winning Race, Politics, and Irish-America: A Gothic History (Oxford UP, 2023). Her first book with Oxford UP was a cultural history of Ireland’s indigenous minority Traveller community, and in 2022, she collaborated with Tramp Press on a new edition of The Horse of Selene, a neglected cult novel by Traveller-Romany writer Juanita Casey. She was a 2022 LRH Fellow at alma mater Trinity College Dublin for an in-progress book on expatriates in postwar Ireland.

Lukas Ernst (TCD)

The Ghosts of Gelsenkirchen: Life-Writing, Emigration, and Return in the Plays of Dermot Bolger

The recent Irish past has witnessed seismic economic, political, social, and cultural changes. Between the 1990s and 2000s, the Celtic Tiger seemed to transform a country plagued by sustained emigration and a pervasive sense of disappearance into a booming, globalized economy, until, following a sudden crash, austerity and emigration returned. Alongside these shifts, the very concept of “Irishness” has been transformed. At the same time, however,& commentators have frequently criticized Irish culture, and contemporary Irish theatre in particular, for ignoring these transformations. Yet, one potential counterexample may be found in the work of Dermot Bolger, especially the set of plays In High Germany (1990) and The Parting Glass (2010), recently concluded by Home, Boys, Home (2024). Originating from Bolger’s own experiences travelling to support the Irish national football team in Gelsenkirchen during the 1988 European Championship, these plays trace the journey of their protagonist from emigration to Germany in the 1980s towards a return to Celtic Tiger Ireland. Considering the plays’ liminal position on the auto/fiction spectrum, an analysis of how they function autofictionally poses a range of questions that relate, conceptually, to the intersections between theatre and autofiction but also to how Irish drama, by focusing on individual perspectives, may register broader changes through subjective narratives. This discussion may then provide further nuance to the criticism of contemporary Irish theatre’s alleged disengagement by considering how these plays engage with Ireland’s transformations, while Bolger’s representation of the emigration–return dynamic explores a haunting disjunction of past and present, experiences of home and exile, and questions of Irish identities.

Lukas Ernst is a PhD student at Trinity College Dublin’s School of English. His main academic interest is in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish theatre, and his current research project examines how contemporary Irish drama engages with the transformations in the country’s recent past through questions of ‘(post-)Irish’ identities.

Rachel Fehily (UCD)

The Reject Room

My practice-based doctoral thesis, 'Adoption, An InterdisciplinaryReframing: Memoir, Legality and Multi-racialism', comprises a stand-alone memoir, 'The Reject Room', with a critical exegesis. The memoir situates my own positionality, as lawyer, mother, and mixed-race born illegitimate, South African Indian and Irish adoptee, before tracing my adoptive family across three generations and my biological family briefly across two. It opens by holding two figures in deliberate opposition: my adoptive grandfather, Surgeon Jack McArdle, an anti-clerical, early feminist, and Éamon de Valera, the architect of conservative Catholic Ireland. My fate, I argue, was produced by both. The narrative follows my parents' decision to adopt six children through St Patrick's Guild from a contested space, Temple Hill adoption home in Blackrock. It follows my 'free-range' 1970s childhood in Dublin's literary liminal quarter: Baggotonia. It ends when I am 17 and have experienced a1980s adolescence which was defined by the consequences of being a woman in an era of repression. The memoir departs from the dominant adoption arc of rupture, identity crisis, search and reunion with family of origin. I do not seek out my biological relations nor perform gratitude to my adoptive parents along a white-saviour narrative. Instead, I propose that belonging can be produced by education, place, a stable early adoption, and strong family bonds. This memoir offers Irish-European life-writing a counter-narrative to traditional and contemporary Life Writing stories which interrogate racism, trauma and alienation.

Rachel Fehily worked as a barrister for 20 years. She is currentlycompleting a practice-based PhD at University College Dublin, supervised by Professor Eamonn Jordan and Sarah Moss. Her thesis, “Adoption: An Interdisciplinary Reframing”, comprises a memoir with a critical exegesis. She has just completed a 2026 visiting residency at the University of Oxford, teaches Literature and Justice at UCD, and is widely published.

Adeline Henry (Ulster University)

Irish and European life writing in the rural female line – the Mountnorris Magowan link

Writing from personal experience has a long tradition within Irish fiction. With Northern Ireland writing as a backdrop and my own trajectory as example, this paper will show the importance of Irish rural female life writing. Visiting my grandmother in 1980s Co. Armagh, I was intrigued by Elizabeth Shaw’s books on the shelves. My granny and Shaw’s mother were sisters. On a German exchange programme in the 1990s, I bought Shaw’s memoir and contacted her. Only years later did I discover Shaw’s renown through a GDR friend. During a creative writing MA, I wrote about my Troubles childhood. My subsequent PhD research showed that Troubles writing was dominated by men. Anna Burns’ Milkman was the catalyst for much women’s writing, yet my rural, female and protestant experience had not yet been represented.

Women often approach writing through their own and family experience, as per écriture féminine. This paper will draw on autoethnography and writing on feminism, place and identity to argue that Irish and European women’s personal stories have a unique role in the canon, filling gaps neither identified nor explored by other writing approaches.

Adeline Henry was born in rural Co Armagh. Originally a linguist, she has worked as a translator in Germany, taught German and English, and now holds an MA in Creative Writing (Queen’s University, Belfast, 2019) and a PhD in Creative Writing (Ulster University, 2024). She has been published in The Irish Times, The Honest Ulsterman, Fortnight Magazine and various anthologies. Adeline’s writing is informed by growing up and living in Northern Ireland, as well as the years she spent elsewhere. Her first novel – A Quiet Hill – is due for publication in 2026.

Patricia Kennedy (UCC)

‘Palimpsest’-layers of womanhood, virgin, mother, crone, migrant, tourist, vagabond, nomad

This paper employs the concept of ‘palimpsest’, to explore multiple layers, partly hidden beneath the surface, in life writing, and in this case, the personal experience of life writing over several decades by an Irish woman, across life transitions, and across Europe and across continents. As Alexander (2005) indicates, a palimpsest is: ...a parchment that has been inscribed two or more times, the previous text having been imperfectly erased, -ethical entanglements of the body, memory, space, time, afterlife’ (2005, 190). This paper focuses on life transitions from girl/ virgin to woman/ mother, to grandmother/ crone/ wise woman. It overlays personal experiences of being a migrant, a tourist and nomad, and how different roles and different settings influence whether one is silenced and/ or encouraged to give voice and speak out. It concludes by highlighting the usefulness of palimpsest for understanding the experience of Roma.

Patricia Kennedy, B. Soc. Sc., MSc. Sc., PhD, is currently Lecturer in Social Policy in the School of Applied Social Studies at UCC. My areas of interest include conceptual, theoretical and methodological approaches to social policy, equality, and diversity. My research has focused on comparative social policy, gender, equality, sexual and reproductive health rights, maternity policy and services, criminal justice, migration, gender-based violence and the rights of refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, Travellers and Roma. My latest research involves leading a team of Roma peer researchers to develop the Health Strategy for Roma in Cork and Kerry. I am Principal Investigator on Seafarers Support, developing a collaborative response to meeting the health and wellbeing of seafarers, an Irish Research Council funded project. I was the Senior Researcher on the Independent Familicide and Domestic Homicide Review (August 2020-April 2021). I was the Co-PI on a Feasibility Study into a Dedicated Support Programme for Traveller Women in the Criminal Justice System (2018-2020). I was the Principal Investigator on Roma in Ireland: A National Needs Assessment (2018) which was a participatory research project with 18 peer researchers. have published ten books including Maternity Policy in an International Context, risk, rights and welfare regimes (2015); Welcoming the Stranger, Irish Emigrant Welfare in Britain since 1957 (2015); Key Themes in Social Policy (2013); Motherhood in Ireland; Creation and Context (2004) and Maternity in Ireland: a Woman-centred Perspective (2002).

Fergal Lenehan (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena)

Portrait of the Irish-German Music/TV Star as a Young Man: Rea Garvey, Memoir and YouTube

The German-based and Irish-born singer and television star Rea Garvey published a memoir in 2025 entitled – despite being largely in German – Before I Met Supergirl. It appeared in conjunction with a bilingual three-part YouTube documentary called You’ll Be Grand. Garvey’s autobiographical engagement sees a further extension of Irish “migrant autobiographers” (Harte, 2009) into the German-language context, while also making clear that the form and parameters of autobiography are changing and going beyond the printed word – due largely to the ubiquitous reality of digital media. Garvey’s multimodal autobiographical story-telling suggests narrative parallels with cinematic musical biopics – e.g. difficulties to be overcome before success, crucial moments in which the young star sees images of a possible future – as well as parallels with other recent Irish memoirs. Thus, in line with Elizabeth Shaw’s How I Came to Berlin, Garvey looks to explain his Irish origins specifically to a German readership, explains how he came to live Germany, and reflects on the plurality of his identity. Also in line with Neil Jordan’s recent Amnesiac: A Memoir, a narrativized encounter with ghosts of deceased relatives forms a central vignette of Garvey’s memoir in a type of, it is argued, post-Catholic spiritualism presented in terms of continuity rather than rupture.&

Apl. Prof. Dr. Fergal Lenehan is Adjunct Professor at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena. He has published two monographs and co-edited seven volumes, including Elizabeth Shaw’s How I Came to Berlin, co-edited with Sabine Egger.

Rachel Magshamrain (UCC)

Breandán O hEihir's Radio Documentary ‘East Germany Today’ (1985)

This paper examines an Irish-GDR life-writing connection, albeit one mediated by the airwaves, specifically Breandán Ó hEithir’s RTÉ radio documentary broadcast in 1985 in which he interviewed citizens of the GDR about their everyday lives. Multilingual broadcaster, journalist and author, Ó hEithir (1930-1990) visited the GDR in the 1980s, a decade of economic crisis, growing dissent and concomitant state activity to try to suppress a movement that by the end of the decade would peacefully bring about the collapse of the regime.

Rachel MagShamhráin is a senior lecturer in German studies in UCC, and currently vice-head for EDI in the College of Arts. Most recently her research has been focusing on portrayals of disability in German culture.

Eamon Maher (TU Dublin)

Memoir and Art: a Franco-Irish Case Study

This paper proposes to do a comparative study of the French priest-writer Jean Sulivan (1913-1980) and his Irish counterpart John McGahern (1934-2006) in terms of how they describe traditional Catholic rural childhoods in Brittany and the northwest midlands of Ireland respectively. Anticipate Every Goodbye (Sulivan’s autobiographical description of his close relationship with his mother and the birth of ‘a priesthood of the pen’ that I translated into English), and McGahern’s Memoir, also reveal a strong attachment to pious mothers who wanted above all else for their sons to become priests. The desolation of witnessing the death of these cherished presences, and the way in which literature became a way of working through the grief associated with loss, is a shared trope in both memoirs.

Eamon Maher is Joint Principal Investigator of the Centre of Irish Studies in TU Dublin and the General Editor of two book series with Peter Lang Oxford, Reimagining Ireland (150 books) and Studies in Franco-Irish Relations (26 books). He has published widely on the two writers he is dealing with in his paper, John McGahern and Jean Sulivan.

Maggie O’Neill (Galway University)

Across Borders, Across Forms: Kate O'Brien as European Writer

From Spain, Italy, and France to New York and Russia, Kate O'Brien's extensive travels informed her literary imagination. Centralising women in her novels, O'Brien consistently emphasised their mobility across spatial and social borders, bearing this out through her own movement. Though she maintained a base in England – spending the early war years in Oxford and London before settling in Kent – she continued travelling into her later years, returning repeatedly to Spain and engaging with international literary organisations, driven by a strong belief in the capacity of culture to improve the world.

Yet O’Brien's relationship to travel was deeply ambivalent. In an Irish Times essay, she articulates a tension between the comfort of home and the necessity of self-imposed exile. For O'Brien, writing “connotes exile” – not only physical displacement, but what she terms “the spiritual condition of exile,” understood as “a power of detachment.” Physical remove from one’s sources, she argues, greatly enhances this essential detachment, privileging inner terrains of remembrance and reflection over documentary immediacy. In her later writings, ageing and exile become increasingly central to her creative process, rendering mobility both a compulsion and a philosophy.

Dr Maggie O’Neill is a researcher in the J.E. Cairnes School of Business and Economics at the University of Galway. Her interdisciplinary research spans literature, ageing, employment, and social policy. Her work originated in literary studies, including publications on Irish writers and representations of ageing. This foundation in critical and cultural analysis continues to inform her approach to social research. She has published extensively on gender and ageing in Irish literature, culture and society.

Claire O’Reilly (UCC)

Life-Writing and Biographical Interviews: (reflections on) an Irish-German Project

This talk will reflect primarily on an Irish-German Life-Writing project, which had Irish students undertake real-time biographical interviews with German students in a virtual exchange classroom. It will reflect on method and form of interviews as a tool for capturing lives and their suitability for the language classroom. Secondly, it will also introduce an archival project currently underway through a life-writing and historical lens on the education of students of German specifically.

Claire O’Reilly: Lecturer, German Department, UCC since 2005; Co-Convenor of the Research Cluster Life Writing, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures; Programme Coordinator for BSc International Business and German, UCC since 2005. Undergraduate studies in Limerick, Karlsruhe; Postgraduate studies in Limerick, Jena, Regensburg. JuniorprofessorIntercultural Training and International Relations, Chemnitz University of Technology, 2002-2005; Postdoctoral research on Austauschforschung, University of Regensburg, 2001-2002. Current Research Interests and Projects: Irish-German Relations; Biography exchange in virtual learning spaces; Internationalisation and socio-cultural learning outcomes of Study Abroad, Women (Professors and Students) in German in academic history and resistance narratives in Nazi Germany and family legacy.

Eda Sagarra (TCD)

Different Kinds of Autobiographies at Different Stages of Life

In my short paper I hope to present two issues for our discussion: firstly: who, why or at what stage in life do people write autobiographies, and, secondly, what are the main obstacles an author faces?

I will suggest that there are several stages, for the precocious childhood – as the nine-year-old Daisy Ashford proved in her masterpiece: The Young Visiters [sic] (1890) – for the ‘average’ person, whoever that might be, later middle age and finally for the old and optimistic, ‘shortly before midnight’. In my experience at least the major obstacle which took me nearly 70 years to overcome: is how to create an appropriate narrative persona.

Eda Sagarra, Em. prof. Dr phil. (Wien), Litt.D. (DU), Litt.D. h.c. (DU), FTCD, MRIA.

Born in Dublin, 15th August 1933.

Degrees in History and German in Dublin (BA, MA), Freiburg i.B/Zurich, Vienna (dr. phil); Litt.D. (DU, 1996); Litt.D. h.c. (DU 2026).

Lecturer, German Dept, University of Manchester (1958-75); Chair of German, Trinity College Dublin (1975-98).

Publications: Social history of German-language literature; modern Austrian literary and cultural history; women's autobiographical writing; biographies of high-ranking civil servants in the Irish Free State.

Vasiliki Tatouli (MIC)

Transnational Literary Activism: Irish Poetic Connections with Eurocentric Ties to Greece and the Greek Identity

Seamus Heaney, Theo Dorgan, and Paula Meehan make autobiographical transnational Irish connections that not only connect ancient Greece with modern-day Ireland but also offer ways of viewing modern-day Greece, home, and the world. These visiting artists inscribe memories, moments, and envisionings. They transmit notions of identity through the English language, surpassing time and borders. By doing so, Irish literary poets actively make Irish, Greek and European identity contributions by transnationally using literature as a means of transcription for a more global audience. Literary activism and literary diplomacy are evident thanks to Irish poets who explore Greek identity and ´Greekness´ through the Irish lens of seeing and understanding.

Transnational literary poets open pathways for literary explorations that inscribe strong internal European connectivity that reformulate national and personal identities in the process of vagabonding elsewhere and within. Transnational literary activism is not highly acknowledged within Europe. Historically, it has made significant strides in internal Eurocentric connectivity and the creation of national European identities. As one nation coexists along with other nations, Irish-Greek identity formations are being renegotiated and reformulated. Further explorations will help promote social, political, and economic contributions that transnational literary activism provides, eliciting relevancy in today´s constantly changing world.

Vasiliki Tatouli is currently completing a PhD in Modern English Literature at Mary Immaculate College on the topic of “Philhellenic Vagabonding: An Exploration of Anglophone Writing Contributions to Modern-Day Greece and the Greek Identity”.