Carlow College, St. Patrick’s is excited to be hosting Haunted Hibernia: Conjuring the Contemporary Irish Gothic conference on the 28th – 29th October 2022.

This exciting conference is being organised by Lecturer in English, Dr. Simon Workman together with Carlow College alumni, Eva Burke, Karmel Knipprath and Jack Phelan. It seeks to explore the myriad ways that the Gothic has been deployed to interrogate the social, economic, and political transformations that have occurred in Ireland since the end of the Celtic Tiger, and to exhume the associated historical trauma engendered by these changes.

The conference will also host plenary speaker, Dr. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Senior Lecturer and founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Conference organisers are currently welcoming papers that engage with the Gothic in a wide variety of forms and media, including: fiction, poetry, drama, film, tv, visual art, music, digital media and storytelling, and the broader field of popular culture.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Gothic tropes and motifs (the monstrous, the spectral, the uncanny, the haunted house) in contemporary Irish artistic culture.
• The Gothic and gender/sexuality: The Gothic as a lens through which we engage with the politicised female body and ownership/possession of the female body in 21st century Ireland.
• The use of the Gothic as a mode of progressive social and political protest.
• The Gothic and the representation of economic/financial crisis in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.
• Contemporary artistic engagement with an older Irish Gothic tradition and/or the aesthetic evolution and re-invention of the Gothic in contemporary Irish art and literature.
• Narratives of Gothic imprisonment/entrapment in contemporary Ireland, both literal and structural.
• The Gothic as a response to Ireland’s ongoing mental health crisis.
• Representations of home and homelessness in the contemporary Irish Gothic.
• Constructions of domesticity and the domestic space in the contemporary Irish Gothic.
• Spectres of imperialism in contemporary Ireland.
• Eco Gothic and Eco horror in an Irish context.
• The Gothic in Contemporary Irish Children’s Literature.
• The Covid pandemic and the Gothic.

Proposals (300 words) and a brief biography should be sent to hauntedhibernia@gmail.com by 1st May 2022.