Irish Studies Welcome Visiting Professor
18.10.2023Maureen O'Connor research includes the female perspective or the role of animals in Irish literature of the 19th and 20th century. In the new winter semester, she will share her knowledge professor at the University of Würzburg.
Irish Studies Würzburg (ISWÜ) is delighted to welcome Maureen O'Connor from Ireland's University College Cork as a Travelling Visiting Professor at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in the winter semester 2023/24. The guest professorship is funded by the Emigrant Support Programme (ESP) of the Embassy of Ireland in Berlin. Further support for accommodation is provided by the Siebold-Collegium Institute for Advances Studies Würzburg (SCIAS).
Contact with Würzburg had been established in 2021 when Maureen O'Connor contributed a lecture to an online workshop at JMU. Despite the purely digital format, she found the experience "stimulating and convivial" even then and "hoped to have the opportunity to visit the university in person before too long."
Immersing Herself in the Culture and the Educational System
That opportunity now comes in the form of the visiting professor position. The literary scholar is delighted about this. "I could hardly believe my luck" is how O'Connor describes her emotional state after receiving the acceptance from Würzburg. Past stays at foreign universities had been shorter and purely limited to research. Now she is particularly excited by "the prospect of total, extended immersion in another culture as well as in a different educational system and an unfamiliar institution.”
Maureen O'Connor is looking forward to the upcoming lectures with great anticipation. She has already experienced a warm welcome at a symposium for postgraduate students in the Environmental Humanities: "The students here in Würzburg are clearly an exceptional group, and I am looking forward to learning from them," says the visiting professor. Especially the challenge of working on and discussing texts new to her with the students is promising, she says.
In addition to new professional insights, Maureen O'Connor hopes above all to "learn at least a little German."
Varied Programme
During her stay, Maureen O'Connor will teach three courses: "The Comic Tradition in Irish Writing ", "Irish Women's Writing at the Fin de Siècle" and "The Natural World in Irish Women's Writing".
She will also give a lecture on "Haunted Nature in the Fiction of Edna O'Brien" on Thursday, Nov. 30th.
In addition, Maureen O'Connor, along with ISWÜ professors Ina Bergmann, Maria Eisenmann, and Kirsten Sandrock, is organizing an international and interdisciplinary symposium on "The Animal in Ireland, Real and Imagined" at JMU, February 21-23, 2024.
About the Person
Maureen O'Connor is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at University College Cork in Ireland. She has published widely in the field of Irish Studies and has delivered keynote lectures in India, Japan, Austria, Spain, and France. She is the author of The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women's Writing (2010). She has co-edited several field-defining volumes.
Her most recent book, Edna O'Brien and the Art of Fiction, published by Bucknell University Press in 2021, has been described by writer Éilís Ní Dhuibhne as "a wonderful book, indispensable for anyone interested in Edna O'Brien or contemporary Irish literature." O'Connor is currently writing a volume for the Cork University Press series, Síreacht: Longings for Another Ireland, on the theme of animals.
Contact
Prof. Dr. Ina Bergmann, ina.bergmann@uni-wuerzburg.de
Prof. Dr. Maria Eisenmann, maria.eisenmann@uni-wuerzburg.de
Prof. Dr. Maureen O'Connor, maureen.oconnor@uni-wuerzburg.de
