Call for Papers
Mapping and Counter-mapping Ireland
The Biennial Conference of the Nordic Irish Studies Network
Uppsala University, Sweden, 24-26 September 2025
The 2025 biennial conference of the Nordic Irish Studies Network focuses on various forms of maps, mapping, and counter-mapping in Irish culture and society. Mapping draws on linguistic, visual, material, and cultural ideas and practices. As documents, maps reflect complex relations between power, agency, and cultural expression. Established power-structures are challenged through counter-mapping as resistance, or the creation on unofficial and unauthorised cartographies and exchanges.
The earliest known map of Ireland appeared in Ptolemy’s Geography, completed by the middle of the first century CE. In the Early Modern period, surveys and maps were an important means of extending and consolidating British control on the island. The Down Survey (1656-8), the first systematic map of the island, facilitated the transfer of land from Gaelic and Old English aristocrats to Cromwell’s soldiers and merchant adventurers. The 19th century Ordnance Survey, famously dramatized in Brian Friel’s Translations (1980), gave new, Anglicized names to places which had previously had none. Place names are thus sites of encounter between language and power. The naming and renaming of places enshrines or contests particular national and ethno-linguistic identities: Doire/Derry was renamed Londonderry by royal charter in 1613, and King’s County and Queen’s County were renamed Offaly and Laois in 1922. The map of Ireland was redrawn again with the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and the creation of a border had a profound impact on the island’s culture and society in the 20th century. Brexit again raised the question of reunification and yet another re-drawing of the map of Ireland. There is also a long-standing interest in the creation and naming of places in Irish literary tradition, from the early Middle Ages to the present day. Early Irish saga literature abounds with digressions that explain the creation and naming of the present-day landscape. One of the most widely-copied and modified texts in medieval Ireland, the Dindshenchas Érenn, is a collection of verse and prose entries which purport to explain the origin of places throughout the island. Similar onomastic legends abound in the oral tradition, and a preoccupation with the experience of place persists in Irish poetry in English, Irish, and other languages.
Presently, maps of Ireland are mostly accessed with digital technologies on digital screens and platforms. The omnipresence of electronic devices raises the spectre of surveillance, whether by state bodies at the increasingly monitored border, or by private corporations. The omnipresence of social media creates new national and transnational ‘spaces’, calling for new approaches to mapping, cartography, and the local and global cultural imaginary of place. Networked media also increasingly highlight the complex relations between visible interfaces, underlaying layers of code, and material infrastructures. Such changes in transmission and exchange require new ways of exploring the entangled relations between power and cultural expression, and their impact on the island’s landscape and environment. The organizers welcome proposals for individual papers of 20 minutes, as well as panel proposals, addressing the above themes. Paper topics may include, but are by no means limited to, the following:
- Place and space in Irish literature and media
- Cartographies of transmission and exchange in literature, art, and culture
- Language, place, and translation in cultural and creative practice
- Mapping material and embodied space
- Migration, mobility, and travel
- Linguistic landscapes and contested toponomies
- Dinnseanchas in literature and folklore
- Borders, partition, and surveillance
- Online “spaces” and social media
- “Feral maps” and rewilding
Cuirfear fáilte roimh pháipéir i nGaeilge.
As always, the organizers also welcome submissions on other topics related to the wider field of Irish Studies. Abstracts of 200-300 words, along with a brief biographical sketch, should be sent to gregory.darwin@engelska.uu.se by June 1, 2025. Any questions about the call or the conference can be sent to the same e-mail address.
Please note that all speakers must be paid members of NISN at the time of the conference.