MAPPING AND COUNTER-MAPPING IRELAND
The Biennial Conference of the Nordic Irish Studies Network
Uppsala University, Sweden
24-26 September 2025
PROGRAMME
WEDNESDAY 24 September
(Engelska Parken, 6-K1031)
13.00-13.30 Registration and opening remarks
13.30-15.00 Panel 1, chair: Ciaran McDonough
MARIA ZIRRA (Stockholm University): Birds, Oysters, Lobsters and Badgers: Mapping Animacies and the Implicated Subject in Seamus Heaney’s Animal Poems
ANNE KARHIO (University of Inland Norway): Feral cartographies and itineraries of resistance in literature and art from Ireland
AUDREY ROBITAILLIÉ (Catholic University of Toulouse): Counter-Mapping the City: Reading Dublin from a Neurodivergent Perspective in Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells (2015)
15.00-15.30 Coffee break
15.30-17.00 Keynote 1
Chair: Gregory Darwin
PATRICIA PALMER (Maynooth) and EVAN BOURKE (Maynooth): Counter Mapping Colonial Cartography: the MACMORRIS Deep Map
18.00 Reception, Engelska Parken, 16-0011
THURSDAY 25 September
(Blåsenhus, 12:004)
9.30-10.30 Panel 2, chair: Audrey Robitaillié
JOY MCCLEAN (Queen’s University Belfast): Mapping Oneself Through the Museum: An Autoethnographic Analysis of the Ulster Museum’s ‘Troubles and Beyond’ Exhibition
DAVID GRAY (Dalarna University): Mapping Ulster-Scots in Eighteenth Century Ireland
10.30-11.00 Coffee break
11.00-12.00 Panel 3, chair: Patricia Palmer
HIRAM MORGAN (University College Cork): Power Drawing – Battle depictions and pictorial maps from the Nine Years War, 1594-1603
FELIKS LEVIN (Aarhus University): Placing Ireland in the archipelagic and European contexts: the representations of the Irish past in the seventeenth-century Irish Catholic writings
12.00-13.30 Lunch
13.30-15.00 Panel 4, chair: Astrid Isac
ANTIONIO BIBBÒ (University of Trento): Impressions of Ireland: Irish Landscape in Italian Translation
CIAN DUNNE (Queen’s University Belfast): ‘But instead I say nothing’: Recalibrating The Distinction Between Translation and Mapping in Adrian Duncan’s The Geometer Lobachevsky
CIARAN MCDONOUGH (Aarhus University): Greek and Roman Sources and Irish Culture: Towards a Hierarchy of Nineteenth-Century Irish Knowledge Production in the Ordnance Survey Letters
15.00-15.30 Coffee break
15.30-17.00 Keynote 2
Chair: Anne Karhio
GAIL MCCONNELL (Queen’s University Belfast): ”The Sun is Open / Solen står på glänt: Poems and Reflections in the Wake of the Troubles”
17:00-18:00 NISN General Meeting
19.00 Conference dinner, Il Forno Italiano, S:t Olafsgatan 8
FRIDAY 26 September
(Engelska Parken, 6-K1031)
9.30-10.30 Panel 5, chair: Gregory Darwin
CÉLINE HEALEY (Maynooth University) and CHRISTINE JOHANNSON (Uppsala University): Innovation in Language Education: A Swedish-Irish Creative Collaboration
ASTRID ISAC (Stockholm University) Insular Encounters with Art: Imagination and Ekphrasis in John Banville’s Ghosts
10.30-11.00 Coffee break
11.00-12.00 Panel 6, chair: Feliks Levin
NICOLE VOLMERING (Trinity College Dublin): Félire Óengusso as a Literary Map of Irish Ecclesiastical History
DAVID MCCAY (University of Cambridge): Localising knowledge in Dindshenchas Érenn
12.00-13.30 Lunch
13.30-15.00 Panel 7, chair: Maria Zirra
AIDAN O’MALLEY (University of Rijeka): Surveying Orson Welles’s ‘Honorary Citizenship of Ireland’
PHYLLIS BOUMANS (Stockholm University): Mapping the Radio Story on Radio Éireann (1940-1965)
EBBA NYBERG (University of Gothenburg): Dancing at Lughnasa: A Contrastive Analysis between a Play and its Movie Adaptation
15.00-15.15 Closing remarks
15.00 Visit to Special Collections in Carolina Rediviva Library
Call for papers: Mapping and Counter-mapping Ireland
The Biennial Conference of the Nordic Irish Studies Network
Uppsala University, Sweden
24-26 September 2025
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 15 June. 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.
