The Morgan and the James Joyce Society celebrate Joyce's birthday with a lecture in J. Pierpont Morgan's historic library by Mary M. Burke, Professor of English at UConn and author of Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History. Joyce's writings on the Irish language and his creation of Leopold Bloom as a Jewish Irishman in Ulysses inform Burke’s timely discussion of Máirtín Ó Cadhain's Cré na Cille (“graveyard soil,” 1949). This late modernist avant-garde rejoinder to Joyce in Irish furthered his concerns by acknowledging the exchanges that arose from Ireland’s history of emigration and Empire. Like Ulysses, Graveyard Soil prophetically asks if Irish culture could create imaginative and linguistic room - in either of its official languages - for Irish citizens of minority identity.
Mary Burke, Professor of English at UConn, is the author of Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Tinkers: Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller (Oxford University Press, 2009). She collaborated with Tramp Press on the 2022 reissue of Traveller-Romany Juanita Casey’s cult novel, The Horse of Selne. Her work has placed with JJQ, NPR, the Irish Times, Irish national broadcaster RTE, and Faber. A former University of Notre Dame NEH Irish Fellow, she was a 2022 LRH Fellow at her alma mater, Trinity College, Dublin.