InTransition Lecture by Colin Graham

June 27, 6-8 pm, Campus Westend, IG 1.414 (Wine Reception to follow)

‘A Real Event in Slow Motion’: (Northern) Irish Poetry after Brexit

The event of Brexit, as it unfolds uncertainly, has the capacity to change the political and cultural landscape of Northern Ireland. This paper considers the potential effects of Brexit on Northern Ireland by examining what Brexit is, what it thinks it is, and what critical paradigms, in an Irish context, offer themselves to understand Brexit. While the course of Brexit seems to collide with the actuality, and certainly the spirit, of the Good Friday Agreement, culture, and specifically poetry, in Northern Ireland over the past twenty years has been attempting to comprehend the effects of post-Agreement culture on the nature of the political self. How will Brexit reconfigure that self, and what effect might the political realignment of a post-Brexit culture have on the way in which the voice of Northern Irish poetry expresses itself?

Colin Graham is Professor and Head of English at Maynooth University, Ireland. His books include Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography (2013), Deconstructing Ireland (2001) and Ideologies of Epic (1998), and he is co-editor of three collections of essays. He co-edits The Irish Review and is curator of the Illuminations gallery space at Maynooth University. He is currently working on a book on Brexit and Northern Ireland.