St Mary's Academic to Speak at Liverpool Irish Festival

Research Fellow in the Centre for Irish Studies at St Mary’s University, Twickenham Dr Keith Hopper has been invited to give a public lecture for the Liverpool Irish Festival. The lecture will be held at Liverpool John Moores University on 19 October 2015, and forms part of the Marginal Irish Modernisms strand at this year’s festival. Marginal Irish Modernisms is a two-year AHRC-funded research network project, which involves collaboration between Liverpool John Moores, Trinity College Dublin, and St Mary’s. The aim is to rethink Irish historical experience during a key period of the country’s modern evolution (1880-1939). The project is multidisciplinary in scope and impact, drawing on current debates in the fields of English, History, Musicology, Politics, Economics and Cultural Studies. The overall objective of the project is to develop a better understanding of the Irish experience of Modernism, and to effect a change in the wider understanding of that term as it has traditionally been employed in Irish Studies as well as in wider academic discourses. The title of Dr Hopper’s lecture is Experimenting with Time: J.W. Dunne and Irish Modernism. Dr Hopper said, “J.W. Dunne (1875–1949) was an aviator and aeronautical engineer who also wrote a series of best-selling books on parapsychology and precognition, including An Experiment with Time (1927). Despite their eccentricities, Dunne’s speculative theories of ‘serial time’ proved immensely attractive for a number of popular and avant-garde writers, including H.G. Wells, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, J.B. Priestley, Graham Greene, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, and many others. Although he was quite well-known in Britain and Ireland in the 1930s and 40s, Dunne has long since disappeared from intellectual histories of the period. As part of an ongoing research project, this lecture will focus on the influence of Dunne on the Irish novelist Flann O’Brien.” —Keith Hopper teaches Literature and Film Studies for Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education, and is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Irish Studies at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. He is the author of Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-modernist (revised edition 2009) and general editor of the twelve-volume Ireland into Film series (2001–2007). He is the co-editor (with Neil Murphy) of Flann O’Brien: Centenary Essays (2011) and The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013), and of Dermot Healy’s The Collected Short Stories and Fighting with Shadows, which have just been published by Dalkey Archive Press.