St Mary's Academic to speak at Yeats Conference

Dr Keith Hopper, Research Fellow in the Centre for Irish Studies at St Mary’s University, Twickenham has been invited to give the opening keynote lecture at a two-day symposium in India entitled W.B. Yeats and the India Connection. The lecture will take place at the India International Centre, New Delhi on 27^th November 2015, and forms part of the worldwide Yeats2015 celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of the poet’s birth. The title of Dr Hopper’s lecture is “The island dreams under the dawn”: W.B. Yeats, India and Ireland. He will also be taking part in a panel discussion about Yeats’s life and work. Dr Hopper said, “W.B. Yeats is the most important poet of the twentieth century, and it’s a great privilege to able to talk about his work in New Delhi. Although Yeats never visited India, he was deeply influenced by Indian poetry and culture, and I look forward to exploring these literary connections with Indian academics, writers, and artists”. —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.