Amy Mulligan Lecture (Irish Studies): "A Globalized Poetics: Ireland, Britain and Writing Place from 700-1250"

Amy Mulligan, Assistant Professor of Irish Language and Literature and a fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and the Medieval Institute, will speak on “A Globalized Poetics: Ireland, Britain and Writing Place from 700-1250.”

Living on an island at the very edge of the known world, the medieval Irish were in a unique position to contemplate how location shapes a people. Experiencing this geography in many ways– as monastic peregrini and penitent pilgrims, as ambitious dynasts pursuing political expansion, as subjects of English conquest, as imaginative poets forging refuges for a precarious culture – the Irish translated the world around them into narratives about their identity and transnational character. An immense body of poetry and prose from ca. 700-1250, in Irish and Latin, verbally maps out Ireland, the North Atlantic archipelago, and a larger medieval world centered in Jerusalem. The medieval Irish did not only innovate significantly in developing a geospatial literature at once global and local. Medieval Irish thinkers also enacted a medieval ‘spatial turn’ by developing a globalized poetics that profoundly shaped medieval European conceptions of how to write place.

In 2016, Professor Mulligan won two prestigious fellowships—one a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and the other a Fulbright for her current book project “A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain, and the Poetics of Irish Space from 700-1300."

Read more about Professor Mulligan

Co-sponsor: Medieval Institute

Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.