Campus Map: https://maps.appstate.edu/
Thursday, September 25, 2025 (ASU Solarium in Plemmons Union)
4:15 PM: Shuttle from Rhodes Motor Lodge (and other Boone hotels)
4:30 PM: Registration
5:00 PM: Welcome address
5:30 PM: Poetry reading by Eamonn Wall
6:30 PM: Reception (vegetarian/vegan hors d'oeuvres with gluten free options)
7:30 PM: Shuttle back to Rhodes Motor Lodge (and other Boone hotels)
Friday, September 26, 2025
8:15 AM & 8:30 AM: Shuttle from Rhodes (and others) to Sanford Hall
8:30 AM: Light breakfast opens (Sanford Hall, Ground Floor)
9:00 AM - 10:30 AM: Concurrent Panels
Roundtable: Open-Eyed, Full-Throated: Eco-Poetry by ACIS Poets, I (Mural Alcove: Chair, Nathalie Anderson)
Nathalie Anderson, Swarthmore College Emerita
Ed Madden, University of South Carolina
Ann Neelon, Murray State University Emerita
Drucilla Wall, University of Missouri at St. Louis Emerita
Panel: Transforming Space and Place (108 Sanford Hall: Chair, Wanda Balzano)
Wanda Balzano, Wake Forest University
“Behind the Veil of the Mythoscene: Memory, Sacred Space, and Enclosed Places in Ní Chuilleanáin’s Poetry”
Olivia Phillips, Indiana University
“Sometimes I’m in This Country”: Finding Ireland in the Singing of Beech Mountain, North Carolina’s Lee Monroe Presnell
Jeanne Dubino, Appalachian State University
“Dervla Murphy and Questions of Identity: An Irish Traveler in East Africa”
10:30 - 11 AM: Break
11 AM: Keynote (102 Sanford)
Malcolm Sen, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
"Shipwrecks: Vitality in the Void”
12:30-1:45: Vegetarian/Vegan Buffet lunch w/gluten free options (Sanford, Ground Floor)
2:00 PM - 3:15 PM: Concurrent Panels
Panel 1: Beyond Plantation Mentalities (102 Sanford Hall: Chair, Alonzo Smith)
Jessica Martell, Appalachian State University
“Plantations and Environmental Futurity in Modern Irish Literature”
Anna Teekell, Christopher Newport University
“At the Black Pig’s Dyke: Reading the Irish Border’s Ecology from Táin to Travelogue”
Joseph Lennon, Villanova University
"Irish Soft Power and Sustainability"
Panel 2: Shifting Political Landscapes and Fragile Peace (412 Sanford Hall: Chair, Cameron Lippard)
Kara E. Dempsey, Appalachian State University
“Brexit and Peace-Building”
Catherine McNamee, Queens University, Belfast
“Mixed Religion Romantic Relationships in Northern Ireland”
Cameron D. Lippard, Appalachian State University
“Are Refugees Really Welcome?: Understanding Ethno-Racial Attitudes toward Asylum Seeker Communities in Northern Ireland”
3:15-3:30 Break
3:30 PM - 4:45 PM: Concurrent Panels
Panel 1: Humans in a Multi-species World (102 Sanford: Chair, Jeanne Dubino)
Peggy Dunn Sturba, Coastal Carolina University
“Burning Oil and Breaking Down: Industrial Deterioration and Human Disintegration in Solar Bones”
Andrew Smyth, Southern Connecticut State University
“Dogs, Trust, and Co-Species Relationships in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Intermezzo”
Elizabeth Ricketts-Jones, University of South Florida
“Trickster Heroes, Royal Pigs, and Wily Storytellers: Mythological Resistance in Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten”
Panel 2: Irish Song and Literature (Sanford 412: Chair, CeCe Conway)
Michael Docherty, Appalachian State University
“Whiskey, You're the Devil: Alcoholic Affordances in Irish Song and Literature”
Leon Lewis, Appalachian State University
“A newer beauty and a steadier charm: The gay and melancholy strains of the Irish folk-song”
Ryan McGuckin, Appalachian State University
"Acoustic Intimacies: W. B. Yeats' Poetics of Drinking."
5:00 PM: Dinner on your own (an easy walk to King Street/Howard Street and restaurants)
7:00 PM: Film screening and discussion (at Greenbriar Theater on ASU campus; an easy walk from
King/Howard St. restaurants)
When All is Ruin Once Again (2018) Director: Kenneth Walsh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjkceagDTxk
9:30 PM: Shuttle from King Street back to Rhodes (and other hotels)
Saturday, September 27, 2025
8:15 AM & 8:30 AM: Shuttle from Rhodes (and others) to Sanford Hall
8:30 AM: Light breakfast opens
9:00 AM - 10:15 AM: Concurrent Panels
Panel 1: Embodied Artists in Joyce and Yeats (Sanford 102: Chair, Adrian Rice)
Richard Russell, Baylor University
"The Protestant Artist and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Joyce, Byron, and Stephen Dedalus”
Jefferson Holdridge, Wake Forest University
“The Rocking Cradle of Soul and Body in W.B. Yeats”
Panel 2: Poetry and the Anthropocene (Sanford 412: Chair, Nathalie Anderson)
Nolan Goetzinger, UC Riverside
“not the world, but heavy with it”: Trevor Joyce’s Lyric Tailing
Sydney Feldhake, Indiana State University
“Temporal Threads: Gender, Sacrifice, and Trauma in Heaney’s “The Tollund Man”
Kaitlin Thurlow, University of Georgia
“Sweeney Praises the Trees: Seamus Heaney and Henry Pearson’s Fine Press Book Collaborations”
10:15 AM - 10:45 AM: Break
10:45 AM - noon: Concurrent Panels
Roundtable: Open-Eyed, Full-Throated: Eco-Poetry by ACIS Poets, II (Mural Alcove: Chair, Nathalie Anderson)
Eamonn Wall, University of Missouri at St Louis
Adrian Rice, Appalachian State University
Charlene Spearen, Allen University
Joseph Lennon, Villanova University
Panel: Before the Anthropocene (Sanford 102: Chair, Mary Valante)
Brian Cook, Auburn University
“Pangur Bán: Playful Cat Poem and Serious Religious Reflection”
Laura McCloskey, University of West Georgia
“Imagination and Piety in Early Irish Hagiography: Echoes in Manuscript Decoration”
Helen Davies, UNC-Charlotte
“Uncovering Bricriu’s Feast”
12:30 PM – 1:30 PM: Buffet lunch with business meeting (Main Dining Hall, Jimmy Smith Room)
1:30-2 pm: Poet Stephen Sexton reads “Wild Ireland” from Belfast (Zoom, Jimmy Smith Room)
2:30-4:30 Special Activities
A. Excursion to Blue Ridge Parkway & Moses Cone Park
https://www.blueridgeheritage.com/destinations/moses-cone-manor/ (Meet shuttle outside dining hall at 2:15)
B. Workshop: “The Past in the Present: Creating and Digitizing Manuscripts” (Easy campus walk from Dining Hall to 421 Belk Library)
Laura McCloskey, University of West Georgia, “Early Irish Art”
Mary Valante, Appalachian State University “Insular scripts (and early printed book fonts)”
Helen Davies, UNC-Charlotte and Brian Cook, Auburn University “Accessibly Imaging Manuscript and Old Documents”
The fragile survival of early Irish manuscripts is vital to our understanding of the period. In this hands-on workshop, you are invited to visit, however imperfectly, the physical and often sustainable world of scribes and artists, and to see how modern scholars can use technology to learn even more. Laura McCloskey will guide you through recreating patterns and themes from early Irish art. Mary Valante will teach you how to use quills and oak gall ink to write in medieval Insular scripts, including the one that became the basis for a font used in nineteenth-century translations of medieval sources in Ireland and the UK. Helen Davies and Brian Cook will demonstrate, and allow you to try your hand at, using a full spectrum camera to accessibly image documents from medieval manuscripts to modern but damaged printed items. They will discuss with you affordable tools for multi-spectrum imaging in your own research. Participants will be offered the opportunity to try all three, or whichever interests them. Facsimiles of the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels will be available to look through, and our copy of the 1867 edition and translation of the Cogadh Gaedhil re Gallaib (The War of the Irish with the Foreigners) will be on display.
4:45: Shuttle from Belk Library to Rhodes (and other hotels)
6-8 pm: Dinner at Over Yonder restaurant in Rhodes Motor Lodge
Contact Peden Council for reservations with number in party, times preferred and phone number at peden.overyondernc.com Menu at Over Yonder: https://www.overyondernc.com/
Music by High Country Irish Music Trio
The dinner is not paid for as part of conference registration, but the food is local and delicious, and we would love to gather with you before you head home!