The Keynote Speakers will be Nicholas Grene of Trinity College and Anthony Roche of University College Dublin. Plenary session speakers will be Peter Gahan, independent scholar and Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel of Massachusetts Maritime Academy.
Nicholas Grene
Nicholas Grene is Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, and the author of a number of books including Bernard Shaw: a Critical View (1984) and The Politics of Irish Drama (1999), the editor of Major Barbara for the New Mermaids series (2008) and the co-editor with Dan Laurence of Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey (1993). Nicholas’s paper is titled 'Dalkey's outlook: Shaw's scenic sense'.
Anthony Roche
Anthony Roche is an Associate Professor in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. He has published widely on twentieth and twenty-first century Irish drama and theatre. Recent publications include CONTEMPORARY IRISH DRAMA: SECOND EDITION (2009) and BRIAN FRIEL: THEATRE AND POLITICS (2011), both published by Palgrave Macmillan. Anthony’s paper is titled 'Shaw and Yeats: Theatre and its Anti-Self'.
Photo courtesy of Bobbie Hanvey
Peter Gahan
Dublin-born Peter Gahan graduated in Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin, and is the author of Shaw Shadows: Rereading the Texts of Bernard Shaw (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004) and editor of a volume of essays Shaw and the Irish Literary Tradition, published as SHAW 30: the Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies (Penn State University Press, 2010). He currently lives in Los Angeles. His paper is titled "Bernard Shaw, Irish Nationalist"The paper details Shaw's contributions to the Irish nationalist debate in a survey of the years from 1906, the year he wrote the preface to John Bull's Other Island, through 1922, the year of Irish Independence. Those years included the famous 1909 Abbey production of Shaw's The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet in defiance of Dublin Castle , the 1913 Dublin Lock-out, the 1914 "Curragh Mutiny," the 1916 Easter Rising and trial of Roger Casement, the Irish Convention of 1917, and the Anglo-Irish War 1918-1921.
Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel
Nelson’s plenary session talk is titled: "Shaw, the Poor Law, and 1910 Dublin: The Rocky Road to Connolly." Nelson's paper will examine Shaw's important 1910 lecture in Dublin, "The Poor Law and Destitution in Ireland", which was part of a concentrated Fabian campaign against the British government's Poor Law system, but delivered amid a socialist controversy stirred by James Connolly. The year marked the return to Dublin, if briefly, of Shaw and Connolly, setting both on courses of collaboration and reaction that precipitated a provocative socialist movement within Dublin. He has published his fourth book, Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation, University Press of Florida, in 2011, and this year's SHAW 32 will mark his third essay in SHAW since 2007. He is professor in the Humanities Department at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy in Buzzard’s Bay, Massachusetts.
