Talking about my research: and a little bit about Obama...

While I have spent the last academic year writing up my book, I have given seminars and papers on my research - which have been great for getting to meet other academics working in similar fields. In February I gave a talk at KCL's American Studies graduate seminar: 'Family feeling: the American-Irish cultural inheritance in Fitzgerald, O'Neill, Steinbeck and others'. Then in April I spent a month on a Visiting Fellowship at the Trinity Long Room Hub, Dublin, where I carried out archival research and met with fellows working in similar fields: I even met an academic working in children's literature to whom I recommended the children's stories of the early twentieth century Irish-American writer Padraic Colum. Colum's Hawaiian stories ended up being a present for Barack Obama when he visited Ireland in May! I was excited to be a small part of the story... And lastly, in July I gave a paper at the annual Transatlantic Studies Association conference (this time, it was held in Dundee). It was exciting to be on a panel dedicated entirely to Irish-American transatlantic poetics: my paper discussed the ways in which American modernist writers 'translated' the Irish landscape in their poetry. The programme was suitably varied; my panel (as is often the case!) was on the last morning...