39th California Celtic Conference

March 16-19, 2017

D-37 Hearst Field Annex

Free and open to the public, no registration required.

Program is subject to change.

Thursday Mar 16:
5:00-6:15 PM opening Plenary: Louis De Paor (NUI Galway), “A scholar
manqué? Flann O’Brien and early Irish literature”
6:00pm: Special reception for the Irish Studies Program at UC Berkeley.

Friday Mar. 17:
9-10:30
Philip O’Leary (Boston College) Presenting a Challenging Past: Piaras Béaslaí’s play An Danar (1928)
Natasha Sumner (Harvard) The Revivalists’ Diarmaid and Gráinne
Éilish Cullen (Independent scholar) “Utopian Visioning: Hope, Experimental Sound, and Live Art in Ireland”

10:45-12:15
Panel moderated by Gary Holland
Joseph Eska (Virginia Tech) Laryngeal realism and Celtic phonology
David Wallace-Hare (U-Toronto) Epigraphic evidence of Hispano-Celtic bear worship in Roman Spain
Lindy Brady (U-Miss) Conṡlechta and Eachtra an Mhadra Mhaoil: Ear cropping and Tail docking

1:30-2:45
Introduction by Annalee Rejhon
Sioned Davies (Cardiff University) Plenary

3:00 pm Brianna McElrath Panasenco (UC Berkeley) “The Celtic woman from the Norse perspective: Renegotiating place through ‘women’s work’ and Magic”
Heather Newton (Harvard) “There once was a woman who swallowed a fly: Ingestion and reproduction in Celtic and Scandinavian literature”
Katharine Olson (San Jose State University/Bangor University) “…in Englishe or Welshe yonge and olde to Reherse it: Language, Reformation Politics, and Religious Identity, c.1538-1553”

4:30
Introduction by Eve Sweetser
Antone Minard (Simon Fraser University) Plenary: ‘“Around the catafalque she ran’: The nature of horror in Breton and Welsh legend”

6 pm Poetry reading by Louis De Paor (refreshments served).

Saturday March 18
9:30-10:30
Catherine McKenna (Harvard) Cyfarwydd as poet in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi
Joseph Shack (Harvard) “A Race bred in rocks”: Re-examining of the origins of the Welsh “Barbarity” topos

10:45-12:15
Jessica Hemming (Corpus Christi College) Exultation and ecocriticism, or What to do with the gorhoffedd poems
Michaela Jacques (Harvard) Rewriting tradition: An early modern edition of the medieval Welsh bardic grammars
Joshua Byron Smith (University of Arkansas) Ms. Arundel 14 and Wales

1:30-2:45
Introduced by Eve Sweetser
Joseph Falaky Nagy (Harvard) Plenary: Misguided Ulstermen

3:00-5:00
Thomas Walsh (UC Berkeley) Remarks on early Irish poetry in comparison with early Greek poetry
Richard Martin (Stanford) Why Suckfist? Epithets, exegesis and performance in Cóir Anmann

5:15-6:30
Introduced by Annalee Rejhon
Brynley Roberts (Aberystwyth, University of Wales Center for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies) Plenary: Edward Lhwyd, father of Celtic Studies

Sunday March 19
9:30-11:00
Elizabeth Gilbert (UC Berkeley) Fionnuala and the flare: Myth and gas in the Irish landscape
Carmel Ní Bhriain (NUIG) Mapping TG4: Framing and reframing the Irish language
Tom Clancy (Independent scholar) Go, move, shift: Exploring Irish cultural changes through ten songs
11:30-1:00 Special panel
The Irish Language as Taught in Northern California: A Roundtable Discussion and Panel in Memory of Eddie Stack
In memory of UCB’s most recent teacher of Irish, the late Eddie Stack, the participants will discuss the teaching of Irish in the Bay Area and beyond. Topics to be discussed will include Eddie Stack’s contribution to teaching the Irish language at UC Berkeley and at the New School in S. F.; the Irish language taught outside the academic context (e.g., Irish Immersion at the S.F. Irish Center); Irish on the peninsula (Stanford) and in central California (Santa Cruz).

Thomas Walsh (on Irish at UC Berkeley)
Imelda White (on Irish teaching at the United Irish Center and at Stanford)
Matt Horton and Elizabeth Creely on the Irish in early San Francisco.
Presented by the Celtic Studies Program, the Irish Studies Program,
the Department of Linguistics and the Diebold Fund, the Department of Scandinavian, the Department of English, the Folan Fund (Division of the Humanities), and the Division of Social Sciences at UC Berkeley.
Special thanks to the The Irish Studies Program and Professor Eric Falci.
And to Laura Watkins and Éilish Cullen for their assistance with the conference.