Dublin: A Global City of Literature – Lecture by Professor Chris Morash. The second annual Dublin UNESCO City of Literature Lecture.

The Dublin of Patrick Kavanagh, or of Joyce, was at times more like an overgrown village than a modern metropolis, a place where wandering the streets produced chance encounters, and the streets themselves contained layers of history. In the past twenty-five years, that city has been overlaid by another, a global city, connected outwards as a global hub in a connected world. This lecture will explore some of the ways in which these two Dublins have been imagined by the city's novelists, from contemporary works by writers such as Sally Rooney, Benjamin Black, Paul Murray and Anne Enright, but also looking back to Joyce and his contemporaries. In the end, this lecture will ask: how does a city connect to the world and remain connected to its own past at the same time?

Chris Morash is the Séamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing in Trinity College Dublin, where he served as Vice-Provost of the university from 2016-19. He has published extensively on Irish culture, including studies of Irish Famine literature, A History of the Irish Theatre 1601-2000, A History of the Media in Ireland, and he is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre (2016). From 2009 to 2014, he served as the first chair of the Compliance Committee of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland. He was elected to Membership of the Royal Irish Academy in 2007, and to Fellowship of Trinity in 2016. He is the new chair of the judging committee of the Dublin International Literary Award. He is originally from Nova Scotia.