Almost time!

The conference is only two days away now! We hope everyone is excited and wish you all safe travels.

Please note that we have posted a final schedule on the site. We have also created pages detailing how to get to and from Dublin airport, how to find your way around TCD, as well as some extra information concerning restaurants and attractions in the city.

Registration Reminder

Registration forms were due back to literatureandconservation@gmail.com by 1 August. If you have not yet returned this form, please do so as soon as possible so we know how many people we will be attending the conference and the optional trips.

Suggested accommodation & other details

Hello everyone! Now that the deadline for papers has come and gone, we can start providing all of our speakers with some more information.

Due to the high number of excellent paper proposals we received, our conference will be beginning Friday afternoon (2 September).

We will be posting suggested hostels/hotels/guesthouses on this site.

Hostels:

Kinlay House, Dublin Centrally located hostel. Just by Dublin Castle, Christ Church and Temple Bar.

Barnacles Located right in Temple Bar!

Avalon House Just at the top of George's Street, not far from Stephen's Green and St. Patrick's Cathedral. Great coffee shop on the first floor.

Citi Hostel Between St Stephen's Green and the Grand Canal.

Guesthouses:

Townhouse Hotel, Gardiner Street (Nice Georgian townhouse that was a former residence of Dion Boucicault)

Charles Stewart Guesthouse On Parnell Square at the top of O'Connell Street. Very close to James Joyce Centre, Irish Writer's Centre and Dublin City Hugh Lane Gallery.

Hotels:

North Star Hotel, Amiens Street (Across the road from Connolly Station)

Central Hotel Great location just off Georges Street. Wonderful "Library Bar" upstairs.

Maldron Hotel Along the river by the new "Grand Canal Theatre".

O'Callaghan Hotels - 3 different locations all located around Trinity College and the beautiful Merrion Square. Close to National Gallery of Ireland.

Mespil Hotel, Just along the Grand Canal.

For those with a high level of financial ability:

The Shelbourne One of the most beautiful hotels in Dublin, built in 1824. Princess Grace and John F. Kennedy are among the previous guest list.

The Merrion Hotel Dublin's premier hotel. Michelin starred Patrick Guilbaud's restaurant inside.

New additions to the conference

Hello everyone,

I'm pleased to announce that two wonderful Irish poets, Moya Cannon (http://www.gallerypress.com/Authors/Mcannon/mcannon.html) and Sean Lysaght (http://www.gallerypress.com/Authors/Slysaght/slysaght.html)will be reading from their work at our conference dinner.

Our conference dinner will be taking place in the James Joyce Centre on the Saturday evening on the conference.

Literature and Environmental Conservation: Responsibilities

Literature and Environmental Conservation: Responsibilities

2-4^th September 2011

Trinity College, Dublin

The “Literature and Environmental Conservation: Responsibilities” conference will be a two day event, bringing together speakers interested in exploring the intersections between literature and conservation. How does literature alter the way in which we perceive our environment? How does literature provide us with a sense of responsibility toward this environment? A theme that lends itself to multiple fields, this conference will promote interdisciplinary collaborations between the humanities, visual arts, and sciences, engaging points of overlap as well as lines of divergence.

The conference will take place over three days, with the plenary speaker on the Friday evening. Saturday will be a full day of panels followed by a round table discussion concerning the role literature (and on a larger scale, the arts) plays in terms of conservation policy and planning. On Sunday, there will be an optional hiking trip in the Wicklow mountains.

Paper are encouraged on (but not limited to) the following topics:

• Ecopoetics
• Postcolonial ecocriticism
• Cultural geography
• Environmental disasters
• Parks and wildlife conservation
• Children’s literature
• Conservation & literary movements
• Literature of “place” (regional/national literatures)

Our plenary speaker will be John Elder, Emeritus Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT). John Elder is the author of one of the most formative ecocritical texts, Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature (1986. He has also edited the Norton anthology Nature Writing: The Tradition in English.  In recent years, he has been engaged in service-learning and community-based education, through courses related to residents' sense of place in the town of Starksboro, VT and to the challenges and hopes of eleven Addison County, VT, farmers.  His three most recent books -- Reading the Mountains of Home, The Frog Run, and Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa -- have each combined discussion of literature, description of Vermont's landscape and natural history, and personal memoir. His interests have also recently been leading him to Ireland, and he was asked to write the introduction for Cork University Press’s new collection of essays, Out of the Earth: Ecocrtitical Readings of Irish Texts (2010).

Abstracts should be 200-250 words and should be sent to the conference organizers no later than 15 April 2011.

literatureandconservation@gmail.com

http://literatureconservation.blogspot.com/