The Trieste Joyce School

The Trieste Joyce School offers a programme of lectures and seminars complemented by a lively series of social and cultural events in the city Joyce called 'my second country'.

The academic programme consists of lectures which are held each morning as well as week-long seminars, which take place each afternoon from 14.30 to 16.00. Places will be assigned on a first-come, first served basis.

• The Ulysses seminar will be led by Dr Caroline Elbay.
• The Finnegans Wake seminar will be led by Sun-chieh Liang.
• The Environmental humanities seminar will be led by Dr Malcolm Sen.

Attendees are encouraged to bring their own digital or physical copies of the texts!

The 2026 Programme is forthcoming.

The Trieste Joyce School attracts a range of participants: University doctoral candidates, seasoned Joyce readers, budding Joyce enthusiasts from undergraduate level. There is inevitably a splendid mix of ages, nationalities, and talents in Trieste united in the pursuit of broadening and deepening their knowledge of Joyce while soaking up the multicultural atmosphere of the Adriatic city.

Lucy Caldwell is a Northern Irish playwright, short story writer and novelist. She is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas and three collections of short stories - Multitudes, Intimacies and Openings - as well as the highly-anticipated new collection Devotions. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, she was the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories in 2019. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for 'All the People Were Mean and Bad'. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Walter Scott Prize and the 2022 E. M. Forster Award.

Trisevgeni Bilia completed her DPhil in April 2025 at the University of Oxford (Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Sub-faculty of Modern Greek). Focusing on the trajectory of James Joyce's Ulysses in the Greek literary space, her thesis explored the novel's translations and critical reception to develop arguments about translation practices and modes of reading Joyce and modernism in the periphery. She is interested in world literature, translation studies, modernism, modern Greek studies and Joyce studies. Her current projects examine the role of translation in the circulation of modernism in Greece, as well as Joyce's interest in the modern Greek language. She has participated in International James Joyce Symposia, workshops at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, as well as James Joyce Italian Foundation conferences.

John Dredge is honorary secretary of the James Joyce Institute of Ireland for whom he hosts and moderates a weekly online Ulysses reading group. He contributes to a number of international, online Finnegans Wake reading groups and has lectured on the Wake at Dublin's James Joyce Centre. A history educationalist by profession, John lectured in history pedagogy at the School of Education, University College Dublin, where he is currently an adjunct research fellow.

Jeffrey Drouin is the Frances W. O'Hornett Associate Professor of Literature at The University of Tulsa, where he edits the James Joyce Quarterly and co-directs the Modernist Journals Project. He has published articles and book chapters on Joyce, modernist periodicals, archival theory and the First World War and is the author of James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture: 'The Einstein of English Fiction' (Routledge 2015). He is currently writing a book on À la recherche du temps perdu and Gothic cathedrals provisionally titled 'Proust and the Circuits of Memory'.

Dr Caroline Elbay is a Lecturer and International Internship Programme Director at Champlain College Dublin where she teaches courses in Irish literature; Academic Writing; and Irish music. She was awarded a PhD by Queen's University Belfast (2016) where her thesis ('Joyce, Bloom, Sex and Character: A Comparative Study') focused on representations of gender, anti-feminism, and anti-Semitism in the works of James Joyce and Otto Weininger. Caroline will lead the seminar on Ulysses for this year's Trieste Joyce School.

Thomas Gurke is DAAD Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota. He has a degree in English Literature and Musicology. His PhD dissertation focused on the intersemiotic, aesthetic, and affective dynamics of music and literature in the texts of James Joyce. His publications focus on Joyce, contemporary fiction, ecology, the short-story, and popular culture. He is co-editor of Words, Music, and the Popular: Global Perspectives on Intermedial Relations (Palgrave, 2021, with Susan Winnett) and Guest editor of a forthcoming Special Journal Issue on 'Emotions and Affect in Words and Music' (Humanities, MDPI, 2026).

Dr Shelly Harder is an interdisciplinary writer and scholar, with a DPhil from the University of Oxford. Their doctoral research on William Blake's position in Joyce's writing life is underway as a monograph, and their work has appeared in Genetic Joyce Studies. Their research interests include reception studies, genetic criticism, art history, and feminist and queer theoretical approaches. Their creative writing has been in numerous publications including The Fiddlehead and The /tɛmz/ Review, and they are the author of several chapbooks of poetry.

Alexandros Karavas is a graduate of the Athens School of Fine Arts. His current practice centers on psychologically charged figurative works, balancing gesture, expressionism, and the grotesque. Over the past two years, he has been developing a graphic novel adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses, contextualized within a practice-based PhD project. He lives and works in Lesvos, Greece.

Damien Keane is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of Ireland and the Problem of Information, which was awarded the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature by the American Conference for Irish Studies, as well as articles on radio broadcasting, intelligence monitoring, and literary recordings. At an almost imperceptible pace, he is working on a monograph centered on the institutional afterlives of Joyce's gramophone recordings in the LP era.

Sun-chieh Liang is Professor of English Literature at National Taiwan Normal University. His areas of specialization include translation studies, comparative literature, and the twentieth-century novel. His research focuses on modernist and postmodernist literature from a global perspective. He has published scholarly articles on James Joyce, Geoffrey Chaucer, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Lévinas, among others. He has edited a collection of essays on modern Irish literature and, in 2024, published a Taiwanese Sinitic translation of Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

Erika Mihálycsa is Associate Professor of modern British and Irish literature at Babeș -Bolyai University, Cluj. Editor, with Jolanta Wawrzycka, of Retranslating Joyce for the 21st Century (European Joyce Studies, 2020), and with Anne Fogarty and Scott Hamilton, of Flann O'Brien: Palimpsests, Intertexts, Translations (Cork UP, forthcoming 2026), she has mainly published in the field of Joyce in translation, Beckett and the visual arts, and various aspects of literary and visual modernism, Editor of Rareș Moldovan's new, annotated Romanian translation of Ulysses (2023), she has translated fiction by Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Patrick McCabe and others into Hungarian and a handful of contemporary Hungarian authors into English.

Vike Martina Plock is Head of English and Creative Writing and Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. Her publications include the monographs Joyce, Medicine and Modernity (2010), Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers (2017) and The BBC German Service during the Second World War: Broadcasting to the Enemy (2021). She is an advisory editor of the James Joyce Quarterly and has edited two JJQ special issues ('Joyce and Physiology' 2009 and 'Anniversary Joyce', 2019). She was a member of the academic committee in charge of organising the XXV International James Joyce Symposium that took place in London from 13-18 June 2016. She is currently beginning work on a new project on modernist writers and paper.

Malcolm Sen is Associate Professor in the Department of English at UMass Amherst. His research focuses on questions of sovereignty, migration, race, and war in the contexts of climate change and the Anthropocene. His literary archive spans global Anglophone, Indian, and Irish literatures. He is the co-editor of Postcolonial Studies and Challenges of the New Millennium (Routledge, 2016), the editor of The History of Irish Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); and co-editor of Race in Irish Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024). His monograph 'Unnatural Disasters: Literature, Climate Change and Sovereignty' will be published by Syracuse University Press in 2026. Malcolm will lead a special seminar on the environmental humanities for this year's Trieste Joyce School.

Ronan Crowley is an Affiliate Researcher at KU Leuven. His research focuses on literary history of the Irish revival and Irish modernism with a specialism in James Joyce, and he has published widely in these areas. He was a Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation for several years and now serves as its Vice President and President-Elect.

John McCourt is Magnifico Rettore (Rector) and professor of English literature at the University of Macerata. He is President of the International James Joyce Foundation and a member of the academic board of the International Yeats Summer School. He previously taught at UniversitàRoma Tre, where he was director of the Centre for Research into Irish and Scottish Literature, and at the University of Trieste, where he co-founded the Trieste Joyce School. He is the author of many books and articles on James Joyce and on 19th and 20th century Irish literature including The Years of Bloom: Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920 (Lilliput, 2000); Ulisse Guida alla Lettura (Carocci, 2021); and Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of 'Ulysses' in Ireland (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Katherine O'Callaghan is a Senior Lecturer in the department of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She received her PhD on the topic of Joyce and Music from University College Dublin. She grew up in Dublin and moved to Western Massachusetts in 2015. She is the editor of Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature: Musical Modernism (Routledge, 2018), and the co-editor, with Oona Frawley, of Memory Ireland Volume IV: James Joyce and Cultural Memory (Syracuse University Press, 2014). She is completing a monograph entitled 'James Joyce's Literary Soundscapes: Silence, Exile, and Music.'

Laura Pelaschiar is programme director of the Trieste Joyce School. Her PhD is from the University of Bologna, and she has worked as a translator for many years, translating over fifty books for Mondadori, E. Elle Einaudi Ragazzi, Fazi Editore. Her research focuses mainly on the work of James Joyce and the nexus between Joycean texts, the Gothic tradition and Shakespeare. She published Ulisse Gotico (Pacini Editore) in 2009. She has also published widely on the Northern Irish novel. She teaches English literature and English language at the University of Trieste.