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 Dubliners seminar will be led by Dr Caroline Elbay.
• The Ulysses seminar will be led by Dr Shinjini Chattopadhyay.
• The Finnegans Wake seminar will be led by Terence Killeen.

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

Please be advised that the opening reception will be held on Sunday June 30th at 8pm and not at 6pm as erroneously stated in the programme. We apologise in advance for any inconvenience!

Download the 2024 programme

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.

Leeanne Quinn's debut collection, Before You (2012), was highly commended in the Forward Prize for Poetry 2013. Her second collection, Some Lives (2020) was a Book of the Year in The Irish Times and The Irish Independent. Her current book focuses on the Irish modernist Nano Reid.

Robert Baines is an associate professor of English at the University of Evansville in southern Indiana. He is the author of Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (Oxford University Press: 2023).

Emily Bell recently defended her PhD on James Joyce's library and his intertextual methods at the University of Antwerp. She is currently a Vice-Chancellor Independent Research Fellow at Loughborough University where she will use genetic criticism to consider how ill health impacted modernist writing processes and environments. She has published in Genetic Joyce Studies, Modernist Review, and the James Joyce Quarterly.

Shinjini Chattopadhyay (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Modernism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States. She earned her PhD from the University of Notre Dame, US. She is currently working on her monograph, "Plurabilities of the City" where she explores various literary representations of modernist metropolitan cosmopolitanism. Her writings on James Joyce have appeared in the James Joyce Quarterly, European Joyce Studies, Joyce Studies in Italy, and are forthcoming in various edited collections including Finnegans Wake: Human and Non-Human History (Edinburgh University Press, 2024); Teaching Joyce (University Press of Florida, 2024); and "Ulysses" Forty Years: Critical Retrospective of Hans Walter Gabler's Critical and Synoptic Edition of "Ulysses" (Clemson University Press, 2024). She has also published on Virginia Woolf and the middlebrow modernist, Stella Benson. She serves on the board of trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation.

Ronan Crowley is a Marie Curie Fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Vice President and President-Elect of the International James Joyce Foundation. He is writing a book on Ulysses in Europe.

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.

Dr Cleo Hanaway-Oakley is Lecturer in Liberal Arts and English at the University of Bristol. She specialises in the work of James Joyce, literary modernism, medical humanities, sensing and the sensory, and notions of embodiment. Her first monograph, James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. She is currently working on her second monograph, James Joyce and Non-normative Vision: Re-viewing the Blind Bard, and is co-editing - with Keith Williams - The Edinburgh Companion to James Joyce and the Arts. Cleo is a trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation.

Terence Killeen is Research Scholar at the James Joyce Centre, Dublin. He is the author of Ulysses Unbound: A Reader's Companion to 'Ulysses' (now in a new edition from Penguin). He has lectured at the Trieste and Dublin Joyce Summer Schools and is also the co-ordinator of an online Finnegans Wake seminar. He has co-ordinated the Finnegans Wake seminars at several summer schools and was a keynote speaker at the James Joyce International Conference in Mexico City in 2019.

Zachary Leader is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Roehampton. He has also taught at the University of Chicago, Caltech and Harvard. He is the author or editor of a dozen books in the fields of English Romantic Poetry and contemporary fiction, among them biographies of the English novelist Kingsley Amis and the American novelist Saul Bellow. His book on Richard Ellmann and the making of his biography of James Joyce will be published next year by Harvard University Press. He is General Editor of The Oxford History of Life-Writing, a seven-volume series published by OUP, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Born in Dublin, Donal Manning studied Medicine at University College Dublin. After retiring from a career as a paediatrician in Ireland and Britain, he was awarded PhD at Liverpool University for a thesis on Ulster and unionism in Finnegans Wake. His first book, 'Finnegans Wake', Ulster and Partition, was published by Cork University Press in 2023. Donal has published and presented papers on Joyce's treatment in the Wake of medical genetics, Ireland's Huguenots, and the Great Famine. He has taught on Joyce's fiction at the Department of Continuing Education, Liverpool University.

Annalisa Mastronardi currently teaches Italian in Dublin. She recently completed a PhD at Dublin City University, focusing on the legacies of James Joyce in contemporary Irish women's writing. Her Master's thesis, 'James Joyce: attrazione e repulsione per la Chiesa Cattolica' (James Joyce: Attraction and Repulsion towards the Catholic Church), won the 2019 UAAR Graduate Thesis Award. Her articles, interviews and short stories have been featured in esteemed publications such as the Irish Independent, Joyce Studies in Italy, The Bookish Explorer, Hook Magazine, HeadStuff, Writing.ie and the Contemporary Irish Literature Research Network.

John McCourt is 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 the Università Roma Tre where he was director of CRISIS (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 Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of Ulysses in Ireland (Bloomsbury 2022) and Ulisse Guida alla Lettura (Carocci, 2021). He is also the author of The Years of Bloom: Joyce in Trieste 1904 - 1920 (2000).

Tekla Mecsnóber earned her master's and doctoral degrees in Budapest, Hungary, and currently teaches modern and contemporary anglophone fiction and book history at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her research interests include intersections of literature with political and language ideological discourses and practices, material and sociological approaches to literature, and more recently, translingual authorship in the global digital literary ecosystem. She is the author of the monograph Rewriting Joyce's Europe: The Politics of Language and Visual Design in 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake', co-editor of two collections, and a member of the editorial board of European Joyce Studies.

Georgina Nugent is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Vienna and the author of Beckett and Stein (Cambridge University Press, 2023). She is currently conducting a comparative study of Joyce and Stein's literary rivalry and competing modernisms.

Laura Pelaschiar is co-director of the Trieste Joyce School. She is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Trieste and has worked as a translator, translating over 50 books for Mondadori, E.Elle Einaudi Ragazzi, Fazi Editore. Her research focuses mainly on contemporary Irish literature, the work of James Joyce and the nexus between Joycean texts, the Gothic tradition and Shakespeare, and more recently, on the theory and practice of “narratourism”.

Erik Schneider has lived in Trieste for 35 years, and has spent much of that time researching James Joyce's Triestine period. He was a co-founder and director of the Trieste Joyce Museum from 2004-2009. He is the author of Zois in Nighttown: Prostitution in the Trieste of James Joyce and Italo Svevo (Ashgrove, 2014) and Mare Grega (2016), a fiction based on Joyce, Svevo and Marinetti. The Italian translation of his study of prostitution in Trieste, Un pane molto duro: la prostituzione nella Trieste di James Joyce e Italo Svevo, is forthcoming.

Like the eponymous Joyce scholar of the novel The Death of a Joyce Scholar, Sam Slote is a Professor at Trinity College Dublin and lives in the Liberties in Dublin. He is the author of Annotations to James Joyce's 'Ulysses' (Oxford, 2022), Joyce's Nietzschean Ethics (Palgrave, 2013), and is the co-editor, with Luca Crispi, of How Joyce Wrote 'Finnegans Wake' (Wisconsin, 2007). In addition to Joyce and Beckett, he has written on Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Queneau, Antonin Artaud, Dante, Mallarmé, and Elvis.