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 Dr John Coyle.
• 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 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.

Caoilinn Hughes's latest novel is The Alternatives, a New York Times Editor's Choice. Her second novel, The Wild Laughter won the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and her debut Orchid & the Wasp won the Collyer Bristow Prize and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her short stories have won the Irish Book Awards' Story of the Year, The Moth Story Prize, and an O.Henry Prize and have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Winter Papers and elsewhere. She was recently Oscar Wilde Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and a Cullman Center Fellow at New York Public Library.
Photo: © Amitava Kumar

Arianna Autieri is a Lecturer in English and Translation Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and holds a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Warwick. Her first monograph, entitled James Joyce's Music Performed: The 'Sirens' Fugue in Experimental Re-Translation, is in press and forthcoming with Legenda (2025); the monograph includes her experimental translation of 'Sirens' into Italian. She has published several articles on James Joyce, music and translation, most recently, with Lauri Niskanen, 'The Geno-song and Pheno-Song of the "Sirens": The Finnish, Swedish, and Italian (Re)Translations of the Musical Prose of "Sirens"' in the James Joyce Quarterly, and 'Translating the songs of the "Sirens" in James Joyce's Ulysses' in the Studia Translatorica (a special issue on song translation studies).

Pat Callan is a historian of early twentieth century Dublin and Ireland. His early research focused on military, educational, and cultural aspects of the period. In recent times, he has turned his attention to the representation of Dublin in Ulysses, and the broadcasting of Joyce's work on the BBC. His Joyce research has appeared in the James Joyce Quarterly; Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television; Studi Irlandesi; and the Dublin James Joyce Journal. Pat is a visiting research fellow in the Centre for Contemporary Irish History at Trinity College Dublin.

John Coyle is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, where he specialises in comparative literature and the twentieth-century novel. His main research interests lie in the field of modernist and postmodernist literature from an international perspective. He has published articles on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alain-Fournier, Proust and Joyce, and has edited two introductory studies on Joyce. John will lead the seminar on Finnegans Wake for this year's Trieste Joyce School.

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.

Philip Keel Geheber is a lecturer at Princeton University, teaching in the Princeton Writing Program and in the Emma Bloomberg Center for Access & Opportunity's summer seminar for entering first-generation / low-income students. He's co-editor of Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde (University Press of Florida 2019; with Jessica Martell and Adam Fajardo). His articles and books chapters have appeared in LARB, the JJQ, Genetic Joyce Studies, Katherine Mansfield Studies, and elsewhere on Ithacan/Zolian encyclopedism, gastronationalism, Bloom's and Lenehan's bodies, a Bovaryesque tryst on the French WWI Front, Richard Murphy's surfaces, and butter.

Siobhán McDonald was born in New York and lives and works in Dublin. She works with natural materials, withdrawing them from their cycles of generation, growth and decay. This process gives form to a range of projects which consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time. Her artworks make use of natural phenomena and technologies to stage poetic and philosophical engagements between people and their natural world. Siobhán is the recipient of many prestigious international awards, and her work is held in public and private collections.

David McWilliams is an economist, author, and podcaster. His latest book, Money: A Story of Humanity has been made the Financial Times and The Economist's book of the year for 2024-2025. It focuses on the crucial relationship between money and humanity from the Stone Age right up to Bitcoin. David aims to make economics uncomplicated and accessible, with his podcast The David McWilliams Podcast, which has over 35 million downloads establishing itself as one of the most successful economics podcasts globally. He is also the founder of the world's only economics and stand-up comedy festival, 'Kilkenomics', described by the Financial Times as 'simply, the best economics conference in the world'.

Niall Ó Cuileagáin is a Taighde Éireann-Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University and received his PhD from University College London in 2022. His research focuses primarily on how rural Ireland has been depicted and utilised in twentieth-century Irish literature. His monograph, James Joyce, Rural Ireland and Modernity: Beyond the Pale (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), is the first book-length study to consider James Joyce's portrayal of rural Ireland across his oeuvre. He has also had articles and reviews published in James Joyce in Italy, the Dublin James Joyce Journal, the Review of Irish Studies in Europe, and the Irish University Review. His current research examines how politically radical Irish writers made rural matters a central concern in their interrogations of modernity and visions of the nation.

Dr Alice Ryan is Curator of the James Joyce Tower in Sandycove, Dublin caring for a unique collection of Joycean artefacts as well as the Martello Tower itself, its 'cold domed room', and its famous stairhead. She regularly delivers an eighteen-week course on reading Ulysses at the James Joyce Tower and previously at Saor-Ollscoil na hÉireann. She has presented papers at the International James Joyce Symposia in Utrecht (2014) and Dublin (2022). She was also co-editor with Helen Solterer of the 2022 reissue of C. P. Curran's James Joyce Remembered. Alice received her PhD from the UCD Research Centre for James Joyce Studies for a thesis entitled 'Politics and Identity: The Jewish Question in Joyce's Ulysses'

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.

Alberto Tondello has recently completed a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Bern. His project, titled 'Inhospitable Modernism: The Ecological Value of Modernist Alienation', reconsiders the notion of inhospitality from a social and environmental perspective, analysing how characters at the fringe of society deals with inhospitable environments in the works of Djuna Barnes, Nella Larsen, Jean Rhys, and James Joyce. He has published articles in a number of journals including Humanities, Dublin James Joyce Journal, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui. His first monograph, titled 'Forms of Materiality in James Joyce's Fiction' is under contract with Edinburgh University Press.

Dirk Van Hulle is professor at the University of Oxford and University of Antwerp. His publications include Textual Awareness (2004), Modern Manuscripts (2014), Samuel Beckett's Library (2013, with Mark Nixon), James Joyce's Work in Progress (2016), the Beckett Digital Library and a number of volumes in the 'Making of' series (Bloomsbury) and genetic editions in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project.

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.