The Trieste Joyce School

Valérie Bénéjam teaches English literature at Nantes University. A former student of the école Normale Supérieure, she has written extensively about Joyce. She has coedited with John Bishop a collection of articles on the issue of Joyce's representations, across his work, of spatiality and space (Making Space in the Works of James Joyce, Routledge 2011). A collection on Joyce and cognitive sciences, co-edited with Sylvain Belluc, Cognitive Joyce, was published with Palgrave-Macmillan (2018). She is currently writing a study of the role of theatre and drama in Joyce's fiction (Joyce's Novel Theatre), and working on a new edition of Dubliners that will incorporate its original punctuation for dialogue. She has twice been an elected trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation and serves on the editing board of several specialised journals and collections (European Joyce Studies, James Joyce Quarterly, Dublin James Joyce Journal).

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. Committed to the concept of Adult Education, Caroline is also the founder and facilitator of the lifelong learning programme at the Dublin James Joyce Centre where the ever-popular 'Ulysses for All' is celebrating its 10th year alongside the Ulysses centenary celebrations. A graduate in English and Music from St. Patrick's College Drumcondra (Dublin City University), Caroline subsequently undertook postgraduate studies at Trinity College Dublin where she read for both the H. Dip. Ed. and M.Phil (Anglo Irish Literature). 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. Enjoying a lifelong interest in Irish writers, Caroline was awarded the inaugural National Library of Ireland James Joyce Dedicated Scholarship in 2008. She continues to lecture widely on the works of Irish writers, and particularly James Joyce, both in Ireland and abroad.

Dr Matthew Fogarty is an Associate Lecturer at the School of English, Drama and Film in University College Dublin. His research interests include modern Irish fiction and culture, aesthetic modernism, continental philosophy, and academic writing and pedagogy. He holds a BA in English and Philosophy from Maynooth University and an MPhil in Irish Writing from Trinity College Dublin. His doctoral studies, completed at Maynooth University in 2019, explored how the literary works of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett interrogate the strengths and weaknesses of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy. The first year of this doctoral programme was funded by a John and Pat Hume Research Scholarship and the final three years by the Irish Research Council.

Matthew has published articles or has articles forthcoming in the Irish Gothic Journal, International Yeats Studies, Modern Drama, the James Joyce Quarterly, and the Journal of Academic Writing. His first monograph, Subjectivity and Nationhood in Yeats, Joyce and Beckett: Nietzschean Constellations, is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press. His co-edited collection, Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism, is forthcoming with Clemson University Press.

A non-binary academic, writer, and gender-diversity consultant from the north of Ireland, Dr Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston is SSHRC - CIHR Banting Post-Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of Alberta in Canada. Their research explores the cultural politics of sexual health, queer history and culture, and the history of erotica and obscenity, and has appeared in publications such as the Journal of Medical Humanities, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Irish Times. Their first monograph, Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in February, and in May they will be joining the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow.

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). This volume was translated into Spanish, Japanese, and Hungarian while the Italian version, Gli Anni di Bloom (Mondadori, 2005), won the Comisso prize. In 2009 his edited collection, James Joyce in Context, was published by Cambridge University Press. In the same year he published Questioni Biografiche: Le Tante Vite di Yeats and Joyce (Bulzoni). This was followed by Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce and Cinema (Cork University Press, 2010). In 2015 he published Writing the Frontier: Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press). He recently co-edited Flann O'Brien: Problems with Authority with Paul Fagan and Ruben Borg (Cork University Press, 2017) and Reading Brendan Behan (Cork University Press, 2019).

Laura Pelaschiar is co-director of the Trieste Joyce School. She is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Trieste. She graduated in English language and literature at the University of Trieste with an MA thesis on Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey. In 1994 she completed her PhD at the University of Bologna with a dissertation on the contemporary Northern Irish novel. She 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”. She published various articles and essays, including Writing the North: The Contemporary Irish Novel (1989), Ulisse Gotico (Pacini Editore) in 2009. In 2015 she edited the collection Shakespeare/Joyce for Syracuse University Press and in 2022 “C'era una volta…”: Letteratura, palcoscenici e storia per nuovi narra-itinerari (Marsilio Editore)

Annalisa Volpone is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Perugia, her study research includes modernism, (post)modernism, romantic poetry and the interconnections between literature and science. She co-directs with Massimiliano Tortora the CEMS (Centre for European Modernism Studies) and she is general editor of the peer reviewed CEMS series. She is the author of Speak of us of Emailia. Per una lettura ipertestuale di Finnegans Wake (For an Hypertextual Reading of Finnegans Wake), Joyce Give & Take, she is the co-editor with Massimiliano Tortora of Borders of Modernism, Il romanzo modernista, and of the two volumes La funzione Joyce nel romanzo italiano and La funzione Joyce nel romanzo occidentale, she is the author of many articles and reviews that appeared in European Joyce Studies, Joyce Studies in Italy, James Joyce Literary Supplement, she has contributed with book chapters in edited collections on Joyce. In 2020 she was awarded an RM-MLA Research Fellowship at the Huntington Library in San Marino (CA).

Michelle Witen is Junior Professor of British and Irish Literature at the Europa-Universität Flensburg. She did BA and MA at the University of Western Ontario, her DPhil at the University of Oxford, and her postdoc at the University of Basel. Her research areas focus on the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and she has published on Modernism and music, Darby O'Gill and the Little People, Ladybird books, Lewis Carroll, Elizabeth Bowen, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, and is working on a monograph on Victorian periodicals. She is the author of James Joyce and Absolute Music (Bloomsbury 2018) and co-editor of the James Joyce Quarterly Special Issue “James Joyce and the Non-Human” (with Katherine Ebury 2020/21); Shakespeare and Space (with Ina Habermann, Palgrave 2016), and Modernism in Wonderland (with John Morgenstern, Bloomsbury 2023).