Guest Lecture Series in Irish Studies: Imagining Environmental Futures: Hope in Contemporary Irish Writing by Prof. Dr. Patrick Lonergan
ABSTRACT:
Twenty-first-century Irish literature is increasingly preoccupied with environmental crisis: biodiversity loss, flooding, species extinction, and energy insecurity recur across drama, fiction, and poetry. Yet rather than succumbing to despair, many Irish writers articulate a form of grounded hope – a hope that is expressed not as prediction but as practice, rooted in locally-focused action and the agency of ordinary lives. Through readings of Marina Carr’s The Boy, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, Paula Meehan’s The Solace of Artemis, and Carys Coburn’s Hothouse, this paper argues that contemporary Irish writing imagines environmental futures by sustaining hope as an ethical practice, negotiating a path between naïve optimism and apocalyptic fatalism.
Guest speaker: Prof. Dr. Patrick Lonergan,
University of Galway, Ireland
BIODATA:
Patrick Lonergan is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Galway.
At present, he is carrying out a CHANSE/HERA transnational research project called “CoastARTS: Coastlines as Zones of Ecocultural Crisis – Shaping Resilience through Transnational Performance-based Arts”, together will collaborators in the UK, Spain, Portugal and Norway. He has written many books and articles on Irish literature, including most recently Theatre Revivals for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, 2023), and Druid Theatre: Fifty Years, which was published by Lilliput Press in November 2025. He has lectured widely on Irish writing internationally, including in Princeton, San Jose, Florence, Florianapolis (Brazil), Wroclaw, and Tokyo. He was the 2019 Burns Visiting Fellow for Irish Studies at Boston College.
Date: 30 April 2026
Time: 11.45- 13.15
Room: N.1.44
Contact: Dr. Nursen Gömceli
Nursen [dot] goemceli [at] aau [dot] at
(Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik)
