Kilfeather Symposium - Programme - Queen's University Belfast

A Symposium in honour of
Siobhán Kilfeather
Friday 29 – Saturday 30 June, 2012
Queen’s University Belfast
Image by kind permission of the Belfast Celtic Society
WWW.BIGGROWTH.COM

A poem in memory of Siobhán Kilfeather by Medbh McGuckian
THE PLUMROSE ANEMONE
The Lime coral alters and recrystallises, slipping
Between things. In the afternoon yellow.
A breastsling is paired by its shadow.
Purple wreathwort twists its old leaf
In her ovary, or a leaf about to be old,
Gifted with a flower. She keeps to the corners
Of her counterpane, her bed covered
With plates and dishes. Her veins are parallel
Like pillars of books, her skirt is stretched out
At the hips where her canvas petticoat
Gapes open. She wears a foul mob
Over the perfect, glossy folds of her hair,
Thus gambling with her grace.
At the wind-rounded hour of low water,
We drape her with bright red fabric
Most gratefully fragrant. The currach
Sleeps on its back in the grass,
The curve of its belly upturned like a star
Washed ashore, by the abolition of all metaphor.
[composed April, 2007]
Printed by kind permission of Medbh McGuckian

Paul Muldoon, A HARE AT ALDERGROVE
A hare standing up at last on his own two feet
in the blasted grass by the runway may trace his lineage to the great
assembly of hares that, in the face of what might well have looked
like defeat,
would, in 1963 or so, migrate
here from the abandoned airfield at Nutt’s corner, not long after
Marilyn Monroe
overflowed from her body-stocking
in Something’s Got to Give. These hares have themselves so long been
given to row
against the flood that when a King
of the Hares has tried to ban bare knuckle fighting, so wont
are they to grumble and gripe
about what will be acceptable and what won’t
they’ve barely noticed that the time is ripe
for them to shake off the din
of a pack of hounds that has caught their scent
and take in that enormity just as I’ve taken in
how my own DNA is 87% European and East Asian 13%.
So accustomed had they now grown
to a low-level human hum that, despite the almost weekly atrocity
in which they’d lost one of their own
to a wheeled blade, they followed the herd towards this eternal city
as if they’d had a collective change of heart.
My own heart swells now as I watch him nibble on a shoot
of blaeberry or heather while smoothing out a chart
by which he might somehow divine if our Newark-bound 757 will
one day overshoot
the runway about which there so often swirled
rumours of Messerschmitts.

Clapper-lugged, cleft-lipped, he looks for all the world
as if he might never again put up his mitts
despite the fact that he, too, shares a Y chromosome
with Niall of the Nine Hostages,
never again allow his Om
to widen and deepen by such easy stages,
never relaunch his campaign as melanoma has relaunched its
campaign
in a friend I once dated,
her pain rising above the collective pain
with which we’ve been inundated
as this one or that has launched an attack
to the slogan of ‘Brits Out’ or ‘Not an Inch’
or a dull ack-ack
starting up in the vicinity of Ballynahinch,
looking for all the world as if he might never again get into a fluster
over his own entrails,
never again meet lustre with lustre
in the eye of my dying friend, never establish what truly ails
another woman with a flesh wound
found limping where a hare has only just been shot, never again
bewitch
the milk in the churn, never swoon as we swooned
when Marilyn’s white halter-top dress blew up in The Seven Year Itch,
in a flap now only as to whether
we should continue to tough it out till
something better comes along or settle for this salad of blaeberry
and heather
and a hint of common tormentil.
Printed by kind permission of Paul Muldoon

Symposium in honour of Siobhán Kilfeather
This symposium is being held in honour of Dr Siobhán Kilfeather, a much loved
and esteemed colleague in the School of English, Queen’s University Belfast,
who sadly died in 2007. The programme of papers is varied, reflecting
Siobhán's wide interests in women’s writing, feminism, Irish literature and
culture. The speakers are close friends, former colleagues and students of
Siobhán’s, just some of the many people who were touched and influenced by
her life and work. .
Friday 29th June
3.00pm-4.30pm: Canada Room (Queen’s Lanyon Building)
Opening plenary lecture: Prof Clair Wills (Queen Mary)
Introduced by Dr Eamonn Hughes (QUB)
4.30pm-5.30pm: Canada Room
Panel 1. Chair: Dr Ramona Wray (QUB)
Dr David Dwan (QUB), ‘Burke and the politics of truth’
Prof Margaret Kelleher (NUI Maynooth), ‘Bilingual Registers: Re-examining
the Language Question in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’
5.30pm-6.00pm: Tea / coffee
6.00pm-7.00pm: Canada Room
Poetry Readings:
Prof Paul Muldoon (Princeton) and Ms Medbh McGuckian (QUB)
Introduced by Prof Ed Larrissy (QUB)
7.00pm-8.00pm: Naughton Gallery at Queen’s
Wine reception
Current exhibition: Walter Sickert and Éduoard Vuillard
8.00pm: Deanes at Queens
Symposium Dinner

Saturday 30th June, 9.30am-5.00pm: Peter Froggatt Centre 02/025
9.30am-11.00am: Panel 2. Chair: Prof Claire Connolly (Cardiff)
Dr Sonja Lawrenson (TCD), ‘“Born to Conquer”: The Public Virtue and
Private Empire of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761)’
Dr Aileen Douglas (TCD), ‘“By a Lady”: Female authorship and Irish liberty
in the 1780’s’
Professor James Chandler (Chicago), ‘Kilfeather's Edgeworth’
11.00am-11.30am: Coffee / tea (PFC Foyer)
11.30am-1.00pm Panel 3. Chair: Prof Brian Caraher (QUB)
Prof Joe Cleary (NUI Maynooth / Yale), ‘Forms with Form: the Big House,
the Bildungsroman, and the Modern Irish Novel’
Dr Michael Cronin (NUI Maynooth), ‘Frozen Youth: figures of crisis and
modernity in the fiction of Forrest Reid and Patrick Pearse’
Prof Luke Gibbons (NUI Maynooth), ‘Seeing Dark Strangers: Film in the
Shadow of Irish Neutrality’
1.00pm-2.00pm: Lunch (PFC Foyer)
2.00pm-3.00pm: Panel 4. Chair: Prof Mary O’Dowd (QUB)
Prof Jayne Lewis (U of California, Irvine), ‘Aura is Aura; The Matter of
Siobhan’s Mary Webb’
Dr Eamonn Hughes (QUB), ‘Metropolitan Women: Women, Writing,
Belfast’
3.00pm-3.30pm: Coffee / tea (PFC Foyer)
3.30pm-5.00pm: Panel 5. Chair: Dr Moyra Haslett (QUB)
Prof John Archer (NYU), ‘The Living Record of your Memory’
Prof Dorothea von Mücke (Columbia), ‘A Bear, a Marionette and the
Visibility of the Soul – Heinrich von Kleist and Philip Pullman’s Golden
Compass’
Dr Vincent Quinn (Sussex), ‘Remembering to Forget: The Arts of
Institutional Memory’

Siobhán Kilfeather: an obituary by Prof Clair Wills
The Guardian, Friday 27 April, 2007; reprinted by kind permission of the author.
Forthright champion of Irish women writers
Loved for her sharpness and wit, and occasionally feared for her forthrightness,
Siobhán Kilfeather, who has died of cancer aged 49, was an expert on 18thcentury
Ireland whose work helped transform the study of the history of
sexuality in Ireland. Few scholars brought such grace and intelligence to their
work, combining erudition and rigour with warmth and unparalleled generosity
to others. She was much loved as a teacher whose standards encouraged
excellence in her students, many of whom went on to teach in British, Irish and
US universities.
Her research interests ranged from 18th-century and romantic literature to
gender studies, Irish studies, the Gothic, postcolonialism, cinema and
intersections between literature and the visual arts. She published critical
editions of Maria Edgeworth and Louisa M Alcott, and her Dublin: A Cultural
and Literary History was published in 2005.
She was best known as an editor of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing,
Volumes 4 and 5 (2003). The first three volumes of the anthology had been
attacked from several quarters. And some of the most bitter complaints were
sparked by its perceived neglect of the female contribution to Irish literature
and culture. Siobhán’s critical but measured interventions in this argument
helped set the agenda for the two subsequent volumes, entirely devoted to
women’s writing.
Yet she had little patience with wishy-washy or sentimental versions of gender
and identity politics. I recall one of our long meetings in which the eight editors
tried to thrash out exactly what we meant by gender and sexuality. Siobhán
was explaining why she thought it was important to include writing by men in
an anthology dedicated to women writers, part of her insistence on the
primacy of real lives and practices over abstract ideas of identity. She waved an
impatient arm at our rather dry conceptualisations: “What I want to know is,
were they fist-fucking in the 18th century?”

Siobhán was born in Belfast, daughter of John and Rene Kilfeather. John was a
shy civil servant whose real passion was literature. Their home was a
shambling, bohemian meeting point for the poet John Hewitt and his socialist
literary circle. Kilfeather relatives remember a house overflowing with books.
Siobhán was encouraged to form opinions about her reading from a very early
age.
She then worked in London and Rome but returned to Belfast in 1980, one of
the most acute periods of the Troubles, the time of IRA hunger strikes and dirty
protests. Siobhán spent two years involved in cultural politics and creative
writing in Belfast, before winning a scholarship to take a PhD at Princeton
University in New Jersey. A post in the school of English at Columbia University
in New York followed.
In 1992 she married Peter Jameson, and settled in Shropshire, from where she
commuted to Sussex University and her post as an English lecturer. Their
beloved children, Constance and Oscar, were born in 1995 and 1997. In 2004
the family returned to Belfast, where Siobhán joined the school of English at
Queen's University, committed to developing the study of Irish literary culture
in the wake of the political settlement.
Seven years ago she struggled with and seemed to have beaten melanoma, in
part through her determination to spend more time with her children, who
were then only two and four. When the cancer returned some months ago she
accepted it with equal bravery and determination.
A few weeks before she died, Siobhán said to me that one of the things she was
surprised to find herself regretting was that she might not get to find out what
happened to Harry Potter. Such oblique and funny asides were characteristic of
her. It was not so much about the waste of time reading the first six volumes,
but her intense engagement with plot. Narrative was fundamental to her
worldview. She was fascinated by the way that the formal requirements of plot
and storyline both ground us in a particular past - for her a past rooted in
Catholic Ireland - and at the same time create the tensions and possibilities for
unknown futures.
· Siobhán Marie Kilfeather, academic, born August 9 1957; died April 7 2007

Siobhán Kilfeather: selected writings
‘The Gothic Novel’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel,
ed. John Wilson Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), pp.78-96.
‘Alice Maher’s Materials’ in Field Day Review, eds. Seamus Deane
and Brendán Mac Suibhne, 2 (2006): 3-17.
‘Ireland in 1825: Situating Tales by the O’Hara Family’ in Ireland and
Europe in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Colin Graham and Leon
Litvack (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006).
‘Irish Feminism’ in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish
Culture, eds. Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), pp.98-116.
Dublin: A Literary and Cultural History (Oxford: Signal Press; New
York: Oxford University Press; and Dublin: Liffey Press, 2005).
‘Terrific Register: The Gothicization of Atrocity in Irish Romanticism’,
in boundary 2, Special issue on Contemporary Irish culture and
politics, eds. Seamus Deane and Kevin Whelan, 31:1 (Spring 2004):
49-71.
Belinda, ed. Siobhán Kilfeather, for The Collected Novels of Maria
Edgeworth (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), Volume III.
The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volumes 4 & 5: Irish
Women’s Writings and Traditions, eds. Angela Bourke, Siobhán
Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Gerardine Meaney, Mairín Ni Dhonnchadha,
Mary O’Dowd and Clair Wills (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002; US
NYU Press, 2002).

“Oliver Plunkett’s Head”, in special issue on Irish Secular Relics, ed.
Lucy McDiarmid, Textual Practice, 16.2 (Summer 2002): 229-248.
‘Disunited Kingdom: Irish, Scottish and Welsh Writing in the Postwar
Period’, in British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to
Literature and Society, 1945-1999, eds. Alistair Davies and Alan
Sinfield (London: Routledge, 2000), pp.9-30.
‘Sex and Sensation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel’, in Gender
Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Separate Spheres, eds.
Margaret Kelleher and James Murphy (Dublin: Irish Academic Press,
1997), pp.83-92.
‘Origins of the Irish Female Gothic’ in Bullán, 1:2 (Autumn 1994): 35-
46.
‘Look Who’s Talking: Scandalous memoirs and the performance of
gender’ in The Irish Review, 13 (Winter 1992/3): 40-49.
‘The Rise of Richardson Criticism’ in Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary
Essays, eds. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp.251-66.
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, eds and notes by Siobhán Kilfeather
and Vinca Showalter, introduction by Elaine Showalter (London and
New York: Penguin Classics, 1989).
‘Strangers at Home: Irish Women’s Writing 1690-1829’ (PhD thesis,
Princeton University, 1989).
‘Beyond the Pale: Sexual Identity and National Identity in Early Irish
Fiction’ in Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women and
Gender, 2 (1986): 1-31.

We would like to thank the School of English, the Centre for
Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Institute of Irish Studies,
Queen’s University Belfast, and all those who travelled to attend, for
making this event possible.