Special Issue: “Enlightenment and Modern Ireland:  Legacies and Afterlives”

Guest Editors:

James Ward, Ulster University, Northern Ireland, jg.ward@ulster.ac.uk

Joe Lines, Chang'an-Dublin International College, China, joe.lines@ucd.ie

Please submit 250 word abstracts to the editors by 17 October 2022

Whether we praise or deride it, we now live in its shadows and must reckon with what it has bequeathed us. Western thought is haunted by the Enlightenment

(Genevieve Lloyd, Enlightenment Shadows, 2013)

We invite critical and creative responses to such questions which focus on the following issues: 

-       Ways in which Enlightenment legacies shape contemporary debate about global citizenship, migration and asylum

-       Enlightenment legacies of sexuality and gender, including reflections on masculinity and femininity as vectors of historic nationhood, or on the ability of enlightenment thought to encode or challenge regimes of normativity

-       Reflections on science and scientism as an Enlightenment legacy in contemporary Irish culture, which might focus on discourses or individuals connected with economics, technocracy, pseudoscience, or responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

-       Afterlives of figures such as Jonathan Swift or Edmund Burke, who have been conceived as opposed to or ambivalent about Enlightenment thought, and the potential complicity of Irish thought and culture in the present turn to "post-Enlightenment" and "post-truth" conditions

-       Irish views of ‘race’, whiteness, and difference in the context of empire in the eighteenth century, the Atlantic slave trade and its legacies

-       The Enlightenment and ‘long eighteenth century’ (1660-1830) as a living presence which persists in recent Irish writing, art and screen media

-       Adaptations and afterlives of works and events from the Enlightenment period (1660-1830)