The Keough-Naughton Institute invites you to a conversation on literary biography with Professor Frank Shovlin, University of Liverpool, and Professor Brian Ó Conchubhair, University of Notre Dame. Shovlin and Ó Conchubhair will discuss their respective work on the biographies of writers John McGahern and Flann O'Brien, the research and creative processes involved in biography writing, and resonances between writers' lived worlds and the worlds they bring to life on the page.
The conversation will be moderated by Gráinne McEvoy, assistant director of research programs at KNI.
Speaker Biographies

Brian Ó Conchubhair is a professor of Irish language and literature at the University of Notre Dame and currently serving as interim chair of the Department of Irish Language and Literature. His research focuses on cultural nationalism; Irish-language fiction; the European fin de siècle; and modernism. He is currently editing a collection of Flann O'Brien Irish-language essays and articles. Recent publications include a co-edited (with Philip O'Leary) a special issue of Éire-Ireland on the contemporary Irish-language short story, and an article on Brendan Behan in Litteraria Pragensia. Forthcoming articles will appear in Cambridge History of the Irish Novel; The Cambridge History of Irish Poetry; and The Revival in Irish Literature and Culture.
 
 

Frank Shovlin is a native of the west of Ireland who was educated at the Universities of Galway and Oxford before taking up a position at the University of Liverpool where he is now professor of Irish literature in English. He has published a wide range of books, chapters and articles on a range of subjects revolving around the development of literature in 20th-century Ireland, with his most recent book The Letters of John McGahern winning widespread critical acclaim. He is currently the M. H. Abrams Visiting Research Fellow at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina where he is completing his authorized biography of John McGahern.
 
Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.