The Irish Jewish Museum is proud to present two events for Bloomsday, Sunday, June 16th about the Jewish history of Dublin during James Joyce’s time.
1.30pm: Joyce Focus Tour
The Irish Jewish Museum welcomes you to visit us in the heart of what was the Jewish quarter of Portobello. Here you will find memories of life as Leopold Bloom might have known and Joyce witnessed in the early 1900’s. €10 per ticket.
3pm: Screening of Estella
A documentary on the life of Estella Solomons, the Irish landscape and portrait painter and contemporary of Joyce. Born in Dublin in 1882 in a country on the verge of great political and social change, she joined the struggle for independence and her portraits record three generation of rebels, artists and literary figures who forged the new Ireland. (2002. Ireland. Colour. Beta. 52 mins)
The film is directed by Steve Woods, who will be present at the screening. €5 per ticket.
For reservations, please email info@jewishmuseum.ie. Tickets will be sold at the door.
Coillte and Rotary in Ireland present “Save the Trees of Ireland”: Ulysses and Ireland’s Imagined and Actual Arboreal Narrative, a talk by Donal Magner on Bloomsday, Sunday June 16th at 11am at the Meeting House of Beyond the Trees Avondale, Co. Wicklow.
Trees are repeatedly referenced in Ulysses, often reflecting the parlous nature of Irish forestry in 1904. This talk, delivered by Donal Magner, explores Joyce’s awareness of forest decline in Ulysses and transposes the narrative to what was actually happening to rescue Ireland’s vastly depleted forests at the time. While the customers in Barney Kiernan’s public house were bemoaning the decline of Irish forests, Avondale house and estate was just purchased by the State in June 1904 as a forestry school and tree species trial. The cry to “Save the trees of Ireland,” by the “Citizen” in the Cyclops episode, was being met in reality as the first tentative steps to restore Ireland’s forests were being taken. Donal Magner discusses the uncertain narrative of Irish forestry leading up to 1922, when Ulysses was published and brings the story up-to-date in the Meeting House, Avondale, close to Coillte’s Beyond the Trees experience.
The talk is free and open to the public. Visitors are required to pay a €5 parking charge at the venue.
Join us for this illustrated Bloomsday lecture by Yseult O’Driscoll at the Hugh Lane Gallery on Sunday, June 16th at 1pm.
James Joyce based Ulysses largely on Homer’s epic adventure story The Odyssey, adapting, reworking, and often subverting it, to apply to the Dublin of his day. He created parallels, that were sometimes ironic, between the ancient Greek heroes and their adventures, and the various characters and their activities as they cross the streets of Dublin over the course of the 16th June 1904. This lecture looks at how contemporary artists have produced work exploring similar parallels between the ancient and modern worlds, just as Joyce does in his version of Homer’s epic tale.
The event is free, no booking required. Space limited.
Come join us at the James Joyce Centre on Tuesday, June 11th at 6pm for the formal launch of this year’s Bloomsday Festival. The Bloomsday Festival is in full-swing this year with close to one-hundred separate events on June 11th-16th throughout Dublin. Our reception will feature talks and readings (and some wine!) as we celebrate another year of Bloomsday celebrations. We will be joined by British artist Jo Hamill as she introduces our new art exhibition Gutter Words. French artist Rémi Rousseau will also be on hand as he introduces his new art exhibition Ulysses: Illustrations. Join festival goers around Dublin and the world as we kick off this extraordinary time of the year!
Join us at the GPO Museum from 12pm on Saturday, June 15th for an afternoon of talks and music for the Bloomsday Festival. Located in ‘the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis,’ as Joyce might say, the General Post Office has stood in the middle of Dublin’s busiest street since 1818. An iconic building in Dublin’s urban landscape, the GPO is also home to the GPO Museum, where we are dedicated to discussing Ireland’s 20th history with particular focus on Ireland’s fight for independence.
This Bloomsday weekend the GPO will hold a series of talks relating to James Joyce, rebellion and mythology. This includes a special talk at 12pm by renowned Joyce expert Luke Gibbons, author of James Joyce and the Irish Revolution (2023). Gibbons has taught as a Professor of Irish Studies in Maynooth University and the University of Notre Dame, and has published widely on Irish culture and criticism. These talks will focus on a variety of topics, exploring both Joyce’s relationship with Ireland’s revolutionary period and its cultural revival, and the use of Irish mythology during Ireland’s cultural revival and the fight for independence alongside Joyce’s use of other mythologies in his Dublin epic Ulysses.
We will also have music from harpist Rachel Duffy between the talks celebrating James Joyce’s great love of music. Rachel Duffy is from Bray in Co. Wicklow, has performed at festivals around the world and plays regularly with groups including Na Cauci, Triad Trio and the National Folk Orchestra. She enjoys teaching the harp in Wicklow and Dublin and working with harp ensembles at Bray CCE and TU Dublin.
Admission to the Bloomsday talks and Music is free and a ticket is not required, though they are available on the website. Priority seating will be given to café customers. If you have any queries, please get in touch with us at: +353 01 872 1916 or email us at: info@gpowitnesshistory.ie.
Please note that admission to the Bloomsday Talks and Music event does not include entry to the museum. Tickets are non-transferable to another person, tour or date.
Come celebrate Bloomsday in MoLI – Museum of Literature Ireland on St. Stephen’s Green. MoLI is situated in the Newman House, where James Joyce (and Stephen Dedalus) went to university when it was the campus of University College.
5PM: Dedalus Lecture with Fintan O’Tolle
Journalist and author Fintan O’Toole delivers the museum’s annual lecture inspired by Ulysses.
Fintan O’Toole is a writer and author. His books include We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, and Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, he is a winner of the European Press Prize and the Orwell Prize. He is also professor of Irish letters at Princeton University.
Tickets are €18.
7-10PM: MoLI Bloomsday Garden Party
Round off your Bloomsday celebrations at the MoLI Bloomsday Garden Party – held across the museum’s beautiful exhibitions and gardens. Celebrate 102 years of Joyce’s Ulysses with a glass in hand, and live music from Ireland’s most exciting musicians and rappers, whose adventure with language echoes Joyce’s own fearlessness with words. A guaranteed highlight of the summer!
Includes a welcome drink on arrival. Presented in partnership with the Dublin Liberties Distillery. Under 18s must be accompanied by an adult.
Offica has redefined what it means to be an Irish rapper, breaking records with a run of classic singles and game-changing freestyles. He has carved a niche for himself by seamlessly incorporating Irish and Yoruba slang into his lyrics, providing a unique window into his culture and identity. Watch video
Celine is a talented musician known for her unique style and storytelling in true rap. She has gained a strong following for her emotional lyrics and captivating performances. Watch video
Emmy Shigeta is a Japanese DJ whose love for music developed while working in a record store in Tokyo. Now based in Dublin, she loves to play ambient (環境音楽), city pop, and the latest underground J-pop in various venues and on her monthly Dublin Digital Radio show.
Come join us at the James Joyce Centre for a unique experience at Finnegans Wakeshop.
Carol Wade of Art of the Wake and Des Gunning of Joyceborough will look back at ‘FW85,’ the 85th anniversary of the publication of Finnegans Wake, and a headsup on plans to mark ‘Mamalujo 101’ in 2025. Des Gunning has been running the Joyceborough Finnegans Wake Reading Group for fifteen years and Carol Wade has been illustrating the Wake for as long. This year, they and others combined forces for the first time to mark the occassion of FW85.
In Finnegans Wakeshop, they will reflect in that experience and look ahead to the coming 15 years, which will bring us to FW100. A copiously-illustrated with live performance of the text and plenty of audience participation. A short film, ‘On the Calends of Mars,’ will be screened.
The event is free but booking is essential. No previous Wake-reading experience required. Come enjoy this uniquely Joycean experience!
The Ringsend & District Historical Society in partnership with Dublin City Council’s South East Area Community Team is proud to present Bloomsday Villages: Ringsend/Irishtown on June 15th and 16th. Ringsend is where James Joyce and Nora Barnacle had their first date on June 16th, 1904 — the date on which Ulysses is set. What better way to celebrate Bloomsday than to spend it where it all began!
Saturday, June 15th
11 am: Ringsend Library
A lecture by the DCC Historian in Residence Cormac Moore, ‘The Life of Constance Markievicz’
12pm: Ringsend Library
A walking Tour with Eddie Bohan, ‘In The Footsteps of Joyce 1904.’ Departs & ends at the Ringsend Library.
1.30pm: Bus Tour
A 45-minute bus tour courtesy of the Big Bus Open Top. The tour takes place in Sandymount Strand, the Green and Irishtown.
3pm: Ringsend Library
An outdoor ballad/folksong session.
Sunday, June 16th
10.30am: Thorncastle Street
A horse and carriage parade to Ringsend Park, departing from Thorncastle Street. Tour route: Irishtown Road, Pembroke Street, Strasburg Terrace with a Ulysess performance, Ringsend Park, return via Caroline Row, Fitzwilliam Street to the RICC Centre. The event will feature the unveiling of a plaque and seat dedicated to James Joyce and Nora Barnacle commemorating their first date with thanks to Dublin City Council.
12.30pm: RICC Centre
The Bloomsday Brunch featuring live music, food and period dress.
4 pm: CYMS Hall, Ringsend
The Writers Adventure, ‘Remembering Ringsend.’ A short story and poetry prize presentation. Books tokens (€200, €100 & €75) awarded courtesy of Savvi, Irishtown.
The James Joyce Centre and Instituto Cervantes Dublín is proud to present Rosa Chacel and James Joyce: A Portrait of a Joycean Artist with Mónica GalindoGonzález on 6 June 2024 at 6:30pm.
This year is the centenary of Spain’s first publication regarding the work of James Joyce, which was a review by Antonio Marichalar about the upcoming Spanish translation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Even though the translation was officially published in 1926, some writers were fortunate to get an early copy of the novel and explore its contents. One of these writers was Rosa Chacel, who immediately fell in love with Joyce’s novel and started to experiment with his techniques.
Rosa Chacel (1898 – 1994) is a writer part of the “Generation of ’27” and the Sinsombrero thanks to her participation in the intellectual and cultural milieu of the 20th-century Spain. Due to the close relationship between her life and her writings, her literary innovations made her a nonconformist and subversive writer, always concerned about her style and trajectory. One of her main influences was the writings of James Joyce, which made her recognise that her work is part of “el mundo Joyce” (Joyce’s world).
Joycean scholar Mónica Galindo González will guide the audience through Rosa Chacel’s work and its Joycean connections. The event will be followed by a Q&A section.
Mónica Galindo González is one of the assistants at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin and a language tutor at University College Dublin. During her Erasmus in Birmingham, she decided to explore Dublin. Her first visit to the James Joyce Centre in 2019 was so inspiring that it gave her the idea to research Joycean traits in the work of Spanish writers for her bachelor’s dissertation. Her passion for James Joyce and the work of Rosa Chacel allowed her to continue this project and bring it to University College Dublin, where she recently submitted a research masters dissertation on the same topic. Mónica has also presented papers in three international conferences in Joyce Studies. In June of this year, she will be presenting a paper at the International Joyce Symposium in Glasglow about the symbol of paralysis in Spain and Ireland.
The funeral of Paddy Dignam in James Joyce’s Ulysses serves as the pivotal event of the ‘Hades’ episode. Dignam’s funeral cavalcade leaves his home in Sandymount at 11 a.m. on 16 June 1904, taking him across the city to Glasnevin Cemetery. His death and interment allowed Joyce the freedom to consider many of the conventions, rituals and superstitions associated with death and burial in Dublin. Drawing on Ulysses as well as contemporary sources, this talk by Dr. Patrick Callan will look at a variety of aspects relating to the domestic and public treatment of the dead body in Dublin, including the practice of the wake, and the traditional offerings of flowers.
Dr. Callan is a Dublin historian and Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. His book Death in Dublin during the Era of James Joyce’s Ulysses will be published by Routledge.
The event is free but booking is essential. The talk is part of the James Joyce Centre Lecture Series.
For 33 years John Hunt was a literature professor at the University of Montana in Missoula, where he chiefly taught Shakespeare and other writers of the English Renaissance. Later in his career he began offering classes in Joyce’s works, a passion that led to the creation of the Joyce Project, an online resource to aid readers of Ulysses as they read. This halfway-to-completion website offers edited versions of the novel’s eighteen chapters with embedded hyperlinks that allow readers to jump immediately to annotations that can help them make sense of the passages they are reading. The commentary is supplemented with abundant visual illustrations.
Professor Hunt will talk about the possibilities available to an annotator of Joyce who chooses to publish online rather than in print. His work builds on the labours of previously published scholars but employs a new format appropriate to the electronic medium. The structure he has devised allows annotations to become longer, to address multiple passages in the text, to accommodate multiple ways of reading passages, to supplement objective presentation of information with subjective description of artistic effects, to engage with the non-linear, cross-referential structures that Joyce built into his book, and to speak effectively both to first-time readers of the novel and to more experienced Joyceans. Hunt will detail the logic behind his form of commentary and look at a few examples on the website. At the end of his prepared remarks there will be time for questions and discussion.
14 Henrietta Street presents Teatime Talks, a series of talks inspired by the history and people of 14 Henrietta Street. By listening and engaging with visitors, historians, experts, local people, former tenement residents and their families, we continue to uncover, record and respond to the 300 year story of 14 Henrietta Street.
Henrietta Street is described in Dubliners, James Joyce’s celebrated collection of short stories. But what was happening on this street in the lifetime of James Joyce? In this illustrated talk, historian Donal Fallon will explore the journey of Henrietta Street and the local area (including Bolton Street and Capel Street) in the age of Joyce. Donal Fallon is social historian to Dublin City Council Culture Company and the presenter of the Three Castles Burning podcast.
This talk will take place in person on the 1st floor of the Museum and can be accessed via lift.
Tickets are €5 general, €3 concession. If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact us on +353 1 524 0383 or email us at info@14henriettastreet.ie.
Please join us at James Joyce Centre for a personal Bloomsday Festival presentation on Berenice Abbott, a pioneering 20th-century photographer who took some of the most iconic portraits of Joyce and his family, and the community of creative, queer women who supported his career.
A chance discovery of a box of family photos in a basement in New Jersey led one woman to uncover Abbott’s seldom told artistic legacy. Follow storyteller, archivist, and social activist A.G. Norton on her personal journey through Abbott’s private archive revealing: letters written by Lucia Joyce to Berenice, personal commentary made by Berenice about her multiple photography sessions with the beloved author, and the intersections between the publication of Ulysses and the community of queer women who supported it.
Throughout the 1920s, Berenice Abbott’s life crisscrossed between Greenwich Village and Paris where, in addition to the Joyce family, she photographed and befriended fellow queer women including Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Djuna Barnes, Jannett Flanner, and Sylvia Beach. Hear of how their friendships and artistic endeavors all entwined with one another and the lessons and blessings their legacies leave behind.
Delighted to be joining the Bloomsday Festival from Connecticut, Norton will share her research into Abbott’s fascinating life which all started with the discovery of photos taken by her late grandfather and went onto interviews with both of Abbott’s biographers and personal friends, Julia Van Hafften and Hank O’Neal.
Special guest reader Deirdre Mulrooney.
Tickets are €15.
A.G. Norton Bio
A.G. Norton has over 15 years experience in London as a social worker and children’s rights activist where she used her voice to publicly advocate for underserved, marginalized communities.
Returning to New York in 2018 she discovered her family’s personal connection and photographs of photographer Berenice Abbott and has spent the last three years gathering research into her remarkable life. Norton has written several performance pieces based on the photographic legacies she inherited and has toured them at the Brighton, Camden, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festivals. Norton was the 2023 recipient of the Brighton Pride Award to support queer storytelling.
Images: Berenice Abbot, Portraits of Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, Lucia Joyce, and Nora Joyce, 1926-27, courtesy Clark Art Institute. Centre photgraph by Charles Norton, courtesy of A.G. Norton.
James Joyce spent almost twenty years in Paris over the course of his life. He was drawn to the city by his fascination with French poets, such as Charles Baudelaire, and in turn left his own mark on the city by way of a small park in the 13th arrondissement, the Jardin James Joyce.
And yet, the pull of home remained strong, as Joyce, in exile, constantly wrote about Dublin in his work. Never returning to Ireland, Joyce, nevertheless, demonstrates the many connections that exist in the migrant’s life.
This talk, delivered by DCU Assistant Professor of English Ellen Howley, explores Joyce’s time in Paris, from the literary circles he engaged with to the works he published while there. Taking us from the bohemian Left Bank in the 1920s to the impending threat of war in the 1930s, it reveals the importance of the City of Light to Ireland’s most well-known author.
