Release date: March 9, 2004
Contact: Deb Hammacher, Associate Director, University Media Relations,
at 404-727-0644 or dhammac@emory.edu

Emory Launches Irish Studies Program

Emory University has a national and international reputation among students and scholars of Irish studies as having one of the leading programs in the field. The irony is that no such program existed and only was launched this spring. Director of the new initiative is associate professor of English Geraldine Higgins, who formally announced the program's creation at the Southern regional meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies at Emory March 4-7. Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon, who read from his work at the conference, generously has allowed Emory to print a limited edition broadside of his poem "The Coyote" to celebrate the launch.

Emory's program grows out of the university's tremendous teaching and research strengths in Irish arts and literature, according to Higgins. The tremendous collection of 20th-century Irish literary materials in the university's special collections plays a large role in creating an impression of a long-standing Irish studies program. The cornerstone of that collection began in 1979 when Emory appointed noted W.B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde biographer Richard Ellmann as its first Woodruff professor and began to acquire substantial archives of Yeats and Lady Gregory. Since then, Emory has acquired the papers of many of the top living Irish poets, the correspondence between Yeats and Maud Gonne (in 2002), and just last fall a significant portion of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney's archive.

"Emory is ideally placed to consolidate the resources and interest in the field and to offer accessibility to faculty, archival researchers and visiting scholars," says Higgins. "By mobilizing our existing resources and planning our progress alongside new hires and developments in study abroad, the Emory Irish Studies program can go beyond merely filling a vacuum to become a center of excellence in Irish studies rivaling the internationally renowned programs at Notre Dame and Boston College."

Creation of the program is no mere whim, but is based on sustained interest from faculty, students and independent scholars. In addition to the literary archives in special collections, resources within or affiliated with the university include:

• co-editorship of the "Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats" by Goodrich C. White Professor of English Ronald Schuchard;
• the W.B. Yeats Foundation of Atlanta, founded by Winship Professor of the Arts James Flannery, which promotes Irish cultural events;
• The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett project affiliated with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences;
• study abroad opportunities; and
• additional faculty scholarship and teaching in literature and history.

"Our students have been flocking to the special topic courses in Irish studies and responding enthusiastically to Irish content in other courses," says Higgins. "There is sustained interest from both faculty and students in adding Irish studies to the university's international curriculum."

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