ISAANZ 27 | HEALTH, WELLNESS and CARE
20-22 November 2025
University of Otago / Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, Aotearoa / New Zealand

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Keynote lectures:

• Dr Paul Fagan (LMU Munich), lead researcher of ‘Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing, 1860-1950s’
• Dr Ida Milne (Carlow College), author of Stacking the Coffins: Influenza, War and Revolution in Ireland
• A.Prof. Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi, Kāi Tahu, Irish; Massey), author of Hopurangi―Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka

Guest writer: Dr Emma Donoghue, author of The Wonder and The Pull of the Stars

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Registration for the conference is now closed. If you are interested in attending a session, please contact maebh.long@otago.ac.nz

Presenters are also asked to be ISAANZ members. Membership prices are very reasonable and new members can join by following this link.

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Programme

Thursday 20^th November

Time
9.00 – 9.30	Registration
9.30	Opening: mihi whakatau and waiata tautoko
9.45-10.45	Keynote: Paul Fagan – Celibate Care in Kate O’Brien’s The Ante-Room Chair: Chris Murray
10.45-11.15	Morning tea
11.15-12.45	Women, Health and Culture Chair: Emma-Jean Kelly  Attracta Brownlee – Powerful Sisters: Women Religious and Healing Rituals in Ireland Molly-Claire Gillet – Materializing care in the Irish Countrywomen’s Association and Federated Women’s Institutes of Ontario [online]  Lisa Marr – Wellington’s Cumann na nGaedheal and Members’ Well-Being	Attending to Illness Chair: Matthew Ryan Maebh Long – ‘She was still immune, ignorant’ – Elizabeth Bowen and Narratives of Immunity  Ronan McDonald – Attention as Care: Irish Modernism, Diaspora, and the Politics of Distraction  Marion Quirici – Christy Brown and Critical Disability Studies: Lessons on Care, Community, and Creativity
12.45-1.45	Lunch
1.45-3.15	Caring Across Cultures Chair: Rory Sweetman Hawk Chang – A Therapeutic Journey through Narrative Therapy: Spiritual Healing in Anne Enright’s The Green Road [online]  Margaret Coffey – Maintaining health, Practising care—Irish Settler Colonists on Naarm  Patricia Kennedy – The Habitual Residence Condition: a Barrier to Accessing Social Protection and Transnational Families in Ireland?	Literatures of Care and Health Chair: Mark Finnane Yingjun Wei – Towards a Theatre of Embodied Care: Temporalities of Healthcare, Non-Linear Dramaturgy of Illness, and Caring Possibilities in The Tightrope Walker (2023) [online]  Maggie Nolan – The Mixed-race Family as a Site of Care in Anita Heiss’ Dirrayawadha (2024)  Matthew Hayward – ‘Danish bacon, Irish eggs, American sugar, French milk, Canadian marmalade, Scotch porridge, New Zealand butter, Dutch toast’: The English Breakfast and Nutritional Health in Ulysses
3.15-3.45	Afternoon tea
3.45-5.15	Literature of Illness and Loss Chair: Maggie Nolan Matthew Ryan – ‘animal, mineral, vegetable / father, husband, citizen’: the Matter of Illness in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones  Pascale Grard – ‘it’ll be no worse than having a bad tooth out’: Abortion Interiors in Dymphna Cusack’s Jungfrau and Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South  Melody May – ‘I have been condescended to by enough consultants to know when I am not believed’: Combating the Gender Pain Gap with Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations	Class Formation and Mobility Chair: Malcolm Campbell Scott Denis McCarthy – The Catholic Elite and the Construction of Irishness in Victoria and New South Wales, 1878–1923  Constantin Torve – ‘She arranged [for] a party of men [to] take her away, as if by force […] to take the blame off herself, as a man named McGuinness wanted to marry her.’ Policing, gender, and class in pre-Famine Ireland  John A. Clancy – Healing, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual, in John A. Clancy’s forthcoming novel A Bard on the Pampas: A Story of Irish Migration to Argentina
5.30	Opening Reception with Her Excellency, Jane Connolly, Ambassador of Ireland to New Zealand

Friday 21^st November 

Time
9.00-10.30	Memory and Metaphors  Chair: Ida Milne Fergal McDonald – ‘They then played a game that I know to be Russian Roulette’: Truth, Memory and Communicative Orality in Ballymurphy, Northern Ireland [online]  Hugh Hanley – Conor Cruise O’Brien and the Pathologization of Irish nationalism [online]  Katherine Hall – Silence, Forgetting and Nostalgia in the (Post) Pandemic World	Body and Spirit in Nineteenth-Century Literature Chair: Matthew Ryan  Matthew L. Reznicek – Gothic Care: Vulnerability, the Body, and Care [online]  Chris Murray – Encounters with Yoga in Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary   Thomas McLean – Frances Browne’s Northern Tales
10.30-11.00	Morning tea
11.00-12.00	Keynote: Robert Sullivan – Health, Wellness and Care: Discovering the MaramatakaChair: Maebh Long1.17
12.00-1.00	Lunch
1.00	Minivans/walk to Toitu
1.30-2.30	Emma Donoghue and Maebh Long in Conversation, Toitu Museum
2.30-2.45	Minivans/walk back to campus
2.45-3.15	Afternoon tea
3.15-4.15	Medical Migration  Chair: Pascale Grard  Swati Joshi – Medical Care Migration to India: Examining the Strategic Role of HSE-NTPF Endowments in Addressing the Care Crisis in Ireland [online]  Michael Brosnan – The Influence of Irish Medical Graduates: Over 180 years of Medical Migration to New Zealand from the First Settlers to the Present Day	Domestic History Chair: Dianne Hall Barb Kelly – Watchem Hibernians: 1919. A Warm New Years Day in the Mallee, Irish families Gathered to Grieve and Find Solace. A Cruel War, Conscription Tensions and the Irish conflict.  Jules McCue – The Vulnerability in Cultural Isolation: Two O’Connors, father and daughter: both experts in their fields of invention and creativity. They succeeded in their professions, but he lost the psychological war: she did not.
4.15-4.30	Short break
4.30-5.30	Abuses and Healing Chair: Lisa Marr  Emma-Jean Kelly – Irish Diaspora Lives and Intergenerational Mental Health  Patrick McCabe – Journey to an Unmarked Grave: The Case of Mary Power	Border Discourses Chair: Russell Smith  Liam McIlvanney – Crime Fiction Poetry in Scotland and the North of Ireland  Neil Vallelly – Border-as-Flesh, Border-as-Ethics
5.45-6.45	Optional tours of the Irish material at the Hocken Collections, Dunedin – numbers limited to 20 people

 

Saturday 22^nd November 

Time
10-11.30	Mental Health in Irish Australia Chair: Brad Patterson Malcolm Campbell – ‘The bleak moorland of perpetual resentment’: Bigotry and the Troubled World of Early Twentieth-century Irish Migrants in Australia  Kevin Molloy – ‘There was no money to bury them’: Health and Welfare Issues amongst Post-war Irish Migrants in Australia  Mark Finnane – Silence and Whispers: Remembering Madness in Irish History and Historiography	Caring about Joyce Chair: Marion Quirici Peter Kuch – Why does Bloom want his fantasy villa ‘Flowerville’ built in either Dundrum or Sutton?  Russell Smith – James Joyce’s Radio Tower of Babel: Finnegans Wake as a technography of ‘this wireless age’.  Seokmoo Choi – Decontaminating Adventure Stories: James Joyce’s Ulysses
11.30-12.00	Morning tea
12.00-1.00	Keynote: Ida Milne – Coping with a Pandemic in a Time of World War and Domestic Revolution: Ireland, 1918-1919Chair: Dianne Hall 1.17
1-1.45	Lunch (with book table from University Book shop)
1.45 -2.30	Book launch: Paul Fagan launches Marion Quirici’s Fitness for Freedom: Disability, Degeneration, and Modern Irish Writing (Syracuse, 2025)
2.30-4.00	Survival and Independence in Irish New Zealand Chair: Erin Carlston Seán Brosnahan – An Gorta Mór: the Shadow of the Great Irish Famine and New Zealand’s Pioneer Irish Generation  Kathryn Patterson – ‘The climate is in fact most beautiful and salubrious, and health almost universal as the result’: Patterns of Longevity and Mortality of Irish Soldiers Discharged from Imperial Regiments in New Zealand  Rory Sweetman – Patrick Joseph O’Regan and the Irish Self-Determination League of New Zealand, 1921-22	Networks of Care and Carelessness Chair: Scott McCarthy  Dianne Hall – Communities of Care among Irish Migrants in Colonial Victoria  Rodney Sullivan and Robin Sullivan – ‘I could continue to pour out burning words of indignation’: Participation by Queensland Irish Planters and Parliamentarians in the Pacific Islands Labour Trade [online]  Patricia Kennedy – 70 years of Maternity Policy in Ireland 1954-2024
4.15-5.00	ISAANZ AGMOBS Boardroom, 2.19-2.20
6	Conference dinner

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Call for Papers

As the emergency measures of the pandemic fade into memory, but the virus transitions into an endemic part of our medical landscape, we invite scholars and community members to use the vantage point of this new ecosystem – viral, social, political, economic, environmental – to consider what health, wellness and care mean for Ireland and Irish communities worldwide. What understandings of the well-being or disorders of Irish peoples can we gain through the interdisciplinary framework of Irish Studies? From the impact of medical metaphors over time to the movement of medical practitioners over seas, from the slow construction of hospitals to the rapid rise of patients in corridors, from the responsibilities of domestic carers to the glamour of wellness influencers, how can our varied disciplines come together to take the temperature of Irish societies and Irish studies?

We invite papers addressing the conference themes through topics that might include:

• Historical and contemporary expressions of community care and public health provision in Irish societies
• The role of the extended family and the diaspora in fostering transnational networks of medical support and solidarity
• Wellness as an industry in Ireland and for the Irish diaspora
• Representations of health and care providers, from institutional care to family carers
• Literary, political, and structural responses to physical and mental health crises
• Considerations of the metaphorical resonances of discourses of health, such as the moral or spiritual health of the nation
• Narratives of health and illness within academia and the discipline of Irish Studies
• The intersections of gender, class, race, and disability within Irish experiences of sickness and care
• Digital health communities and the impact of new technologies, from genetics to improved imaging, on health, family histories and identity
• Environmental health challenges and sustainable futures
• The complexities of discourses of health and illness, vulnerability and resistance, diagnosis and recovery

For those whose research does not touch on areas of health, wellness or care, we also welcome papers on any aspect of Ireland, Irish Australia, Irish New Zealand, Irish Pacific or the Irish diaspora generally.

Individual Papers or Creative Contributions: submit a 250-word abstract and a short bio (100 words).

Panels and Roundtables: submit a short panel/roundtable description, along with 250-word abstracts and bios for each participant. We hope that conference participants will join us in beautiful Dunedin, but there is also the option to present papers online.

Proposals should be emailed to maebh.long@otago.ac.nz. We have now moved to a rolling deadline for submissions. Please submit your abstract when ready and we will respond every fortnight. The rolling deadline will remain until 1 August 2025.