Plenary speakers

	Professor Andrew Carpenter was educated at Oxford (MA 1967) and at University College Dublin (PhD 1970). He taught in universities in Portugal and Canada before joining the staff at UCD where he lectured for nearly forty years and served as Head of School, Dean of Arts, Director of Development and a member of the Governing Body: he is now Emeritus Professor of English at UCD. His main research interests are in book history and in poetry written in English in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland, particularly that of Jonathan Swift and his circle. He has written extensively on the period for scholarly presses in Ireland, Britain, Europe and America and for internationally peer-reviewed journals. His best known publications are Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (2003) and Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (1998). His edition of the Purgatorium Hibernicum was published by the Irish Manuscripts Commission in 2012. His most recent book, edited with Lucy Collins, is The Irish Poet and the Natural World: an anthology of verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics (2014). He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
	Professor Bryan Fanning is author of several pioneering works on immigration and social change in the Republic of Ireland. His books include Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (2nd edition, 2012) and New Guests of the Irish Nation (2009). He has also written extensively on the modernisation of Irish society and on Irish intellectual history. Recent works include (with Tom Garvin) The Books that define Ireland (2014) and Histories of the Irish Future (2015). He teaches in the School of Applied Social Science at University College Dublin.
“Courtesy of Pat Boran”	Theo Dorgan is a poet who is also a novelist, non-fiction prose writer, editor, translator, broadcaster, librettist and documentary scriptwriter. He has published five books of poetry. His most recent collection is Nine Bright Shiners, published in 2014 by Dedalus Press. His two prose accounts of crossing the Atlantic under sail, Sailing for Home and Time on the Ocean: A Voyage from Cape Horn to Cape Town, won wide acclaim, as has his recently published first novel, Making Way (New Island Books, 2013). His work has been widely translated: three full collections have been published in Italian and a selected poems in French. La Hija de Safo was published by Ediciones Hiperión, Madrid, in 2001
	Poet and playwright Paula Meehan was born and reared in Dublin where she still lives. She studied at Trinity College, Dublin and at Eastern Washington University in the United States. She has published six original collections of poetry, the most recent, Painting Rain, in 2009. She has written plays for both adults and children, including Cell and The Wolf of Winter. Music for Dogs: works for radio, collects three plays concerned with suicide during the recent economic boom years in Ireland. Selections of her poetry have been published in French, German, Galician, Japanese, Estonian, Spanish, Greek, Chinese and Irish. She has received the Butler Literary Award for Poetry presented by the Irish American Cultural Institute, the Marten Toonder Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award for Dharmakaya, published in 2000, The Laurence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry, and the PPI Award for Radio Drama. Dedalus Press has recently republished Mysteries of the Home, a selection of seminal poems from the 1980’s and the 1990’s. She was honoured with election to Aosdána, the Irish Academy for the Arts, in 1996. She is currently Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2013 to 2016.