Two items in the British quality Press (Guardian and Observer) about Irish culture, from January 2018 and April 2019.

In one, German-born, Irish-raised Stephanie Preissner, co-writer of the Netflix comedy show Can’t Cope Won’t Cope, combines pop history and feminist denunciations of ingrained misogyny into Irish essentialist self-stereotyping: “It’s said that Irish people are funnier because they’ve developed humour as a coping mechanism for the terrible stuff that’s happened in our past [...] If that’s true, humour is bound to be ingrained in the DNA of Irish women given the horrors we’ve dealt with.”
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On 26-28 June 2019, an imagological conference will be hosted at the Center of Human Sciences of the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn (Poland). The conference title is Image as a topic of communicative theory, cultural anrhropology and text semiotics. We will post the URL of the conference website as soon as it is onlne. A PDF can be downloaded here.

The imagology site will maintain a blog of contemporary manifestations of national essentialism – the spread of ethnotypes and the belief in ethnicity/“culture” as a social explanation. Many of these are diffuse, ephemeral, “banal”. Hence the need to capture and document them.

The electronic journal Iberic@l: Revue d’études ibériques et ibéro-américaines, published for the Institut d’Études hispaniques at the Sorbonne, has published a theme issue (nr 10, Autumn 2016) edited by Géraldine Galeote: La construction des identités nationales depuis une perspective transnationale. Iberic@l is online at http://iberical.paris-sorbonne.fr.

A Conference on National stereotyping and cultural identities in recent European crises will be held at the “Long Room Hub”, Trinity College Dublin, on 09-11 March 2017. It will investigate how recent European crises such as the Euro crisis, the Ukraine conflict, the threat of terrorism, increased migration, the rise of right wing, populist neo-nationalism across Europe and most recently the looming Brexit have revived and used centuries-old, culturally constructed patterns of national stereotyping and how these have been actualized and instrumentalized in public discourse and political debate.

A fuller descripton and programme is online here.

The bibliography is being completed and updated on an ongoing basis, and older publications are also being worked in by assistant Eva Schouten. We are now nearing the benchmark of 3000 titles and trust an initial completion will have been achieved by the end of the year.