POSTPONED! Margaret Heavey Memorial Lecture 2024

Regrettably, we have had to postpone the Margaret Heavey Memorial Lecture planned for 12 March. We hope to hold the lecture on a future date.

Margaret Heavey Memorial Lecture 2024
Prof. Isabelle Torrance (University of Aarhus)

“A Trip to the Moon: Lucian, Irish Satire and Migration History”

For background on the lecture series (and details for access via Zoom) see here:
https://www.universityofgalway.ie/classics/events/heavey/

Abstract:

A Trip to the Moon by Mr Murtagh McDermot is a little-studied 18th-century Irish satire, published hot on the heels of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. It reports extraordinary encounters with animal-human hybrids, the lunar monarch and his court, Pythagoreans, an underwater cave where poetry is created with anvils and hammers, the discovery of the Philosopher’s stone, and a moon language learned by ingesting boiled books.

This talk will introduce the text and will put forward three interconnected arguments on classical reception, political satire, and migration history. First, the significance of Lucian’s Vera Historia (True History) for framing the narrative will be mapped out. Second, the insistence on Irish identity and politics within this satire will be highlighted as distinctive within 18th-century Irish Utopian literature. Finally, it will be suggested that the imagined experiences of migration satirized in A Trip to the Moon should be read against the backdrop of the first large waves of migration from Ulster to North America.