Guest Lecture: Dr. Raphael Zähringer (University of Tübingen, Germany), "Post-Tiger Ireland“

This talk explores the shifting contours of Irish literature in the wake of two transformative moments in contemporary Irish history: the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (1998) and the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy (2008). The peace process opened up new political and imaginative spaces for writers to grapple with identity, memory, and belonging beyond the binaries of conflict, while the end of the economic boom forced a re-evaluation of Ireland’s social values, aspirations, and fractures. Against this backdrop, the talk examines how contemporary Irish short fiction reflects, interrogates, and reshapes these national transitions. Focusing on selected stories from Lucy Caldwell’s Being Various: New Irish Short Stories, it will be discussed how writers respond to the complexities of post-Tiger Ireland—negotiating themes of precarity, migration, queerness, and fractured community - while also participating in the evolving project of reimagining Irishness in a post-conflict, post-boom era.
 

Raphael Zähringer is assistant professor of English Literatures and Cultures at Tübingen University and a founding member of the Tübingen Centre for Irish Studies. His key project in Irish Studies is his completed habilitation thesis Writing Crisis: Ireland, 1596-2018, in which he reads Irish literature as a powerful seismograph of Ireland's crises. He has also worked on novels by Maria Edgeworth and Anna Burns, as well as on the Irish border, and has taught several courses on Irish fiction and drama. He is currently venturing into Irish science fiction, his most recent project being the Tübingen Database of Irish Science Fiction (TDISF).

Registration

If you are interested in participating in this event, please sign up by submitting this registration form or by sending an email with the subject line “ZAEHRINGER” to irishstudies@uni-wuerzburg.de by January 19, 2026. Please include your full name and affiliation. Please note that the above given email address is used solely for registration purposes. If you want to contact ISWÜ, please use the contact information given below.

Contact
Irish Studies Würzburg (ISWÜ)
Prof. Dr. Ina Bergmann & Prof. Dr. Maria Eisenmann
ina.bergmann@uni-wuerzburg.de,  maria.eisenmann@uni-wuerzburg.de