ISI Teacher Amongst World-Renowned Researchers and Scholars.
Presenting at International Academic Conference in Athens: BatailleNow
Did you know that when you choose to live and study in Dublin with ISI English Language School, you are choosing an award-winning institute that counts amongst its teaching staff internationally-renowned researchers, scholars, and authors? Here at ISI, we are proud to inform you that our teacher Edia Connole has recently represented ISI Dublin — English Language School at BatailleNow, a three-day international conference held in Athens, Greece, on the contemporary application of the French philosopher Georges Bataille’s thought.
Bataille (1897-1962) was not only a philosopher, but a writer, librarian, pseudonymous-pornographer, and co-founder of the influential journals Critique and Acéphale. He was a contemporary of our very own Irish writer James Joyce, with whom (as you’ll know from previous and future blog posts) ISI Dublin boasts a very unique relationship. Our teacher Edia chose to capitalise on this relationship and present on her ongoing research into previously unexplored avenues that connect these two figures, in a comparative analysis of their lives and works — which all but crossed paths in Paris in the 1920s and 30s.
Edia was joined by a host of world-renowned researchers, scholars, and translators of Bataille’s corpus, brought together by his re-discovery and rising influence within Anglophone academia. Bataille has, in this regard, had an enormous impact on contemporary critical thought — his often obscure works reaching us through such canonical writers as Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Susan Sontag. Many of his books, including the notorious Story of the Eye and the rigorously thought-out Accursed Share, are now modern classics.
Joining Edia in representing ISI Dublin, and travelling to Athens from all four corners of the globe, the delegates at the BatailleNow conference represented such prestigious academic institutions as Queen Mary University of London, Wolverhampton University, Kingston School of Art, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Heidelberg University Germany, Aarhus University of Denmark, the Indian Institute of Technology Gandinagar, University of Thessaly Greece, and the University of Klagenfurt Austria, to name but a few.
The conference, which was organised by Konstantinos Kerasovitis and Jon Auring Grimm, was a three-day event, beginning on Thursday the 21st of September 2023 and ending on Saturday the 23rd of September 2023. The first two days were hosted in the space of the French Institute in Athens, Greece. The proceedings took place in the Gisèle Vivier amphitheater. On the final day, the conference moved to one of the most emblematic neoclassical buildings in Athens — inside the amphitheater of the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture, which narrates Greek culture from prehistoric times up to the 20th century.
Edia has generously provided us a link to her paper, NON SERVIAM, as it was presented in the Gisèle Vivier amphitheater at the French Institute in Athens on Friday the 22nd of September 2023. We hope you enjoy it and love learning from it as much as we have done here at ISI — after all, that is our motto: Love Learning, Love Dublin, Love ISI!
You can read Edia’s paper HERE
Did you know that, like Edia, Joyce was himself an English language teacher? (Edia teaches on our Erasmus+ English and training courses for teachers.) Did you know that he was educated by Jesuits at the very school here in Dublin city-centre where we host our ISI English Summer Camp for teenagers? Read all about it in our next blog posts!