Tuesday, October 1

Global Irish Studies, the Department of English, and the Disability Studies Program present:

“James Joyce’s Bad Visions”

A talk by Professor Robert Volpicelli

Tuesday, October 1 at 5pm in the Murray Room of Lauinger Library.

James Joyce had notoriously bad vision. Suffering from both iritis and glaucoma, Joyce would regularly experience bouts of painful eye inflammation that interrupted his writing. In an effort to preserve his vision, he also underwent more than a dozen eye surgeries over the course of his lifetime. In this talk taken from his current book project on bad eyesight in modern art and literature, Robert Volpicelli discusses Joyce’s troubled vision, examining how it shaped the perspective of his writing as well as how other artists have incorporated his visual impairments into their own portraits of the author.

Dr. Robert Volpicelli is Associate Professor of English at Randolph-Macon College. His first book, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour (Oxford UP, 2021), won the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize. His writing on modern literature has also appeared in such journals as Twentieth-Century Literature, New Hibernia Review, NOVEL, PMLA, and Modernism/modernity.