Legal-Literary Imaginaries across the Ireland–India Nexus

Call for Papers

Convenors: Rupsa Banjeree (SR University) and Eugene McNulty (DCU) 

Co-hosted by the Ireland–India Institute (Dublin City University) and the Irish Humanities Alliance Legal Humanities Working Group 

Keynote: Danny Shanahan (Stanford), 'Literature and Emergency Law in Kashmir and Northern Ireland: Disturbed Areas' 

The organisers welcome proposals for papers (20mins) that speak to the workshop’s key themes / contexts. While we give an outline of some of the event’s key concerns below, this is a guide rather than prescriptive, we would welcome papers that address related ideas / texts / contexts (within the broad Ireland-India nexus). 

This workshop is co-hosted by the Ireland-India Institute (DCU) and the Irish Humanities Alliance’s Legal Humanities Working Group. It seeks to explore the interconnections between the literary, legal, and social imaginations in Ireland and India, and to highlight enabling crosscurrents of comparative analysis between the two regions. The workshop aims to interrogate literary, cultural, and legal texts from Ireland and India, critically examining how these texts negotiate entangled histories of colonial oppression, marginalization, and resistance. . 

Proposals may address (but are not limited to) the following themes: 

• Emergency laws and the deliberate creation of the state of exception in areas of legal dispute: CASPA (Ireland, 1922) and Special Powers Acts (Northern Ireland, 1973), PSA (Kashmir, 1978), AFSPA (Kashmir, 1990) and their roots in British-ruled colonial law; Contributors are encouraged to present on literary counter-archives, prison writing, and testimony as resistance. 

• Famine as a biopolitical event: the Great Irish Famine (1845–52) and the Bengal Famine (1943), and colonial records of managing nutrition and demographic re-engineering, literary representations of engineered scarcity, and the exertion of slow violence as form of structural discrimination against a population. 

• Partitions and their aftermaths: Northern Ireland-Republic of Ireland 1921 and India– Pakistan 1947 and the kinds of border literatures, refugee narratives, and the legal productions of minority subjecthood that such traumatic events gave rise to in both the countries. 

• Race, caste, and hierarchies of humanity: Racial discrimination of the Irish in 19thcentury racial discourse posited alongside the racialisation of caste in India; anti-caste writing and Irish Traveller literature as parallel challenges to internal exclusion within the nation state; how the writers from marginalized communities in India (e.g., Adivasi or Dalit voices) and Ireland (e.g. Migrant or Traveller narratives) seek to subvert hegemonic cultural spaces. 

• Political suppression of languages and the decolonization of the tongue: Revivalist movements related to the Gaelic League and the imbalance of power-relations between English and other state languages in India, the development of vernacular modernisms, the practice of translation as resistance, and multilingualism. 

• Diaspora and return: Irish and Indian diasporic writing; legal ambiguities of citizenship in both nations and literary examinations of the rights and freedoms of the figure of the migrant. 

• Environmental legacies of empire: plantation monocultures, deforestation, and famine ecologies; contemporary eco-literary responses to extractivism in both regions. 

We particularly encourage papers that bring lesser-known archives, non-anglophone traditions (Irish-language, Tamil, Urdu, Bengali, etc.), and early-career or independent scholars into dialogue. 

Abstracts of c.250 words + short bio (100 words) should be sent by Thursday 29th January 2026 to both organisers at: 

rupsa.banerjee@sru.edu.in 

eugene.mcnulty@dcu.ie