Talks | Catherine Morris in conversation with Eve Patten and Klaus Ottmann at Hodges Figgis

Event Details

Please join us for a conversation between author CATHERINE MORRIS, Irish critic EVE PATTEN, and Spring editor KLAUS OTTMANN about Morris’s new book, Intimate Power: Autobiography of a City, at HODGES FIGGIS in Dublin on September 25 from 6 to 8 pm.

Intimate Power: Autobiography of a City is a meditation on forms of personal losses that we carry with us all our lives. It simultaneously serves as a recovery of voice for the kinds of trauma that the city has carried through successive generations, be it slavery, famine, war, asylum, or exile. The book is a series of walks through Liverpool made on a return journey from a feeling of long exile. It is a recovery of voice through which the author situates parts of her own life into a collective solidarity that she sought out in conversations, chance encounters and in the stories that she uncovered in the city’s local and international multimedia archives.

CATHERINE MORRIS is a writer, academic, and curator based in Dublin. Her first book Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012) uncovered the forgotten cultural feminist arts practice of one of the founders of modern Ireland. In 2023, Spring published The Art of Aftermath: Words and Pictures Exchanged between 07/2020 – 03/2023,based on an image/writing exchange between Morris and the American photographer TIM MAUL around a set of 35 mm slides Maul had gifted her from his 1994 commission with the National Library of Ireland. Morris is Assistant Professor of Literature at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Previously, she was Associate Professor in Creative Writing & Literature in Liverpool where she was elected the Central Library’s first Writer-in-Residence.

EVE PATTEN is Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin, where she lectures in modern Irish and British literature, and a former director of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute. Her recent books include a study of Irish representations in English modernist literature, Ireland, Revolution, and the English Modernist Imagination (Oxford UP, 2022) and an edited volume, Irish Literature in Transition, 1940-1980 (Cambridge UP, 2020). She is also co-editor of Dublin Tales, published in the Oxford UP City Tales series in 2023.

KLAUS OTTMANN is the publisher and editor of SPRING PUBLICATIONS and Chief Curator Emeritus of The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. He was the curator of ev+a 2007: A Sense of Place, Ireland’s biennial of contemporary Art, which takes place every two years across venues in Limerick city and beyond. His publications include Yves Klein by Himself: His Life and Thought (2010) and The Genius Decision: The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition (2004). Most recently, he translated the complete correspondence of Nicolas Poussin: Your Very Humble and Very Affectionate Servant: The Letters of Nicolas Poussin, 1630–1665.

ABOUT SPRING
SPRING began under the auspices of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York as Spring Journal during the Second World War, bringing the ideas of C.G. Jung into American translations. Its logo (the ram and the goat) symbolizes the focus of the press. The ram’s forward push and the goat’s backward look recall a Renaissance idea: that one best moves forward by looking back to history and tradition. The animals are poised over a watery, reed-rimmed pool, emblems of reflection and the soul—a major theme in many SPRING books. SPRING has been publishing books about soul-making since 1970, blurring the lines between art, philosophy, the history of ideas, psychiatry, mythology, literature, and religion.

For more information please contact: events@hodgesfiggis.ie