We hope delegates will be able to attend as much of the programme as possible. Please register for each day you are able to attend. Conference attendance is free, but registration is essential. Conference packs will be available for sale on arrival. 

Attendees can view the schedule or download from the link below.

North at 50 PDF Schedule

Thu 5 Jun 2025

3.00-4.30pm: Opening Panel 

- Dr Dane Holt, ‘North and self-elegy’
- Dr Stephen O’Neill, ‘“grown long-haired and thoughtful”: North and coming-of-age’
- Prof Eve Patten, ‘“…not from Ulster or from Mars”: North, poetry and parody’

4.45-6.30pm: Keynote Lecture

- Prof Nicholas Allen, ‘Heaney in the Seventies’

7.05pm-8.00pm: Readings from North

- introduced by Dr Stephen Sexton

Fri 6 Jun 2025

9.00am: Coffee and Registration

9.15-11.00am: Panel One - Writing North

- Selma Mikalsen Kollstrøm, Balance and Buoyancy: Moments in the Composition Process of “Act of Union”
- Dr Adam Hanna, ‘The Pressure [...] of What Has Been Withheld’: Seamus Heaney’s North Notebooks
- Olly Colvin, ‘Heaney’s (Lines of) Flight: Geophilosophy, Geopoetics and Ethico-Aesthetic Subjectivation in Seamus Heaney’s North’
- Prof Juan Christian Pellicer, ‘The sexual drive of knowing’: North at 50

11.15-12.45pm: Panel Two - Bogs and Bodies

- Dr Ellen Howley, ‘North as Environmental Text’
- Cyrus Larcombe-Moore, ‘The Bog’s a Library: Bog-Text in Seamus Heaney’s North’
- Dr Stuart McWilliams, ‘The Impression of Archaeology’

LUNCH BREAK

1.30-3.15pm: Panel Three - North, South, East, West

- Dr Patricia Malone, From Myth to Memory: Heaney’s Broadcast Paratexts
- Marcella McSweeney, The Question of American Influence: Connections Between Seamus Heaney’s North and Robert Bly’s The Light Around the Body
- Dr James Little, ‘North by Northeast: Seamus Heaney’s Multidirectional Prisons’
- Sacha White, “Coming to consciousness/ by jumping in graves”: Heaney's Haunted Lyric in North’

3.20-4.50pm: Panel Four - Singing Schools

- Dr Gillian Groszewski, ‘Singing School’ at School: Primary-school student responses to Heaney’s poems and their geopolitical contexts
- Ellen Orchard, ‘Our dual citizen’: The Antagonistic Child of North
- Dr Tom Walker, ‘obscured by the bad bits”: Ciaran Carson, The Honest Ulsterman and North’

5.00-6.00pm: Roundtable

- with Prof Edna Longley, Dr Eamonn Hughes, Prof Leontia Flynn, and Dr Padraig Regan 

Sat 7 Jun 2025

11.00-12.30pm

- Anna-Marie Cummins, North and the Seamus Heaney Centre’s Archives
- Brian Leyden, ‘Going North: A response to North in the overall context of Seamus Heaney’s career’

1.00-3.00pm: It Goes As Follies

- North edition of the SHC monthly family-friendly trad session

3.00-5.00pm: Heaney in Limboland

An archive film screening in the Queen’s Film Theatre, presented in association with the BFI