May 2008 NUI Galway host International Conference on Sport

An international conference hosted by the Huston School of Film & Digital Media, and the Department of French, NUI Galway is to bring together leading academics, and practitioners, concerned with the representation of sport through history and in contemporary life on 23 and 24 May, 2008.

Dr Seán Crosson, The Huston School of Film & Digital Media, NUI Galway, says "From the fine arts, through print and audio-visual culture, sport has been an enduring subject of representation. This has increasingly become the case with the development of the contemporary global media industry where representations of sport, from soccer to boxing and athletics, constitute some of the most popular subjects. It is one of the aims of this event to bridge the familiar divide between "high" and "popular" cultural spheres and thus to allow the spreading of knowledge in a broader community than would generally be the case for academic conferences."

As well as considering the representation of sport in Ireland, the conference will also focus on its representation in the British Empire and Commonwealth, France, the UK and across Europe.

A distinctive highlight of the event will be the screenings of two documentaries: Red Mist - Roy Keane and the Football Civil War(2007) directed by Eamonn Little, as part of a panel discussing 'Representing Sport & Controversy' which will include the director as well as award-winning Irish Times sports writer, Keith Duggan; and Pat Comer's A Year 'til Sunday (1998), which will be introduced by the director, to mark the tenth anniversary of the production of this award-winning and seminal documentary on Gaelic football.

Among the distinguished contributors to the conference will be Professor Mike Cronin (Academic Director of the Centre for Irish Programmes at Boston College in Dublin and author of Sport and Nationalism in Ireland: Gaelic Games, Soccer and Irish Identity since 1884 (1999)); Professor Alan Bairner (Loughborough University and editor of Sport and the Irish. Histories, Identities, Issues (2001)); Professor Richard Holt (International Centre for Sports History and Culture, De Montfort University, and author of Sport and the British: a modern history (1989)) and Dr. Paul Dietschy (Université de Franche-Comté, and co-author of Sport, culture et société en France du XIXe siècle à nos jours (2006)).

Also contributing to the conference will be Professor David Scott, of Trinity College, Dublin, who has published extensively in the field of French textual and visual studies. A middleweight amateur boxer, Professor Scott is also the author of The Art and Aesthetics of Boxing (University of Nebraska Press, 2008).

The conference is supported by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS), NUI Galway's Millennium Fund and the Department of French, NUI Galway.

For a full programme or to register to attend the conference, please go to the Huston School of Film & Digital Media website at http://www.filmschool.ie/events or contact Seán Crosson at sean.crosson@nuigalway.ie