Professor Nicholas Allen  is Moore Institute Professor at NUI Galway. He is writing a cultural history of 1916 and its impact on modernism for Cambridge University Press, and editing Ernie O'Malley's later letters and papers with Cormac O'Malley. His other books are Modernism, Ireland and Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and George Russell and the New Ireland (Four Courts, 2003).

  Nicholas Allen is editor of That Other Island (2007), with Eve Patten, Gerald Dawe's The Proper Word (2007) and The Cities of Belfast (2003), with Aaron Kelly.

  He leads the Galway strand of Texts, Contexts, Cultures, a graduate programme run in association with Trinity College Dublin and University College Cork, and has supervisory interests in the broad range of twentieth century Irish literature, history and art.

   Eilen Egan-Mack

  Dr. Nicola Gordon Bowe is Associate Fellow, Faculty of Visual Culture, NCAD; Research Fellow, University of Wales; Visiting Professor, School of Art & Design, University of Ulster.

  Dr. Cathy Fagan received her PhD. In English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, with a concentration in American Studies.  A long-time visitor of the Adirondack “North Country,” Dr. Fagan discovered Jeanne Robert Foster in the early 1990’s, hearing her poetry and seeing photos of her loveliness in the Schroon Lake movie theater, predicated by Noel Riedinger Johnson’s 1986 publication of Adirondack Portraits:  A Piece of Time.  Her fascination with Foster’s life and work led to Dr. Fagan’s doctorate on Jeanne Robert Foster:  “The Excitement of an Afternoon Call.”  Involvement with Foster leads to fascination with the Yeats family and the great artists of the Irish Literary Renaissance and of the world of John Quinn and the great modernist art movement.  While her work as the English Writing Placement Coordinator at Nassau Community College (Long Island, New York) centers on developmental composition and literacy, Dr. Fagan continues to read about, study, and discuss Foster and friends and has been associated with the three previous JBY Seminars

  Róisín Kennedy is a graduate of UCD and the University of Edinburgh. She curated and catalogued the historic and contemporary state collection at Dublin Castle, and wrote Dublin Castle Art (1999). She is a former Yeats Curator at the National Gallery of Ireland, 2006-8, and organized ‘The Fantastic in Irish Art’ and ‘Masquerade and Spectacle: The Travelling Fair in the Work of Jack B. Yeats’ in 2007.

  Sam McCready is an internationally respected actor, theatre director, teacher, and published author. Born in Belfast, he was a founding member of the Lyric Players Theatre, and later a Trustee and Artistic Director of the company. He emigrated to the United States in 1984, when he was appointed Professor of Theatre at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He has directed off-Broadway and appeared as an actor in a number of theatres in the US.  His publications include the memoir Baptism by Fire: My Life with Mary O’Malley and the Lyric Players (Lagan Press, 2008); A William Butler Yeats Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press, 1997); Coole Lady: The Extraordinary Story of Lady Gregory (Lagan Press, 2005); and The Great Yeats!(Lagan Press, 2010).  His adaptation of Helen Lewis’s memoir A Time to Speak, was presented by the Lyric Theatre at the Belfast International Festival, 2009.  He is an acknowledged expert on the plays of W.B. Yeats and conducts the Drama Workshop each year at the prestigious Yeats International Summer School.

  Joan McCready was a founder member of the Lyric Players Theatre and is an experienced actress, teacher, and theatre director.  She has taught in a range of schools in Ireland, Wales, and the US; most recently as Head of Drama and Communications at the Park School in Baltimore.  As an actress, she has specialized in performing roles in the plays of W.B. Yeats and the later works of Samuel Beckett, among them Rockaby and Ohio Impromptu, which she performed throughout Ireland. Most recently she has played Maurya in Synge’s Riders to the Sea, and Madge in Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come!  She has also toured extensively in the one-woman play Coole Lady: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Gregory, which she performed to much acclaim Off-Broadway and on three tours of Ireland and the UK. Her performances of the Holocaust memoir, A Time to Speak, at the Belfast International Festival and in England have been widely celebrated.

 Lucy McDiarmid is the Marie Frazee-Baldassarre Professor of English at Montclair State University. Lucy is a noted author on Irish Literature and has particpated in the three previous JBY Seminars at Chestertown. Lucy's many published works include: "The Treason of the Clerks," in Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden Between the Wars (Cambridge University Press,1984).; Joyce, Heaney, and 'that Subject People Stuff' (Greenwood Press, 1989);  The Irish art of controversy, (Cornell University Press - Ithaca, NY 2005)

  Alison Ní Dhorchaide is a Masters student and tutor of Irish Language and Literature in UCD. She is also a poet and an enthusiastic blogger, and has recently had some of her Irish and English language haiku translated to Japanese in 'Toy Box 2010', a compilation of English language and Japanese poetry. An avid Yeatsian, Alison has attended the past four Yeats Summer Schools, and has worked as the video archivist for the Summer School Lectures at The Hawk's Well Theatre.
 

  Hilary Pyle is Yeats Curator Emeritus at the National Gallery of Ireland. Biographer of Jack B. Yeats and author of the definitive catalogue raisonné of his works, as well as biographer of James Stephens, Susan L. Mitchell, and many publications and articles internationally on Irish art and Anglo-Irish Literature. Past President of the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, Past President of the Association of Iconographers of Ireland. Elected HRHA (Hon.Royal Hibernian Academician) 2000; Hon. D.Litt (NUI) June 2004. Her major works on the Yeats family are:Jack B. Yeats: a Biography; Jack B. Yeats in the National Gallery of Ireland; Jack B. Yeats: A Catalogue Raisonné of the oil Paintings; Jack B. Yeats:his Watercolours, Drawings and Pastels; The Different Worlds of Jack B. Yeats:his Cartoons and Illustrations; Yeats: Portrait of an Artistic Family; Cesca's Diary 1913 - 1916:Where Art and Nationalism Meet - the life and personal journals of Sadbh Trinseach, Artist and Nationalist.

  John Purser is now a crofter on The Isle of Skye. He was the first manager of the Scottish Music Information Centre 1985-7 and a trustee of The John Muir Trust 2001-4. He is author of The Literary Works of Jack B. Yeats (1991) and regularly lectures on Yeats's literary work. John has been associated with the previous two JBY Seminars.

  Doug Saum is a former English teacher residing in Reno NV USA with his wife, Judith, and their two cats, Iko and Jokomo. His master's thesis is titled William Butler Yeats: A Dialectical Analysis. In 1996 he began, with a coterie of Reno musicians and singers, to put the poems of W. B. Yeats to Saum's original music. His "Everlasting Yeats Project," as he calls it, is two-thirds done with the following CD releases complete: First Songs: Lullabies for Ireland, The Rose @ the Crossway, The Wind, the Reeds, and the Seven Woods, Responsibilities, and Youth and Age. Still to be recorded are: Words for Music, Upon a Golden Bough, and Last Songs. When completed Saum will have put approximately two-hundred and fifty Yeats pieces to song. "As human culture continues its unprecedented changes, I want to do my bit to make the magical words of W B Yeats accessible to people who might never pick them up in a book, and hopefully enhance appreciation of the poems for those who know them."

  Bruce Stewart lectures at the School of Languages and Literature, University of Ulster,Coleraine. Bruce was Literary Director (Conseiller Littéraire) to Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco (from 1995-2005). 

His publications include:
20th Century Literature in Ulster: A Bibliography (British Council 1995),

Asst. Ed., The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, ed. Robert Welch (OUP 1996).
Cat’s Eye: York Notes (Longmans 1996),

Ed., That Other World: The Supernatural and Fantastic in Irish Literature and its Contexts, 2 vols. (Colin Smythe 1998).

Ed., Beckett and Beyond (Colin Smythe 1999).
Ed., Hearts and Minds: Irish Culture and Society Under the Act of Union (Colin Smythe 2002).
Ed., The Irish Book Lover: An Irish Studies Reader (Colin Smythe 2004), Preface [pp.xiii-xviii] and ‘Afterword’ [pp.371-83].

Civilizations were let down from heaven in the dawn of history,and we find the laws of Moses and Manu and other primitives all whispers from heaven to earth. Then kings began to put themselves in place of heaven, and after the kings came the aristocracies, and after the aristocracies the oligarchies of the wealthy, and now there appears a place in the sun for the average man moulding his own destiny in harmony with his neighbours,and that is what the world has long awaited and been in travail to get, and if we can inspire Irishmen in this fever of the world to co-operate, to work together to save their country, we may make Ireland a country worth living in …

Æ, ‘Notes of the Week’,

The Irish Homestead

19 May 1917, pp. 588–9.