Luke Gibbons’ most recent book is James Joyce and the Irish Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2023). He has taught as Professor of Irish Studies at Maynooth University and the University of Notre Dame, and has published widely on Irish culture and criticism.
‘Hospitality on Holles Street: James Joyce, Evolution, and the Extended Mind.‘ – June 2025
This talk will investigate how critical responses to Darwin were shaped by cultural as well as religious and scientific factors. Irish responses, most notably in James Joyce’s Ulysses and related ‘Celtic’ interventions, emphasised co-operation rather than competition as driving forces in evolution. This called for a re-thinking of an ‘extended mind’ in wider cultural, collective terms, rather than the narrower mental (‘consciousness’) or physical (‘brain’) approaches that have dominated thinking about intentional design versus random natural slection.
