AFIS 2025 | Consolation(s) in France and/or Ireland

How to live the life to which one is called in times of crisis? How to remain or become oneself when individual or collective crisis events throw us off course? In this post-pandemic, recessionary, ecoanxious and conflict-ridden world, are individuals and societies faced with new forms of crises as they navigate individual and collective life? A literary tradition of consolation has flourished since Ancient and Biblical texts. Unsurprisingly, in recent years, the theme of consolation has inspired a new flowering of essays and exercised the minds of academics seeking to situate this search for consolation in a theoretical framework. Have the foundational philosophical, spiritual and literary foundational consolatory texts been internalized in later cultural expressions? The AFIS 2025 conference will take all these interrogations into the multidisciplinary field of Franco-Irish Studies and will welcome contributions on the theme of consolation(s) from scholars in the following areas with reference to Irish, French or Franco-Irish contexts in comparative literature (consolation from bereavement, illness, and exile); Food and drink as sources of consolation; Consolation and conflict resolution; Consolation, interconnectedness and the ethics of care; the consolation of art (artistic practice and relationship to art); The consolation(s) of nature; Beauty as consolation in church architecture and liturgy; Expressions of need for spiritual consolation.