Joyce's Dublin

Joyce’s Dublin – An Exploration of “The Dead’

A podcast digital humanities project commissioned by UCD and produced by Athena Media.

James Joyce is one of Ireland’s most celebrated authors and his work is among the most influential writing in modern literature. Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 and educated at University College Dublin (UCD). He left Ireland in 1904, returning for a few short visits, but his work explores Ireland; particularly his native home, Dublin. ‘The Dead’, the final story in Joyce’s 1914 collection Dubliners, is considered one of the finest short stories in the English language. Joyce’s great friend, Con Curran, remarked of Joyce that ‘his memory was a map of the town’, and the city of Dublin is lovingly present in ‘The Dead’.

Joyce’s Dublin, an exploration of ‘The Dead’ is an audio podcast series designed to assist readers of Joyce’s work. These podcasts help us to understand the context of his work. They help us not just to understand the religious and political debates of the time, but also to hear the popular songs that Joyce knew, to picture the streets and people of that time, and to appreciate how this story sits within a rich history of the city and the country. The website directs us to the archives and its resources to give us a vision of Joyce’s Dublin and bring new life to the story, just as the story brings new life to the archives.

‘Joyce’s Dublin’ is led by Professors Gerardine Meaney and Anne Fogarty, with research by Dr John O’Neill of University College Dublin. The audio podcast series and website, ‘Joyce’s Dublin’ is commissioned by UCD and is an Athena Media production produced by Helen Shaw. The project is funded through the Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA), a component of the UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland, funded by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) through the Programme for Research in Third-Level Institutions (PRTLI). The IVRLA has preserved elements of UCD’s main repositories and encouraged access to the material by digitising and cataloguing it. The IVRLA is one of the first comprehensive digital primary-source repositories in Ireland.

Visit the UCD Digital Library and listen to the podcast series via  Soundcloud

Barry McGovern reading Joyce