Professor Bob Welch, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ulster is to deliver a keynote address on the history of the Irish book to the Annual Conference of the Economic and Social History Society of Ireland in NUI Maynooth this week.

Delivering the annual Connell Lecture, Professor Welch discusses the long history of book publishing in Ireland - from the earliest manuscripts, through the introduction of printing in the late 16th century, to the present day, and will give his audience an insight into the contents of the exciting History of the Irish Book project now under way.

"We are in a major phase of book history research," said Professor Welch.

"Perhaps because of the increasing dominance in our lives of the digital technologies and the ways in which they have affected social process, education, bureaucracy and thought itself, we have begun to think again about the book and what it does - and has done - to our cultures and civilisations.

"It is as if the ever-greater reliance on information technology has resurrected for us the significance of the book as a cultural resource and icon," he said.

The History of the Irish Book series is a landmark undertaking in scholarship, and will result in five volumes, said Professor Welch:

The series is edited by Professor Welch and Professor Brian Walker of Queen’s University, Belfast, and has an editorial team of 12. It will be published by the Oxford University Press. The first volume is scheduled for publication in 2005.

Professor Welch’s lecture takes place at 7pm in Rhetoric House, NUI Maynooth, on Friday 12th November.

For further information, please contact:

David Young
Telephone: 028 90366074
Email: David Young