Carlos Gamerro, a prose writer and literary scholar teaching this term at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, will add his perspective to our Institute's year of "Global Ulysses."

Borges was, if we believe his claim, the first writer of the Spanish language to read Ulysses. All through his writing life, his attitude towards his Irish peer veered between devotion and derision. The story of Borges' reading of Joyce is part of the story of the unrequited love of Argentine literature for Irish literature.

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In this, the fourth film in the series "Screening the Irish Troubles," Steve McQueen, who would later direct 12 Years a Slave, began his feature directorial career with this biopic of Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and other Republican prisoners jailed in Northern Ireland who performed hunger strikes in 1981. The film chronicles the various strikes performed by the group prior to the hunger strikes that garnered worldwide attention while also teasing apart the moral questions inherent to incarceration and self-punishing activism.

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