Bloomsday at the Library - Featuring Joyce Scholar Vicki Mahaffey!

June 16, 2026
12:00pm - 1:00pm

Join us for our third annual "Bloomsday," a celebration of all things James Joyce. Have Lunch with Leopold and Molly Bloom!

Attendees are encouraged to wear period dress (1904-ish) or to dress like a character from any of Joyce's books. There food, music, readings, stories, games and prizes for best dressed.

JUST ANNOUNCED

We will be joined for a conversation from Paris via ZOOM at 12:30 by Joyce Scholar Vicki Mahaffey, English Professor at the University of Illinois and author of "The Joyce of Everyday Life," which celebrates the power of language to preserve and multiply lived experiences across time and space,

Dr. Mahaffey is passionate about the importance of reading as a mode of interpretation that needs to be more than a socially-conditioned reflex. In her new book, The Joyce of Everyday Life (Bucknell University Press; September 2024), she brings a depth of scholarship and a lively interpretive voice to show how James Joyce himself read, drawing from his entire corpus for her examples. With no omniscient narrator, Joyce’s work requires a reader to observe and listen anew, thereby finding connections that revive a rich appreciation of daily life: sleeping, washing, writing, eating, religion, and love. This book offers a way to slow down and return to the present moment whenreading, using Joyce as a roadmap.

The Joyce of Everyday Life distills what Mahaffey, who has taught literature for forty years in both the U.S. and England, has learned about reading and language. Her work on Ireland illuminates the banshees in “On Dirty Sheets” and the salmon of knowledge in “On Salmon”; her experience teaching gender and sexuality leads to the shattering conclusions of “On Adultery and Virginity” and “On Fat.” Shakespeare, together with Plato and Aristotle, enrich the treatment of beds in “On Beds.” She also takes on bigger interpretive challenges in the sections “On Love” and “On Religion.”

See: www.vickimahaffey.com/

See also: http://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/the.../9781684485277