27 - 30 June 2024

Hinterland, Mechanics' Institute, San Francisco

We look forward to welcoming the following speakers appearing at Hinterland, Mechanics' Institute, San Francisco 8-10 November, 2019. Click on the images below for a short biography.

Brian Murphy

Brian Murphy

Brian Murphy

Brian Murphy

Brian Murphy is one of the most popular and respected sports journalists in the Bay Area. In tandem with Paul McCaffrey he presents the KNBR Radio morning sports show from 6-10 am. “Murph and Mac” have been entertaining sports fans in the Bay area since 2006. A former sportswriter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Murph, a North Bay native, covered every Bay Area sports team during a 15-year writing career and brings an almost encyclopaedic memory of sports knowledge, trivia and Bay Area sports history to the show. He’s authored six books, including three labors of love on the 2010, 2012 and 2014 World Series champion Giants. He is also well known to Irish sports fans as the erudite ‘US Murph’ of the Second Captains podcast.

Catherine Flynn

Catherine Flynn

Catherine Flynn

Catherine Flynn

Catherine Flynn lectures on British and Irish modernist literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her recently published James Joyce and the Matter of Paris looks at the experience of the author of Ulysees in the city in which the book was published and Finnegan’s Wake was written. She is also the author of James Joyce, Walter Benjamin and the Matter of Modernity, She has published articles on Joyce, Benjamin, Brecht, Kafka, and Surrealism and on theories of the Avant-Garde and of Modernism. She is co-editor, with Richard Brown, of a special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly titled "Joycean Avant-Gardes." She is also at work with David Wheatley on a scholarly edition of Flann O’Brien’s Cruiskeen Lawn.

Dave Nihill

Dave Nihill

Dave Nihill

Dave Nihill

David Nihill is a US based Irish entertainer and bestselling author. In what doesn't sound like the best plan ever, David decided to try and overcome his fear of public speaking by pretending to be an accomplished comedian called "Irish Dave" who just happened to be on tour in America for one full year, crashing as many comedy clubs, festivals and shows as possible. One part of the plan was at least logical: he was already Irish and already called Dave. In one year, David went from being deathly afraid of public speaking to hosting a business conference, regularly performing stand-up comedy, and winning storytelling competitions in front of packed houses. He did it by learning from some of the best public speakers in the world: stand-up comedians. He also told a lot of funny stories along the way. David shares them along with the principles, techniques and tools of the world’s best speakers in a humorous talk based on his bestselling book Do You Talk Funny? 7 Comedy Habits to Become a Better (And Funnier) Public Speaker.

Elizabeth Creely

Elizabeth Creely

Elizabeth Creely

Elizabeth Creely

Elizabeth Creely is a writer and public historian whose passion is researching and documenting the Irish community of San Francisco’s Mission District. As a community historian, Elizabeth also works with the Irish American Crossroads Festival, founded to promote the arts, culture, history and traditions of Irish America. In March, 2016 Elizabeth produced a walking tour for the festival, entitled  “Walking the Rebellion: Irish-Americans and the 1916 Easter Rising in the Mission District”, which explored and examined Irish and Irish American culture at home, and in meeting halls, churches and places of business within the Mission District. Her essays have been featured in journals such as The Fourth River, The Mississippi Review and The New Hibernia Review and Found SF, an online encyclopaedia of San Francisco-based history.

Emer Martin

Emer Martin

Emer Martin

Emer Martin

Emer Martin is a Dubliner who has lived in Paris, London, the Middle East, and various places in the USA. The Cruelty Men, her most recent novel is published by Lilliput Press and has been nominated for Irish Novel of the Year 2019. Her first novel Breakfast in Babylon won Book of the Year 1996 in her native Ireland at the prestigious Listowel Writers’ Week. Houghton Mifflin released Breakfast in Babylon in the U.S. in 1997. More Bread Or I’ll Appear, her second novel was published internationally in 1999. Emer studied painting in New York and has had two sell-out solo shows of her paintings at the Origin Gallery in Harcourt St, Dublin. Her third novel Baby Zero, was published in the UK and Ireland March 07, and released in the U.S. 2014. She released her first children's book Why is the Moon Following Me? in 2013. Pooka is a Halloween book for children released in 2016. Her latest children book The Pig who Danced was released in 2017. She completed her third short film Unaccompanied. She produced Irvine Welsh’s directorial debut NUTS in 2007. Emer was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. She now lives between the depths of Silicon Valley, CA and the jungles of Co. Meath, Ireland.

Ethel Rohan

Ethel Rohan

Ethel Rohan

Ethel RohanEthel Rohan’s Rohan’s debut novel The Weight of Him (St. Martin’s Press and Atlantic Books, 2017) was an Amazon, BustleKOBO, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book. The Weight of Him won a Plumeri Fellowship, Silver Nautilus Award, the Northern California Publishers and Authors’ Award, and was shortlisted for the Reading Women Award. She is also the author of two short story collections, Goodnight Nobody and Cut Through the Bone, the former longlisted for The Edge Hill Prize and the latter longlisted for The Story Prize. She is a former winner of the Bryan McMahon Short Story Award. Her work has appeared in The New York TimesWorld Literature TodayPEN America, The Washington Post, Tin House Online, The Irish Times, and GUERNICA, among many others. Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, Rohan lives in San Francisco where she received her MFA in fiction from Mills College and is a member of The Writer’s Grotto.
Geordie Lynch

Geordie Lynch

Geordie Lynch

Geordie LynchGeordie Lynch is an independent filmmaker born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He received his degree in history at University of California, Santa Cruz, and later studied video and multimedia through San Francisco State University. He has been motion graphics designer, producer, director, and editor for various production companies and independent projects. Geordie’s passion for history and the film arts has led him to his current work, “City of White Gold,” a documentary film about San Francisco’s meteoric rise to metropolis in the 19th century Gilded Age metropolis in the 19th century Gilded Age.
Glen Gendzel

Glen Gendzel

Glen Gendzel

Glen Gendzel

Glen Gendzel is an historian and author of numerous articles on aspects of California history. He is Professor of History at San Jose State University and has published articles, book chapters, encyclopaedia entries, and reviews on subjects ranging from California mythology, politics, and migration, to the baseball business, social memory, and McCarthyism. A regular contributor to Hinterland:Kells, where he has spoken about the Vietnam War and other American subject matter.

Gray Brechin

Gray Brechin

Gray Brechin

Gray Brechin

Dr. Gray Brechin is an historical geographer and author whose chief interests are the state of California, the environmental impact of cities upon their hinterlands, and the invisible landscape of New Deal public works. A graduate of UC Berkeley he returned to the U.C. Berkeley Department of Geography in 1992 to write a dissertation using San Francisco as a case study of how all great cities operate at the expense of their environs for the benefit of dynastic elites, especially the Thought-Shapers who control mass media. Published by U.C. Press in 1999 as Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, the book spent sixteen weeks on the San Francisco Chronicle’s best-seller list and is now considered a classic of urban studies. Dr. Brechin is a frequent radio and television guest and a popular public speaker. He is currently a visiting scholar in the U.C. Berkeley Department of Geography and founder and project scholar of the Living New Deal (https://livingnewdeal.org)

Jim Lockhart

Jim Lockhart

Jim Lockhart

Jim Lockhart

Jim is one a founding member of one of the most successful Irish rock bands, Horslips. Founded almost fifty years ago Horslips are regarded as the ‘fathers of Celtic rock’ and continue to play together on a regular basis, although they formally ‘retired’ in 1980. Their music is inspired by traditional Irish airs and is heavily influenced by the work of the great Irish composer Sean O’Ríada. Jim is one of the group’s vocalists (in English, Irish and Manx) and is also a multi-instrumentalist, playing keyboards, pipes, whistle and flute. Jim was also, for many years, a music producer in RTÉ, working with, among others Dave Fanning, and has been partly responsible for the nourishing of much Irish musical talent of the last thirty years.

Kathleen Walkup

Kathleen Walkup

Kathleen Walkup

Kathleen Walkup

Kathleen Walkup is the inaugural Lovelace Family Chair in Book Art. She has lectured widely on the history of women and printing and on contemporary artists’ books practice. In Fall, 2019, she will have a solo exhibition of her printed books and ephemera in the Mills College Library, and in Fall, 2020, she will curate an exhibition examining the role of women in the rise of artists’ books in the 1970s and 1980s, with satellite exhibitions at the Book Club of California and Mills. She has written extensively on the recent history women and artists’ books on the East and West coasts. She also keeps an occasional blog, New Irish Journal.

Kellie Hughes

Kellie Hughes

Kellie Hughes

Kellie Hughes

Kellie Hughes is a theatre artist with over twenty years’ experience as a director, writer and performer. She has toured extensively nationally and internationally. Highlights include; Galway International Arts Festival, Dublin Theatre Festival, The National Theatre, London, Barbican Arts Centre, London, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York and Adelaide Theatre Festival. Kellie is Artistic Director of the UCD Ad Astra Performing Arts Academy. For the 2019 Hinterland Festival, Kellie and dramatist Matthew Spangler presented a reading of Act 1 of Striking Back, a theatrical adaptation of activist Mary Manning's book, detailing Mary's experiences as a Dunnes Stores anti-apartheid striker during the 1980s.

Luke O’Neill

Luke O’Neill

Luke O’Neill

Luke O’Neill

Professor Luke O’Neill has become the public face of science in Ireland, largely through his weekly appearances on Pat Kenny’s radio programme, first on RTÉ and then Newstalk, where he explains science to the layman in a witty, informative and charismatic style. Winner of the prestigious Boyle Medal in 2009, and a longstanding member of the Royal Irish Academy, Luke is author of the 2018 book Humanology: A Scientist’s Guide To Our Amazing Existence.

Mark Smith

Mark Smith

Mark Smith

Mark Smith

A native of Kells, Co. Meath, artist Mark Smith, spent a decade working as a production designer in the fashion industry in Paris before returning to Ireland to establish the Sawmills Arts Centre in Kells, and to originate the annual Type Trail. The Type Trail consists of a number of art installations positioned around the town of Kells during the months of June and July, based on a different word each year. In 2016, for example, that word was ‘rise’, to coincide with the centenary of the 1916 Rising. Mark is also behind the Printworks project in Kells. This will use half a dozen meticulously restored Victorian and Edwardian printing presses, to initiate and train a new generation in the arts of letterpress and block printing.

Mary Manning

Mary Manning

Mary Manning

Mary Manning

Dunnes Stores cashier Mary Manning knew little or nothing about apartheid when, in 1984, at the age of twenty-one, she refused to register the sale of two Outspan South African grapefruits under a directive from her union. She was suspended, and nine of her co-workers walked out in support. They all assumed they would shortly return to work. They didn’t. Instead they became the central figures in a prolonged strike and boycott that captured world attention, a dispute waged at considerable financial and emotional cost to themselves. After the Dunnes Stores strike ended, Mary Manning emigrated to Australia until her name had been forgotten by potential employers, who associated her with the ‘anti-establishment’ label. Now living in Dublin, she has given talks throughout Ireland, as well as in London, New York and Washington. She has two daughters. Striking Back: the Untold Story of an Anti-Apartheid Striker is her account of the Dunnes Stores strike and much more besides.

Myles Dungan

Myles Dungan

Myles Dungan

Myles Dungan

Dr. Myles Dungan is a proud Kells resident. He is a writer and broadcaster, presents The History Show on RTÉ Radio 1 and is the author of a number of Irish and American history books. The most recent of these is Four Killings, which looks at the bloody legacy of his extended family in the Irish War of Independence. He holds a PhD in history from Trinity College, Dublin, is Dean of Humanities at City Colleges, Dublin and is an adjunct lecturer in history at University College, Dublin.