On June 16, 2016, the board of trustees for the International James Joyce Foundation voted unanimously to move the organization to The University of Tulsa and appoint Sean Latham, Pauline McFarlin Walter Chair of English and Comparative Literature, as its new executive secretary. The IJJF was founded by Thomas F. Staley at The University of Tulsa in 1967 and rapidly grew into an international body dedicated to facilitating work of all kinds on James Joyce. In 1990, its offices moved to The Ohio State University.
Trustees are elected every two years and currently include representatives from Ireland, Italy, Belgium and the United Kingdom as well as the United States and Canada. This group, in conjunction with a president and vice president, selects meeting sites for a biennial international symposium, which typically draws between 300 and 400 scholars from the around the world for a weeklong series of talks, presentations, exhibitions and performances. In addition, the foundation publishes a regular newsletter, offers an array of services to scholars working on Joyce and provides thousands of dollars in scholarships to students.
Over the course of the next year, the foundation will gradually move its operations to TU where it will be housed in the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities. “We are delighted to welcome the IJJF back to its first home here in Tulsa, and to renew this university’s long-standing commitment to the international Joyce community,” Latham said. He noted that the foundation would collaborate with the James Joyce Quarterly to create a new portal designed to serve as an international clearinghouse for information and scholarship about Joyce’s life, work and legacy. The James Joyce Quarterly, also founded by Staley, has been continuously published by TU since 1963 and McFarlin Library holds some the rarest and most important Joyce-related documents in the world. “Taken together, the resources now assembled at The University of Tulsa will make it one of the capitals of global Joyce studies, second only to Dublin itself,” Latham said. “We are grateful that the foundation selected TU and will work to ensure that we sustain its invaluable legacy.”