Academic conference on U2

Move over James Joyce. It seems Ireland's hottest intellectual property is a "band of ambitions, paradoxes, ironies and sincerity," better known to the rest of us as U2.

North Carolina Central University are hosting a full-blown academic conference to ponder the many inscrutable layers and meaning of U2, their lives and work. You know you're the biggest band in the world when a professor of political science writes a paper titled Botanizing on Asphalt: Representations of Laissez Faire Inherent in U2's Music, while a professor of anthropology investigates The General Admission Queue and Fan Self-Organizing Culture at U2 Concerts.

For the culturally minded there's Vertigo-Event-Context: The Interpretive Lyric/Music Binary in the U2 Corpus and ’O may the moon and the sunlight seem / One inextricable beam:’ The Imaginative Experience in Yeats’ ‘The Tower’ and U2’s ‘Lemon’. (English lit students, compare and contrast the user comments on the Youtube clip below: King Veda (1 week ago) 'This is a poem about lemons, right?')

Around 50 speakers are lined up altogether to deliver papers, studies, keynote addresses and the like. If you don't believe me, look here.