I stepped into the reading room of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation for the first time in May 2005, shortly after completing my PhD on Joyce and medicine at the University of York. It was a special year for the Foundation. During my fellowship a string of festive events took place, celebrating its 20^th anniversary as a centre of Joyce studies in the city that Joyce had made his temporary home during WW1.

What made my time as a fellow even more exiting was the sudden arrival of a battered suitcase, containing what became later known as the Hans E. Jahnke bequest. I vividly remember the moment when staff, researchers and visitors gathered around Fritz Senn as he was cautiously opening this suitcase, looking on with awe and disbelief as never-before-seen Joyce materials materialised.

More than twenty years later, I came full circle when I returned to Zurich in the summer of 2026 to pursue archival work on a project focusing on Joyce and paper, looking again at original materials from the Jahnke bequest now securely stored in the vaults of a bank on Bahnhofstrasse. As a first-time fellow at the Zurich Foundation, I also completed an article that became a chapter of Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity (2010). A few years later I used my time at the Foundation to write an article for and edit a special issue of the JJQ.

The Foundation always provides a nurturing environment for Joyceans to read, think and write. But these momentous, sometimes unexpected, events and encounters are what makes this place so special, giving scholars and visitors the chance to see how Joyce scholarship develops in real time.

Exeter, UK, September 2026