We began our academic year celebrating the work of our colleague Colleen Taylor. Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland (Oxford University Press), a new monograph by Taylor, details the resistance and creativity of Irish matter, from coins to mud cabins and pigs. Irish Materialisms pioneers an emerging research field that prioritizes material objects in Irish cultural and environmental heritage. Locating the book in a wider context, an expert panel featuring Malcolm Sen (UMass Amherst), Finola O’Kane (University College Dublin), and Christine Cusick (Seton Hill) discussed new developments in Irish environmental studies.
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Mary C. Murphy, an expert on the complex relationship between Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Europe, has been appointed director of Boston College’s Irish Institute. Murphy is excited to contribute to the important work that Boston College pioneers in honoring its connections to Ireland and the Irish diaspora. The Irish Institute looks forward to working with the wider political science community, and with Irish and U.S. political and academic networks, through the hosting of events, facilitation of networks, and encouragement of scholarship.
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Patricia Palmer, Visiting Burns Scholar »
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Patricia Palmer, professor of English at Maynooth University, is the fall 2024 Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies. Palmer is teaching a graduate-level course on the digital humanities and early modern Ireland. In November, she will present her Burns Scholar lecture, titled “The Poetics of Property: The Ground Possessed and Dispossessed in Early Modern Ireland,” in which she explores how English colonists in 16th and 17th-century Ireland field-tested strategies for translating land into property.
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Burns Summers Fellows: Chris Cusack and Fionnuala Walsh »
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BC Irish Studies hosted two visiting Burns Summer Fellows: Chris Cusack of Radboud University and Fionnuala Walsh of University College Dublin.
Chris Cusack consulted the Burns Library’s archival resources for several projects. He examined a range of materials, from letters sent to priest-novelist Canon Patrick Sheehan and the diaries of Boston Pilot editor Katherine E. Conway to drafts for the (unrealized) movie version of Juanita Casey’s The Horse of Selene.
Fionnula Walsh, whose primary research centers on Irish women’s history, inspected four manuscript collections at the Burns Library: the Loretta Clarke Murray papers and those of Kathleen Daly Clarke, Molly Flannery Woods, and Mary Boyle O’Reilly. She identified sources that are relevant for a collaborative project examining the afterlives of war-affected women.
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BC’s History Department invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professorship in 19th-century U.S. immigration and labor history, with preference for a scholar of Ireland’s diaspora. The position will teach four courses annually, including survey courses, undergraduate electives, and graduate courses. Apply via Interfolio. The deadline is October 15, 2024.
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In December, the University of Massachusetts Press will publish Inventing the Boston Game: Football, Soccer and the Origins of a National Myth, which Mike Cronin co-authored with Kevin Tallec Marston. The book scrutinizes a local origin story of American football, and by extension soccer, revealing how its memory was playfully manipulated by certain Bostonian elites.
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“Miserable Conflict and Confusion” (Liverpool University Press), Erin Scheopner’s first monograph, investigates Britain’s national press coverage of Ireland and the “Irish question” from the aftermath of the Easter Rising in 1916 to the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922. Bridging the fields of history and media studies, this book adds to our understanding of the complex relationship between the press and politics.
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Guy Beiner contributed an article on “Remembering the ‘Father of Irish Republicanism’” to the History Ireland supplemental volume Wolfe Tone 225, edited by Jim Smyth. Beiner argues that “unlike biological fathers who beget children, national father figures are often retrospective constructions … it was the generation of his great-great-grandchildren that would bestow this recognition on Tone, creating an imagined retroactive genealogy.”
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In October, Merrion Press will publish Revolutionary Times–Ireland 1913-23: The Forging of a Nation. The book, co-authored by Mike Cronin and Mark Duncan, emerged from a popular digital history project commissioned for the Decade of Centenaries and offers an accessible nuanced history of the revolutionary period.
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Andrew Sofer contributed to the Imagined Theatres online open access journal a featured poem on Samuel Beckett. An extension of the book (published by Routledge), the website collects hypothetical performances—written by an ever-growing array of theorists and artists of the contemporary stage—that consider what might be possible and impossible in the theater.
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Seán Cahill co-authored in the Proceedings of the Association of Celtic Studies (vol. 10, 2023) the article “‘More Irish than the Irish themselves’: Learners, teachers and speakers overseas,” which surveys the motivations of those who choose to study the Irish language in the U.S., and what learning the language means to them.
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September 25, 7 p.m., Gasson Hall 100
A groundbreaking and award-winning Irish visual artist from Belfast, Rita Duffy has produced acclaimed public art projects held in museum and private collections worldwide. Since her early ecocritical project Thaw (2004), Duffy’s projects have continued to grow in scale and ambition, exploring with characteristic humor and irony issues of female identity, history and politics, and borders.
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October 23, 5 p.m., Connolly House
Hear Erin Kate Scheopner, senior liaison at Boston College Libraries and adjunct faculty for History and Irish Studies, speak about her book “Miserable Conflict and Confusion,” a study of British press coverage of Ireland and the “Irish question” from the Easter Rising’s aftermath in 1916 to the Anglo-Irish Treaty’s ratification in 1922.
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October 30, 5 p.m., Devlin 101
Irish Studies, in conjunction with the Office of the Vice Provost of Global Engagement, is hosting presentations by a delegation of early-career researchers from the Trinity Long Room Hub, the Arts and Humanities Research Institute at Trinity College Dublin. The event, designed to nurture research collaborations, features talks by Holly Ritchie, Rafael Mendes, and Amy O’Keefe and a Q&A facilitated by Long Room Hub director Eve Patten.
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October 31, 5 p.m., Connolly House
How might we understand parodic practice, from an Irish counter-revival to current concerns with the “fake” and the artificially generated? With reference to various Irish writers, Eve Patten, director of the Trinity Long Room Hub, will discuss the politics of parody and where it should sit within Ireland’s literary and critical heritage.
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November 20, 5 p.m., Connolly House
Springfield College Associate Professor of History Ian Delahanty draws on his new book, Embracing Emancipation (Fordham University Press), to offer a novel explanation for Irish-American anti-abolitionism by uncovering an Irish critique of abolitionism in Famine-era Ireland. Irish-born newspaper editors, exiled nationalists, and common workers then transformed the Irish critique of abolitionism into Irish-American critiques of antislavery writ large.
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In June, Dan Dougherty defended his dissertation “Growing Up Globally: Form and Genre in the Anglophone Bildungsroman,” chaired by Rob Lehman. This fall, he begins as a postdoctoral associate at the University of Florida, working within the writing program.
Daniel Crown was named the 2024/2025 Dalismer Fellow. His dissertation, “The Immigrant Revolution: Irish and Rhenish Farmers and the Politics of Western Expansion, 1740-1780,” details ways Irish and German-speaking immigrants used the American Revolution to overcome voter suppression while revealing uncomfortable ties between proto-democracy and anti-Native xenophobia.
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On September 18, the Burns Library held a talk and book signing by documentary filmmaker, writer, and film lecturer Hilary Dully, for Dully’s 2021 publication On Dangerous Ground. The talk was followed by a screening of Joe Comerford’s 1988 film Reefer and the Model and a discussion with the director.
Burns Librarian Christian Dupont wrote two articles for the Irish Arts Review, one discussing Ross Wilson’s work (“Another Life,” spring 2024) and another focusing on Juanita Casey (“Stallion Eternity,” autumn 2024).
Be on the lookout in the coming months as we open up the application process for our next round of visiting Burns Scholars!
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