Records and Rights is a research initiative focusing on Ireland’s proposed National Centre for Research and Remembrance (NCRR). Organized by Maeve O’Rourke (University of Galway) and Jim Smith (Boston College), collaborators include academics, advocates, and affected people from across Ireland, the U.S., the U.K., and Germany. Working closely with Patricia Carey, the Special Advocate for Survivors of Institutional Abuse, the group is engaged with key stakeholders to draft and debate a “Framework Document” to help negotiate a path towards human rights-based preservation of, access to, and input into records and archives related to Ireland’s institutional and family separation-related abuses and their ongoing legacies. With funding from the Institute for the Liberal Arts and Research Ireland, planned events for Dublin include meetings at BC-Ireland, Leinster House and the Royal Irish Academy. On Wednesday, November 18, Irish Studies will host Dagmar Hovestädt, the former spokesperson for the Federal Commissioner for Stasi Records and expert in transitional justice, archives, and human rights, for a class visit, meetings with faculty and graduate students, and a public lecture.
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University of Oxford Professor of Modern History Senia Pašeta teaches modern British and Irish history, with a particular interest in women’s history, education, and political activism. While at BC, she is teaching a course on Irish women and the rights and duties of citizenship. She will deliver her Burns Scholar lecture, titled “From Suffrage to Sisterhood: A History of Feminism in Modern Ireland,” on September 30 at 5:00 p.m. in the Burns Library.
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Visiting from the University of Limerick, Christina Morin spent her summer working on her current monograph project, Irish Gothic in the Global Nineteenth Century. The collections at the Burns Library aided in research for the work’s fourth chapter on the circulation and dissemination of Irish-authored works in the early American Republic.
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We invite applications for the newly created role of Assistant Professor of the Practice / Assistant Director of Irish Studies. The primary responsibilities for this full-time, non-tenure-track, three-year renewable contract position include working with the director of Irish Studies to organize our programming and a 1-1 teaching load, broadening the current Irish Studies curriculum. Applications must be submitted via Interfolio by October 18.
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Ph.D. candidate Cassidy Allen’s chapter “‘Two Little Plants Sharing the Same Plot’: Twinned Bildungsromans in Sally Ronney’s Normal People” was published in Sally Rooney: Perspectives and Approaches (Bucknell University Press, 2026). Allen examines how stories of Irish boyhood continue to be mediated through Irish girlhood, with negative effects for both young women and young men.
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September 16, 5:00 p.m., Devlin 101
Nigerian-Irish author Melatu Okorie discusses her award-winning 2018 work This Hostel Life for the third annual Irish Studies/AADS collaboration. From queuing for basic supplies in the Irish direct provision system to depictions of everyday racism in Ireland, Okorie shines a light on the injustice of the direct provision system and on the insidious racism experienced by migrant women living in Ireland.
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September 23, 5:00 p.m., Connolly House
Having cared for, curated, digitized, and publicized material in Ireland’s National Archives for forty years, Catriona Crowe is interested in exploring the continuing gaps in the Irish archival record. For the 2026 Flatley Lecture, Crowe will explore critical fabulation theory and the methodologies employed by two contemporary female Irish authors in their use of archival material in creative writing.
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October 14, 5:00 p.m., Connolly House
Specializing in Irish Music and Dance Studies, program alumna Méabh Ní Fhuartháin delivers this year’s Dalsimer Lecture, considering the eponymous 1981 Moving Hearts album. Creating an innovative soundscape, the album presents a generation's response to Ireland and its global place at the beginning of a tumultuous decade.
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October 28, 5:00 p.m., Connolly House
A roundtable discussion with Mike Cronin (Boston College), Cormac Moore (History Link), Cathal Conlon (New England Revolution), and Síofra Cléirigh Büttner (Irish Olympian) will explore the themes in the forthcoming Atlas of Irish Sport (Cork University Press, 2027) and why sport is so important in Irish history, remaining a powerful cultural force in the state and its diaspora.
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The Burns Library hosted a landmark exhibition, The Story of Us: Census 1926, marking the online publication of the complete returns from the first census conducted in the Irish Free State. The exhibition explores Ireland as reflected in the census and reveals what life was like in 1926.
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Co-sponsored by the Burns Library’s Irish Music Archives and BC’s Irish Studies Program, the Gaelic Roots Series this fall features an incredible lineup, including James Kelly on October 15, Copley Street on November 12, and Susan McKeown on December 3.
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After winning the David Krause Research Fellowship prize from ACIS, Theodore Lehre defended their dissertation. Entitled “The Othered Mother: Queer & Alternative Motherhoods in 20th-Century Irish Literature,” their work applied maternal and queer theory to 20th-century Irish literature.
Cassidy Allen was named the 2026/2027 Dalsimer Fellow. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Gothic Spectres in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction,” argues that contemporary Irish women writers employ gothic elements to emphasize contemporary cultural anxieties.
Rowan Bianchi was awarded the inaugural Irish Georgian Society Scholarship for Research on Irish Cultural Heritage, using the funds to travel to Limerick and explore records of agrarian violence during the early 1800s.
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© 2026 The Trustees of Boston College. Legal
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