Alvin Jackson to Deliver Flatley Lecture

Alvin Jackson will deliver this year's Flatley Lecture. His seminar, titled  'Comparing the British-Irish union: multinational union states in Europe and beyond, c.1800-1920,' Alvin Jackson examines the United Kingdom, the union of Ireland and Britain, in the light of the experience of similar states elsewhere. The UK was not in fact the only self-styled 'united kingdom' of the time: Jackson argues that British and Irish elites exported the idea of union through the advocacy or encouragement of other united kingdoms at the beginning of the 19th century. 

Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690–1830

Our new faculty member Colleen Taylor’s monograph with Oxford University Press is the first book to apply new materialist theory to the critical study of Ireland.  Irish Materialisms showcases five original case studies on nonhuman characters in Irish colonial culture, responding to, and revising, literary criticism dominated by the English canon, while also combining English and Irish-language works. 

Faculty Published in Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland

Guy Beiner and Robert J. Savage contributed chapters to The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland (Oxford University Press). Edited by Gladys Ganiel and Andrew R. Holmes, this collection features 36 leading experts who engage with key interdisciplinary topics including identity, secularization, everyday religion, and gender. Beiner’s essay is on “Religion and Memory in Modern Ireland,” and Savage’s essay is on “Religion and Broadcasting in the Two Irelands.” 

Poetry Reading & Film Screening with Paul Muldoon

Former Ireland Professor of Poetry Paul Muldoon, described by the Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War,” joins us at Boston College for a poetry reading and the screening of a documentary about his life. Muldoon is the author of more than 30 poetry collections, including Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize. He has also published collections of criticism, children’s books, opera libretti, song lyrics, and works for radio and television. The reading is on March 13 in Devlin Hall, and the screening of Paul Muldoon: Laoithe ‘s Liricí / A Life in Lyrics (2022, director Alan Gilsenan) is on March 14 in Higgins Hall. 

Joseph Lennon Delivers Annual Dalsimer Lecture

BC Irish Studies alumnus Joseph Lennon delivered this year's Dalsimer Lecture. Now the director of Irish Studies at Villanova University, Lennon's lecture discussed the metaphor of seed-sharing as a way to foster a dynamic that would benefit Irish cultural organizations and Irish Studies programs. By reading current Irish policy documents alongside contemporary Irish art and literature, his Dalsimer Lecture encouraged Irish sustainability initiatives to share seed dispersals across the diaspora.  

Éire-Ireland Special Issue - Seamus Heaney: The Afterlives

To mark the 10th anniversary of the death of Seamus Heaney, Vera Kreilkamp edited a special issue of Éire-Ireland featuring essays exploring archival sources, forgotten publications, and institutional commemorations of the poet’s life as well as auditory and visual echoes of Heaney’s presence. The issue also features nine interviews with poets influenced by Heaney and an article titled “Remembering to Forget: Heaney and 1798 Revisited” by Sullivan Chair in Irish Studies Guy Beiner.

Seamus Heaney: Afterlives, November 16-18

Ten years after the death of Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, the Irish Studies Program at Boston College invites scholars and the public to join us in celebrating a poet whose connections to our University remain fresh in our memory. The conference explores new understandings of the poet since his death. Our panels and keynote speakers will celebrate, interrogate, and develop the legacy of the poet as a critic, public intellectual, and major moral and aesthetic force in Ireland. The conference includes an inaugural Lowell Lecture by Fintan O’Toole, Heaney’s official authorized biographer, and a performance by Belfast theater company Kabosh. The conference is honored by the presence of Seamus’s widow, Marie Heaney, and his daughter and literary executor, Catherine Heaney. 

Claire Connolly - 2023/2024 Burns Scholar

The Burns Scholar for 2023–2024 is Claire Connolly, professor of modern English from University College Cork. Connolly has edited or co-edited ten books and authored dozens of book chapters and articles. Her 2011 monograph, A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829, won the Donald J. Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Monograph, awarded by the American Conference for Irish Studies. Scholarly editions include two volumes in The Works of Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl. While here at BC, Connolly will be teaching a course on Irish Romanticism and a course on Irish Environmental Fictions.

BC Hosts Regional ACIS Conference

The theme for the 2023 New England & Mid-Atlantic regional meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) is “De-Hibernicizing Irish Studies.”  Whereas the Irish Revival was driven by an introspective “necessity for de-Anglicizing Ireland,” it is now timely for Irish Studies to focus on how Ireland and Irish diasporas relate to global/international issues of current relevance. Malcolm Sen and Zélie Asava were the keynote speakers and over 70 acaemics from up and down the East Coast joined us for the conference. 

The Irish Revival: A Complex Vision

Boston College’s Marjorie Howes and the University of Buffalo’s Joseph Valente co-edited a collection of essays on the Irish Revival. The Irish Revival: A Complex Vision seeks to reimagine the field by offering a nuanced reinterpretation of the revival utilizing the theoretical concept of “complexity,” recently developed in the information and biological sciences. 

New Hire - Colleen Taylor

We're thrilled to introduce our newest Irish Studies hire - Dr. Colleen Taylor.  Colleen specializes in eighteenth-century Irish literature and culture, new materialism, and the environmental and blue humanities.

Before coming to Boston College, she was the inaugural W.B. Yeats Postdoctoral Fellow in Irish Literature at the University of Notre Dame. She has also been the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at Notre Dame and the Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, which she held at University College Cork. She has published several articles in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Éire-Ireland, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Persuasions, This Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, and the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing.

Her monograph, Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830 is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. 

Women Writing the Troubles - 25th Anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement

To mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, Irish Studies hosted a two-day symposium at Connolly House on women’s voices that offer insight into the Troubles. On Friday, April 28, Belfast-born author Louise Kennedy read from her acclaimed debut novel, Trespasses, about a romance across the sectarian divide in 1970s Belfast. Saturday’s program featured presentations by Derry-born journalists Susan McKay and Freya McClements and a screening of Lyra, a 2022 documentary by Alison Millar about the life and death of Northern Irish journalist Lyra McKee. The program was co-sponsored by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, the Consulate General of Ireland, the Northern Ireland Bureau, and BC’s journalism program.

Lindsey Earner Byrne Delivers Annual Flatley Lecture

Our annual Flatley Lecuture was presented by Lindsey Earner Byrne, Profesosor of Irish Gender History at University College Cork. Earner Byrne presented a paper titled "Bureaucratic Biographies."

Drawing from the rich Irish Military Service Pensions Collection of the Irish Military Archives, Earner Byrne explored the bureaucratic encounters generated by the Army Pension Act of 1923. Examining how the administrative process translated the lives of its subjects into tales of entitlement, and underlying these bureaucratic biographies are the fuller stories the authors were telling about their loved ones and their lives, Earner Byrne argued that in the tensions between the two narraitves lies the relationship between the social and the private self, the performance of citizenship and the experience of living as a citizen. In this liminal space we can learn about the extent, limit and cost of agency, and get a sense of the human dynamics of bureaucracy.

Eunan O'Halpin Named Spring 2023 Burns Scholar

Eunan O’Halpin is Professor Emeritus of Contemporary Irish History at Trinity College Dublin. As the Spring 2023 Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies, he will teach a course on "Ireland, America and Britain during the Cold War and beyond, 1945-2023."

Professor O'Halpin will be giving his Burns Lecture, "An Island at War: Reframing Irish Political Violence, 1922-23," in the Burns Library on March 2 (reception at 4:45, lecture at 6:00). 

Professor O’Halpin’s lecture will challenge the conventional chronology of events in Ireland in 1922-23. The government’s attack on the Four Courts on 28 June 1922 is generally held to mark the start of the civil war. Yet hundreds of Irish civilians had already been killed in the preceding six months – far more than were to die during the civil war proper, which was almost exclusively a fight between two armed forces. And the majority of those civilian deaths were the result of targeted violence.

Salvage: a novel, Richard Kearney

Richard Kearney's new novel, Salvage, explores tensions between progress and tradition in Ireland during the mid-20th century. Set on an island off the southern coast of Ireland, the story is told through the lens of main character Maeve O'Sullivan, who must negotitate the interplay between the pull of the past and the lure of the modern. 

The novel will be published in May 2023 via Arrowsmith Press. 

Colm Tóibín Lowell Lecture

As part of BC's Lowell Humanities Sereis, Colm Tóibín will be giving a lecture on his newest novel, The Magician. His talk, titled "Writing Thomas Mann: Fact into Fiction," will be held in Gasson 100 on Wednesday, February 22. 

Tóibín's more recent novels include: The Master (2004, winner of the Dublin IMPAC Prize; the Prix du Meilleur Livre; the LA Times Novel of the Year; and shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Brooklyn (2009, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year), The Testament of Mary (2012, Booker Prize Shortlist), Nora Webster (2014, winner of the Hawthornden Prize), House of Names (2017, Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, The Guardian, The Boston Globe) and The Magician (2021, The Rathbones Folio Prize).

Censorship in Thatcher's Britain - Rob Savage

BC Irish Studies faculty member Rob Savage's latest book, Northern Ireland, the BBC and Censorship in Thatcher's Britain, examines the tension between the BBC and the British government over the Northern Irish conflict.

The new book examines the escalating tension between the  broadcast media and the Thatcher government over various flashpoints in the Northern Irish conflict, including the 1981 hunger strike by IRA prisoners;  a deadly IRA bombing attempt that Thatcher narrowly escaped; the killing of three Provisional IRA members in Gibraltar, followed by a loyalist’s attack on the funeral for the three in West Belfast; the killing of two off-duty British soldiers who drove into an IRA funeral procession; and a planned, but never aired, September 1988 TV interview with the Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams just before the ban was issued by Home Secretary Douglas Hurd.  

2023 Dalsimer Lecture - Hidetaka Hirota

Boston College alumni Hidetaka Hiorta (UC Berkeley) will present this year's annual Dalsmier Lecture. Designed to honor one of the key architects of BC's Irish Studies Program - Adele Dalsimer - this memorial lecture feature's the work of our most accomplished graduates. 

Hiorta's lecture, titled "The Origins of the 'Illegal Alien' in the United States: The Impact of Irish, Japanese, and Mexican Immigration," will explore how opponents of immigration in the US today frame debates over immigration in a binary way, stigmatizing undocumented immigrants as 'illegal aliens,' as opposed to 'legal immigrants.'  Hirota reveals how this dichotomy originated by examining nativist discourse against Irish, Japanese, and Mexican immigration during the long nineteenth century.

Eve Morrison, Visiting Professor Spring 2023

Eve Morrison is a visiting Irish historian specialising in the revolutionary period (1916–23) and its social and cultural memory. Both her doctoral research on the Bureau of Military History (Trinity College Dublin) and a postdoctoral fellowship on the Ernie O’Malley notebook interviews (University College Dublin) were funded by the Irish Research Council. From 2018 to 2021, she was Canon Murray Fellow in Irish History at St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford.

While at BC, Morrisson is teaching a class titled "The Dynamics of Gender in Ireland: 1850 to Present" and also lectured on her newest book, Kilmichael: The Life and Afterlife of an Ambush.