Greening the World

St. Patrick’s Day, the 17th of March, is the single biggest national day celebrated globally. In a lunchtime talk, Professor Mike Cronin showed how St. Patrick’s Day was born in the United States as a visceral demonstration of Irish American ethnic power and explored how the Irish state (and associated business interests) have leveraged St. Patrick’s Day globally to market the state and make Ireland one of the most readily recognized national brands.

Celebrating 25 Years of BC Ireland

To mark the 25th anniversary of BC Ireland, Mike Cronin (Director of BC Ireland), Christian Dupont (Burns Librarian), Mary C. Murphy (Director of the Irish Institute), and Guy Beiner (Sullivan Chair and Irish Studies Program Director) held a panel to discuss the many sweeping changes that have occurred in Ireland over the past 25 years. The four analyzed the challenges and opportunities these developments have had on the study of Ireland, both on the island and in America. The event discussed how Boston College - through the work of BC Ireland, the Irish Institute, the Burns Library, and Irish Studies - is uniquely positioned to cater to the interests of both Ireland and Irish America while continuing to advance this transatlantic relationship.

Philosopher Richard Kearney awarded St Patrick’s Day Medal

The philosopher Richard Kearney has been awarded this year’s Research Ireland St Patrick’s Day Medals.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin presented the medal at a ceremony in Washington, DC. The award honors academic and industry leaders in the US, including their contribution to Irish research and collaboration between Ireland and the US. Mr Martin said these achievements “illustrate the exceptional work being carried out by the Irish research diaspora across the US”.

Inventing the Boston Game

In December, the University of Massachusetts Press published 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. 

Cronin and Marston will discuss inventing the Boston game, history, memory, and the power of artifacts during a panel discussion on Wednesday, January 29.

Spring 2025 Burns Visiting Scholar: Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid

We're thrilled to have Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid as the Spring 2025 Burns Visiting Scholar. Nic Dháibhéid is Professor in Irish History and Faculty Director of Education for Arts and Humanities at the University of Sheffield. She works primarily on Irish history, particularly the Irish Revolution, and more broadly the history of political violence and terrorism since the nineteenth century. Her current research engages the cultural history of the Irish Revolution, focusing particularly on the history of emotions.

Her Burns Scholar lecture, titled 'Love in the Time of Revolution: Intimacy, Affection and Kinship in Ireland, 1916-1923,' will take place in the Burns Library on Wednesday, April 9. 

Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason Visits Boston College

It was an honor to have Ambassador Geraldine Bryne Nason on campus this week to launch the Irish Institute and celebrate a century of Ireland-US diplomatic relations!

She explored campus with the Irish Institute Directory Mary C. Murphy, visited the Burns with Head Librarian Christian Dupont, and toured the McMullen Art Museum with Directory Nancy Netzer.  The Ambassador finished her trip by discussing Ireland-US diplomatic relations in front of a packed audience. 

2024 Dalsimer Lecture - Ian Delahanty

Boston College alumni Ian Delahanty (Springfield College) 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 features the work of our most accomplished graduates. 

Delahanty draws on his new book, Embracing Emancipation: A Transatlantic History of Irish Americans, Slavery, and the American Union, 1840-1865, 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.

Pat Palmer's Burns Scholar Lecture

Pat Palmer, Professor of English at Maynooth University, has been named the Fall 2024 Burns Visiting Scholar. Palmer works on cultures in contact in, principally, early modern Ireland, on the conflictual exchange between English colonists and the Gaelic world, on linguistic colonization, the aesthetics of violence, and the politics of translation. She is Principal Investigator on the MACMORRIS Project, a digital humanities project that maps the full range of cultural activity, across languages and ethnic groups, in early modern Ireland.

Her Burns Scholar lecture, titled "The Poetics of Property: The Ground Possessed and Dispossessed in Early Modern Ireland," will take place in the Burns Library on Wednesday, November 13. 

Revolutionary Times

In October 2024, Merrion Press published 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.

The Future of Irish Environmental Studies with Colleen Taylor

Colleen Taylor began the academic year by launching her first monograph, Irish Materialism: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland. The book details the resistance and creativity of Irish matter, from coins to mud cabins and pigs. Irish Materialisms takes part in an emerging research field that prioritizes the environmental stories of Irish culture and history. But where is Irish environmental studies going next? What new questions must the field raise and answer? Taylor organized an expert panel, featuring  Malcolm Sen (UMass Amherst), Finola O'Kane (UCD), and Christine Cusick (Seton Hill) which explored these questions and outlined Irish Studies' bright environmental future! 

Mary C. Murphy to head Boston College Irish Institute

Mary C. Murphy, an expert on the complex relationship between Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Europe, especially in the post-Brexit era, has been appointed as director of the Boston College Irish Institute. The head of the University College Cork (UCC) Department of Government and Politics since January 2023, Murphy will begin her duties as Irish Institute director, and as a professor in BC’s Political Science Department, in August.

2024 Burns Summer Fellows

This summer we were joined by Chris Cusack (Radboud University) and Fionnuala Walsh (University College Dublin). Both Summer Fellows used the resources at the Burns Library for their up-coming projects! 

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. 

“Remembering the ‘Father of Irish Republicanism’”

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.”

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.  

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. 

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.

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. 

Maeve O’Rourke, 2023 Burns Summer Fellow

Maeve O’Rourke, a lecturer at the University of Galway’s Irish Centre for Human Rights, visited Boston College as a Burns Summer Fellow. Her research in the Burns Library will inform the writing and development of policy proposals regarding Ireland’s historical social care system.

Salvage: a novel - Richard Kearney

Richard Kearney, the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philsolphy at Boston College and director of the interntaional Guestbook Project, has launched a new book titled: Salvage: a 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. 

St Brigid, patroness of poetry, craft and midwifery, hovers over this
richly evocative story about the tension between progress and tradition.
Timely and timeless, Kearney’s novel offers sensual homage to a singular
landscape brimming with a Gaelic wisdom about the natural world.

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.

Forgetting the Irish Civil War? One Hundred Years of Silence Breakers

It was an “unspeakable war,” wrote one journalist, and “a story that nobody dared to tell.” But contrary to popular assumption, the tragic Irish Civil War of 1922-1923—a wrenching, destructive run-up to the establishment of an independent Ireland—has long persisted in the national Irish memory, despite efforts to downplay or outright erase it from official discourse. The Boston College Irish Studies Program hosted a lecture by Irish historian and author Síobhra Aiken, who has chronicled the determination of veterans and later generations to keep alive the story, now in its centenary, of the Irish Civil War.

Aiken, a lecturer in the Queens University Belfast Department of Irish and Celtic Studies, presented “Forgetting the Irish Civil War (1922-23)? One Hundred Years of Silence Breakers,” on October 25 at 4 p.m. in Connolly House. Her talk encompass research she published earlier this year in Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War.

Sullivan Chair Inaugural Lecture

Award-winning historian Guy Beiner gave his inaugural lecture as the Craig and Maureen Sullivan Millennium Professor of Irish Studies at Boston College on November 16 at 5:30 p.m. in the Burns Library Thompson Room. 

Beiner, who was appointed as the Sullivan Chair in 2021 and serves as director of the University’s Center for Irish Programs, presented “Paddies in Space: Irish Studies in the 24th Century”—his examination of science fiction depictions of the Anglo-Irish conflict in popular culture that reveal how imagining the future draws on cultural traditions from the past, and what this suggests about current attitudes toward the prospect of the reunification of Ireland.

Redress: Ireland’s Institutions and Transitional Justice

The Irish Studies community and guests gathered in the Burns Library’s beautiful stained glass Thompson Room on September 6th for the US launch of Redress: Ireland’s Institutions and Transitional Justice published by University College Dublin Press earlier this year.

Edited by Katherine O’Donnell (History of Ideas, School of Philosophy, UCD), Maeve O’Rourke (School of Law and Irish Center for Human Rights, University of Galway) and Boston College faculty member in English and Irish Studies, Jim Smith, the project has its origins in the “Towards Transitional Justice” conference which took place on the BC Campus in November 2018. Redress explores the ways in which Ireland – North and South – treats those who suffered in Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, County Homes, industrial and reformatory schools, and in a closed and secretive adoption system, over the last one hundred years.

The Editors are donating all royalties in the name of survivors and all those affected by Ireland’s carceral institutions and family separation to the charity Empowering People in Care (EPIC).

Burns Scholar Paul Murray

Paul Murray was named the Burns Visiting Scholar for Fall 2022. Murray is the author of three novels including Skippy Dies, which Marlon James, writing in The New York Times, called “one of the few true masterpieces of this young century.” While at Boston College, he led a workshop for undergraduates in Fiction Writing while completing edits on his fourth novel, The Bee Sting, to be published next year.

He delivered his Burns Lecture in November, “How to Write a Novel” – a title he said is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. “John Lennon said that life is what happens while you’re making other plans,” he explained. “I feel the same way about writing. Each of the novels I’ve written has emerged from some other, quite different project. There’s so much serendipity involved. For my lecture, I thought it would be fun to dig into the chaos that underlies the creative process.” He also enjoyed teaching his writing workshop. “I find teaching very rewarding, but for me it’s difficult to teach and write at the same time. As I’m finishing a book, the timing of the fellowship is perfect. It’s a joy to be a part of a community after five years working almost entirely on my own.” He added that the notion that teachers learn from their students is a cliché because it’s true. “Yesterday for instance I learned from my class that Teen Vogue has become a hotbed of radical leftwing thought. I found that very heartening."

'Miserable Conflict and Confusion'

'Miserable Conflict and Confusion': The Irish Question and the British National Press, 1916-1922 (Liverpool University Press), Erin Kate 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.