Irish Studies

Founded
1973
Seminar Number
535

This seminar serves as an interdisciplinary forum on all aspects and periods of Irish culture. Seminar participants come from a wide variety of fields: history, literature, art history, film studies, political science, sociology, anthropology, music, and folklore. These scholars bring to any topic under discussion a diversity of background which is stimulating and informative for all present. The concern for Irish studies as a field of scholarly inquiry is reflected in the collegial sharing of information about resources and repositories for research in the field.

Co-Chairs
Mary McGlynn
Baruch College, CUNY
mary.mcglynn@baruch.cuny.edu

Terrence Byrne
byrneter@tcnj.edu

Rapporteur
Marcella Yakalis
mjy2112@columbia.edu

Meeting dates and locations are subject to change. Please confirm details with the seminar rapporteur.

Welcome

Meetings

09/05/2014	Faculty House 7:00 PM	Communist Modernism and the Making of Ernie O’Malley’s On Another Man’s Wound. Spurgeon Thompson,, Fordham Speaker Link Abstract Abstract After the revolution, as the conventional wisdom goes, those who fought for it usually sell out, are transformed into staid bureaucrats or inflexible politicians. They get real jobs and move on with the affairs of state. Experimental arts (and indeed often artists) are banished by the new state and rebels, one by one, are quietly co-opted. Because of the peculiar nature of Ireland’s several stages of decolonization, it was not possible for a guerilla fighter and I.R.A. commander like Ernie O’Malley to be bought out or co-opted by the state. He remained radically inassimilable. This essay seeks to dislodge O’Malley’s key work from its conventional framing as either a useful historical primary source or as a “hearty tale” of Irish struggle to set alongside Dan Breen’s My Fight for Irish Freedom (1924) or Tom Barry’s Guerilla Days in Ireland (1949). O’Malley was an IRA officer and organizer in an astonishing 18 Irish counties or regions during the guerilla-fought Irish War of Independence (1918-1921), responsible for numerous actions, and the training of hundreds of volunteers. So the critical tendency has been, until recently, to group his story with those of other IRA volunteers. Instead, I argue that due to its production in modernist writers’ and artists’ circles in America as well as within persistent conditions of transience and transatlantic exile, its deployment of montage, temporal condensation, its negotiation of speed and movement, and its rich allusiveness and engagement with the visual art of its time, On Another Man’s Wound is a text of international modernism. Indeed, it could not have been written without modernism’s networks of possibility (both social and artistic), modernism’s gathering places, as well as its literary models. By placing the author in this context, I am participating in a recovery of O’Malley for global subaltern modernism begun by Nicholas Allen in Ireland, Modernism, and Civil War (2009) and continued by David Lloyd in his “Afterword: On Republican Reading,” in Broken Landscapes: Selected Letters of Ernie O’Malley (2011), among others.

11/07/2014	Faculty House 7:00 PM	THE O’KALEMS: IRELAND AND THE IRISH ON SCREEN, 1910-1914 Peter Flynn, Emerson College Speaker Link Abstract Abstract Between 1910 and 1914, Sidney Olcott and Gene Gauntier of the New York-based Kalem Film Company made a series of films on location in Ireland. Designed primarily for Irish and immigrant audiences in the US, these films—many of them emigration dramas—offered a nuanced and authentic picture of Irish life and spoke to the traumas of exile and the twin histories of poverty and political persecution that had led many to leave their families and communities. THE O’KALEMS will trace the history of the “O’Kalems” and the explore the ways in which they represented Ireland and the Irish on screen.

12/05/2014	Faculty House 7:00 PM	The Genders of Nationalist Space Aidan Beatty, The University of Chicago Speaker Link Abstract Abstract This paper discusses issues of space, power and masculinity in Irish nationalism and Zionism. Both movements sought to move from 'relative space' (stateless dispersion or a subservient status as an internal part of the UK) to 'absolute space' (a separate and spatially coherent nation-state). Moreover, for many Jewish or Irish nationalists, their vaguely defined ‘relative space’ mirrored their nations’ ill-defined racial and gendered identity. Part of a broader project comparing the uses of masculinity in Zionism and Irish nationalism, this paper looks at how both national movements strove to create sanitised, male-dominated public spaces as a precursor to national independence.

02/06/2015	Faculty House 7:00 PM	"Robert Flaherty and Seán Ó Direáin: Lights, Camera, and (not too much) Action" Tomás Ó h-Íde (Ihde), Lehman College. Speaker Link Abstract Abstract While most of us are familiar with and have seen Robert Flaherty’s 1934 documentary "Man of Aran", few would be aware that he also directed the first Irish language film "Oidhche Sheanchais" (1935), a 10-minute curtain raiser sponsored by the Free State's Department of Education and shown in cinemas. The title "Oidhche Sheanchais" means 'a night of storytelling'. The short was long thought to have been lost. In fact a documentary about Robert Flaherty which aired in 2010 on TG4 confirmed that. However to the surprise of many, "Oidhche Sheanchais" surfaced in 2012 at Harvard University. Tomás will share with attendees the story behind the Aran cottage set at the Gainsborough Studios in London, England, with special reference to Seán Ó Direáin, the storyteller, and Robert Flaherty, the director. The film was faulted in its day for not having enough action; however, with Irish language film being so prominent today (TG4, the Irish language TV station, has a $50 million plus annual budget), the discovery of the first Irish language talkie is notable. Parts of the research into this topic were completed in the Butler Library at Columbia University where the Flaherty Papers are held.

2nd Floor, Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive, MC 2302 New York, NY 10027

Phone: 212.854.2389 | Fax: 212.854.8248 | Email: univ.seminars@columbia.edu

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Irish Studies

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