Seminars

Famine news is often treated as monolithic – a persistent and unrelenting stream of accounts of Irish suffering. This perspective flattens the complexity of Famine reporting. This talk brings together digital humanities methods of text analysis, and the literary concept of the chronotope to explore the genre of Great Famine news, in order to understand how themes in Famine reporting shaped international perspectives on Ireland and the Irish. The chronotope is a literary concept which posits that discursive meaning is made in the relationship between time and space. Burst analysis is a method that reveals patterns in chronological archives (like collections of newspaper articles). It is typically applied to large archives or corpora – for example, all newspaper reporting on the Famine from anywhere around the world. However, the framework of the chronotope reminds us that it is impossible to understand why and when particular interpretations of the famine “burst” without linking that temporality to geography. This talk brings chronotopic and burst analysis together to investigate how different interpretations of the famine rose and fell in popularity over the course of the crisis. It argues that the Famine’s meaning was made in overlapping geographies and temporalities, and as different interpretations of the Famine “burst” in different places around the world. Anelise Hanson Shrout is an associate professor of History and Digital and Computational Studies at Bates College. She uses both traditional archival and digital humanities methods to explore how Ireland and the Irish diaspora have shaped the world beyond Ireland’s borders.

Bridget Keown is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. She earned her Ph.D. in History at Northeastern University, where her research focused on the experience and treatment of war-related trauma among British and Irish women during the First World War and Irish War of Independence, and the construction of history through trauma. She has contributed to the American Historical Association, Lady Science, and Nursing Clio, and is currently researching kinship among gay and lesbian communities during the AIDS crisis in both the U.S. and Ireland. Her broader interests include the history of emotions, history of medicine, gender and the horror genre, and postcolonial queer theory and performance. She co-chairs the Gender and Memory Working Group of the Memory Studies Association and serves on the Executive Council of the American Conference for Irish Studies. In this talk, Dr. Keown discusses how, in September 1990, sixteen members of REACH - a multi-denominational Christian group from the Republic of Ireland - travelled to Rostrevor, County Down, to meet with the Northern Ireland Council on Religion and Homosexuality (known to members as the Gay Christian Fellowship). Over a long weekend, the members prayed, sang, and confronted the social, spiritual, and political challenges faced by gay communities across the island. She shows how this meeting represents one way in which queer activists in Ireland used faith to articulate a new sense of community, as well as a revitalised notion of Irish identity. They were soon joined in solidarity with queer activists in the United States who used symbols and narratives of religion to insist on a new conception of Irish-American identity. Using their model as a guiding light, she seeks to reimagine the boundaries, borders, and bodies (both corporeal and spiritual) that frame traditional narratives of faith and identity in Irish Studies.

By all accounts, Ireland currently faces an acute housing crisis not seen since the 1960s. While the country has historically struggled with housing inadequacy and eviction, this most recent crisis, unlike those facilitated by colonial dispossession, is a self-inflicted wound – the result of short-sighted economic decision-making and the failures of a free-market approach. Yet, what many analyses have failed to appreciate is the culture animating housing in both its material and symbolic dimensions. Using contemporary Irish photography as a source of inquiry into the cultural origins of the crisis, this talk considers how imaginative constructions of home by Martin Parr (b. 1952), Paul Seawright (b. 1965), Anthony Haughey (b. 1963), Aideen Barry, and others have troubled domesticity in post-war Ireland. Sarah Churchill is currently Postdoctoral Fellow for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and a lecturer of modern and contemporary art and museum studies. She is currently researching the visual culture of housing crisis in the US, Britain, Ireland and France. Her forthcoming article, “Domestic Documents: Contemporary Photography and the Irish Housing Crisis,” is soon to be published in a special issue of the Irish University Review. Her research has also been funded by the American Conference for Irish Studies Interdisciplinary Fellowship.

Marilynn Richtarik was educated at Harvard University, where she earned an undergraduate degree in American History and Literature, and at Oxford University, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar. Her previous books include Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980-1984 (OUP, 1994), Stewart Parker: A Life (OUP, 2012), and an edition of Stewart Parker’s autobiographical novel Hopdance (The Lilliput Press, 2017). Richtarik is a Professor of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she teaches British, Irish, and world literature. She spent the first half of 2017 at Queen’s University Belfast as a US Fulbright Scholar. Her new book Getting to Good Friday (Oxford University Press, 2023) intertwines literary analysis and narrative history in an accessible account of the shifts in thinking and talking about Northern Ireland’s divided society that brought thirty years of political violence to a close with the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Progress in this period hinged on negotiators’ ability to revise the terms used to discuss the conflict. As poet Michael Longley commented in 1998, “In its language the Good Friday Agreement depended on an almost poetic precision and suggestiveness to get its complicated message across.” Interpreting selected literary works, she demonstrates the extent to which authors were motivated by a desire both to comment on and to intervene in unfolding political situations. Getting to Good Friday suggests that literature as literature—that is, in its formal properties in addition to anything it might have to “say” about a given subject—can enrich readers’ historical understanding. Through engaging narrative, creative writing emerges as both the medium of and a metaphor for the peace process itself. In her presentation, she will introduce the book briefly and read an extract about the lead-up to the IRA ceasefire in August 1994 and Longley’s poem “Ceasefire.”

Dr Immo Warntjes is Associate Professor in Early Medieval Irish History at Trinity College Dublin. After graduating in History and Mathematics from the University of Göttingen (Germany) and earning a PhD from the University of Galway (Ireland), he held lectureships in Medieval History at the University of Greifswald (Germany) and Queen’s University Belfast (UK) before joining Trinity College Dublin in 2016. His research interests span the entire Middle Ages, with a strong focus on early and high medieval scientific thought and manuscript culture. He spends much of his research time roaming the libraries of Western Europe and the US in search of unidentified early medieval Irish texts. In addition to his work on early medieval Irish political and intellectual history, he has published extensively on the use of languages in early medieval monastic education and late medieval burial practices. For this talk, Dr Warntjes will discuss a recent scholarly rediscovery: what is considered to be the first scientific biography of St Patrick, written in 1894 by the Celticist Heinrich Zimmer, which marks the beginning of modern academic/scientific study on Patrick. Situating this work within 21st-century scholarship, he will explore how historical perspectives on this 5th-century figure have evolved over time and the implications for our understanding of early medieval Ireland.

Anna Teekell is Associate Professor of English at Christopher Newport University in Virginia and Series Editor of Anthem Irish Studies. In addition to her book, Emergency Writing: Irish Literature, Neutrality, and the Second World War (2018), she has published widely on 20th century Irish literature, most recently in Éire-Ireland and The Irish University Review, and forthcoming in LIT, Études Anglaises, and Cambridge’s Elizabeth Bowen in Context. In April, Syracuse UP will publish the critical edition of John McGahern’s The Dark that she co-edited with Ellen Scheible, and her collection, Teaching Modern Irish Poetry (co-edited with Guinn Batten) will be published later this year by MLA Press. Her talk at the Columbia Irish Studies Seminar comes from work on a new monograph, BorderLines: A Literary Map of the Irish Border.

The Necromantics examines the relationship between reanimated bodies and 19th-century theories of history in the work of Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, WB Yeats, Bram Stoker, and others, arguing that the literature of reanimation is an explicitly unhaunted gothic, one preoccupied with the powers of the present rather than the agency of the past. The talk will address the development and stakes of the project, situating it not only within the fields of Victorian Studies and Irish Studies but also within the emerging field of Monster Studies.

The talk will discuss new attention by scholars to the realities of a significant Irish-speaking diaspora that had emerged by the second half of the nineteenth century, explored most often through its impact on literature composed in Irish. What evidence have scholars uncovered regarding the scope of this global community, how does this change our view of the development of an Irish-language culture in the Revival period, and what information can be gleaned from the latest Irish-language sources being made available to scholars? This talk will review these findings and the ways they suggest a concurrent global influence on this emerging Revival-era Irish-speaking culture, with a particular focus on new findings made available through the publication of online digitized editions of key Irish-language texts of the era including Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge, An Claidheamh Soluis, and, most recently, An Gaodhal.

Professors Scheible and Devine will discuss their forthcoming edited collection, "Sally Rooney: Perspectives and Approaches." This timely collection focuses on critical essays in the field of Irish literary studies and women's fiction, specifically contemporary work by Sally Rooney. In a time of rapid social and cultural change, Rooney’s novels carry intellectual and pedagogical currency in both the undergraduate classroom and the fields of Irish literary and critical studies. As a contemporary woman writer who produced fiction both before and after the current discourse on reproductive rights in Ireland, Rooney often presents as a beacon of radical inclusion or progressive change for young readers. Students identify with her subtle humor, sharp critiques of capitalism, and the sexual openness at the core of her provocative storylines and characters. Scheible and Devine will discuss their different approaches to Rooney's work and will offer a glimpse into the upcoming collection.

Professor O'Neill's talk is entitled "The Linguistic Ecology of Irish, Sustainability, and the Utopian Impulse." It explores the current discourse on ecological crisis and sustainability. The precarious nature of the Irish language has also been referred to metaphorically in terms of ecological crisis. Using a framework from ecolinguistics, this presentation will trace how the Irish language – as a cultural artifact – has been deployed historically in narratives of ecological discourse. The presentation will draw on several more contemporary aspects of the work of Tim Robinson, John Moriarty, Manchán Magan, and Katie Holten to explore the themes and tropes that cohere around the language in this context. Ecological sustainability has informed linguistic debate, but what might the historical tenacity of the Irish language offer to a discursive juncture inflected by catastrophe? Examining these themes raises interesting questions about what they signify in terms of linguistic sustainability and ecological discourse.