Seminars

‘Artistic bombs’ - that’s how the Shemus cartoons were described in the Irish parliament in 1923. Published in Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal newspaper between 1920 and 1924, they were remarkably hard-hitting comments on the events of that period. During the War of Independence, they targeted the increasingly brutal nature of British rule in Ireland. They later attacked the new government of Northern Ireland and the republicans who opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. The cartoonist was an Englishman, Ernest Forbes (1879-1962), who went on to enjoy some success as an artist in London and in his native Yorkshire. His work for the Freeman’s Journal gives a most unusual angle on the history of the period in question. Felix Larkin will present a selection of the best of the cartoons, with a general introduction to Forbes and his work and some explanatory comments on individual cartoons. Felix is a historian and retired public servant. He has written extensively about the history of the press in Ireland, and was co-founder of the Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland. His publications include Terror and Discord: The Shemus Cartoons in the Freeman’s Journal, 1920–1924 (Dublin, 2009) and Living with History: Occasional Writings (Dublin, 2021). He has contributed essays to all three volumes of The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press (Edinburgh, 2020 & 2023). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Irish Women’s Prison Writing: Mother Ireland’s Rebels, 1960s-2010s explores 50 years of Irish women’s prison writing, 1960s-2010s. It connects the work of women leaders and writers in the Six Counties of Ireland, especially during the Troubles. It analyzes political communiqués/ petitions, news coverage, prison files, personal letters, poetry and short prose, and memoirs. It highlights the personal correspondence, auto/biographical narratives, and poetry of the following key women: Bernadette McAliskey, Eileen Hickey, Mairéad Farrell, Síle Darragh, Ella O’Dwyer, Martina Anderson, Dolours Price, Marian McGlinchey, Ann and Eileen Gillespie, Roseleen Walsh, and Margaretta D’Arcy. It also includes interviews. This project builds on different fields and discourses to reimagine gender and genre as central to an interdisciplinary and intersectional prison archive. It repositions Irish women and their work in order to accurately archive social movements for civil rights and cultural productions about them – and this tradition is relevant even now during this moment of transatlantic solidarity with #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter Movement, including in Ireland, post-Easter Rising Centennial, as part of the big conversations happening now around the impacts of political repression and state attacks on social justice advocates and the harms of the carceral state. Red Washburn (they/he) is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center. Finishing Line Press published their poetry collections Crestview Tree Woman and Birch Philosopher X. Their academic book Irish Women’s Prison Writing: Mother Ireland’s Rebels, 1960-2010s is forthcoming from Routledge.

Editors Mary Burke (University of Connecticut) and Tara Harney-Mahajan (Caldwell University) will be joined by contributors to a collection on independent woman-owned Tramp Press to discuss contemporary Irish fiction and publishing. Contributors include Claire Bracken, Kate Costello-Sullivan, Matt Eatough, Caroline Heafey, Adam McLain, Brian Ó Broin, and Mary McGlynn.

This talk - part of a larger project on parody and Irish writing - explores the role of squibs, spoofs, parodies and caricatures in the celebrated post-1969 Northern Irish poetry ‘renaissance’. Eve Patten will be looking at satirical treatments of Seamus Heaney and his immediate cohort, and with an eye to Lefebvre (Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, 2016), questioning both the politics and the critical significance of this burlesque counter-renaissance. Eve Patten is Professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin, where she specialises in modern Irish and British literature and cultural history. Her recent publications include, as editor, Irish Literature in Transition, 1940-1980 (CUP, 2020), and as author, Ireland, Revolution, and the English Modernist Imagination (OUP, 2022). She is co-PI on the HEA North-South Research Programme Ireland’s Border Culture project, a digital archive of border-related literature and visual art, and co-editor of Dublin Tales, published by OUP in 2023. She is currently researching a critical biography of the novelist, travel writer and political activist Ethel Mannin. Professor Patten is a visiting fellow at the Heyman Institute in the autumn of 2025.

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.