Seminars

News from Dublin is a collection of nine stories, set across Ireland, Spain, and the United States, about family, loss, longing, and love. Colm Tóibín, the Irene and Sydney Silverman Professor of the Humanities in Columbia’s Department of English and Comparative Literature, is the author of numerous novels, stories, and essays, among them Brooklyn, Long Island, The Master, and The Magician. Andreas Huyssen, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature Emeritus, has written numerous books about literature, memory, critical theory and the visual arts. We expect a lively conversation that will leave time for Q & A.

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.

‘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.

In the forty years since the emergence of feminist study of care ethics, it has become a sort of truism that we are all alive because someone has cared for us. This fundamental recognition of the universal dependency on care from others poses a series of challenges to the traditional framework of Western politics, both from the perspective of political philosophy and from the perspective of contemporary Western political institutions. Feminist theorists such as Joan Tronto and Virginia Held have argued that “the world would look different if we move care [...] to a place near the center of human life.” Care ethics, in this tradition, is overtly political, shaping public and governmental structures. Care ethics, as Talia Schaffer has recently shown, also provides an enormously helpful way of re-reading the nineteenth-century novel because it enables us to re-examine the representation of communities, dependency, and relationality. Extending Schaffer’s arguments about care as a frame for literary critique alongside the more overtly political analyses of care by Tronto, Matthew Reznicek explore the way that care provides an alternative mode of reading the nineteenth-century novel–one in which the social and political structures are undermined, critiqued, and reinvisioned by the mutual dependency, vulnerability, and renegotiation of social roles that are part and parcel of care. Re-reading the nineteenth-century novel through the politics of care allows us to see the ways in which the novel in the nineteenth century re-imagines society through the experience of care. In Ennui (1809), Mansfield Park (1814), Waverley (1814), care becomes a key fulcrum not only in re-working the individual and social politics of the novels, but also in re-envisioning the foundations of nineteenth-century Irish and British social order. Matthew L. Reznicek is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where he co-coordinates the Certificate for Arts and Humanities in Medicine. He has published widely on Irish literature from the long nineteenth century, including The Irish Bildungsroman (Syracuse UP, 2025) with Sarah Townsend and Gregory Castle; The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature (Liverpool UP, 2026) with Chris Cusack and Bridget English; and his second monograph, Tales of Health: Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale (Liverpool UP, 2026). He has also co-edited a special issue of Studies in the Novel on disease and disability in the novel with Lydia Cooper. He currently serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine.

And how is it related to ‘the long 1990s’? In this seminar, Lucy McDiarmid will explain how she discovered and named the concept of the ‘slightly magical’ and why it appeared in the ‘long 1990s,’ a period marked by the erosion of the authority of church and state. The talk will also focus on poems by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Rosamund Taylor, and Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh; copies of the poems will be distributed so everyone present can join in the discussion. Thus, this talk will be the occasion to present Lucy McDiarmid's ninth academic book, Slightly Magical Irish Poetry and the Long 1990s (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a former president of the American Conference for Irish Studies, and an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy. She was the first Marie Frazee Baldassarre Professor of English at Montclair State University, where she also won two teaching awards.

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.