New Books in Irish Studies
197 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★★ - 6 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Ireland about their New Books
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Paige Reynolds, "Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode" (Oxford UP, 2023)
July 09, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesPaige Reynolds's book Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode (Oxford UP, 2023) examines the tangled relationship between contemporary Irish women writers and literary modernism. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Irish women's fiction has drawn widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, with a surprising number of these works being commended for their innovative redeployment of literary tactics drawn from early twentieth-century literary mod...
Shahmima Akhtar, "Exhibiting Irishness: Empire, Race and Nation, c. 1850-1970" (Manchester UP, 2024)
June 30, 2024 08:00 - 18 minutesShahmima Akhtar is a historian of race, migration and empire and an assistant professor of Black and Asian British History at the University of Birmingham. She previously worked at the Royal Historical Society to improve BME representation in UK History, whether working with schools and the curriculum, cultural institutions, community groups or other learned societies. Dr. Akhtar has also worked closely with museums and heritage sites as a researcher and consultant on shaping histories of the...
Laurence M. Geary, "The Land War in Ireland: Famine, Philanthropy and Moonlighting" (Cork UP, 2023)
June 15, 2024 08:00 - 27 minutesIn this interview, he discusses his new book The Land War in Ireland: Famine, Philanthropy and Moonlighting (Cork UP, 2023), a collection of interconnected essays on different aspects of agrarian agitation in 1870s and 1880s Ireland. The Land War in Ireland addresses perceived lacunae in the historiography of the Land War in late nineteenth-century Ireland, particularly deficiencies or omissions relating to the themes of the title: famine, humanitarianism, and the activities of agrarian secre...
Bronagh Ann McShane, "Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530-1700: Suppression, Migration and Reintegration" (Boydell & Brewer, 2022)
June 11, 2024 08:00 - 37 minutesIrish Women in Religious Orders, 1530-1700: Suppression, Migration and Reintegration (Boydell & Brewer, 2022) by Dr. Bronagh Ann McShane investigates the impact of the dissolution of the monasteries on women religious and examines their survival in the following decades, showing how, despite the state's official proscription of vocation living, religious vocation options for women continued in less formal ways. Dr. McShane explores the experiences of Irish women who travelled to the Continent...
Cian T. McMahon, "The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine" (NYU Press, 2021)
June 08, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesCian T. McMahon is an associate professor of history at University of Nevada-Las Vegas. His research focuses on the history and identity of the Irish Diaspora. In this interview, he discusses his new book The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine (NYU Press, 2021), a social history of migration during the Great Irish Famine (1845-55). Drawing primarily on migrants’ diaries and letters, The Coffin Ship reconstructs the experience of leaving Ireland by sea during the ...
Nicholas Taylor-Collins, "Shakespeare, Memory, and Modern Irish Literature" (Manchester UP, 2022)
May 24, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn this interview, Dr. Nicholas Taylor-Collins discusses his most recent book Shakespeare, Memory, and Modern Irish Literature (Manchester UP, 2022). Shakespeare, Memory, and Modern Irish Literature explores the intertextual connections between early modern English and modern Irish literature. Characterizing the relationship as 'dismemorial', the book explores how ghosts, bodies, and the land are sites of literary connection through which modern/contemporary Ireland draws on Shakespeare's Eng...
Marc McMenamin, "Ireland's Secret War: Dan Bryan, G2 and the Lost Tapes that Reveal The Hunt for Ireland's Nazi Spies" (Gill Books, 2022)
May 17, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourMarc McMenamin's Ireland's Secret War: Dan Bryan, G2 and the Lost Tapes that Reveal The Hunt for Ireland's Nazi Spies (Gill Books, 2022) is a thrilling account of the true extent of Irish-Allied co-operation during World War II. It reveals strategic Nazi intentions for Ireland and the real role of leading government figures of the time, placing Dan Bryan and G2 - the military intelligence branch of the Irish Defence Forces - firmly at the centre of the country's battle against Nazi Germany. W...
Marion R. Casey, "The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image" (NYU Press, 2024)
May 08, 2024 04:00 - 29 minutesMarion Casey is a professor at Glucksman Ireland House at New York University where she also serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies. She has published widely on various aspects of Irish-American history and in 2006 she co-edited Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States with Joe Lee. In this interview, she discusses Her most recent book The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image (NYU Press, 2024), which surveys the changing images of Ir...
Crawford Gribben, "J. N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)
April 24, 2024 08:00 - 43 minutesJ.N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism (Oxford University Press, 2024) describes the work of one of the most important and under-studied theologians in the history of Christianity. In the late 1820s, John Nelson Darby abandoned his career as a priest in the Church of Ireland to become one of the principal leaders of a small but rapidly growing religious movement that became known as the "Plymouth Brethren." Darby and other brethren modified the Calvinism that was common among their eva...
Peter Gray, "William Sharman Crawford and Ulster Radicalism" (U College Dublin Press, 2023)
April 21, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesExploring both his life and legacy, the first full biography of William Sharman Crawford, the leading agrarian and democratic radical active in Ulster politics between the early 1830s and the 1850s. This biography places the life and ideas of William Sharman Crawford in the context of the development of radical liberalism in Ulster province over a more extended period, from his father's involvement in the Volunteers in the era of the American and French revolutions, through William's own lead...
Philip Freeman, "Two Lives of Saint Brigid" (Four Courts Press, 2024)
April 17, 2024 08:00 - 24 minutesSt. Brigid is the earliest and best-known of the female saints of Ireland. In the generation after St. Patrick, she established a monastery for men and women at Kildare which became one of the most powerful and influential centres of the Church in early Ireland. The stories of Brigid's life and deeds survive in several early sources, but the most important are two Latin lives written a century or more after her death. The first was composed by a churchman named Cogitosus and tells of her man...
Aidan Beatty and Dan O'Brien, "Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture" (Syracuse UP, 2018)
April 12, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe Irish and the Jews are two of the classic outliers of modern Europe. Both struggled with their lack of formal political sovereignty in the nineteenth-century. Simultaneously European and not European, both endured a bifurcated status, perceived as racially inferior and yet also seen as a natural part of the European landscape. Both sought to deal with their subaltern status through nationalism; both had a tangled, ambiguous, and sometimes violent relationship with Britain and the British ...
Seamus O'Malley, "Irish Culture and 'The People': Populism and Its Discontents" (Oxford UP, 2022)
April 11, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesSeamus O’Malley is an associate professor at Yeshiva University. His first book was Making History New: Modernism and Historical Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2015). He has co-edited three volumes, one of essays on Ford Madox Ford and America (Rodopi, 2010), a research companion to Ford (Routledge, 2018) and a volume of essays on the cartoonists Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell (Mississippi, 2018). He is the chair of the Ford Madox Ford Society and co-chair of the Columbia University Sem...
Colleen Taylor, "Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830" (Oxford UP, 2024)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourCoins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, pigs. Each of these objects were ubiquitous in the premodern cultural representation of the Irish. Through case studies of these five objects, Colleen Taylor’s new monograph Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830 (Oxford University Press, 2024) recovers the sometimes-oppressive, sometimes-liberatory meanings invested in nonhuman matter. Irish Materialisms collects a rich archive of material from William Carleton’s “Phi...
Anelise Hanson Shrout, "Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy" (NYU Press, 2024)
March 22, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesFamine brought ruin to the Irish countryside in the nineteenth century. In response, people around the world and from myriad social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds became involved in Irish famine relief. They included enslaved Black people in Virginia, poor tenant farmers in rural New York, and members of the Cherokee and Choctaw nations, as well as plantation owners in the US south, abolitionists in Pennsylvania, and, politicians in England and Ireland. Most of these people had no persona...
Paul Bew, "Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics: Judging Dillon and Parnell" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 22, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe story of Charles Stewart Parnell, one of the greatest Irish leaders of the nineteenth century and also one of the most renowned figures of the 1880s on the international stage, and John Dillon, the most celebrated, but also the most neglected, of Parnell's lieutenants. As Paul Bew shows in Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics: Judging Dillon and Parnell (Oxford UP, 2023), the differences between the two men reflect both Ireland's past and its future. Every time the principle of consent for ...
Michael O'Malley, "The Beat Cop: Chicago's Chief O'Neill and the Creation of Irish Music" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
February 03, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutesFrancis O’Neill (1848–1936) was a Chicago police officer and a folk music collector. Michael O’Malley connects these two seemingly unrelated activities in his biography of O’Neill, The Beat Cop: Chicago’s Chief O’Neill and the Creation of Irish Music (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Born in Ireland in 1848, O’Neill emigrated to the United States soon after the Civil War was over and eventually joined the Chicago Police Department. He rose through the ranks and became Chief of Police in 19...
Renée Fox, "The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature" (Ohio State UP, 2023)
January 27, 2024 09:00 - 35 minutesThe Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (Ohio State UP, 2023) dwells on the literal afterlives of history. Reading the reanimated corpses—monstrous, metaphorical, and occasionally electrified—that Mary Shelley, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and others bring to life, Renée Fox argues that these undead figures embody the present’s desire to remake the past in its own image. Fox positions “necromantic lit...
Prophet Song: A Novel about a Totalitarian Takeover in Ireland
January 23, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIt’s the UConn Popcast, and today we discuss Prophet Song (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023), Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize winning novel about a totalitarian regime coming to power in Ireland. We discuss the novel’s theorization of individual rights and political power, its success in depicting a family’s unraveling and its failures in telling a broader, more universal story. Why have critics lauded this novel, and who is its intended audience? More fundamentally, what is the role of literary fictio...
Jane Ohlmeyer, "Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 20, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourEmpire and imperial frameworks, policies, practices, and cultures have shaped the history of the world for the last two millennia. It is nation states that are the blip on the historical horizon. Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Jane Ohlmeyer re-examines empire as process—and Ireland's role in it—through the lens of early modernity. It covers the two hundred years, between the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth ce...
The Future of Ireland: Kevin Meagher on Why a United Ireland is Inevitable
January 17, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutesIn A United Ireland: Why Unification in Inevitable and How It Will Come About (Biteback Publishing, 2017), Kevin Meagher argues that a reasoned, pragmatic discussion about the most basic questions regarding Britain's relationship with its nearest neighbour is now long overdue, and questions that have remained unasked, and perhaps unthought, must now be answered. Indeed, in the light of Brexit and a highly probable second independence referendum in Scotland, the reunification of Ireland is not...
Patrick R. O'Malley, "The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy Across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
January 11, 2024 09:00 - 57 minutesPatrick R. O'Malley's book The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy Across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century (U Virginia Press, 2023) analyzes the role of Irishness in nineteenth-century constructions of race and racialization, both in the British Isles and in the United States. Focusing on the years immediately preceding the American Civil War, Patrick O’Malley interrogates the bardic verse epic, the gothic tale, the realist novel, the stage melodrama, and the political po...
Huw Bennett, "Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966–1975" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
December 22, 2023 09:00 - 26 minutesHuw Bennett is a Reader in International Relations at Cardiff Unviersity. He specializes in strategic studies, the history of war, and intelligence studies, and work on both historical and contemporary issues concerning the use of military power. His research focuses on the experiences of the British Army since 1945, in the contexts of British politics, the Cold War, the end of empire, and the War on Terror. In this interview he discusses his book Uncivil War: The British Army and the Trouble...
Gregory J. Goalwin, "Borders of Belief: Religious Nationalism and the Formation of Identity in Ireland and Turkey" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
December 07, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDespite theories to the contrary, religious nationalism, and the use of religion to determine membership in the national community, has continued to play a role in processes of identification in societies all around the globe ... and such processes seems likely to continue to structure the ways in which communities view themselves even in today’s globalized and seemingly secularized world. – Gregory Goalwin, Borders of Belief: Religious Nationalism and the Formation of Identity in Ireland and...
Seán Creagh, "The Wolfhounds of Irish-American Nationalism: A History of Clan Na Gael, 1867-Present" (Peter Lang, 2023)
November 20, 2023 09:00 - 30 minutesAs Ireland's oldest revolutionary movement and America's oldest transatlantic nationalist organization this is the first book covering the entire history of Clan na Gael. Formed in 1867 and existing up to the present Clan na Gael has been involved directly and indirectly in every violent revolutionary attempt for Irish independence and unification since its formation 155 years ago. Despite this long history it is the least studied and most underappreciated of Ireland's revolutionary movements...
Elizabeth DeYoung, "Power, Politics and Territory in the ‘New Northern Ireland’" (Liverpool UP, 2023)
November 11, 2023 09:00 - 30 minutesIn the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, the redevelopment of the former Girdwood Army Barracks in North Belfast was hailed as a ‘symbol of hope’ for Northern Ireland. It was a major investment in a former conflict zone and an internationally significant peacebuilding project. Instead of adhering to the tenets of the Agreement, sectarianism dominated the regeneration agenda. Throughout the process, politicians, community groups and paramilitaries wrangled over the site’s future, and territor...
Seamus Heaney’s Afterlives
November 08, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn 1995, Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. During his speech, he explained that the adequacy of lyric poetry spoke to the “‘temple inside our hearing’ which the passage of the poem calls into being. It is an adequacy deriving from what Mandelstam called ‘the steadfastness of speech articulation,’ from the resolution and independence which the entirely realized poem sponsors. It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyanc...
David Veevers, "The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire" (Ebury Press, 2023)
November 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe story of the British Empire is a familiar one: Britain came, it saw, it conquered, forging a glorious world empire upon which the sun never set. In fact, far from being the tale of a single nation imposing its will upon the world, the expanding British Empire frequently found itself frustrated by the power and tenacious resistance of the Indigenous and non-European people it encountered. From gruelling wars in Ireland to the failure to curtail North African Corsair states, all the way to ...
Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson, "Dublin: Mapping the City" (Birlinn, 2023)
October 31, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourMaps are essential tools in finding our way around, but they also tell stories and are great depositories of information. Until the twentieth century and the arrival of aerial images, a map was the best way of getting a sense of what a city looked like on the ground. Dublin: Mapping the City (Birlinn, 2023) by Dr. Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson presents a carefully chosen selection of maps that traces the growth and development of Dublin from the early seventeenth century to the present day, ...
James V. Fenelon, "Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790" (Routledge, 2023)
October 28, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesIn this interview James Fenelon discusses his new book entitled Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790, recently published with Routledge (2023). The book traces 500 years of European-American colonization and racialized dominance, expanding our common assumptions about the ways racialization was used to build capitalism and the modern world-system. Professor Fenelon draws on personal experience and the agency of understudied Native (and Af...
Luke Moffett, "Reparations and War: Finding Balance in Repairing the Past" (Oxford UP, 2023)
October 27, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesFor thousands of years, reparations have been used to secure the end of war and to alleviate its deleterious consequences. While human rights law establishes that victims have a right to reparations, reparations are not always feasible and are often difficult to deliver. In Reparations and War: Finding Balance in Repairing the Past (Oxford UP, 2023), Professor Luke Moffett used interviews with hundreds of victims, ex-combatants, government officials, and civil society actors from six post-co...
Michael Wheeler, "The Year that Shaped the Victorian Age: Lives, Loves and Letters of 1845" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
September 27, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesWhat was special about 1845 and why does it deserve particular scrutiny? In The Year that Shaped the Victorian Age: Lives, Loves and Letters of 1845 (Cambridge UP, 2022), one of the leading authorities on the Victorian age argues that this was the critical year in a decade which witnessed revolution on continental Europe, the threat of mass insurrection at home and radical developments in railway transport, communications, religion, literature and the arts. The effects of the new poor law now...
Jamie Bronstein, "The Happiness of the British Working Class" (Stanford UP, 2023)
September 21, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesFor working-class life writers in nineteenth century Britain, happiness was a multifaceted emotion: a concept that could describe experiences of hedonic pleasure, foster and deepen social relationships, drive individuals to self-improvement, and lead them to look back over their lives and evaluate whether they were well-lived. However, not all working-class autobiographers shared the same concepts or valorizations of happiness, as variables such as geography, gender, political affiliation, an...
John O'Donovan, "An Introduction to the Irish Civil War" (Mercier Press, 2022)
September 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDuring the Irish Civil War, events of late 1922 and early 1923 together with waves of 'dishonourable' killings created poisoned relations between Republicans and 'Free Staters' which would last for several generations. The most enduring of these controversies, a policy of summary executions carried out by the Provisional Government from November 1922, continues to surround the argument. John O'Donovan's book An Introduction to the Irish Civil War (Mercier Press, 2022) offers a fresh perspecti...
Charlotte Lydia Riley, "Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain " (Penguin, 2023)
September 15, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesCan Britain escape from being a nation trapped in its past? In Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain (Penguin, 2023), Charlotte Lydia Riley, an Associate Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Southampton, and co-host of the Tomorrow Never Knows podcast explores the history of Britain as an imperial nation, both at home and abroad. The book shows how it is impossible to separate the history of post-war Britain from the history of empire, even a...
A Better Way to Buy Books
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesBookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...
Conor Lucey, "House and Home in Georgian Ireland: Spaces and Cultures of Domestic Life" (Four Courts Press, 2022)
August 19, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesConor Lucey's book House and Home in Georgian Ireland: Spaces and Cultures of Domestic Life (Four Courts Press, 2022) explores the everyday character and functions of domestic spaces in Georgian Ireland. While the design and decoration of the country pile and the aristocratic town house enjoys a long and distinguished literature, to date there has been no sustained examination of how rooms were habitually occupied and experienced, or how different social demographics--not least the burgeoning...
Isadore Ryan, "No Way Out: The Irish in Wartime France, 1939–1945" (Mercier Press, 2018)
August 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe experiences of the Irish in France during the war were overshadowed by the threat of internment or destitution. Up to 2,000 Irish people were stuck in occupied France after the defeat by Nazi Germany in June 1940. This population consisted largely of governesses and members of religious orders, but also the likes of Samuel Beckett, as well as a few individuals who managed to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up in internment camps (or worse). Isadore Ryan's bo...
David Clare et al., "The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights (1716-2016)" (Liverpool UP, 2021)
August 16, 2023 13:30 - 46 minutesThe 2015 #WakingTheFeminists Campaign for gender equality in Irish theatre highlighted the marginalization of women in this industry and led to several significant initiatives that interrogated existing theater practices and pushed for inclusion and representation. Inspired by this movement, three academics, David Clare, Fiona McDonagh, and Justine Nakase, joined forces to co-edit a two-volume collection of scholarship on Irish women playwrights. In this episode, these three scholars discuss ...
Finola O'Kane, "Landscape Design and Revolution in Ireland and the United States, 1688-1815" (Paul Mellon Centre, 2023)
July 30, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesLandscape Design and Revolution in Ireland and the United States, 1688-1815 (Yale University Press, 2023) by Dr. Finola O’Kane explores how revolutionary ideas were translated into landscape design, encompassing liberty, equality, improvement and colonialism. Spanning the designed landscapes of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776 and the Irish rebellion of 1798, with some detours into revolutionary France, this book traces a comparative history of property s...
Lynsey Black, "Gender and Punishment in Ireland: Women, Murder and the Death Penalty, 1922-64" (Manchester UP, 2022)
June 27, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesDr Lynsey Black is a lecturer in criminology, in the School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University. She researches in the areas of gender and punishment, the death penalty, historical and postcolonial criminology, and borders. In this interview she discusses her new book, Gender and Punishment in Ireland: Women, Murder and the Death Penalty, 1922-64 (Manchester UP, 2022). Gender and Punishment in Ireland explores women's lethal violence in Ireland. Drawing on comprehensive archival resea...
Mary M. McGlynn, "Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction" (Syracuse UP, 2022)
June 18, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesIn this interview Mary M. McGlynn, Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, discusses her new book Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction (Syracuse University Press, 2022). While the national narrative coming out of Ireland since the 2008 economic crisis has been relentlessly sanguine, fiction has offered a more nuanced perspective from both well-established and emerging authors. In Broken Irelands, McGlynn examines Irish fiction of the post-crash era, addressing the ...
Alan Marshall, "Intelligence and Espionage in the English Republic C. 1600-60" (Manchester UP, 2023)
May 24, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesAlan Marshall's book Intelligence and Espionage in the English Republic C. 1600-60 (Manchester UP, 2023) is a richly detailed account of the ideas and activities in the early-modern 'secret state' and its agencies, spies, informers and intelligencers, under the English Republic and the Cromwellian protectorate. The book investigates the meanings this early-modern Republican state acquired to express itself, by exploring its espionage actions, the moral conundrums, and the philosophical backgr...
Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, "Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women" (Sandycove, 2023)
May 16, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesChild abandonment, theft, kidnapping, prostitution, bigamy, and murder! Bad Bridget is a must-read examination of crime and Irish emigrant women in the U.S. and Canada, written by Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, and out now with Sandycove. Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not a very good place to be a woman. Among the wave of emigrants from Ireland to North America were many, many young women who travelled on their own, hoping for a better life. Some lived live...
Tim Clarkson, "A Mighty Fleet and the King's Power: The Isle of Man, AD 400 To 1265" (John Donald, 2023)
May 02, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesSituated in the middle of the Irish Sea, the Isle of Man is like a stepping-stone between the lands that surround it. In medieval times, it played an important role in the histories of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales. A Mighty Fleet and the King's Power: The Isle of Man, AD 400 to 1265 (John Donald, 2023) by Dr. Tim Clarkson explores the first part of that turbulent era, tracing the story of the Isle of Man from the fifth to the thirteenth centuries. It looks at the ways in which various...
Jason Knirck, "Democracy and Dissent in the Irish Free State: Opposition, Decolonization, and Majority Rights" (Manchester UP, 2023)
April 02, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesJason Knirck is the chair of the History Department at Central Washington University. He is a modern Irish historian who also teaches British and western European history. His research concerns the Irish revolution and the foundation of the Irish Free State, focusing particularly on the political rhetoric of the period. Some of his previous books include Women of the Dáil: Gender, Republicanism and the Anglo-Irish Treaty and Afterimage of the Revolution: Cumann na nGaedheal and Irish Politics...
Marie-Luise Theuerkauf, "Dindshenchas Érenn" (U College Cork, 2022)
March 29, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesThe purpose of the present volume, Dindshenchas Érenn (U College Cork, 2022), is to provide an accessible overview and entry into the complex literary creation known as Dindshenchas Érenn ‘History of the Notable Places of Ireland’. The five chapters in the book consider different aspects of the Dindshenchas corpus, ranging from the manuscript sources; the format and structure of the various texts so labelled; an overview of the scholarship published to date; the dating of the corpus; the Dind...
Declan Warde et al., "Safety As We Watch: Anaesthesia in Ireland 1847-1998" (Wordwell Books, 2022)
March 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe discovery of anaesthesia which could be administered safely to eliminate the pain of surgery and other medical and dental procedures is widely considered to be one of the greatest developments of the nineteenth century. Yet, until now few studies have focused on anaesthesia in Ireland. Safety As We Watch: Anaesthesia in Ireland 1847-1998 (Wordwell Books, 2022), written by three Irish anaesthetists, is the first published study of the history of anaesthesia in Ireland. Featuring fascinati...
John Soderberg, "Animals and Sacred Bodies in Early Medieval Ireland: Religion and Urbanism at Clonmacnoise" (Lexington Books, 2021)
March 24, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesClonmacnoise was among the busiest, most economically complex, and intensely sacred places in early medieval Ireland. In Animals and Sacred Bodies in Early Medieval Ireland: Religion and Urbanism at Clonmacnoise (Lexington Books, 2021), John Soderberg argues that animals are the key to understanding Clonmacnoise’s development as a thriving settlement and a sacred space. At this sanctuary city on the River Shannon, animal bodies were an essential source of food and raw materials. They were als...
Andrew Phemister, "Land and Liberalism: Henry George and the Irish Land War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
March 20, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesAndrew Phemister is Research Associate at Newcastle University. He has previously held postdoctoral positions in History at NUI Galway, the University of Oxford, and Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. In this interview he discusses his new book, Land and Liberalism: Henry George and the Irish Land War (Cambridge University Press, 2023) Irish land in the 1880s was a site of ideological conflict, with resonances for liberal politics far beyond Ireland itself. The Iris...