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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Episodes
Elizabeth Boyle, "Fierce Appetites: Loving, Losing and Living to Excess in my Present and in the Writings of the Past" (Sandycove, 2022)
May 23, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesIn Fierce Appetites: Loving, Losing and Living to Excess in my Present and in the Writings of the Past (Sandy Cove, 2022), Dr. Elizabeth Boyle weaves together the past and the present together, creating a beautiful memoir and reflection. To quote the book blurb, “Not only does Elizabeth Boyle write dazzling accounts of ancient stories, familiar and obscure, from Ireland and further afield, but she uses her historical learning to grapple with the raw and urgent questions she faces, questions t...
Heather Jones, "For King and Country: The British Monarchy and the First World War" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
May 03, 2022 08:00 - 44 minutesFor King and Country: The British Monarchy and the First World War (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a ground-breaking history of the British monarchy in the First World War and of the social and cultural functions of monarchism in the British war effort. Heather Jones examines how the conflict changed British cultural attitudes to the monarchy, arguing that the conflict ultimately helped to consolidate the crown's sacralised status. She looks at how the monarchy engaged with war recruitment, bereaveme...
Book Talk 51: Ardythe Ashley on Oscar Wilde
April 18, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourSecretly his unconscious body, still flickering with life, is spirited away by to an island monastery in the Venetian lagoon where he recovers his health and joie de vivre. From there he begins a series of adventures that include Auguste Rodin, a romance with an English aristocrat, a new lover, a session with Sigmund Freud, and an heroic death. I spoke with novelist Ardythe Ashley about her meticulously researched historical novel that breathes new life into a writer who continues to charm an...
Patrick J. McDonagh, "Gay and Lesbian Activism in the Republic of Ireland, 1973-93" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
April 08, 2022 08:00 - 35 minutesIreland’s 2015 Marriage Equality referendum is often framed as an incredible achievement just twenty years after sex between men was decriminalized (1993). But starting the story of gay and lesbian rights in Ireland in 1993 is misleading; the work and roots of the major reforms of the 1990s and twenty-first century are in the 1970s, when gay and lesbian activists formed organizations, lobbied for legislative change, and, perhaps most importantly, engaged in the essential work of shifting publ...
Karl Kitching, "Childhood, Religion and School Injustice" (Cork UP, 2020)
April 05, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Childhood, Religion, and School Injustice (Cork University Press, 2020), Dr. Karl Kitching examines how debates about religion and education internationally often presume the neutrality of secular education governance as an irrefutable public good. However, understandings of secular freedom, rights and neutrality in schooling are continuously contested, and social movements have disrupted the notion that there is a uniform public to be educated. Simultaneously, unjust, neoliberal and major...
Adam Wyeth, "about:blank" (Salmon Poetry, 2021)
March 25, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesThe city of Dublin, with its ancient cobblestones, historic pubs, and legendary river Liffey, has been a source of inspiration for writers and poets for centuries. Though it might provide a creative buzz, modern city existence can often prove exhausting for the contemporary poet constantly bombarded with new sights, sounds, and smells, as well as the increasing pull of technology, with smartphone apps and messages vying for attention, offering new ways of interacting with the history of the c...
Billy O'Callaghan, "Life Sentences" (Godine, 2022)
March 22, 2022 08:00 - 30 minutesLife Sentences (Godine, 2022) tells three interconnected stories about a family in his home country of Ireland. In lyrical, moving prose, with characters that reach across the years, Billy O’Callaghan describes births, deaths, war, and the life of his family. The book begins in the 1920’s with Jeremiah, who survived as a soldier in the Great War. He’s drunk and jailed on the night before his sister’s funeral to prevent him from killing his sister’s husband. “Life had its struggles,” he says a...
Deirdre Ní Chonghaile, "Collecting Music in the Aran Islands: A Century of History and Practice" (U Wisconsin Press, 2021)
March 18, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesDeirdre Ní Chonghaile is a writer, musician, broadcaster, and curator from the Aran Islands. Working bilingually in Irish and English, she is drawn to voices, contemporary and historical, especially those that have been marginalized, and to what they have to say or sing. She read Music at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, and worked at the University of Notre Dame and the Library of Congress. Deirdre is currently curating an exhibition for Roinn na Gaeilge at NUI Galway on the first professor of I...
Kevin O'Sullivan, "The NGO Moment: The Globalisation of Compassion from Biafra to Live Aid" (Cambridge UP, 2021))
March 18, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn this episode, Kevin O’Sullivan talks about his book on aid-focused NGOs from Ireland, Britain, and Canada in the 1960s-80s, The NGO Moment: The Globalisation of Compassion from Biafra to Live Aid (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He deems this era particularly crucial for the development of the NGO sector and its relationship to the Third World because it witnessed the internationalization of a particularly western form of compassion. Professor O’Sullivan makes the claim that the years 1...
Sophie Cooper, "Forging Identities in the Irish World: Melbourne and Chicago, 1840-1922" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)
March 14, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesForging Identities in the Irish World: Melbourne and Chicago, 1840-1922 (Edinburgh UP, 2022,) explores the shifting influences of religious demography, educational provision, and club culture to shed new light on what makes a diasporic ethnic community connect and survive over multiple generations. Sophie Cooper focuses on these Irish populations as they grew alongside their cities establishing the cultural and political institutions of Melbourne and Chicago, and these comparisons allow schol...
Lili Zách, "Imagining Ireland Abroad, 1904–1945: Conceiving the Nation, Identity, and Borders in Central Europe" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
March 02, 2022 09:00 - 46 minutesLili Zách is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University) in Budapest and has previously taught at Maynooth University (Ireland). She received her MA Degrees in History and Irish Studies in 2006 from the University of Szeged, Hungary. In 2010 she completed a Diploma Course in Irish Language and completed her PhD at the National University of Ireland, Galway in 2016. In this interview, she discusses her new book Imagining Ireland Abroad, 1904-1945: ...
Daniel Finn, "One Man's Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA" (Verso, 2021)
February 10, 2022 09:00 - 2 hoursWhen most people think of the Irish Republican Army, they naturally think of terrorism. But what of the political context that led to some 10,000 Irish nationalists to take up arms against a divided Ireland? With One Man's Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA (Verso, 2021), Daniel Finn tries to answer this question. This thoroughly researched study of the IRA explains the ideological and tactical decision making processes that led to The Troubles and the deaths of some 3,500 between 1968...
Margaret M. Scull, "The Catholic Church and the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1968-1998" (Oxford UP, 2019)
February 08, 2022 09:00 - 46 minutesUntil surprisingly recently, the history of the Irish Catholic Church during the Northern Irish Troubles was written by Irish priests and bishops and was commemorative rather than analytical. Margaret M. Scull's The Catholic Church and the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1968-1998 (Oxford UP, 2019) uses the Troubles as a case study to evaluate the role of the Catholic Church in mediating conflict. During the Troubles, these priests and bishops often worked behind the scenes, acting as go-betweens ...
Micah Alpaugh, "Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
February 07, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourAs the old cliché goes, “there must have been something in the water.” A new book by historian Micah Alpaugh, Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (Cambridge UP, 2021), courses a thread through the various disorders that riddled the Atlantic World in the late-eighteenth century. Alpaugh searches for and brings to light commonalities that spread through regions circling the North Atlantic. From the Caribbean islands to Ireland; France, colonial Am...
Tracy Collins, "Female Monasticism in Medieval Ireland: An Archaeology" (Cork UP, 2021)
February 04, 2022 09:00 - 48 minutesIn Female Monasticism in Medieval Ireland: An Archaeology (Cork UP, 2021), Dr. Tracy Collins writes the first archaeological investigation into female monasticism in medieval Ireland, primarily from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. Weaving in early medieval evidence, textual sources, and examples from Britain and the continent, new considerations are given to the archaeology, architecture, and landscape through the lens of gender. Introducing her results from her recent surveys and excavat...
Simon Topping, "Northern Ireland, the United States and the Second World War" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
February 04, 2022 09:00 - 53 minutesIn Northern Ireland, the United States and the Second World War (Bloomsbury, 2022), Dr. Simon Topping analyses the American military presence in Northern Ireland during the war, examining the role of the government at Stormont in managing this 'friendly invasion', the diplomatic and military rationales for the deployment, the attitude of Americans to their posting, and the effect of the US presence on local sectarian dynamics. He explores US military planning, the hospitality and entertainmen...
Camilla Fitzsimons et al., "Repealed: Ireland's Unfinished Fight for Reproductive Justice" (Pluto Press, 2021)
January 27, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourCamilla Fitzsimons is an activist and a member of the Dublin West Pro Choice group. She works at Maynooth University and is the author of Community Education and Neoliberalism. Sinéad Kennedy is the co-founder of The Coalition to Repeal the Eighth and an executive member of Together for Yes. She works at Maynooth University and is the co-editor of The Abortion Papers, Ireland. In this interview Fitzsimons and Kennedy discuss their new book Repealed: Ireland’s Unfinished Fight for Reproductive...
Nicholas Canny, "Imagining Ireland's Pasts: Early Modern Ireland Through the Centuries" (Oxford UP, 2021)
January 19, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesNicholas Canny is an Emeritus Professor at the National University of Ireland-Galway (NUIG). Since completing his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania he has pursued an influential publishing career spanning the early 1970s until today. He is the author or editor of 11 books and has written over 70 published papers. He was founding Director of the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies at NUIG and served as Director there from 2000-2011 at National University of Ir...
Martin Conway, "Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945-1968" (Princeton UP, 2021)
January 03, 2022 09:00 - 41 minutesWhat happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? In Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945-1968 (Princeton UP, 2021), Martin Conway provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe—and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latter decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Conway describes how West...
Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, "Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)
November 26, 2021 09:00 - 31 minutesKatarzyna (Kasia) Bartoszyńska is an assistant professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Ithaca College. Her research and teaching focuses on the novel form and the theories connected to it, combining a formalist investigation of textual mechanics with an interest in studies of gender, sexuality, race, and world literature. Prof. Bartoszyńska is also active in Polish-English translation. She has translated several texts by Zygmunt Bauman, including Sketches in the Theory of Cultu...
Crawford Gribben, "The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland" (Oxford UP, 2021)
November 23, 2021 09:00 - 42 minutesToday Crawford Gribben joins us to talk about his new book, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland (Oxford UP, 2021). Ireland has long been regarded as a 'land of saints and scholars'. Yet the Irish experience of Christianity has never been simple or uncomplicated. The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland describes the emergence, long dominance, sudden division, and recent decline of Ireland's most important religion, as a way of telling the history of the island and its peoples. Throughout its...
Michael Braddick, "A Useful History of Britain: The Politics of Getting Things Done" (Oxford UP, 2021)
November 10, 2021 09:00 - 22 minutesWhat have the Romans ever done for us? That’s the question put to his pals by Reg, in a much quoted scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. The debate is notionally about imperial oppression of Judea, but the assembled radicals ultimately agree that, in fact, the Romans were the bringers of sanitation, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health. In other words, they got things done. In his new book, A Useful History of Britain: The Politics of G...
José Vergara, "All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature" (Cornell UP, 2021)
October 20, 2021 08:00 - 58 minutesAll Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature (Cornell UP, 2021) explores how Russian writers from the mid-1920s on have read and responded to Joyce's work. Through contextually rich close readings, José Vergara uncovers the many roles Joyce has occupied in Russia over the last century, demonstrating how the writers Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin draw from Joyce's texts, particularly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, to address t...
Sonja Tiernan, "The History of Marriage Equality in Ireland: A Social Revolution Begins" (Manchester UP, 2020)
October 19, 2021 08:00 - 55 minutesIn 2015, the world witnessed an Irish social revolution. In a historic referendum vote, the Republic of Ireland voted to extend the constitutional right to marriage to same-sex couples. Thirty years before, sex between men was illegal. From the 1970s, LGBT rights activists advocated tirelessly for decriminalization, fair treatment laws, protection from discrimination, and, most recently, marriage equality. In one of the most Catholic countries in the world, it was never easy. In her book The ...
Gregory Vargo, "Chartist Drama" (Manchester UP, 2021)
October 19, 2021 08:00 - 52 minutesGreg Vargo's Chartist Drama (Manchester UP, 2021) opens a window into a fascinating aspect of working-class radical drama. This book includes scripts of four dramas performed or published by members of the Chartist movement, as well as an informative introduction situating these plays in their historical context. Ranging from history plays to political drama to Gothic melodrama, these plays show that Chartism was much more than a political movement. It included an entire cultural world, of wh...
Elizabeth Boyle, "History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland" (Routledge, 2020)
October 13, 2021 08:00 - 48 minutesIn History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland, Dr. Elizabeth Boyle closely examines medieval Irish ideas regarding salvation history from 700 to 1200 CE through both Latin and vernacular texts for both ecclesiastical and secular audiences. Incorporating analysis from previously untranslated texts, her book delves into the use of narratives and figures from Hebrew Scriptures and the weaving of elements from the Hebrew and Irish texts into each other. The medieval Irish concept of salvation hist...
Virginia Miller, "Child Sexual Abuse Inquiries and the Catholic Church: Reassessing the Evidence" (Firenze UP, 2021)
September 13, 2021 08:00 - 58 minutesIn Child Sexual Abuse Inquiries and the Catholic Church: Reassessing the Evidence (Firenze UP, 2021), Dr Miller analyses empirical findings, methodologies and conclusions of the three main national inquiries (Irish, US, Australian) into child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and Church responses. Contrasts are drawn with overall media reporting of the problem, such as when abuse peaked, and current safe-guarding and its effectiveness in curbing child sexual abuse. Topics discussed include...
Larry Kirwan, "Rockaway Blue" (Cornell UP, 2021)
August 23, 2021 08:00 - 45 minutesTwenty years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the novel Rockaway Blue (Cornell UP, 2021) probes the griefs, trauma and resilience of Irish American New Yorkers wresting with the deaths and aftershocks of that terrible day. The book weaves throughout New York City, from the Midtown North precinct in Manhattan to Arab American Brooklyn, but it is so grounded in the Irish section of Rockaway in the borough of Queens that Rockaway itself becomes a kind of character Like all of K...
Páraic Kerrigan, "LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland" (Routledge, 2020)
August 11, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour“We know what we want, and one day, our prince will come,” says Toby, the bicycle-shorts-wearing, double ententre-making, unacknowledgely-gay neighbor in RTE’s Upwardly Mobile. Though the first queer characters in Irish entertainment television were tropes and stereotypes, they represented an important shift in LGBTQ visibility in Irish media. The road to early representations in entertainment media was a hard road paved by gay rights activists, AIDS stigma, and production teams looking for s...
Robert Snyder, "All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants, and the Making of New York" (Columbia UP, 2019)
May 04, 2021 09:00 - 29 minutesAll the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants, and the Making of New York by Frederick M. Binder, David M. Reimers, and Robert W. Snyder (Columbia University Press, 2019) covers almost 500 years of New York City’s still unfolding story of cultural diversity and political conflict, economic dynamism and unmatched human diversity. This briskly paced volume – which updates a first edition originally published in the mid-1990s – reminds us that today’s hot button debates about immigration, i...
Jeremy Black, "A Brief History of Britain 1851-2021: From World Power to ?" (Robinson, 2021)
April 14, 2021 08:00 - 42 minutesJeremy Black, one of the most prolific and punchy of historians of modern Britain, has written a new account of a period on which he has previously published. A Brief History of Britain 1851-2021: From World Power to ? (Robinson, 2021) traces an arc of decline and opportunity, from the confidence that was reflected in the Crystal Palace’s Great Exhibition of 1851 to the uncertainty about national purpose or international significance that was reflected in the construction of the Millennium Do...
Kenneth Shonk, "Ireland's New Traditionalists: Fianna Fáil Republicanism and Gender, 1926-1938" (Cork UP, 2021)
April 12, 2021 08:00 - 56 minutesToday on New Books in History, a channel on the New Books Network we are joined by Kenneth L. Shonk, Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse to talk about his new book, Ireland’s New Traditionalists: Fianna Fail Republicanism and Gender, 1926 – 38, out this year, 2021, with Cork University Press. The creation of Fianna Fáil in 1926 marked a new era in Irish politics wherein an evolved version of Irish republicanism, suited to operate in the Irish Free State, entered the polit...
Caroline Ritter, "Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire" (UC Press, 2021)
April 02, 2021 04:00 - 44 minutesWhat role did culture play in the British Empire? In Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire Caroline Ritter, an Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University, explores the importance of culture in maintaining Imperial domination, and then in supporting post-Imperial British influence. Using core case studies of key institutions- the British Council, the BBC, and Oxford University Press- the book shows the ongoing legacy of the Imperial cultural project, ev...
Roy Flechner, "Saint Patrick Retold: The Legend and History of Ireland's Patron Saint" (Princeton UP, 2019)
March 15, 2021 08:00 - 49 minutesThe only surviving contemporary texts that provide insight into the life of Saint Patrick were both written by the legendary patron saint of Ireland. By Patrick's own account, his life and ministry were controversial in his day, and the myths and legends that have surrounded this enigmatic Christian leader have continued to generate speculation and curiosity to the present day. Roy Flechner (University College Dublin) brings the the best available critical tools to the task of seeking to rec...
Michael J. Pfeifer, "The Making of American Catholicism: Regional Culture and the Catholic Experience" (NYU Press, 2021
March 09, 2021 10:00 - 1 hourMichael J. Pfeifer's The Making of American Catholicism: Regional Culture and the Catholic Experience (NYU Press, 2021 traces the development of Catholic cultures in the South, the Midwest, the West, and the Northeast, and their contribution to larger patterns of Catholicism in the United States. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book argues that American Catholicism developed as transnational Catholics creatively adapted their devotional and ideological practices in particular Amer...
Gerry Smyth, "Sailor Song: The Shanties and Ballads of the High Seas" (U Washington Press, 2020)
January 12, 2021 09:00 - 55 minutesSailor Song: The Shanties and Ballads of the High Seas (University of Washington Press, 2020) by performer and scholar Gerry Smyth includes lyrics and commentary for dozens of sea shanties, as well as a brief history of the genre. The world that emerges in these 19th century sailor songs is surprisingly multi-cultural; in a sense, sea shanties were the first sonic products of globalization, combining African-American work songs, Irish ballads, and English folk tunes. This book is designed to ...
N. Mclaughlin and J. Braniff, "How Belfast Got the Blues: A Cultural History of Popular Music in The 1960s" (Intellect, 2020)
December 14, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourThere is no shortage of books about the British Invasion or the history of R&B and the Blues in the United Kingdom. Belfast might seem like something of a peripheral backwater to that story, only meriting a passing reference as Van Morrison’s hometown. Yet, in How Belfast Got the Blues: A Cultural History of Popular Music in the 1960s (Intellect Books, 2020) authors Joanna Braniff and Noel McLaughlin center Belfast, the complex political situation of Northern Ireland just before the Troubles,...
Audrey J. Horning, "Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic" (UNC Press, 2017)
November 13, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Audrey Horning revisits the fraught connections between Ireland and colonial Virginia. Both modern scholars and early modern colonialists themselves viewed English incursions into Ireland and North America as intimately related. But the precise nature of this relationship has been a matter of contention. In the standard narrative, British efforts to establish plantations in Ireland...
Coulter George, "How Dead Languages Work" (Oxford UP, 2020)
October 28, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourAfter reading How Dead Languages Work (Oxford University Press 2020), Coulter George hopes you might decide to learn a bit of ancient Greek or Sanskrit, or maybe dabble in a bit of Old Germanic. But even if readers of his book aren’t converted into polyglots, they will walk away with an introduction to the (in)famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is responsible for the inaccurate meme claiming that Inuits understand snow more deeply than other cultures because their language has one hundred (...
Patrick Honohan, "Currency, Credit and Crisis: Central Banking in Ireland and Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
October 08, 2020 08:00 - 48 minutesFor readers – including non-economists – who want to get to grips with the nature and scale of the last financial crisis, how it was managed and mismanaged, and its particular impact on a small, open economy, Patrick Honohan's book Currency, Credit and Crisis: Central Banking in Ireland and Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020) This is, in part, because it covers complex issues yet is written for a non-specialist audience. But mostly it’s because, as Olivier Blanchard says, this is “financial crisis, s...
Jeremy Black, "A History of Britain: 1945 to Brexit" (Indiana UP, 2017)
September 08, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourAccording to the influential French commentator and scholar, Raymond Aron, one the great un-answered questions of the post-1945 period is how and why the British went from being ‘Romans to Italians’. In an endeavor to answer this question and much more is Professor of History Emeritus at Exeter University Jeremy Black’s book A History of Britain: 1945 to Brexit (Indiana UP, 2017) Spanning the period from Attlee’s surprise victory over Winston Churchill in 1945, to the equally surprising decis...
Alicia Turner, "The Irish Buddhist: The Forgotten Monk Who Faced Down the British Empire" (Oxford UP, 2020)
August 31, 2020 08:00 - 48 minutesBuddhism has always been a world religion, but its popularity in the West really dates only from the late nineteenth century, when much of the Buddhist world was subject to European colonial rule. Of all those Westerners who became interested in, and sought to promote Buddhism at this time, perhaps no-one is more unusual and interesting than U Dhammaloka, an Irishman who “went native” and became a Buddhist monk in British Burma at the turn of the twentieth century. U Dhammaloka is now the sub...
Nadine El-Enany, "Bordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire" (Manchester UP, 2020)
July 30, 2020 08:00 - 46 minutesHow can we understand the legacy of colonialism within contemporary society? In Bordering Britain Law, Race and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2020), Nadine El-Enany, a senior lecturer in law at Birkbeck School of Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law, historicises immigration law and ideas of citizenship in Britain, connecting the project of building a nation after the end of empire to whiteness, colonial violence, and racism. The book analyses legislation and ...
Sarah Stockwell, "The British End of the British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
February 20, 2020 09:00 - 46 minutesHow did de-colonialization impact the United Kingdom itself? That is a topic that Professor of Imperial & Commonwealth History at King’s College, London, Sarah Stockwell aims to tackle in her latest book: The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Looking at the process of de-colonialization and its domestic impact via four sets of institutions: Oxbridge, The Bank of England, The Royal Mint and the Royal military academy at Sandhurst, Stockwell aims to show how ...
Paul Lay, "Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate" (Head of Zeus, 2020)
February 03, 2020 09:00 - 41 minutesIn today’s episode, we catch up with Paul Lay, editor of the leading journal History Today, and a senior research fellow in early modern history at the University of Buckingham. Paul is the author of a brilliant new account of the British republic. Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate (Head of Zeus, 2020) is the most up to date and accessible narrative of the crucial period in which, after a string of military victories and the invasions of Ireland and Scotland, the r...
Gerald Dawe, "The Sound of the Shuttle: Essays on Cultural Belonging and Protestantism in Northern Ireland" (Irish Academic Press, 2020)
January 30, 2020 09:00 - 40 minutesOne of the leading poets of his generation, Gerald Dawe is also a fellow emeritus and professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. Throughout his long writing career he has been thinking about the situation of religion in his native Belfast and the ways in which religion has been instrumentalised to serve competing political agendas. But his writing has always recognised the vitality of religious community and experience. His most recent collection of essays, The Sound of the Shuttle: Essa...
Jeremy Black, "Geographies of an Imperial Power: The British World, 1688-1815" (Indiana UP, 2018)
January 24, 2020 09:00 - 29 minutesToday we talk to Jeremy Black, professor of history at Exeter University, UK, about two of his most recent book projects, both of which relate to the ways in which we think about empires, and the British empire in particular. Geographies of an Imperial Power: The British World, 1688-1815 (Indiana University Press, 2018) and Imperial legacies: The British Empire Around the World (Encounter, 2019) address some very timely themes. A great deal of recent discussion among humanities scholars has f...
Seán Crosson, "Gaelic Games on Film" (Cork UP, 2019)
December 30, 2019 09:00 - 1 hourToday we are joined by Seán Crosson, leader of the Sport and Exercise Research Group at NUI Galway, co-director of the MA in Sports Journalism and Communication, and Professor at the Huston School of Film and Digital Media. He is also the author of Gaelic Games on Film: From Silent Films to Hollywood Hurling, Horror, and the Emergence of Irish Cinema (Cork University Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the first depictions of Gaelic Games on film; American and British portrayals o...
Richard Whatmore, "Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans: The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution" (Princeton UP, 2019)
December 11, 2019 09:00 - 1 hourIn 1798, members of the United Irishmen were massacred by the British amid the crumbling walls of a half-built town near Waterford in Ireland. Many of the Irish were republicans inspired by the French Revolution, and the site of their demise was known as Genevan Barracks. The Barracks were the remnants of an experimental community called New Geneva, a settlement of Calvinist republican rebels who fled the continent in 1782. The British believed that the rectitude and industriousness of these ...
Hannah Weiss Muller, "Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Oxford UP, 2017)
July 15, 2019 08:00 - 41 minutesThere is no denying that the public remains fascinated with monarchy. In the United Kingdom, the royal family commands the headlines, but paradoxically they are distant and knowable all at once. The Queen is an iconic yet reserved figure, what with the kerchiefs, the corgis, and the deftly delivered speeches at state occasions. The younger royals seem to be interested in keeping it real, engaging different publics while maintaining ‘the Firm’s’ commitment to service to the nation. Like Greek ...