This lecture identifies and examines a number of trends in recent historiographical work on the Great Famine including their striking appropriation of narrative and fictive tropes. It explores the existence – or perceived existence – of an 'aff

Scholarcast 61: Style and context -Traditional Irish Harping

Apr 20th, 2017 32m 16s

This Scholarcast is an extract from Helen Lawlor's book, Irish Harping: 1900-2010 (Four Courts Press, 2012). This study provides a musical ethnography and a history of the Irish harp. It gives a socio-cultural and musical analysis of the music

Scholarcast 60: On Development, Waste and Ghosts

Jan 27th, 2016 37m 2s

Movements in ecocriticism that call for links to be made with postcolonialism challenge us, here in Ireland and outside of it, to do work that has not come naturally. As critics like Rob Nixon have pointed out, ecocriticism and postcolonialism

Scholarcast 59: Environmental Narratives, Climate Change and Sovereignty Loss

Jan 11th, 2016 22m 49s

This episode argues for a politicization of cultural and literary critiques of environmental issues in Ireland. It demonstrates methods through which Irish Studies can enter into a creative correspondence with the growing field of Environmental

Scholarcast 58: Taking the Floor: Dance, Nation and Gender in the Irish Revival

Nov 5th, 2015 59m 46s

This episode explores the process whereby dance was transformed from a practice enjoyed for its own sake into ‘a conscious symbolic act' of Irish nationhood during the Revival. Drawing on the work of dance scholars and historians, Barbara O'Con

Scholarcast 57: James Joyce, Treeless Hills and the Night of the Big Wind

Aug 11th, 2015 45m 35s

The fall of the great forests of Ireland provided James Joyce with a rich literary trope laden with cultural memory and socio-political resonances, which he utilized throughout his works and most fully in Finnegans Wake. The trope taps into a c

Scholarcast 56: Revival and Visual Art – Harry Clarke's Geneva Window

Jul 29th, 2015 45m 53s

The episode focuses on one of the most elaborate artworks to be made in Ireland in the 1920s, Harry Clarke's Geneva Window. The work, intended for the League of Nations, illustrates extracts from the texts of fifteen Irish writers. Clarke's inn

Scholarcast 55: Yeats, Revival and the Temporalities of Modernism

Jul 17th, 2015 48m 18s

This lecture puts forward the idea that Yeats's Revivalism lies at the heart of his modernism rather than at the "pre-modernist" periphery of his early career. For Yeats, as for so many of his contemporaries, Revival was not a form of nostalgia

Scholarcast 54: The Revival and the City in James Stephens's Dublin Fiction

Jun 24th, 2015 35m 32s

Examining the infiltration of new notions of urbanism into Irish culture in this era, in particular through the Housing and Town Planning Association of Ireland, this talk looks at the Dublin-based writings of James Stephens to show how revival

Scholarcast 53: Supply Chains: Labour, Poverty, and the the Nonhuman Animal of Joyce's Ulysses

Jun 4th, 2015 29m 40s

In this episode Adam Putz explores complementary representations of labour and poverty in Ulysses which disintegrate category distinctions like human and nonhuman.

Scholarcast 52: Gaelic Culture from the Child's Perspective - The Diaries of Kerry Schoolgirls (1916-1918)

Jun 2nd, 2015 26m 28s

One of the most complicated and persistent questions in the study of childhood in the past relates to the experiences of individual children. How can we know how children perceived the world around them when they have left little written eviden

Scholarcast 51: 'The IFSC as a Way of Organizing Nature': Neoliberal Ecology and Irish Literature

May 26th, 2015 43m 40s

In this episode Sharae Deckard analyses the unprecedented commoditization of new ecological commons under neoliberal capitalism and reflects on the importance of environmental humanities approaches to historicize conceptions of environment and

Scholarcast 49: Silence and Solitude: The absence of intimacy in Roddy Doyle's The Snapper

Apr 30th, 2015 21m 58s

In spite of the linguistic license that defines Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper, the characters maintain crucial silences throughout in relation to meaningful issues. This episode examines the system of self-imposed censorship that operates among the

Scholarcast 50: The Van

Apr 30th, 2015 23m 55s

The Van, the final novel in Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown trilogy, explores the physical, psychological and social impact of unemployment on the protagonist, Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. Having been laid off from his job as a plasterer, Jimmy struggles to find

Scholarcast 47: The Barrytown Trilogy: An Introduction to Roddy Doyle's Dublin

Apr 24th, 2015 20m 53s

What has become known as the Barrytown trilogy: The Commitments (1988), The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991), have become iconic in Irish culture. Centred on one family, the Rabbittes, Roddy Doyle makes reference to current events like the 199

Scholarcast 48: Everybody Speaks: Utopia and Polyphony in The Commitments

Apr 24th, 2015 21m 33s

Fredric Jameson proposes that a "utopia" is a political idea that hopes to transcend, or exist outside, politics, but that must, inevitably, begin inside politics – at "the moment of the suspension of the political," the political must inevitab

Scholarcast Series 13: Dublin, One City One Book 2015 - The Barrytown Trilogy

Apr 24th, 2015 3m 20s

Roddy Doyle is perhaps the single most successful novelist of this period, gaining an audience far beyond the environs of Dublin's Northside where most of his writing is set. Along with the emergence of rock group U2, Doyle represents a brash g

Scholarcast Series 12: Modalities of Revival

Mar 18th, 2015 2m 40s

In Irish Studies, the term Irish Revival broadly defines the cultural nationalist movement which thrived in Ireland from the late nineteenth-century up until the establishment of the Irish Free State. It refers to the pre-Independence period wh

Scholarcast 46: Children and the Irish Cultural Revival

Mar 18th, 2015 32m 4s

This episode discusses how and why various Irish nationalist individuals and organisations attempted to engage children and youth in the Irish cultural revival, particularly in the early twentieth century. It also explores the link between the

Scholarcast 45: Salmon Leap

Dec 22nd, 2014 13m 48s

In this episode, Eamonn Ryan deliberates on the collective leap which individuals and nation states need to make for a sustainable, habitable future. He argues that individuals cannot be faced with moral choices about the environment on a daily

Scholarcast Series 11: Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities

Dec 22nd, 2014 2m 40s

Every reader and scholar of Irish literature is familiar with its extensive genealogy of nature writing, and a 'sense of place' found across a great variety of texts. While not unique to Ireland such a rich heritage has produced some of the mos

Scholarcast 44: Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them

Jun 5th, 2014 1h 6m

In this lecture Paula Meehan delivers the Ireland Chair of Poetry Lecture, 2014. The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust was set up in 1998 and is jointly held between Queen's University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the

Scholarcast 43: Writing the City

Apr 25th, 2014 31m 35s

This talk explores the challenges involved in writing the city of Dublin into poetry. It considers the insights and emotions that emerge from reading the work of these poets as they write to remember, to celebrate and to interrogate Dublin as a

Scholarcast 42: 'Mine by right of love': Women Poets in the City

Apr 16th, 2014 26m 46s

This talk explores some poems by women published in the last one hundred years, from lesser-known figures such as Winifred Letts to contemporaries Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan.

Scholarcast 41: Peopling the Place

Apr 9th, 2014 25m 3s

This short talk will consider some of the ways in which poems in the If Ever You Go anthology visualise and present people in the city environment of Dublin. The poems included cover a broad historical range, from Samuel Ferguson to Paula Meeha