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AJIS/ISAANZ POSTGRADUATE PRIZE WINNER
Ciara Smart, University of Tasmania for her essay
Forty Years of Irish Engagements with Australian Aboriginal Peoples On-Screen

AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF IRISH STUDIES
VOLUME TWENTY-THREE · 2023

RECENT EVENTS & NOTICES

• O’Donnell Fellowship 2025
  Applications are open for the 2025 O’Donnell Fellowship in Irish Studies at St Mary’s Newman Academic Centre, University of Melbourne, Australia. The application deadline is Friday 12 July 2024.
• Samuel Beckett and the Rainbow Girl
  13-23 June 2024. “Samuel Beckett and the Rainbow Girl” – an exciting new play from Bloomsday in Melbourne. Written by Steve Carey, and directed by Carl Whiteside. The centrepiece of the Bloomsday in Melbourne Festival in 2024. It’s late 1920s Paris and Lucia, muse and only daughter of notorious banned novelist James Joyce, is poised to succeed as a daringly original dancer. Into this dysfunctional artistic household arrives alluring young Dubliner Samuel Beckett – enigmatic, hypereducated, a writer seeking his own literary voice. He finds himself drawn into the older writer’s web… and at the same time becomes the reluctant subject of Lucia’s increasingly obsessive amorous gaze. A series of romantic misunderstandings, at first comic but increasingly tragic, strip Lucia of her nascent career and, her family and love interest both lost to her, she spirals into madness.
• 2024 Postgraduate Prize Winner
  2024 Winner of AJIS/ISAANZ postgraduate essay prize is Ciara Smart for her essay titled “Forty Years of Irish Engagements with Australian Aboriginal Peoples On-Screen”. The editors received a wide field of excellent essays and wish to thank all those who entered the competition.
• Stories of migration and return
  22 May 2024. Professor Dianne Hall will speak on the stories that people in 1930s Ireland told of migration to Australia and other diasporic destinations. In the 1930s, school teachers in Ireland were asked to set children the task of talking to older people in their communities about the past. Among the thousands of stories that were collected are a rich vein of narratives about migration. Dianne’s paper will analyse these narratives for information about returned migrants from Australia, who were usually portrayed as rich and successful.  She will also examine some of the magical or folkloric stories that feature Australia as a far off destination where anything might happen.
• CFP: The Global/Oceanic/Nineteenth Century
  15 September 2024. Global Nineteenth-Century Studies is pleased to invite submissions for a special issue on “The Global / Oceanic / Nineteenth Century.” We welcome essays that employ oceanic approaches to nineteenth-century culture, ecology, economics, history, and politics in a range of global contexts. Submissions should be typed and double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman font, with 1-inch margins on all sides. Supporting files, including illustrations, figures, and tables, must be submitted with the written text. Essays should generally be in the range of 9,000 words (including notes and bibliography). Manuscript submissions may be sent to global19c@nus.edu.sg by 15 September 2024. The expected date of publication is fall/winter 2025.
• CFP: Pacific “Celts”? Diasporas, cross-cultural dialogue and revitalized identity
  15 May 2024. This symposium will analyse the diversity and the historical, cultural, linguistic and identity-related richness of these so-called “Celtic” diasporas, and question “Celtic” identities in the Pacific. It will also highlight the cultural and ethnic blending between these diasporic communities and indigenous peoples, such as the Irish-Australian Aborigines, or in New Caledonia, where certain tribes may have mixed Kanak and Irish origins. Proposals (French or English) should include an abstract of up to 300 words accompanied by a brief bibliography, and a biography of up to 100 words. It is intended that a subsequent publication will include a number of papers from the symposium.
• CFP: Irish Studies Beyond the Text
  12 April 2024. Guest editors Emily Mark-FitzGerald (UCD) and Emma Radley (UCD) invite contributions for a special issue of Irish University Review. Over the last five years, a number of collections, special issues, handbooks, and critical companions have emerged in Irish Studies, focused (in various ways) on defining and mapping the field in the twenty-first century. Collectively they have sought to account for the state(s) of Irish Studies after the Celtic Tiger, through recession, austerity, and pandemic. These include the 2020 Jubilee issue of the Irish University Review, edited by Emilie Pine; Paige Reynolds’ The New Irish Studies, Cambridge University Press, 2021; Reimagining Irish Studies for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Eamon Maher andEugene O’Brien, published by Peter Lang in 2021; and, most comprehensively, The Routledge Handbook of Irish Studies, edited by Renée Fox, Mike Cronin and Brian Ó Conchubhair, published in 2022.
• CFP: Oral History & Identity
  5 April 2024. The Oral History Network of Ireland (OHNI) is pleased to announce its 2024 conference on the theme of Oral History and Identity. The conference will be held 21-22 June 2024 at Ulster University (Derry ~ Londonderry Campus). To participate, please submit an abstract (of not more than 250 words) along with your contact details by no later than Friday 29th March 2024. All proposals must demonstrate a clear engagement with oral history and/or personal testimony, and we actively encourage the use of audio and/or video clips.
• CFP: The Power of Oral History
  1 April 2024. CFP deadline for OHA Biennial Conference. Oral history can be powerful in so many ways. Interviews generate potent emotions. Recordings capture the power of voice as well as the power of silence. Multimedia productions engage and connect new audiences with the complexities of the past. Fundamentally, oral history transforms the historical archive and challenges mainstream histories. It can shift traditional power dynamics, bring forth new voices and perspectives, reshape policies and politics, and shake up old certainties. Yet those possibilities come with risk as well as reward. Recording sensitive subjects is never easy. Creating an oral history production takes time, skill and care, and sometimes goes wrong. Imaginative re-uses of oral history recordings can raise ethical and legal complexities. And oral histories that disrupt accepted narratives can generate pain and conflict, in families, communities and nations.
• CFP: Time in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
  31 March 2024. The deadline for the receipt of abstracts for the Society for the Study of Nineteenth Century Ireland (SSCNI) Annual Conference 2024 has been extended. As we grapple with an accelerating digital culture defined by just-in-time deliveries, synchronous communication, instantaneous connectivity, and 24/7 availability, the 2024 SSNCI Conference aims to bring together researchers from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds to consider ‘time’ itself as a neglected dimension of Irish history. A critical approach to temporality in nineteenth-century Ireland and amongst the Irish diaspora might embrace a variety of methodological foci, from visual, dramatic and literary representations of time to its perception, measurement and use in everyday life. From the rise and fall of local ‘time zones’ to the disruptive ‘annihilation of time’ brought about by steam, locomotion and telegraphy, the emergence of modern synchronized ‘clock time’ accompanied seismic shocks in Irish life.