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1 February 2026. The nineteenth century, including in Ireland, is often characterised by large-scale, abstract processes of accelerated change. The phenomenon of ‘modernisation’, encompassing various forms of economic rationalisation, administrative bureaucratisation, social standardisation, and cultural massification is seen to have left the Ireland of 1900 (or 1921) as almost unrecognisable from that of 1800 (or 1801). The voluminous records of a quasi-colonial ‘union’ state have provided rich pickings for historians and others seeking to situate and understand this transformation. But how do scholars find the human core to this enormous story? How did these changes impact ordinary lives? And indeed, how did ordinary people in nineteenth-century Ireland contribute to, contend with, or confound the transformations going on around them? The deadline for receipt of abstracts is 1 February 2026 and three conference travel bursaries of 300 euro each are available on a competitive basis.

12 November 2025. Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone / It’s with O’Leary in the grave’. Yeats once called himself ‘the last Romantic’, but the curious thing about his famous refrain in ‘September 1913’ is that none of the Romantics he memorializes there are actually poets. Not Edward Fitzgerald, not Wolfe Tone, not Robert Emmet, and not John O’Leary himself. What was Yeats’s relationship to the Irish poets who were writing around the turn of the 19th century? How did Yeats regard Thomas Moore, the most famous of them, whose unofficial role as Ireland’s national poet Yeats would lay claim to? What did Yeats’s own Romantic canon look like? What were its blind spots?

23 November 2025. Join us for a screening of Na Trí Céilithe (The Three Concerts), a short dance film that blends memory and movement to reimagine the vibrant Gaelic concerts held by Melbourne’s Irish diaspora in the early twentieth century. In the absence of archival footage, the film takes a bold leap – reinterpreting céilí dances through a contemporary lens to explore how tradition can live and breathe in the present. Perfect for lovers of film, Irish dance, and stories that connect past and present!

21 October 2025. ​Following David’s upcoming October 2025 Australian & New Zealand tour, he will be joined on stage by Prof. Ronan McDonald for an entertaining evening and discussion on growth trends, geo-politics, currencies, financial markets and the link between economics, along with his unique sense of humour and objective to make economics digestible and engaging for all.

12 December 2025. The Association of Celtic Students will be holding its thirteenth annual conference on 11-13 June 2026 in Dublin, Ireland. We welcome presentations in English and in any of the Celtic languages. We accept papers from current students and recent graduates on any aspect of Celtic Studies, as well as any topic associated with any of the Celtic languages, peoples, literatures, histories, cultures, including comparative and reception approaches. Conference papers should be between 15-20 minutes in length. We will also be hosting posters on our online Conference Hub throughout the event. We welcome poster submissions on any aspect of Celtic Studies, in any of the Celtic languages and/or English. Abstracts of up to 200 words should be submitted by December 12th 2025.

20 August 2025. This talk will explore how Irish people understand their historical links to settler colonialism and how valid or common it is for them to express solidarity with other colonised peoples, particularly Indigenous groups. Focusing on the relationship between the Irish and Native Americans, especially the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma since the 1990s, the talk will explore these expressions of solidarity. It draws on thousands of comments submitted by Irish donors to a GoFundMe page between 2020 and 2024.

2025 Winner of AJIS/ISAANZ postgraduate essay prize is Ciara Maloney (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick) for her essay titled “Haunting in The Beauty Queen of Leeane and The Lonesome West”. The editors received a wide field of excellent essays and wish to thank all those who entered the competition.

16 August 2025. The Great Irish Famine Commemoration will be on Saturday 16 August at 11:00am at Hyde Park Barracks.  On this day we remember all those who left Ireland during the Great Irish Famine, on the long journey to Australia and other parts of the world.

9 July 2025. From his first ‘pars’ (short contributions) for the Bulletin, Joseph Furphy’s curiosity about Aboriginal ethnology and languages is continuous and subtly counter-cultural. Joseph Furphy’s The Buln-Buln and the Brolga (1948) stages the meeting in Echuca between the urban authoress and the bushmen and their talk is a reminder of a frontier which by the early twentieth century was increasingly in retreat, vicious, secretive and remote.

Applications are open for the 2026 O’Donnell Fellowship in Irish Studies at St Mary’s Newman Academic Centre, University of Melbourne, Australia. The O’Donnell Fellowship is available for the period Monday 5 January – Sunday 15 February 2026. The Fellowship, which is non-stipendary, offers: college living quarters and all meals; access to the Academic Centre building and collections; research space in the Gerry Higgins Room; access to the University of Melbourne library; $2000 for travel and other expenses. The application deadline is Friday 11 July 2025..