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19 May 2026. Elizabeth Malcolm died peacefully in Melbourne following a long illness aged 77. Elizabeth was the inaugural Gerry Higgins professor of Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne. She was also one of the founders of ISAANZ, the Australasian Journal of Irish Studies and a renowned historian of Irish and Irish Australian history.  Teacher, mentor and friend to many, Elizabeth will be greatly missed. She is survived by her son Hartley and her brother Robert. May she rest in peace. Funeral details to be announced. 

Applications are open for the 2027 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 4 January – Sunday 14 February 2027. 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 3 July 2026.

2026 Winner of AJIS/ISAANZ postgraduate essay prize is Constantin Torve from Queen’s University, Belfast, for his essay: Tipperary Boys, Red Ribbons, and the Eureka Stockade: The global Irish diaspora and agrarian protest repertoires in Australia, 1840-1860. The editors received a wide field of excellent essays and thank all those who entered the competition. Constantin’s essay will be published in the next issue of AJIS.

21 June 2026. Bloomsday in Melbourne has been celebrating 16th June for more than thirty years with staged productions of his work. This year they bring a brand new play to the stage, Between The Lines: The James Joyce/Groucho Marx Letters. A young female academic makes the find of a lifetime – and has to negotiate her way through the patriarchal world of academe in the mid-1980s. Bloomsday in Melbourne is also presenting their annual Bloomsday Seminar and Lunch on Sunday 21st June at The Wild Geese in Brunswick, where a panel will discuss, among other things, the repercussions of Helen Garner’s 1995 book The First Stone.

15 May 2026. With the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant, the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame invites applications for its postdoctoral fellowship program.The NEH Keough-Naughton Fellowship will enable outstanding scholars to continue their research while in residence at the Keough-Naughton Institute for up to three years beginning with the 2026-27 academic year. The fellowship is open to Ph.D. scholars in any area of Irish studies. The fellow’s stipend will be determined based on experience.The fellow will participate in a periodic research seminar and present a paper on their research during the academic year. Apart from the seminar, the fellow’s only obligation is to pursue their research. The fellow will be fully integrated into the life of the institute, with library privileges and access to the institute’s research tools and network.

15 April 2025. Accounts of the Ocean in premodern periods are often analysed against the background of what was not yet known at the time: studies abound in premodern seafarings, premodern zoologies, premodern geographies, premodern cosmographies. We often investigate the early medieval worldview in terms of what we now know that they did not. However, any study of the Ocean in the modern milieu immediately reveals that our current relationship with the Ocean goes far beyond what we know and do not know about it. This paper will attempt to review a few accounts of the Ocean from early medieval Ireland from this emerging perspective, in order to see whether we might find more in common with them than the often-discussed knowledge gap suggests.

18 March 2025. This paper focalizes provision in Claire Keegan’s fiction. Food transgresses boundaries between the natural and domestic worlds and problematizes comfortable notions of autonomy. Her work establishes a complex nexus of need and desire. I explore how scenes of consumption in Keegan’s short stories reveal economic, social, and moral vulnerabilities. This paper investigates how, through a fundamental preoccupation with desire and control, Keegan situates the dinner table as a space of reconstitution and manipulation.

5 March 2026. As the third Irish Home Rule crisis grew more threatening from 1911 onwards, Ulster Unionists began searching for allies across the British Empire, including in Australia. This research highlights the role and influence of the Australian anti-Home Rule movement from 1911 to 1914, investigating why the Loyal Orange Institution in Australia published resolutions sympathetic to the Unionist cause. The research also investigates who the supporters were, who donated thousands of pounds in aid, or who enlisted in an Australian Ulster volunteer contingent. Most importantly, it considers how widespread and organised these Ulster sympathisers were, particularly by 1914 when they produced an anti-Home Rule petition, which reached up to 250,000 signatures.

3 February 2026. ​Historian Perry McIntyre explores the immigration scheme to bring young destitute single women to Australia during the years 1848–50. Destitute families found refuge in workhouses in Ireland before the Great Famine of 1845. Australia offered young single women with little prospect of employment in Ireland a totally free passage to Sydney, Port Phillip and Adelaide. Who devised this scheme and why? Who were the key players and what were the outcomes for these young women and the colonies? Hear about a project that untangles the lives of the 4114 girls who participated in this immigration scheme.

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.