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AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF IRISH STUDIES
VOLUME TWENTY-TWO · 2022

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RECENT EVENTS & NOTICES

An Irish Goodbye – Fundraiser

Lament: Celebrating an Irish Tradition

Irish Melbourne: Then and Now

CFP: 10th Celtic Studies Conference

CFP: Global Irish Diaspora Congress 2023

• An Irish Goodbye – Fundraiser
  2 April 2023, The Academy Award winning short film, An Irish Goodbye, will be shown at ACMI, Federation Square, Melbourne on Sunday 2 April 2023 from 4:00 – 5:30pm, to raise funds for the Inclusion Foundation. The film will be followed by a conversation with the lead actor, James Martin. Following the death of their mother, a young man with Down syndrome and his estranged brother discover her unfulfilled bucket list. What happens when a parent dies? Many parents worry about this. So do their children. Sometimes magic happens. Sometimes your relationship with your siblings can change in surprising ways. Join us for this half hour short movie followed by conversation with young people with Down syndrome about their acting and working lives. Ticket costs will be donated to Inclusion Foundation to support young people with Down syndrome preparing for the workforce.
• Lament: Celebrating an Irish Tradition
  3 May 2023. Lament: A one-day (hybrid) celebration of the tradition of Irish Keen featuring poetry, music, performance and new research, on the 250th Anniversary of the poem ‘Lament for Art O’Leary’. Presented by The Cambridge Group for Irish Studies. The Irish Caoin or Keen was a vocal ritual performed at a wake or graveside. Highly stylised and yet capable of being intensely personal, it recognised the life of the deceased whilst also honouring grief of their loss. Performed (traditionally in Irish) by a group of women made up of professional ‘keeners’ and the female bereaved, its unique sound featured spontaneous utterance, repeated motifs, crying and elements of song. It has been described as ‘A very melancholy chant, rhythmic … Almost a spontaneous choir…’, and as ‘extremely beautiful’. The event will have two strands: in the morning, papers on Lament, its context, history and tradition will be presented by a range of respected Irish scholars, with ample time for discussion, questions and audience participation. The afternoon sessions will feature a poetry reading by Irish poets Martina Evans, Fran Lock and Mícheál McCann, who will consider the lasting impact of ‘Lament for Art O’Leary’, and the theme of the public performance of mourning and grief. Poets Paul Muldoon and Vona Groarke will then discuss their translations of ‘Lament for Art O’Leary’.  The day will close with a premiere performance of an extract of Irene Buckley’s opera, ‘Lament for Art O’Leary’, conducted by the composer, along with other settings of extracts of the poem composed by students of Cambridge University.
• Irish Melbourne: Then and Now
  9 March 2023. Irish Melbourne: Then and Now. A night of conversation and music with HE Ambassador Tim Mawe, Irish Ambassador to Australia. In advance of St Patrick’s day, the Celtic Club has the honour of hosting Irish Ambassador to Australia HE Tim Mawe for an evening of conversation, music and fun at the prestigious Woodward Room, in Melbourne University. The evening will be centred around a lively 30-minute panel discussion on the Irish history of this great city and some reflection on the current relationship between Ireland and Australia.  The Ambassador will be joined by Professor Dianne Hall, and historian Val Noone. The discussion will be moderated by Professor Ronan McDonald.
• CFP: 10th Celtic Studies Conference
  25 September 2023. The Tenth Australian Conference of Celtic Studies will be hosted by Celtic Language Teaching and Research,  School of Art, Communication and English, The University of Sydney from Monday 25 to Wednesday 27 September 2023 in person at The University of Sydney and online. Online sessions will take place in the early evening Sydney time, to facilitate international participation, and will be projected in the conference room for those attending in person.Papers are invited on any topic falling within the academically recognised discipline of Celtic Studies.  Papers taking a comparative or reception approach to areas within Celtic Studies are also welcome.  Papers will be of 20 minutes’ duration follow by 10 minutes’ question time. Abstracts of up to 300 words should be sent by Monday 24 July 2023.
• CFP: Global Irish Diaspora Congress 2023
  13 March 2023. The Global Irish Diaspora Congress which was scheduled for July 2020 will now be held from Wednesday 19 to Saturday 23 July 2023 at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. The closing date for new submissions for review is Monday March 13th 2023 at 17:00 GMT.
• Celtic Connections: “Successes of Failure”
  23 February 2023. The Celtic Connections Series is a new monthly event where multi-generational Celts from all walks of life are invited to come together, to chat and laugh, to listen to some music and to maybe even learn something new! No Irish blood is required! All you need to bring is an interest in Ireland and Irish Australia and a willingness to enjoy yourself. Our first event is being held on Thursday 23rd February at the Oxford Scholar on Swanston Street, Melbourne CBD. The aim of the night is to create a fun environment where you can meet and connect with new people and discuss everything from culture to politics to business. We will also host a Q&A with Professor Ronan McDonald on the theme “Successes of Failure.” 
• MISS: Life & Work of Count Strzelecki
  7 February 2023. This talk will give an introduction to the life and work of the Polish count Paul (Paweł) Edmund Strzelecki, a figure significant in the 19th century history of Australia and Ireland. As a global traveller, in Australia Strzelecki is best-known as the one of the earliest European explorers and mappers of Gippsland, which he named, along with Australia’s highest peak, Mount Kościuszko. In Ireland, Strzelecki played a major role in humanitarian aid during the Great Famine of the 1840s, as one of the primary agents of the British Relief Association. Strzelecki was the subject of an exhibition produced by Professor Peter Gray (Queen’s University Belfast) and Associate Professor Emily Mark-FitzGerald (University College Dublin), in collaboration with the Polish Embassy of Ireland and launched at the Royal Academy of Ireland, which has toured in both Ireland and Australia.
• CFP: RISE. Review of Irish Studies in Europe
  1 March 2023. Remapping Irish Literary and Cultural Landscapes in the Mid-Twentieth Century. This special issue of RISE defines mid-twentieth century as from the 1930s to the 1970s—roughly coinciding with the conservative years of “de Valera’s Ireland,” starting from Fianna Fáil entering government in 1932, up until Seán Lemass’s programmes of economic expansion which led to Ireland’s European Economic Community membership in 1973. It understands literary and cultural landscapes in the broadest term: horizontally as a geographic space with borders real and imagined; vertically as a space where high and low cultures clash and commingle. We welcome studies that examine the various forms of border-crossing—geographic, linguistic, generic—that contribute to a fuller map of Irish literature and culture in the mid-twentieth century. We especially appreciate scholarship that expands traditional disciplinary boundaries, from the fields of history, film, media, visual culture, and digital humanities.
• Postgraduate Essay Competition is Open
  ISAANZ and the editor of AJIS are pleased to announce the 2023 competition is now open to anyone enrolled in an MA or PhD between June 2022 and June 2023 at any tertiary institution, with essays on any aspect of Irish Studies considered. Essays entered for the prize and thus for publication in AJIS must not be submitted for publication elsewhere until after judging is completed. Submissions must be received by  31 March 2023.
• CFP: Multilingual legacies of Ireland’s revolution
  10 December 2022. Ireland’s revolutionary period (1916–1923) is generally studied and approached in terms of the English language. This does not reflect the rich linguistic landscape of early-twentieth century Ireland: large sections of the country were still Irish speaking, the travelling Mincéir community were strongly grounded in their own linguistic traditions, while regional dialects and language varieties, including Ulster Scots, were not just a marker of geographic background but also of socioeconomic class. Ireland was also home to various ethnic communities, including migrants from France, Germany, Switzerland, as well as a vibrant Jewish community from Russia. This symposium invites contributions from scholars working across different languages. It aims to explore how the events of the Irish revolution and civil war were conceived and reconceived in various languages at home and abroad at different points in time and during different political moments. In an increasingly diverse Ireland, what can we learn from these multilingual legacies?