Year: 2023

Notices

CFP: Irish women and relationships from medieval to modern history

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CFP: Irish women and relationships from medieval to modern history

12 January 2024. The Women’s History Association of Ireland’s annual conference will take place at Queen’s University Belfast on 26-27 April 2024. The broad theme for this year is ‘Irish women and relationships from medieval to modern history’. Papers which relate to the theme are welcome. Abstracts of between 250-300 words and a short biography should be sent before 12 January 2024. The Women’s History Association of Ireland welcomes contributors at all career stages and international participants. 

Conferences, Events

ISAANZ 26 | Disruptions and Transitions

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ISAANZ 26 | Disruptions and Transitions

12-14 December 2023. Registration is now open for ISAANZ 26. A draft programme for the conference is available, subject to change. A final programme will be available closer to the date. Discounted registration rates are available for current financial members of ISAANZ, and special rates are also available for full-time students. Renew your membership if you've not done so already.

Events

2023 Irish Famine Orphan Girls Commemoration

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2023 Irish Famine Orphan Girls Commemoration

19 November 2023. The annual commemoration event this year marks a dual anniversary; 175 years since the start of the Earl Grey Scheme (1848-1850) and the first ships to Australia, and 25 years since the Famine Rock memorial was erected at Williamstown (1998). Guest speakers will share fascinating insights into this important moment in Irish-Australian history. Meet at 2:00pm, Famine Rock, Burgoyne Reserve, The Strand (near Stevedore Street), Williamstown

Events

“Songs of an Exile”: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop

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“Songs of an Exile”: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop

21 November 2023. Prof Anna Johnston speaking on the Irish and Australian poetry of Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796-1880), who emigrated to New South Wales in 1838 from Coleraine. Dunlop's best known (and highly controversial) poem, 'The Aboriginal Mother', was written in response to the 1838 Myall Creek Massacre, one of the only massacres of First Nations people by settlers that were prosecuted in the colonial Australian courts. More conventionally, Dunlop's sentimental elegies mourned Anglo-Irish family members and members of colonial society. Connecting Dunlop's literary and family history back to Northern Ireland reveals how she used a sentimental poetic discourse, popular with women publishing in new periodicals and literary albums, to grapple with 'the uncanny persistence of violence in a globalised liberal society' (Hensley, Forms of Empire, 1). The bloody history of revolution and its suppression in Ireland remained potent metaphors through Dunlop's writing career. She joins a cadre of poets who imagined liberal forms of colonialism, while also finding themselves deeply implicated in its contradictions and complicities.

Events

Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing

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Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing

22 November 2023. Opening with a close reading of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), this paper by Professor Paige Reynolds offers a new history of Irish women’s writing, exposing the critical biases that have occluded our understanding of its intricate relationship with literary modernism. It will also lay out the conceptual framework for the stubborn mode of modernism. Stubborn modes are tried-and-true literary tactics that trigger a sense of recognition when readers encounter them, a constellation of traits—including style, tone, forms, content, and history—commonly associated with a particular literary movement or school that travels across time. Composed of literary conventions, the stubborn mode of modernism in contemporary fiction sustains the aesthetic as well as the political impulses associated with the movement’s early history. By helping to remind readers of the sweep of history, the stubborn mode in Irish women’s fiction underscores the durability of certain cultural problems, as well as calling attention to remedies previously imagined for them, whether the outcomes of those interventions have proven to be successful, unsuccessful, or (more likely, as seen across time) a measure of both.

Notices

Asst. Prof. of Contemporary Ireland

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Asst. Prof. of Contemporary Ireland

27 November 2023. The University of Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs is hiring an Assistant Professor who specializes in Contemporary Ireland, broadly defined. Fields that may be considered include, but are not limited to, political science, economics, international relations, peace studies, history, development studies, sociology, or any other field or discipline that touches on contemporary Ireland.

Events

Richard Madden. An Irishman of many parts

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Richard Madden. An Irishman of many parts

25 October 2023. Hugh Myers speaking on Richard Madden, an Irish Catholic surgeon who served as colonial secretary to Western Australia (Swan River colony) in 1848-49, later becoming a prominent historian and biographer of the 1798 movement. During his time in Australia, Madden advocated for the position of indigenous people, insisting they be paid for their work. He had previously worked as a magistrate in the West Indies during the 1830s in the aftermath of the emancipation of the slaves.

Events

Irish Film Festival 2023

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Irish Film Festival 2023

5 October - 5 November 2023. In cinemas and online. Celebrate all things community and culture with our carefully selected program of movies and documentaries that reflect a new Ireland in 2023, whilst sharing stories from our past that deserve to be heard. Enjoy some of the finest Irish stories on screen never seen before in Australia that will move you in the way only Irish stories can. Whether you’re watching at one of our exciting cinema events in person, soaking up the stories on screen with family and friends at home or immersing yourself in our online offerings from your phone, there’s something for everyone.

Events

Material culture, women and the Irish diaspora

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Material culture, women and the Irish diaspora

12 September 2023. Limerick lace veils were used in ceremonies designed to introduce Sisters of Mercy to often-suspicious Australian communities while Perth-based Sisters wrote back to Ireland requesting coloured eyeglasses be sent to enable them to maintain their health and therefore their work. Across the world, women religious swapped tips and materials to help them to sustain their emerging communities. In turn, the Irish diaspora used the built environment to encourage a sense of belonging abroad. Looking at these religious and ethnic communities through a material culture lens allows for greater insight into the tools that women across the Irish diaspora, especially women religious, used to establish and crucially, to sustain, communities during the nineteenth century. In this paper Dr Sophie Cooper will use material culture to explore connections between women, and particularly women religious, across the Irish diaspora.