Author: isaanz

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?

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.

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.