20 April 2021. What was the relationship between Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels (1726) and his own experience of contemporary Anglo-Irish travel? The Irish Sea made Swift into a restless and necessary traveller capable of living in the space between an imperial England and a colonised Ireland, never at home in any one place.
23rd March 2021. Join this international online book launch and discussion of a new book on women and the commemorations of the Irish revolutionary period. Women and the Decade of Commemorations, edited by Oona Frawley, highlights not only the responsibilities of Irish women, past and present, but it also privileges women's scholarship in an attempt to redress what has been a long-standing imbalance.
23 March 2021. No study has yet undertaken a detailed analysis of how the Great Irish Famine and negative stereotypes about the Irish affected the rate of their incarceration in Canadian lunatic asylums. Drawing on asylum admission records, case files, annual reports, casebooks, and administrative letters, this paper investigates how being Irish affected the medical treatment offered in Canadian colonial lunatic asylums and the gendered significance these medical determinations had on beliefs about the Irish before Canadian Confederation in 1867.
BRIGIDFEST committee are delighted to announce that as Victorian Government restrictions around Covid-19 have eased, BrigidFest will go ahead as a live event. With The Celtic Club’s support, the lunch will be held at a new venue, the historic hotel, Batman’s Hill on Collins. To ensure the viability of the event, we ask that you book early [...]
15 October, 19 November & 17 December, 2020. The British Association for Irish Studies have scheduled online talks on 15 October: Race, Representation & Resistance in Contemporary Irish Writing & Culture'. Also 19 November: Becoming Irish? Brexit, Identity & Citizenship. And 17 December: A celebration of Irish Studies in Britain.
The 13th Annual General Meeting of the Irish Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand (ISAANZ) will be held online via Zoom on Wednesday 9th December 2020 at 7:00pm ACDT (Adelaide), 7:30PM AEDT (Melbourne), 9:30PM NZDT (Wellington). Meeting agenda, minutes and annual reports can be found on the ISAANZ AGM page.
8 December, 2020. November 11 is a date that resonates in Australian history. But more than a half century before Kerr’s coup, November 11 was associated with another dismissal. For on that day in 1920 the Labor member for Kalgoorlie, Irish-born Hugh Mahon, was expelled from parliament for his criticism of British rule in Ireland. Jeff Kildea will discuss how that dismissal came about and how the echoes of the controversy continue to be heard down to the present.
1 December, 2020. This seminar will focus on the life of an exceptional yet little-known Irish-Australian, Vincent Joseph Hearnes (1903-1986). A talented artist, engineer and writer, Hearnes spent much of his life studying the Irish language, and creating illuminated manuscripts that drew inspiration from sources such as the Book of Kells. Nevertheless, he never set foot in Ireland.
17 November, 2020. John Harding, the printer of the seditious Letters written by Jonathan Swift under the pseudonym ‘M.B. Drapier’, died five months after his imprisonment in November 1724. It has been assumed that he died from jail fever, which is an assumption that consigns his death to the realm of ‘accident’ and which leaves Swift’s reputation unquestioned, but this paper presents never-before-seen evidence suggesting that Harding, who had been due to appear in court, was the victim of a vicious beating ordered by the Lord Lieutenant, John Carteret, Swift’s friend, and carried out with tacit knowledge on Swift’s part.
13 October, 2020. The intention of this paper is to track the use of commemorations, which have played a pivotal role in Ireland as a way of re-evaluating the ideals and objectives of those who fought for an independent county. A central focus is to examine commemorations at various stages so that we can follow the changing position of women in Ireland and gain insight as to how women’s contributions to the shaping of modern Ireland were in effect written out of Irish history books, until recently.
