Events

In relation to the ocean

23 Mar 202614 Apr 2026by isaanz

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.

Events

Claire Keegan’s (Re)past

5 Mar 202623 Mar 2026by isaanz

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.

Events

Anti-Irish Home Rule Movement

25 Feb 202612 Mar 2026by isaanz

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.

Events

Women Immigrants from Irish workhouses

15 Jan 20265 Feb 2026by isaanz

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.

Events, Notices

CFP: Intimacies in nineteenth-century Ireland

14 Dec 202516 Dec 2025by isaanz

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.

Events

Yeats and the Poetry of ‘Romantic Ireland’

5 Nov 202517 Nov 2025by 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?

Events

Na Trí Céilithe

3 Nov 202527 Nov 2025by isaanz

23 November 2025. Join us for a screening of Na Trí Céilithe (The Three Concerts), a short dance film that blends memory and movement to reimagine the vibrant Gaelic concerts held by Melbourne’s Irish diaspora in the early twentieth century. In the absence of archival footage, the film takes a bold leap – reinterpreting céilí dances through a contemporary lens to explore how tradition can live and breathe in the present. Perfect for lovers of film, Irish dance, and stories that connect past and present!

Events

David McWilliams in conversation

12 Oct 202523 Oct 2025by isaanz

21 October 2025. Following David's upcoming October 2025 Australian & New Zealand tour, he will be joined on stage by Prof. Ronan McDonald for an entertaining evening and discussion on growth trends, geo-politics, currencies, financial markets and the link between economics, along with his unique sense of humour and objective to make economics digestible and engaging for all.

Events

Irish-Native American solidarities

11 Aug 20254 Sep 2025by isaanz

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.

Events

Great Irish Famine Commemoration

4 Jul 20254 Sep 2025by isaanz

16 August 2025. The Great Irish Famine Commemoration will be on Saturday 16 August at 11:00am at Hyde Park Barracks. On this day we remember all those who left Ireland during the Great Irish Famine, on the long journey to Australia and other parts of the world.