MELBOURNE IRISH STUDIES SEMINARS
An Inter-University Forum for Irish and Irish-Australian Studies
MISS has returned to Newman College, in the Jabiru Room in the Academic Centre, while also providing online access via Zoom. We follow all current Government regulations. Zoom links will be sent out a day before seminars. While most MISS talks will be on Tuesdays, the times may vary depending on availability of speaker and space at Newman. Please RSVP to dianne.hall [at] vu.edu.au if you would like to attend online. Recordings will be provided where possible on this page. General queries may be addressed to melbirishstudies [at] gmail.com
SEMINAR PROGRAMME
2024 Semester 1
Wednesday 22nd May, 2024 at 4:30pm (AEST)
Prof. Dianne Hall, Victoria University, Melbourne
Stories of migration and return in 1930s Ireland: The Schools Collection
Tuesday 12th March, 2024 at 4:30pm (AEDT)
Sarah Howe & Charles Richardson
Beyond the sectarian model? Voting and the future of Northern Ireland
Tuesday 6th February, 2024 at 4:30pm (AEDT)
Dr Mary Lawton, University College Cork
Nordic Joyce: Old Cawcaws Huggin and Munin for his Strict Privatear
Details for other topics this semester will be posted here soon.
2023 Seminars
Tuesday 21st November, 2023 at 6:30pm (AEDT), Online only
Prof Anna Johnston, University of Queensland
“Songs of an Exile”: Sentiment and Violence in Eliza Hamilton Dunlop’s Irish and Australian Elegies, 1838-63
Tuesday 12th September, 2023 at 6:30pm (AEST), Online only
Sophie Cooper, Queen’s University Belfast
Material culture, women and the Irish diaspora
Tuesday 22nd August, 2023 at 6:30pm (AEST), Online only
Rodney Sullivan and Robin Sullivan
A Hundred Thousand Welcomes: Opening Windows on Irish Queensland
Tuesday 25th July, 2023 at 4:30pm (AEST), Hybrid
Scott McCarthy, Deakin University, Melbourne
‘Gentlemanly young Australians’ and ‘Cawtholic snobs’: the liminal nature of middle-class Catholic identity in Victoria and New South Wales prior to the Great War
Tuesday 9th May, 2023 at 4:30pm (AEST)
Prof. Stephen Regan, Durham University and University of Melbourne
W. B. Yeats: Culture and Politics in 1921
Tuesday 18th April, 2023 at 4:30pm (AEST)
Prof. Dianne Hall and Loretta Dynan, Victoria University, Melbourne
Going Home: Returning to Ireland from Australia, 1850-1925
Tuesday 7th February, 2023 at 4:30pm (AEDT)
Prof Peter Gray and A/Prof Emily Mark-Fitzgerald O’Donnell Visiting Fellows in Irish Studies
The Life & Work of Count Paul Strzelecki (1797-1873): Australian Explorer and Irish Humanitarian
2022 Seminars
Tuesday 11th October, 2022 at 4:30pm (AEDT)
Rhys Ryan, 2022 Russell Beedles Performing Arts Fellow SLV
Na Trí Céilithe: Revisiting the dances of Melbourne’s Gaelic concerts in the early twentieth century
Tuesday 13th September, 2022 at 6:30pm (AEST)
Dr Damian Gleeson, 2022 Australian Religious History Fellow, SLNSW
Irish convicts and penal Catholicism: New evidence from the Therry Collection
Tuesday 23rd August, 2022 at 6:30pm (AEST)
Dr Matthew Grubits, Charles Sturt University
The Crisis of Captain Moonlite: Andrew George Scott in Australia
Tuesday 19th July, 2022 at 6:30pm (AEST)
Dr Tara McEvoy, Queen’s University, Belfast
Seamus Heaney in Australia
Tuesday 10th May, 2022 at 6:30pm (AEST)
Dr Jennifer McLaren
“This vile place”. An Irish Family in Trinidad in the Revolutionary Atlantic
Tuesday 22nd March, 2022 at 6:30pm (AEDT)
Dr Jimmy H. Yan, University of Melbourne
Contentious Routes: Ireland Questions, Radical Political Articulations and Settler Ambivalence in (White) Australia, c. 1909 – 1923
2021 Seminars
Tuesday 30th November, 2021 at 6:00pm (AEDT)
Dr Chloé Diskin-Holdaway, University of Melbourne
Becoming Aussie: Investigating accent change in the Irish community in Melbourne
Tuesday 28th September, 2021 at 7:30pm (AEST)
Prof. Fearghal McGarry and Dr Darragh Gannon, Queen’s University Belfast
Ireland 1922 : Independence, Partition, Civil War
Tuesday 14th September, 2021 at 6:30pm (AEST)
Prof. Emerit. Peter Kuch, University of Otago
The Sydney Theatre and the Irish play in the 1830s
Tuesday 10th August, 2021 at 6:30pm (AEST)
A/Prof. Katie Barclay, University of Adelaide
Men on Trial: Performing emotion, embodiment and identity in Ireland, 1800-45
Tuesday 29th June, 2021 at 6:30pm (AEST)
Dr Jeff Kildea, Dr Perry McIntyre and Dr Richard Reid
To Foster an Irish Spirit – writing the centenary history of the Irish National Association of Australasia
Tuesday 18th May, 2021 at 6:30pm (AEST)
Dr Sophie Cooper, Teaching Fellow in Irish History, University of Leicester
Women and the shaping of Irish identities in Melbourne 1857-1920
Tuesday 20th April, 2021 at 6:30pm (AEST)
Clive Probyn, Emeritus Professor of English, Monash University.
Anglo-Irish roads to Jonathan Swift
Tuesday 23rd March, 2021 at 12:00 noon (AEDT)
Prof. Jane McGaughey, Concordia University, Canada.
“These raving maniacs”: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Irish in Canadian Colonial Lunatic Asylums, 1832-1868
2020 Seminars
Tuesday 8th December, 2020 at 6:30pm (AEDT)
Prof Jeff Kildea, University of NSW
The Expulsion of Hugh Mahon
Tuesday 1st December, 2020 at 6:30pm (AEDT)
Dr Robert Lindsay
Vincent Hearnes and the cultural landscape of Irish Australia
Tuesday 17th November 2020 at 6:30pm (AEDT)
Dr Craig Pett
The death of Swift’s printer John Harding
Tuesday 13th October, 2020 at 6:30pm (AEDT)
Prof Sonja Tiernan, University of Otago
Commemorating controversy: Women and the shaping of Modern Ireland
Tuesday 1st September, 2020 at 6:30pm (AEST)
Prof Brian Bocking, University College Cork
A long-lost canvas: early Irish Buddhists in Melbourne
Tuesday 11th February, 2020 at 6:30pm (AEDT)
Dr Darragh Gannon, Queens University Belfast
Making Mannix global, 1919-1923: a Melbourne reader
UPCOMING SEMINARS
Details for any upcoming seminars are listed immediately below. Recordings and details of past seminars are provided further down the page.
Stories of migration and return
22 May 2024. Professor Dianne Hall will speak on the stories that people in 1930s Ireland told of migration to Australia and other diasporic destinations. In the 1930s, school teachers in Ireland were asked to set children the task of talking to older people in their communities about the past. Among the thousands of stories that were collected are a rich vein of narratives about migration. Dianne’s paper will analyse these narratives for information about returned migrants from Australia, who were usually portrayed as rich and successful. She will also examine some of the magical or folkloric stories that feature…
Read MoreNEWMAN COLLEGE
Seminars are held in the JABIRU ROOM in the Academic Centre at Newman College, Swanston Street, Carlton. After seminars the speaker usually joins any interested audience members for dinner at a local cafe or hotel. Queries about the seminar series may be directed to any of the MISS convenors: Philip Bull (La Trobe University), Frances Devlin-Glass (Deakin University), Dianne Hall (Victoria University), Elizabeth Malcolm (University of Melbourne), or Ronan McDonald (University of Melbourne)
PAST SEMINARS
Beyond the sectarian model?
12 March 2024. This paper reflects upon the win by Sinn Féin in the Northern Ireland Assembly election of May 2022, which ended the previously unbroken domination of the politics of the province by Protestant unionists. However, there are questions about the practical significance of the result, particularly in the way it was accompanied by the rise of non-sectarian parties. With an increasing number of voters who no longer take the sectarian divide as the main feature of the political landscape, there are hopes of a more ‘normal’ party system, where social or economic issues drive political allegiance. But in…
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Nordic Joyce
6 February 2024. Nordic Joyce compares the interrelationship of James Joyce’s works and specific Nordic literature in translation, employing an onomastic and etymological framework that offers an innovative opportunity to re-visit, re-view, and re-think Joyce’s canon. The paper proposes a methodology to assess Joyce’s work and specific Nordic narratives, arguing that names and terminology may be defined through their respective engagement with thematic considerations, thus providing a relevant critical structure by which to study the application or construction of these in Joyce’s writing.
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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…
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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…
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A Hundred Thousand Welcomes
22 August 2023. In 2018 the Board of the Queensland Irish Association appointed Rodney and Robin Sullivan as Honorary Historians, and commissioned a history to mark its 125th anniversary in 2023. When they asked President Jeff Spender what sort of book he had in mind he replied, ‘a comprehensive history, warts and all.’ They endeavoured to fulfill this request without incurring legal consequences, investigating themes that threaded their way through the history of the Club and Irish Queensland. These included sectarianism, commemoration, and gender. Club premises were a further preoccupation. This paper surveys their presence in A Hundred Thousand Welcomes,…
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