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
Semester 1, 2023
Tuesday 9th May, 2023 at 4:30pm (AEST), 7:30am (GMT)
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), 7:30am (GMT)
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), 5:30am (GMT)
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 Seminar Programme
Tuesday 11th October, 2022 at 4:30pm (AEDT), 5:30am (GMT)
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), 9:30am (GMT)
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), 9:30am (GMT)
Dr Matthew Grubits, Charles Sturt University
The Crisis of Captain Moonlite: Andrew George Scott in Australia
Tuesday 19th July, 2022 at 6:30pm (AEST), 9:30am (GMT)
Dr Tara McEvoy, Queen’s University, Belfast
Seamus Heaney in Australia
Tuesday 10th May, 2022 at 6:30pm (AEST), 9:30am (GMT)
Dr Jennifer McLaren
“This vile place”. An Irish Family in Trinidad in the Revolutionary Atlantic
Tuesday 22nd March, 2022 at 6:30pm (AEDT), 7:30am (GMT)
Dr Jimmy H. Yan, University of Melbourne
Contentious Routes: Ireland Questions, Radical Political Articulations and Settler Ambivalence in (White) Australia, c. 1909 – 1923
2021 Seminar Programme
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
UPCOMING SEMINARS
Details for any upcoming seminars are listed immediately below. Recordings and details of past seminars are provided further down the page.
NEWMAN 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
MISS: W. B. Yeats. Culture and Politics in 1921
9 May 2023. Prof. Stephen Regan speaking on “W. B. Yeats: Culture and Politics in 1921”. 1921 was a crucially important year in modern Irish politics. It was the year in which Ireland was partitioned under the Government of Ireland Act, in which a ceasefire brought an end to the most intense phase of the War of Independence, and in which the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed. It was also a crucially important year in the life and work of W. B. Yeats. It marked the publication of one of his most powerful books of poems, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, containing…
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MISS: Going home. Australians in Ireland 1850-1925
18 April 2023. Many Irish who settled in Australia wrote about their desire to go ‘home’, if not permanently then at least to visit and see familiar people and places. However only a small number of the estimated 400,000 Irish who settled in Australia between 1788 and the 1920s actually did undertake the long and expensive voyage back. Using the Irish census returns for 1901 and 1911, we will showcase some of the Australians and their families who were living in Ireland in the first decades of the twentieth century. Census data however does not include those Irish Australians who returned to…
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MISS: Life & Work of Count Strzelecki
7 February 2023. This talk will give an introduction to the life and work of the Polish count Paul (Paweł) Edmund Strzelecki, a figure significant in the 19th century history of Australia and Ireland. As a global traveller, in Australia Strzelecki is best-known as the one of the earliest European explorers and mappers of Gippsland, which he named, along with Australia’s highest peak, Mount Kościuszko. In Ireland, Strzelecki played a major role in humanitarian aid during the Great Famine of the 1840s, as one of the primary agents of the British Relief Association. Strzelecki was the subject of an exhibition…
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MISS: Melbourne’s Gaelic Concerts
11 October 2022. Rhys Ryan’s creative fellowship at the State Library of Victoria examines original manuscripts documenting the annual céilithe held in Melbourne in the early twentieth century. By focusing on the specific dances performed at these concerts and the context in which they occurred, his research considers how, in a period of burgeoning Gaelic cultural consciousness, these choreographies both preserved and promulgated Irish identity throughout the diaspora.
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MISS: Irish Convicts and Penal Catholicism
11 September 2022. Fr John Joseph Therry, one of two official Roman Catholic priests appointed to colonial New South Wales in 1820, is widely credited as the ‘Founder of the Catholic Church in Australia’. This presentation draws upon correspondence and case studies from the extensive Fr John Joseph Therry Collection held at the State Library of New South Wales to challenge dominant themes in early Irish-Australian historiography, including the religiosity and contributions by convicts and emancipists to the fledgling Catholic Church, and Therry’s role as a community as well as spiritual leader.
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RECORDINGS
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