Tag: MISS

24 June 2026. Amongst the possessions that Irish-born Anne Trotter packed in her trunk to start a new life in Australia was her needlework specimen book. Arriving in Port Phillip in 1844, Anne Trotter was one of many assisted migrants who, along with other members of her family, were deemed suitable emigrants to the colony. Donated to Museums Victoria by a descendant in 2014, Anne's needlework book, which includes various plain sewing exercises and finely-stitched miniature shirts and a dress, provides an insight into the formal schooling provided to young working class girls in nineteenth century Ireland and the skills which they brought to Australia. This lecture will discuss the context of the needlework book and posit its value to a young female emigrant.

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.

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.

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.

28 May 2025. The Ballymurphy Massacre is the name given to the killing of eleven civilians by the British Army on 9-11 August 1971 in Belfast, during the early years of the Troubles conflict. This presentation examines the relationship of the contemporary family led campaign to Springhill Community House’s decades old legacy as a participatory, community-based organisation in Ballymurphy.

16 April 2025. During 2020-2023 An Bosca Leabharlainne (The Library Box) delivered over 70,000 specially selected books to 1831 primary schools throughout Ireland, South and North. This was the flagship project of Áine Ní Ghlinn while she was Laureate na nÓg/Children’s Poet Laureate. Áine Ní Ghlinn will discuss the challenges involved in this effort to find readers in a minority language – for many pupils Irish is a subject they have to do – and she will report on the success of this campaign.

11 September 2024. Dr Elizabeth Pearce will explore John Montague’s early poem ‘All Legendary Obstacles’, in which the poet creates a semi-concealed internal shape that counters the poem’s sense of external bleakness and chaos. It then explores the French translation, ‘Tous les obstacles légendaires’ by Claude Esteban, a contemporary of Montague in Paris. Might a comparable sense of underlying order be achieved by the translator, in a sea of turmoil? This talk reflects on the complex terrain of the poem, and its translation into French, illustrating how this poem is emblematic of the pervading themes in Montague’s work.

21 August 2024. Jeremy George will present a paper drawing on concepts from the recent scholarship in settler colonial studies and “British World” history by John Darwin, James Belich, Priya Satia, Lachlan McNamee, and others, to reassess Elizabeth Bowen’s short story “Her Table Spread” first published in 1930. One of Bowen’s most famous and anthologised stories, “Her Table Spread” has often been received as an example of the Anglo-Irish gothic tradition pioneered by Sheridan Le Fanu and analysed most prominently by Roy Foster.