184 episodes

Interviews with Scholars of Ireland about their New Books

New Books in Irish Studies New Books Network

    • Arts
    • 5.0 • 6 Ratings

Interviews with Scholars of Ireland about their New Books

    Colleen Taylor, "Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Colleen Taylor, "Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Coins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, pigs. Each of these objects were ubiquitous in the premodern cultural representation of the Irish. Through case studies of these five objects, Colleen Taylor’s new monograph Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830 (Oxford University Press, 2024) recovers the sometimes-oppressive, sometimes-liberatory meanings invested in nonhuman matter. Irish Materialisms collects a rich archive of material from William Carleton’s “Phil Purcel, the Pig Driver,” to the it-narrative The Adventures of a Bad Shilling in the Kingdom of Ireland, Gulliver’s Travels to Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl.
    Colleen Taylor is Professor of English at Boston College. She has held the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame and an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Award at University College Cork. Irish Materialisms is her first monograph.
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    • 1 hr 3 min
    Paul Bew, "Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics: Judging Dillon and Parnell" (Oxford UP, 2023)

    Paul Bew, "Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics: Judging Dillon and Parnell" (Oxford UP, 2023)

    The story of Charles Stewart Parnell, one of the greatest Irish leaders of the nineteenth century and also one of the most renowned figures of the 1880s on the international stage, and John Dillon, the most celebrated, but also the most neglected, of Parnell's lieutenants. As Paul Bew shows in Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics: Judging Dillon and Parnell (Oxford UP, 2023), the differences between the two men reflect both Ireland's past and its future. Every time the principle of consent for a united Ireland is discussed today, we can perceive the legacy of both men. Even more profoundly, that legacy can be seen when Irish nationalism tries to transcend a tribalist outlook based on the historic Catholic nation, even when the country is no longer so very Catholic.
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    • 1 hr 7 min
    Anelise Hanson Shrout, "Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy" (NYU Press, 2024)

    Anelise Hanson Shrout, "Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy" (NYU Press, 2024)

    Famine brought ruin to the Irish countryside in the nineteenth century. In response, people around the world and from myriad social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds became involved in Irish famine relief. They included enslaved Black people in Virginia, poor tenant farmers in rural New York, and members of the Cherokee and Choctaw nations, as well as plantation owners in the US south, abolitionists in Pennsylvania, and, politicians in England and Ireland. Most of these people had no personal connection to Ireland. For many, the famine was their first time participating in distant philanthropy.
    Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy (NYU Press, 2024) investigates the Irish famine as a foundational moment for normalising international giving. Dr. Anelise Hanson Shrout argues that these diverse men and women found famine relief to be politically useful. Shrout takes readers from Ireland to Britain, across the Atlantic to the United States, and across the Mississippi to Indian Territory, uncovering what was to be gained for each group by participating in global famine relief. Aiding Ireland demonstrates that international philanthropy and aid are never simple, and are always intertwined with politics both at home and abroad.
    This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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    • 55 min
    Michael O'Malley, "The Beat Cop: Chicago's Chief O'Neill and the Creation of Irish Music" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

    Michael O'Malley, "The Beat Cop: Chicago's Chief O'Neill and the Creation of Irish Music" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

    Francis O’Neill (1848–1936) was a Chicago police officer and a folk music collector. Michael O’Malley connects these two seemingly unrelated activities in his biography of O’Neill, The Beat Cop: Chicago’s Chief O’Neill and the Creation of Irish Music (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Born in Ireland in 1848, O’Neill emigrated to the United States soon after the Civil War was over and eventually joined the Chicago Police Department. He rose through the ranks and became Chief of Police in 1901. But in his spare time and after his retirement in 1905, O’Neill devoted himself to collecting Irish traditional music, ultimately publishing several important large collections of the repertory as well as a book that documents Ireland’s musical landscape at the turn of the twentieth century. O’Malley tells O’Neill’s story within multiple, interwoven contexts including British colonialism, Irish nationalism in the United States, American race relations, the standardization in American institutions, and the internal politics of the Chicago Police Department and the city it protected. O’Malley also reveals fascinating connections between O’Neill’s policework and his approach to Irish music.
    Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.
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    • 59 min
    Renée Fox, "The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature" (Ohio State UP, 2023)

    Renée Fox, "The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature" (Ohio State UP, 2023)

    The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (Ohio State UP, 2023) dwells on the literal afterlives of history. Reading the reanimated corpses—monstrous, metaphorical, and occasionally electrified—that Mary Shelley, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and others bring to life, Renée Fox argues that these undead figures embody the present’s desire to remake the past in its own image. Fox positions “necromantic literature” at a nineteenth-century intersection between sentimental historiography, medical electricity, imperial gothic monsters, and the Irish Literary Revival, contending that these unghostly bodies resist critical assumptions about the always-haunting power of history. 
    By considering Irish Revival texts within the broader scope of nineteenth-century necromantic works, The Necromantics challenges Victorian studies’ tendency to merge Irish and English national traditions into a single British whole, as well as Irish studies’ postcolonial efforts to cordon off a distinct Irish canon. Fox thus forges new connections between conflicting political, formal, and historical traditions. In doing so, she proposes necromantic literature as a model for a contemporary reparative reading practice that can reanimate nineteenth-century texts with new aesthetic affinities, demonstrating that any effective act of reading will always be an effort of reanimation.
    Renee Fox is an Associate Professor at UC Santa Cruz where she also serves as the Jordan-Stern Presidential Chair for Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Studies and Co-Director of The Center for Monster Studies. She’s co-edited quite a number of works in Irish Studies, Irish literature and monster literature as well writing for journals such as Victorian Studies, the Irish University Review and the New Hibernia Review.
    Aidan Beatty teaches in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University.
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    • 35 min
    Prophet Song: A Novel about a Totalitarian Takeover in Ireland

    Prophet Song: A Novel about a Totalitarian Takeover in Ireland

    It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we discuss Prophet Song (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023), Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize winning novel about a totalitarian regime coming to power in Ireland. We discuss the novel’s theorization of individual rights and political power, its success in depicting a family’s unraveling and its failures in telling a broader, more universal story. Why have critics lauded this novel, and who is its intended audience? More fundamentally, what is the role of literary fiction in popular culture?
    The UConn Popcast is proud to be sponsored by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Check out the institute’s Popular Culture Initiative.
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    • 1 hr 17 min

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