Jim Kelly became Ambassador of Ireland to Canada in August 2016. This is Ambassador Kelly's fourth posting as an Irish diplomat. He previously served as Deputy Permanent Representative at Ireland's Mission to the United Nations in New York (2008-13), and also served at Ireland's Permanent Representation to the European Union in Brussels (2001-05) and at the Embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark (1995-98). Most recently, Ambassador Kelly established and directed the new Policy Planning function at the Foreign Ministry, where he led policy development on key issues such as the implications of Brexit for Ireland, and Ireland's response to the refugee and migration crisis.

This podcast was produced by Aaron Lakoff.

Dr. Irene Whelan has taught at Manhattanville College since 1990. A native of County Galway on Ireland’s west coast, she was educated at the National University of Ireland - Galway and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied with James S. Donnelly Jr., a leading historian of modern Ireland. Her dissertation on the evangelical movement in Ireland was published as The Bible War in Ireland: The ‘Second Reformation’ and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1780-1840 in 2005. Her scholarly focus is on the intersection of religious and political history at the local, as well as the global level. She is currently engaged in co-editing a volume of essays, Landscape of Promise and Ruin: Culture, Identity and Reality in the Irish West, 1830-1930, as well a book-length study of the concept of an Irish ‘spiritual empire’ in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This podcast was produced by Aaron Lakoff.

Brad Kent is Professor of British and Irish Literatures at Université Laval in Quebec City. In 2013-14 he was Visiting Professor at Trinity College Dublin in the School of English, and in the spring of 2018 he will be the C.P. Snow Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, where he was the Hobby Fellow in the spring of 2009. His recent publications include George Bernard Shaw in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and The Selected Essays of Sean O'Faolain (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016). He is currently general editor of an eight-volume series of Shaw’s writings that will be published by Oxford World’s Classics in 2021. At present he is working on a monograph entitled ‘Literature, Censorship, and the Cultural Politics of Affect in Ireland,’ which is supported with a major grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

This podcast was recorded and produced by Aaron Lakoff and Simone Lucas.

Marina Carr’s works consist of 13 plays including two for children, between 1989 and 2007. In 2015, the Opera Theatre Company toured Ireland with Carr’s contemporary translation of Rigoletto. In November 2016, she wrote an original oratorio for Wicklow County Council, bringing together choirs, solo singers, and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. Her reimagining of Hecuba was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in September 2015, and her reimagining of Anna Karenina played for two months at the Abbey Theatre until January 2017. Carr is the most recent winner of the prestigious literary honour, the Windham-Campbell Prize. Other prizes include The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, The American/Ireland Fund Award, The E.M. Forster Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, The Macaulay Fellowship, and The Puterbaugh Fellowship. She has also taught at Trinity, Villanova, Princeton and currently lectures in the English department at Dublin City University.​

Recorded and produced by Aaron Lakoff and Simone Lucas

Welcome to the very first edition of the Concordia Irish Studies Podcast!

Kevin Whelan, Director of the Keough-Naughton Notre Dame Centre in Dublin, has been a visiting professor at New York University, Boston College and Concordia University. He is a prolific writer and editor of books and articles on Ireland’s history, geography and culture, including the bestselling Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape. For many years, Kevin Whelan directed Notre Dame's annual Irish Seminar, the leading seminar in the field of Irish Studies.