UCDscholarcast

This lecture explores the Holyhead Road as a cultural corridor along which people, books, and ideas move, and is part of a larger project examining infrastructural links as sites of cultural exchange between Britain and Ireland from Swift to Joyce.

This lecture is an exploration of the archipelagic island imagination of artist, poet and writer Brenda Chamberlain (1912–71) under the rubric of literary cartography. Part of a wider study of the literary text's 'mapmindedness' – the ways in which imaginative writing accomplishes specifically cartographic 'work' – the paper examines Chamberlain's emotional geographies of the Irish Sea, focusing on her fabling autobiographical account of her residence on Bardsey Island (Ynys Enlli), off the Llyn Peninsula, north Wales: Tide-race (1962).

Since the 150th anniversary of the Irish Famine in the 1990s, the Famine has been the subject of a remarkable commemorative boom, with more than one hundred public monuments newly constructed worldwide. Over the past decade Dr Emily Mark-FitzGerald has completed the first large-scale documentation of worldwide Famine monuments, which includes examples erected in Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, the United States, Canada, and Australia.

The Lecture explores the enduring fascination of the Irish Sea, focusing particularly on the Solway Firth, an area regarded by the nineteenth-century artist, art critic, writer and social reformer, John Ruskin, as second only to the Holy Land in its cultural importance. The ageing Ruskin wrote passionately about the Solway in his autobiography, Praeterita, which pays tribute to the beauty of the coast and its creative legacy, as evident in the work of Walter Scott, J. M. W. Turner and the local Scottish music.

This lecture identifies and examines a number of trends in recent historiographical work on the Great Famine including their striking appropriation of narrative and fictive tropes. It explores the existence – or perceived existence – of an 'affective gap' in existing historiography, which is seen to justify this wave of new publications, a gap reinforced by the failure of most famine scholarship to reflect in depth on its own affective and emotional register.

The Prisons Memory Archive is a collection of 170 filmed interviews inside Armagh Gaol and the Maze and Long Kesh Prison. Utilising protocols of inclusivity, co-ownership and life-storytelling, the PMA recorded participants, including prison staff, prisoners, chaplains, teachers and visitors, as they walked-and-talked their way around the empty sites of these prisons, which had operated during the political violence of the last third of the 20th century in Northern Ireland.

By 1916 the British Empire was at a point of crisis. The beginning of the First World War marked the end of a half-century of expansion in trade and speculation that made the empire a global network for the exchange of capital. Consequently, the foundations of Irish separatism were built in movements antagonistic to world trade. Self-help, folk culture and native language were conceived as late compensation for human losses incurred by the displacement of local resources into the global flow. Irish culture had its own recent and bitter evidence for the decimation of an imperial attachment. The memory of the famine inhabited the same cultural space as the increasing import of traded goods in the second half of the ninteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. So it is that James Joyce's short story 'The Dead' pictures the legacy of hunger through the imagination of a meal. If this first wave of globalization came to an end in Britain with the declaration of war in 1914, it suffered fatal arrest in Ireland in 1916. Reaction to the global empire underpinned the cultural and political movements that fed the rebellion. The Easter Rising was a product of the old order and a siren of the revolutions still to come.

When P.H. Pearse proclaimed 'The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic' on Easter Monday 1916, he acknowledged that Ireland of the Rising was 'supported by her exiled children in America'. What assistance did these "exiled children" provide, and how did people in America react to the Easter Rising?

This Scholarcast considers these questions by focusing on three individuals central to America's involvement and response. John Devoy, an exile in New York and keeper of the Fenian flame, raised money for the rebel cause and knew several leaders from their visits to America. Joyce Kilmer, who considered himself Irish (though his actual heritage brought that assertion into question), wrote both journalistic articles and poetry about the Rising and its significance for American readers. Woodrow Wilson, U.S. president in 1916 and candidate for re-election that November, sought to avoid international problems with domestic political implications, deliberately keeping his distance from a matter he considered internal to Great Britain. This Scholarcast probes the Easter Rising's American connections.

In this Scholarcast Paul Brady reflects on his early childhood encounters with music and on the importance of popular music in the 1960s to the formation of his own musical consciousness.  He recounts his earliest experiences playing with various  R ‘n’ B bands during his time as a student at UCD. In 1967 Brady joined The Johnstons whose combination of traditional Irish music with newer trends in folk music brought international success. Having distinguished himself as one of the most talented singers and accompanists of his generation he was invited by piper Liam O’Flynn to join Planxty in 1974.  Although deeply committed to traditional music, Brady stresses the importance of individual musical vision and the constant need for renewal and innovation.

This lecture examines poems which make reference to the Shipping Forecast, as broadcast by BBC Radio Four, including poems by Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Sean Street, Andrew McNeillie, and Andrew Waterman. The aim of the lecture is to consider how both the radio broadcast and the poems it inspired conceptualise the cultural geography of the British Isles. If culture is, as Wendy James has argued, 'adverbial' rather than 'nominal', what kind of cultural geography of the Isles is practised in the poems which draw upon the forecast's daily and nightly ritual of naming the sea areas around Britain and Ireland? How might this maritime and archipelagic imagination of the Isles be related to current post-devolutionary attempts to reconceive the British Isles, both politically and intellectually?