This Scholarcast is an extract from Helen Lawlor's book, Irish Harping: 1900-2010 (Four Courts Press, 2012). This study provides a musical ethnography and a history of the Irish harp. It gives a socio-cultural and musical analysis of the music and song associated with all Irish harp styles, including traditional style, song to harp accompaniment, art-music style and the early Irish harp revival.
Apr 20, 2017
32 min
This episode argues for a politicization of cultural and literary critiques of environmental issues in Ireland. It demonstrates methods through which Irish Studies can enter into a creative correspondence with the growing field of Environmental Humanities scholarship.
Jan 27, 2016
37 min
This episode argues for a politicization of cultural and literary critiques of environmental issues in Ireland. It demonstrates methods through which Irish Studies can enter into a creative correspondence with the growing field of Environmental Humanities scholarship.
Jan 11, 2016
22 min
This episode explores the process whereby dance was transformed from a practice enjoyed for its own sake into 'a conscious symbolic act' of Irish nationhood during the Revival. Drawing on the work of dance scholars and historians, Barbara O'Connor examines the role of the Gaelic League in developing an'authentic' national dance canon that called for an ideal Irish dancing body.
Nov 5, 2015
59 min
The fall of the great forests of Ireland provided James Joyce with a rich literary trope laden with cultural memory and socio-political resonances, which he utilized throughout his works and most fully in Finnegans Wake. The trope taps into a chain of historical events well-rehearsed by nationalist rhetoric and thus it is compatible with Joyce's innovative utilisation of repeated motifs with multiple textual resonances.
Aug 11, 2015
45 min
The episode focuses on one of the most elaborate artworks to be made in Ireland in the 1920s, Harry Clarke's Geneva Window. The work, intended for the League of Nations, illustrates extracts from the texts of fifteen Irish writers. Clarke's innovative approach to the technique of stained glass and his wide knowledge of ancient and modern art and literature made him one of the most remarkable and versatile visual artists of his generation.
Jul 29, 2015
45 min
This lecture puts forward the idea that Yeats's Revivalism lies at the heart of his modernism rather than at the "pre-modernist" periphery of his early career. For Yeats, as for so many of his contemporaries, Revival was not a form of nostalgia, in which the past was cut off from experience; nor was it nostalgia in the sense of longing of a time that never was. Rather it was a deliberate attitude toward time, in which a "backward glance" brought the past into a present moment of critical reflection.
Jul 17, 2015
48 min
Examining the infiltration of new notions of urbanism into Irish culture in this era, in particular through the Housing and Town Planning Association of Ireland, this talk looks at the Dublin-based writings of James Stephens to show how revivalist writers were responsive to the peculiarities of Irish urban experience.
Jun 24, 2015
35 min
In this episode Adam Putz explores complementary representations of labour and poverty in Ulysses which disintegrate category distinctions like human and nonhuman.
Jun 4, 2015
29 min
One of the most complicated and persistent questions in the study of childhood in the past relates to the experiences of individual children. How can we know how children perceived the world around them when they have left little written evidence of their own experience and interpretations of their world? In this lecture, Riona NicCongáil attempts to address the above question by looking at the everyday lives of Irish-speaking children during the revivalist period.
Jun 2, 2015
26 min
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