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...
Oct 29, 2013•39 min
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. In this overview of her project, she dis...
Oct 28, 2013•23 min
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 ...
Aug 23, 2013•48 min
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 related absence of gender as a c...
Aug 20, 2013•34 min
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.
May 13, 2013•13 min
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. Ir...
Apr 12, 2013•32 min
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, raise...
Feb 20, 2012•40 min
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 sin...
Aug 31, 2011•36 min
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 ...
May 27, 2011•36 min
This presentation looks at the relationship between England and the British discipline of English Literature, whose origin, it argues, owes much to the state unification of Britain between 1790 and 1815, particularly informed by an anti-French-Revolutionary Burkean philosophy which was defined by opposition to a written constitution, and by opposition to the national. It suggests that English Literature is stuck in this Burkean-organic-deep-conservative moment in terms of its methodology and its...
May 27, 2011•21 min
In his episode Aude Doody reads from the Introduction to Pliny’s Encyclopedia: The Reception of the Natural History, published by Cambridge University Press. The Elder Pliny's Natural History is one of the largest and most extraordinary works to survive from antiquity. It has often been referred to as an encyclopedia, usually without full awareness of what such a characterisation implies. In this book, Dr Doody examines this concept and its applicability to the work, paying far more attention th...
Dec 10, 2010•11 min
In this episode Nicholas Daly reads from the Introduction to his book Sensation and Modernity in the 1860's published by Cambridge University Press. This is a study of high and low culture in the years before the Reform Act of 1867, which vastly increased the number of voters in Victorian Britain. As many commentators worried about the political consequences of this 'Leap in the Dark', authors and artists began to re-evaluate their own role in a democratic society that was also becoming more urb...
Dec 10, 2010•24 min
The relationship between the poetic and the national is crucial to how war poetry is perceived and interpreted. This essay looks at Second World War (and wartime) poetry from Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and in particular at images of absence, cancellation, annulment and denial, to explore differences in each poetry between how the war and the role of the poet in the war are constructed.
Aug 04, 2010•38 min
Nick Groom's study of the union, The Union Jack: The Story of the British Flag, was published in 2006. In this paper, he brings that story up to the present day by surveying the past five years of Union Jackery, from Gordon Brown's initial enthusiasm for new definitions of Britishness through ongoing redefinitions of the iconic image of the flag to the almost complete absence of issues of national identity in the debates preceding the 2010 UK General Election.
Jul 12, 2010•38 min
The emergence of four nations framework in literary and historical scholarship has helped us to arrive at a fuller understanding of the complex and overlapping histories of the islands of Britain and Ireland, while recent research into Wales and Ireland in particular has helped to make the map of our relations more fully comprehensible. But what is the relevance and meaning of the four nations context for womens writing in Ireland and Wales? What part does gender play in the interconnected histo...
Jun 28, 2010•36 min
Among the many divergent strands of Irish and Welsh cultural history, one commonality stands out: the profoundly self-conscious preoccupation with nationality and nationhood. For decades, political and cultural thinkers have troped this concern in the spatialized relation between centre and periphery. This paper finds poets working on both sides of the Irish Sea strategically critiquing the exhausted-seeming dialectic of the centre-periphery paradigm, in their anti-deterministic deployment of de...
May 27, 2010•35 min
In '"I have only one culture and it is not mine": Professions of English diaspora', Julian Wolfreys engages in acts of memory-work, to recover, through a focus on the voice as mnemotechnic and anamnesiac trace, the occluded and marginalized cultural differences of the regional English. Through a reflection on the work of the literary as archive and and the role folk song and folk culture play in the spectral maintenance of different Englishnesses over a thousand year period, Wolfreys argues that...
May 20, 2010•34 min
In Poems and Paradigms Edna Longley argues that the archipelagic paradigm is crucial to the criticism of modern poetry in English. Quoting John Kerrigan on the expansive, multi-levelled, polycentric aspects of the literary and cultural field, she discussed five poems which display their archipelagic co-ordinates on the surface: W.B. Yeats’s Under Saturn (1919), Philip Larkin’s The Importance of Elsewhere (1955), W.S. Graham’s Loch Thom (1977), Edward Thomas’s The Ash Grove (1916) and Louis MacNe...
May 06, 2010•33 min
In this episode Diane Negra reads from the Introduction of Old and New Media after Katrina published by Palgrave Macmillan. This pioneering collection explores the relationship between Hurricane Katrina and a range of media forms, assessing how mainstream and independent media have responded sometimes innovatively, sometimes conservatively to the political and social ruptures Katrina has come to represent. Looking closely at the organization of public memory of Katrina, this collection provides ...
Apr 15, 2010•38 min
In this episode Diarmaid Ferriter reads from chapter six of his latest book Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland published by Profile Books. Using a huge variety of different sources, Occasions of Sin charts the Irish sexual experience over the course of the twentieth century. In tackling the public and private worlds of Irish sex, this book is groundbreaking in its scope and ambition, covering such subjects as abortion, pregnancy, celibacy, contraception, censorship, infanticide,...
Dec 16, 2009•21 min
In this episode Declan Kiberd reads the closing chapter of his latest book Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living published by Faber and Faber. Kiberd shows that Ulysses, far from being the epitome of elitism, was always intended as a book for the common people. It was rooted in their experience and offers a humane vision of a decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. Leopold Bloom, the book’s hero, shows the young Stephen Dedalus how he can grow and mature as an artist a...
Jun 05, 2009•29 min
Is archaeology a science? Is archaeology a humanity? What are the politics of spectatorship and archaeological representation? These initial thoughts form the basis for our archaeological explorations. Within current archaeological discourse, there are a growing number of requests for expressions, which illuminate and expose the interpretive and artistic qualities of presentation and narration. Yet few scholars actively utilise expressive practice to explore these philosophical issues. As such, ...
Dec 03, 2008•27 min
The presentation is based on my own experience as an artist/practitioner and the experience gained as Director/curator of Sculpture in the Parklands working with both Irish and international artists who have created new artworks that respond to the rich environmental, archaeological and industrial history of Lough Boora, County Offaly. For over 25 years my artwork has explored the subtleties of ritual and imagination. I create artefacts that often combine the textured surfaces and flowing lines ...
Dec 03, 2008•10 min
This short paper offers a personal reflection based on the author’s involvement in the reconstruction phase of the Francis Bacon studio project. During this project, archaeologists were employed to deconstruct or ‘excavate’ the contents of Francis Bacon’s painting studio in London, and meticulously reconstruct the room at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. The studio had long been renowned for its wondrously chaotic contents, its floor strewn with the debris of his creative practice, and its wal...
Dec 03, 2008•16 min
Professor Bailey discusses the various relationships between art and archaeology, and argues that the most exciting current work is pushing hard against the boundaries of both disciplines. His proposal is for archaeologists and artists to take big risks in their work and to cut loose the restraints of their traditional subject boundaries. The result will be work that is neither art nor archaeology, but something else altogether and something that can take the study of human nature into uncharted...
Dec 03, 2008•33 min
Ian Russell introduces Series 2 of UCDscholarcast. In the summer of 2008, Ian Russell curated a series of contemporary art projects entitled Abhar agus Meon as part of Ireland’s hosting of the Sixth World Archaeological Congress at University College Dublin. The projects were placed in the shared spaces between the contemporary arts, archaeology and heritage in Ireland. This introduction is a reflective statement and contextualization of the projects and the intellectual history of the relations...
Dec 03, 2008•10 min
Frank McGuinness speaks of his experience of adapting Brian Friel’s Dancing At Lughnasa for the screen, with Meryl Streep in the leading role. Friel has appeared to shy away from film for most of his distinguished career but was deeply influenced by the wider revolutions in acting, writing and directing across all media during the 1960s when modern sensibility took shape. Friel’s writing may have been influenced by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller but it also owes a debt to powerful films su...
Dec 03, 2008•28 min
Over the last three decades Bill Whelan has been at the heart of many exciting moments of extraordinary innovation in Irish music across the genres from traditional to rock. Here he documents and considers his varied career to date, from jobbing session musician in the early 1970s to Grammy Award winner in 1997. Donal Lunny and Andy Irvine are recalled as seminal influences on his music during the Planxty years while the founding of Windmill Lane Studios in the 1980s is seen as a landmark moment...
Apr 28, 2008•40 min
This lecture examines how contemporary Irish playwrights depict and how they engage the cinematic and narrative patterns we’ve come to associate with American movies. Donal O’Kelly’s Catalpa (1995), Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996), Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets (1999), and Geraldine Hughes’s Belfast Blues (2003) grapple with the effects of Hollywood on their characters and on Irish society. Despite frequently depicting individuals thwarted in their pursuit of big screen s...
Apr 14, 2008•50 min
This lecture explores forms of popular culture that developed in Ireland during the Second World War. Comparisons are drawn with Britain, where radio and cinema assume tremendous importance in the war years. In Ireland the major developments are in amateur drama, reading groups, beginnings of film and journalism. Particular attention is focused on the very specific relationship between high and popular culture which develops in both Britain and Ireland at this time due to the fact that many 'hig...
Apr 08, 2008•55 min
