APRIL 2013

LAUNCH OF IRISH WOMEN IN MEDICINE, c. 1880s-1920s, BY DR LAURA KELLY
Wednesday, April 24 at 6pm in the Moore Institute, NUI, Galway

You are cordially invited to the launch of Irish women in medicine, c.1880s-1920s: origins, education and careers (Manchester University Press, 2013) by Dr Laura Kelly. The book is based on Laura's PhD thesis which was undertaken in the Department of History, NUI Galway (2007-2010). The book is the first comprehensive history of Irish women in medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on the debates surrounding women’s admission to Irish medical schools, the geographical and social backgrounds of early women medical students, their educational experiences and subsequent careers. The launch will take place at the Moore Institute for Research in Humanities and Social Sciences, NUI Galway on Wednesday 24th of April at 6pm. The book will be launched by Professor Gearoid O'Tuathaigh and Dr Caitriona Clear and will be followed by a wine reception. All are welcome!

More info on the book here:  http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719088353

March 2013

The British Labour Party and Twentieth - Century Ireland

'The British Labour Party and Twentieth - Century Ireland' conference, will take place in the Moore Institute, 8 - 9 March, 2013. Drawing on the expertise of a range of leading scholars from Britain and Ireland, it will explore a largely neglected aspect of Anglo-Irish relations in the last century. The conference is generously supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs Reconciliation Fund. The keynote address will be delivered by Kevin McNamara, former Shadow Labour Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The address is scheduled for the Harbour Hotel, Galway, Friday, 8th March, 6.30p.m., and will be followed by a questions & answers session chaired by Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, Professor Emeritus in History, NUI Galway.

For details about the conference programme please click here

Contact: Dr. Laurence Marley, laurence.marleynuigalway.ie

MARCH 2013

BOOK LAUNCH - DR KEVIN O' SULLIVAN

Ireland, Africa and the end of empire: Small state identity in the Cold War, 1955 - 75 (Manchester University Press, 2012)
Kevin O' Sullivan

In the twenty years after Ireland joined the UN in 1955, one subject dominated its fortunes: Africa. The first detailed study of Ireland's relationship with that continent, this book documents its special place in Irish history. Adopting a highly original, and strongly comparative approach, it shows how small and middling powers like Ireland, Canada, the Netherlands and the Nordic states used Africa to shape their position in the international system, and how their influence waned with the rise of the Afro-Asian bloc. O'Sullivan chronicles Africa's impact on Irish foreign policy; the link between African decolonisation and Irish post-colonial identity; and the missionaries, aid workers, diplomats, peacekeepers, and anti-apartheid protesters at the heart of Irish popular understanding of the developing world. Offering a fascinating account of small state diplomacy, and a unique perspective on African decolonisation, this book provides essential insight for scholars of Irish history, African history, international relations, and the history of NGOs, as well as anyone interested in Africa's important place in the Irish public imagination. 

url:  http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719086021 

JANUARY 2013 

BOOK LAUNCH - Dr. TomÁs finn

A new book examining the history of "think tank", established in the mid 1950s, to challenge the ways Ireland was governed, socially, politically and economically, was launched in the National University of Ireland, Galway, on 23rd January. " Tuairim: intellectual debate and policy formulation: Rethinking Ireland, 1954-75", published by Manchester University Press, was written by Dr Tomás Finn, a lecturer in modern Irish History at NUI, Galway.

Tuairim ( the Irish word for "opinion") was an intellectual movement that challenged traditional orthodoxy and put forward new ideas and fresh solutions. From the late 1950s, Tuairim's members, who included the late Garret Fitzgerald, future Supreme Court Judge Donal Barrington, Miriam Hederman O' Brien, Jim Doolan and David Thornley, sought to influence debate and public policy in an attempt to re-invent the country.

This book argues that Tuairim influenced the key public policy decisions that shaped modern Ireland. Investment in education, reforms to censorship and the system of childcare, the central importance of economic planning to Ireland's future and moves towards a more conciliatory policy in relation to Northern Ireland were policies on which Tuairim's members voiced influential arguments.

The book also considers Tuairim's contributions to debates on both administrative and Oireachtas reform and those on the quality of ideas informing public policy. The society's hopes for moves towards equality of opportunity, and increased co-operation, provoked a strong reaction from vested interests, particularly the Catholic Church, but also facilitated increased activity by the state.

In assessing the relative successes and failures of the organisation in these areas, the book is an addition to the current public debate on national policy and its administration and Ireland's intellectual and cultural development in the post-Celtic Tiger period.

This book was launched by Dr Mary Harris, Professor Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, and Professor Jim Doolan on Tuesday 23rd January at 6pm in the Moore Institute, NUI, Galway.

JULY 2012

The 4th International on the Science of Computus
July 13 - 15
Moore Institute, NUI, Galway
www.nuigalway.ie/history/computusconference.html

The Science of Computistics — the mathematics required to calculate the date of Easter, and related topics (incl. astronomical observations and calculations) — straddles the fields of mathematics and astronomy, biblical interpretation and cosmology, empirical astronomical observation, and the perennial quest to understand the concepts of Time and Time-Reckoning. ’Since in the 7^th century the leading experts on the computus were the Irish’ (the verdict of Leofranc Holford-Strevens, The History of Time, a very short introduction [Oxford 2005] 56) it was entirely appropriate that the first landmark conference devoted to this topic should have taken place in Galway, as it did in 2006. It brought together, for the first time, the leading scholars in this field from all over the world, and the conference papers provided a panorama of Early Medieval scientific knowledge, both in Ireland and in the rest of Western Europe, during the period of the so-called ’Dark Ages’. That first Conference was an outstanding success, and the proof is in the fact that we have had two others since, and are now looking forward to the fourth this coming July. In fact, the study of computistics has become synonymous with Galway, with the result that NUIG has become the permanent home for the Conference

   The previous Science of Computus conferences in Galway highlighted

The transmission of Late Antique Mathematical Knowledge in Ireland & Europe
The Development of Astronomy in Early Medieval Ireland & Europe
The Irish role in the development of Computistical Mathematics

A special theme in this year’s Conference will be the use of computistics for purposes of prognostication.

March 2012

Gender and Society in the 19th and 20th centuries:
New Perspectives and new ideas
23rd and 24th of March, 2012
The Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies, NUI, Galway

Generously supported by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences ’New Ideas’ Scheme (http://www.irchss.ie)

http://www.genderandirishsociety2012.com/

A couple at the Hospitals Sweepstakes Grand Ntional Draw, March 1935
Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland ( http://www.nli.ie/)

June 2011

The Francophone World and the Angloworld:
Empires of Culture, c. 1700-2000

8-10 June 2011 

National University of Ireland, Galway 

Part of the Texts, Contexts, Cultures research programme,
Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway
Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

This June, NUI Galway will host an international conference of renowned scholars, who will compare critical approaches to the study of histories and cultures of empire in Britain, France and the US. (There is no charge to attend the conference, but to register please email simon.potternuigalway.ie in advance.)

Studies of the British and French empires have been influenced over the last three decades by the insights offered by postcolonialism, by developments in cultural and critical theory, and by continuing archival research. More recently, scholars have sought to link the histories of the British and French empires to the history of globalisation. In terms of the British empire, this has encouraged some to frame the ’Angloworld’ as a more appropriate basis for analysis, looking at connections between the British empire and the independent, but in many ways imperial, settler societies of the United States. Scholars of French colonial expansion and enterprise are resurrecting the history of the Francophone world as a ’process’ rather than a ’stance’, exploring the ways in which a colonising metropole and colonised territories shaped each other over time. Moreover, imperialism has increasingly been seen as a process of control deeply reliant on a range of regulatory practices, from the dissemination of literary texts to a wide range of theatrical and cultural performances.

Key questions to be considered at the conference include:

• How do the Angloworld and the Francophone world fit in with histories of globalisation?
• What is the prominence given to the role of culture in the scholarship of empire in the British and French contexts?
• Was the impact of empire on Britain and France’s own domestic cultures similar in extent and nature?
• What directions might the study of the British and French empires take over the next decade?
• How did the circulation of culture in the circum-Atlantic and -Pacific spheres influence the nature of the British and French empires?
• What are the different ways in which religion played a part in the dissemination of empire?

This event is part of the wider ’Texts Contexts Cultures’ research project funded by the Government of Ireland PRTLI scheme and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Confirmed Speakers:

James Belich is Professor at the Stout Research Centre, Victoria University, Wellington and Beit Professor-elect of Imperial History at the University of Oxford. His many publications include the ground-breaking study of British and US imperial expansion, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld (Oxford, 2009). His current research focuses on European expansion, industrialization, and divergence, 1500-2000, and is supported by New Zealand’s Marsden Fund.

Lauren Benton is Professor of History and Affiliate Professor of Law at New York University.  Her research interests lie in legal history and the comparative history of Atlantic empires.  Winner of the World History Association Book Award and the James Willard Hurst prize for her Law and Colonial Cultures:  Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (Cambridge, 2002), she recently published A Search for Sovereignty:  Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 (Cambridge 2010).

Tracy C. Davis is Ethel M. Barber Professor in Performing Arts and Professor of English and Theatre at Northwestern University. She is a specialist in performance theory, nineteenth-century British Theatre history, theatrical modernism and aesthetics, and the economics of performance. She has authored several books, including the seminal study Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (Routledge, 1991), The Economics of the British Stage, 1800-1914 (Cambridge, 2000) and Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Duke, 2007).

Alison Games is Dorothy M. Brown Distinguished Professor of History at Georgetown University.  She has published extensively on migration in the English Atlantic world, and her most recent books are Witchcraft in Early North America (New York, 2010), and The Web of Empire:  English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (New York, 2008).

Eliga Gould is Associate Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire.  His research interests lie in colonial North America, with particular specialism in the American Revolution.  Currently writing The World of the American Revolution and An Unfinished Peace: The American Revolution and the Legal Transformation of the European Atlantic, he has also published The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill and London, 2000).

Jean-François Klein is maître de conférences d'Histoire contemporaine at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales and a member of the Centre Roland Mousnier Histoire et Civilisation (Paris IV-Sorbonne). He has published widely on the history of French overseas expansion in Indochina, and on the Lyon silk trade with China and the Far East.

Anne McClintock is Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of many books, including Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995) and Double Crossings: Madness, Sexuality and Imperialism (2001). Her creative non-fiction book Skin Hunger: a Chronicle of Sex, Desire and Money is forthcoming from Jonathan Cape. She is working on a new book called Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

Rob Nixon is Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His books include Dreambirds: the Natural History of a Fantasy (Picador, 2000), which was selected as a Notable Book of 2000 by the New York Times Book Review and as one of the ten best books of the year by Esquire. It was also serialized as Book of the Week on BBC Radio Four. His book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor is forthcoming this year from Harvard University Press. Professor Nixon is a former director of the Border and Transcultural Studies Research Circle.

Francois-Joseph Ruggiu is Professor of History in the Centre Roland Mousnier at the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne.  He specialises in the comparative social history of France and England, with particular expertise in family structures, urban society, and French colonial settlements. Recent publications include Histoire des Îles Britanniques (Paris, 2007), and L’Individu et la famille dans les sociétés anglaise et française (vers 1720-1780) (Paris, 2007).

Damon Salesa is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His work focuses on New Zealand and the Pacific, and his monograph Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage and the Victorian British Empire is due to be published by Oxford University Press in April.

Todd Shepard is Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. His work examines how imperialism intersects with histories of national identity, state institutions, race, and sexuality, particularly in the French empire. His first book, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (2006), was awarded both the American Historical Association’s 2006 J. Russell Major Prize and the Council of European Studies 2008 Book Prize.

Emmanuelle Sibeud is maître de conférences en histoire contemporaine, Université Paris 8 (Vincennes - Saint-Denis) and specialises in the cultural and political history of French colonisation in Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Publications include Une science impériale pour l’Afrique? La construction des savoirs africanistes en France, 1878-1930 (Paris, 2002).

Martin Thomas is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He has published widely on the combined and comparative histories of the European empires, with particular specialisms in the history of the French empire and the history of security services in the European empires. Recent publications include Empires of Intelligence? Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (University of California Press, 2007).

Kathleen Wilson is Professor of History and Cultural Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her publications address themes relating to British culture and empire, and include The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (1995), which won prizes from the Royal Historical Society and the North American Conference on British Studies, and The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (2003). She is currently exploring the politics of theatrical and social performance and colonial rule in sites that range across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds.

Dr Alison Forrestal (History): alison.forrestalnuigalway.ie
Dr Lionel Pilkington (English):     lionel.pilkingtonnuigalway.ie
Dr Simon Potter (History): simon.potternuigalway.ie               

March 2010

Irish Conference of Medievalists
June 25-27, 2010

Since its establishment in 1987, the Irish Conference of Medievalists (ICM) has always displayed in its programme an eclectic selection of papers, aiming not only at representing the current state of Medieval Studies in Ireland and abroad, but also at informing the audience on the latest achievements and the future directions of this scholarly area.

The twenty-fourth ICM, which will be held in the National University of Ireland, Galway, 25–27 June 2010, will continue the conference’s inter-disciplinary approach, considering proposals for papers in medieval archaeology, art, history, linguistics, literature and philology.

The conference will also host plenary sessions that will provide our audience with an opportunity to benefit from the work of some of the most eminent scholars in the field. Prof. Thomas Charles-Edwards (Professor of Celtic in Jesus College, Oxford) will open the conference. Two other plenary sessions will focus on specific themes of wide interest in the area of Medieval Studies: one will deal with the famous Old Irish text known as Amrae Coluimb Chille, while the other will concern research undertaken by the Dublin-based Discovery Programme.

December 2009

A New Publication by Dr John Cunningham
Unlikely Radicals: Irish Post-Primary Teachers and the ASTI 1909-2009 (Cork Univeristy Press, 2009)

In 2009, the ASTI celebrates the 100th Anniversary of its foundation. Founding members included such national figures as Eamon de Valera and Thomas MacDonagh, both of who served as second-level teachers. The ASTI has rich history in representing the teaching profession and in promoting second-level education and has been a dynamic force in the education sector in Ireland. The ASTI is the largest second-level teachers’ union in Ireland with 17,500 members teaching in over 75% of second-level schools.

Unlikely Radicals provides a social and historical account of the ASTI’s role in the development of second-level education and the teaching profession in Ireland. It demonstrates the remarkable contribution which second-level education has made to the lives of millions of young people and to social, political and economic progress in Ireland. It details the development of a trade union which has had a significant impact on social and education policy and which has continued to represent the values of Irish teachers and their aspirations for those they teach. 

More Information: Cork University Press

August 2009

July 2009

An Cumann Staire presents donation to History Department: An Cumann Staire organises the annual Arts Ball & makes a generous donation every year to the Department from the proceeds. The History Department would like to thank An Cumann Staire once again this year for its generous donation.

In the picture: Toni Ó Roduibh (Cumann Staire) presenting a donation to Prof. Dáibhí Ó Cróinín (Acting Head) & Prof. Steven Ellis (newly-appointed Prof. of History)

May 2009

Fri. 22 and Sat 23: Nobility in Early Modern Ireland: A Conference: Once seen as suffering inexorable decline in the early modern period in the face of government centralisation and a rising bourgeoisie, recent research has pointed to the remarkable resiliency of the European nobility, highlighting the myriad ways in which aristocrats adapted to rapidly changing circumstances. The conference seeks to build on the recent expansion of scholarship devoted to nobles and nobility in early modern Ireland. It is hoped that this conference will offer experienced scholars and graduate students a platform to assess the state of the historiography to date, and to introduce new problems and perspectives. The conference is open to all researchers with an interest in nobility in Ireland, c. 1500- c. 1700.

February 2009