Joining the Centre are Prof Mary Hickman, a leading sociologist of the Irish diaspora, co-author of Migration and Social Cohesion in the UK (Palgrave 2012) and co-editor of Women and the Irish Diaspora (forthcoming, Manchester University Press, 2013); Prof Shaun Richards, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama (2004) and co-author of the seminal Writing Ireland (1988); and Keith Hopper, author of Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist a Young Post-modernist (Cork UP, 2011) and series editor of ‘Ireland into Film’ (Cork UP, 2001). Keith has also recently completed a study on Irish film director Neil Jordan at the University of Oxford.

Director of the CIS at St Mary’s Prof Lance Pettitt said, “We are delighted to have such eminent Fellows join us for what will be an exciting period of development in Irish Studies in London.”

The new Fellows extend the existing expertise at the Centre for its new MA in Irish Studies, will support its doctoral students, and develop the programme of research, conferences and community links established by the CIS.

A chara,

We are delighted to announce the new NUI Galway MA Scholarship scheme for the academic year 2013-14. Students who have been accepted on to the full-time taught MA in Irish Studies programme, and that hold a First Class Honours undergraduate degree, will be awarded a scholarship worth €1,500. Further details concerning this new scholarship scheme will be made available at: http://www.nuigalway.ie/postgrad/scholarships/

In addition, the Tadhg Foley MA in Irish Studies Fellowship will be awarded to the outstanding applicant at point of entry to the MA in Irish Studies programme 2013-14. The Tadhg Foley MA Fellowship recognises the extraordinary contribution made by Professor Emeritus Tadhg Foley to the Centre’s activities as Chair of the Board of the Centre for Irish Studies during the period 2003-2009.

Professor Foley’s intellectual generosity and commitment to interdisciplinary studies has provided a model for advanced teaching and research in Irish Studies at NUI Galway. We would greatly appreciate if you could inform those interested in your department of this exciting new opportunity for MA postgraduate study at the Centre for Irish Studies.

The MA in Irish Studies at NUI Galway is a one-year integrated, interdisciplinary programme drawing on the disciplines of Irish, History and English, and including perspectives from Sociology and Political Science. The course provides a comprehensive overview of the Irish experience from the early nineteenth century to the present day. A key element of the MA programme is an Irish-language module, which aims to ensure that all students achieve a minimum working knowledge of the language, with a particular focus on reading and translation skills. Individual course modules and supervision are taught and offered by internationally recognised experts at NUI Galway. The MA is available as a full-time programme over one academic year, and as a part-time course of study to be completed over two years.
Further information on the MA in Irish Studies programme is available at: http://www.nuigalway.ie/centre_irish_studies/MA.htm

We have also attached above our new brochure, celebrating ten years of advanced teaching, research and civic engagement activities associated with the Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway, since its inception in 2000.

In recent years, scholars of culture and literature have begun to elaborate on masculinities in the contemporary Irish context. While providing an invaluable starting point for discussion of Irish masculinities, these studies have tended to focus on the postmodern, with highly theoretical emphases in the findings. 

Normative and hegemonic masculinities remain largely unquestioned, and historical contexts and continuities are often ignored or neglected.

This groundbreaking symposium will attempt to bring the history of Irish masculinities into focus. We aim to bring together for the first time scholars working in history, literature, culture, and sociology, in Medieval, Early Modern, Modern and Contemporary time period specialisms in the fields of gender and masculinities. The symposium will explore connections, continuities, changes and dissonances in masculinities in relation to Ireland, and will explore these themes diachronically. To this end, contributors need to be willing to present and discuss their research in thematically orientated panels that discuss their subject across time periods. This will move discussion of masculinities beyond the synchronic emphases upon ‘crisis’ and the presentist perspective, and foster scholarship that is genuinely interdisciplinary.

We welcome papers in the following fields of enquiry – and are open to suggestion for others: politics, class, social order; religion and conflict; families; fatherhood; the diaspora (from *any* angle); popular imagery; labour and employment issues; Irishmen as “the other”; spaces as areas of negotiated gendered identities; mythology and folklore; language and traditions; manliness and alcohol; war and violence; iconography; masculinities in relation to the nationalist/revisionist binary; masculinities and sexualities.



It is intended to publish the findings of this symposium with the academic series, Genders and Sexualities in History, Palgrave Macmillan

The series has global distribution, and fosters scholarship and scholarly enterprise that examines genders and sexualities in the Longue Duree. We therefore would welcome contributors to the symposium who also have the serious intent to contribute to this publication. Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to Dr. Rebecca Barr, Dr. Sean Brady, and Dr. Jane McGaughey. Deadline for abstracts 4th January 2013.

For a special issue of the journal Studi irlandesi. A Journal of Irish
Studies”(http://www.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-sijis), entitled
“Ex-centric Ireland”, due to be published by Firenze University Press
by the end of 2013.

Over the last twenty years, Ireland has shifted from a flourishing
economy, culture, and society, which characterized the Celtic Tiger
years, to serious economic recession, arguably more acutely than other
European countries. As the not-so-new markets started leaving the
country to find more suitable settings to monetize their productivity,
Ireland was left with large strands of population in a state of
disillusionment, and despair. This posits the issue of considering the
cost of a massive economic improvement at the expense of its underside
effects.
“Ex-centric Ireland” will seek to collect a number of contributions
addressing issues of marginality, liminality, border-crossing,
periphery, migrating, fringe and their implications for the study of
Irish literature and culture. It will consider ex-centricity as a
heterogeneous series of complex positionings outside a centre that is
conventionally identified with normativity, identity, and truth. The
position of Ireland – historical, as well as geographical and cultural
– is going to be addresses by this challenging special issue against
the backdrop of the current drive towards a seemingly suicidal global
capitalist market on the one hand and the rise of new, marginal
attempts to shape alternative forms of non-normative locations of
resistance in language, culture, and the Arts in general.
Essays are welcome in all areas of the Humanities and Social,
Philosophical, and Political Studies. In particular, the Editors are
looking for challenging views that question the stability of
approaches, methods, and techniques in favour of dynamic, plural, and
multiple perspectives. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the
following areas of investigation:

• Theories of ex-centricity
• Representations of ex-centricity in cultural texts
• Ex-centricity and resistance
• Nationalism vs. hybridity
• Ex-centricity and post-colonialism
• Linguistic ex-centricity
• Politics of ex-centricity
• Power, subordination, and dissent
• Sexuality and Gender
Deadlines:

• 20 November 2012: send working title and abstract of 500 words to
Dr. Samuele Grassi and Dr. Fiorenzo Fantaccini, Department of
Comparative Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of
Florence <sijis@comparate.unifi.it>.
• 15 April 2013: finalize paper for submission to referees. Articles
must comply with the editorial norms and must not exceed 12000 words,
including endnotes and bibliography.
All articles are published in English. We strongly suggest paper are
revised by a native speaker.

MA IN IRISH STUDIES

IDENTITIES AND REPRESENTATIONS

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK, IRELAND

 A different kind of Irish Studies

Ireland, an island at Europe’s far western edge, played a vital role in the formation of Western civilisation. Ongoing emigration in the modern era has ensured that Irish cultures and identities are a dynamic global phenomenon. Such issues are at the heart of University College Cork’s new MA in Irish Studies. The programme draws on an unparalleled range of disciplinary perspectives within a strong framework of relevant theories and methodologies. The result is a distinctive and compelling intellectual experience.

Past speaks to present

Through the unifying theme of “identities and representations”, the programme investigates how Ireland’s complex and contested pasts speak to its present and to possible futures. In this programme:

• strong specially-devised core modules explore over a thousand years of Irish history and culture up to the postmodern present

• carefully selected case studies offer contexts to deepen your knowledge of Irish Studies and develop your own research interests

• study tours to spectacular and evocative sites and landscapes are a central part of the learning experience

• you investigate the potential futures of Ireland and its diaspora in an increasingly interconnected, interdependent, and globalized world

• the contributing disciplines include English, History, Irish, Sociology, Music, Geography, Archaeology, Folklore, Government, Politics and Art History

For further information including a more detailed programme description, see http://www.ucc.ie/en/irishstudies/ or email: irishstudies@ucc.ie