Literary scholars have long valued open-endedness, unsettling, and disruption. And no field has been more committed to these values than Modernism. But today, as neoliberal economics undoes hopes of secure work, and as fossil fuels radically disrupt longstanding ecosystems, open-endedness is taking on a new political character. Unpredictability is not a source of pleasure and excitement for those who are anxious about finding their next meal or a safe place to sleep. Corporations praise freedom from state regulations...

Prof Bertrand Cardin is the author of Colum McCann's Intertexts. 'Books Talk to One Another' (Cork University Press, 2016) in which McCann’s work is studied as a mosaic of references to and quotations from other texts. He also guest-edited a special issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English on “The 21st Century Irish Short Story” (N°63, Autumn 2014). With Alexandra Slaby, he co-edited a special issue of Etudes irlandaises: “Contemporary Issues in Irish Studies. In Memoriam...

Dr Eamon Maher is Director of the national Centre for Franco-Irish Studies in TU Dublin and General Editor of two book series with Peter Lang, Reimagining Ireland and Studies in Franco-Irish Studies. His main area of interest is the depiction of Catholicism in 20th-century fiction and he is currently preparing a monograph on the Catholic Novel. His most recent publication, co-edited with Eugene O'Brien, is Reimagining Irish Studies for the Twenty-First Century, which is the landmark 100th book in the Reimagining...

Dr Alexandra Slaby is an Associate Professor at the University of Caen Normandy where she teaches British, Irish and South African civilization. She is half-South African. She published L’Etat et la culture en Irlande (Caen UP, 2010) prefaced by Michael D. Higgins. She is a former editor of Etudes Irlandaises (2011-2017) and was commissioned to write an Histoire de l'Irlande de 1912 à nos jours (Paris: Tallandier, 2016, 2021). She is now researching Irish Catholic presence in South Africa and writing the...

Dr Ciaran Reilly is an historian of nineteenth & twentieth century Irish history based at Maynooth University. His research interests include the Great Irish Famine; country houses and landed estates, and the Irish diaspora, with a particular focus on South Africa. He is the author of a number of books including Capard: An Irish country house & estate (2019); The Irish Land Agent, 1830-60: the Case of King’s County (2014); Strokestown and the Great Irish Famine (2014) and John Plunket Joly and the Great...

Prof Dermot Keogh is emeritus Professor of History at University College where he also held the chair in European Integration Studies.  He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and has twice held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, Washington DC in 1988 and 1991. He was Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Irish Studies, Queen’s, Belfast in 1995/6 and the visiting Burns Scholar at Boston College in 2011/2. He received an honorary doctorate from the Universidad del Salvador, Buenos Aires, in...

This paper explores Catholic Ireland's aid to devastated postwar Europe between 1945 and 1950, an event quasi unknown in Ireland or continental Europe today. And yet, masses of unearthed archives show that Irish humanitarian aid extended from Normandy all the way to the streets of Tirana and Greek islands. The memory of the Great Irish Famine of 1845 (the hundredth anniversary in 1945) and European aid played a role in Ireland's collective response to the postwar catastrophe in Europe. This paper throws light...

Dr Timothy G. McMahon is associate professor of history at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, and the Past President of the American Conference for Irish Studies. Tim received his MA (1994) and PhD (2001) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a social historian with interests in nationalism and national identity, popular culture (especially popular religion), and Empire. He is the author of Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893-1910 (2008) and editor of Pádraig Ó...

Prof Grace Neville studied at University College Cork (BA joint first class honours in French and Irish), l’Université de Caen (where she was a French Government scholarship holder) and l’Université de Lille (doctorate). She is professor emeritus of French at UCC where she was also Vice-President for Teaching and Learning. Her research focuses inter alia on Franco-Irish relations from the medieval to the modern period. Since retiring from UCC in 2012, she has been a member/chair of numerous boards and...

Ian...

Prof Mícheál Mac Craith is a Franciscan priest who lectured in Modern Irish at the National University of Ireland, Galway from 1977 until his retirement in August 2011. From 1997 until his retirement, he held the established chair of Modern Irish. He studied in Galway, Rome and Louvain. He authored and co-authored books on Gaelic poetry. He is interested in the Renaissance, Counter-Reformation literature, Irish communities in exile in the early modern period, Jacobitism, Ossianism and contemporary Gaelic literature,...

Prof Thomas O’Connor is director of the Maynooth University Arts and Humanities Institute. He is a member of the Maynooth University History department and holds a PhD from the Sorbonne. His research interests are in early modern European migration and religion, especially Jansenism, Inquisitions, censorship, ideological controls, social discipline and religious conversion. He is co-director of the Irish in Europe Project and editor of the history sources journal, Archivium Hibernicum. He is a member of the...