Concordia Irish Studies Podcast

Rhona Richman Kenneally is a Professor and former Chair in the Department of Design and Computation Arts, and a co-founder and Fellow of the School of Irish Studies at Concordia University. Her work crosses the domains of design justice, critical materiality, food studies, and the architecture and design of the built environment. Recent publications explore food-related activities, especially in the home, in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, and a new research thread investigates textiles and clothing through the lens of material ecocriticism, to acknowledge the power of wearables as agents in their own right in the material world. Rhona has served as editor of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies through eight annual volumes of that periodical. She is also co-editor of an upcoming special issue of CJIS, devoted to Ireland’s Repeal the Eighth Amendment referendum of 2018.

Kevin Barry is an award-winning Irish writer. His novel City of Bohane was the winner of the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His 2015 novel Beatlebone won the Goldsmiths Prize, and is one of seven books by Irish authors nominated for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award. At the Canadian Association for Irish Studies 2019 conference, Kevin read from three of his works – including an extract from his latest book Night Boat to Tangier, available September 2019.

Sexual violence is an essentially contested concept. Exploring the competing meanings of violence presents formidable challenges, which increases in difficulty when we wander back in time. What do we find when we explore the different meanings attached to sexual violence in 19th and early 20th century Irish history? How did conceptions of such forms of violence change? About Joanna Bourke: Joanna Bourke is a professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a fellow of the British Academy. She is the prize-winning author of 13 books that examine histories of Ireland, modern warfare, military medicine, psychology and psychiatry, violence and emotions, and rape, as well as more than 100 articles in academic journals. Bourke is the principal investigator on a five-year Wellcome Trust-funded project entitled "Sexual Violence, Medicine, and Psychiatry."

Eimear McBride grew up in the west of Ireland and trained at Drama Centre London. Her first novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing took nine years to find a publisher and subsequently received a number of awards, including the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, and the Goldsmiths Prize. Her second novel The Lesser Bohemians won the 2017 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2017 she was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship of the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading. In a 2018 Times Literary Supplement poll of 200 critics, academics and fiction writers, McBride was named one of the 10 best Irish and British novelists writing today.

Clíona Ó Gallchoir is a Lecturer at the University College Cork. Her research interests include Irish women's writing, Irish and British eighteenth and nineteenth-century writing, the figure of the child in eighteenth-century Ireland, the novel in Ireland, and children's literature. Most recently, she has co-edited with Heather Ingman, A History of Modern Irish Women's Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Dr Ó Gallchoir is an expert on the work of Maria Edgeworth, who is the subject of her monograph, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (2005). In addition, she has published essays and articles on other women writers such as Sydney Owenson, Germaine de Stael, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mme de Genlis.

Margaret Kelleher is Professor and Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. Her books include The Feminization of Famine (published by Duke UP and Cork UP, 1997), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (2006), co-edited with Philip O'Leary, and Ireland and Quebec: Interdisciplinary Essays on History, Culture and Society (Four Courts Press, 2016), co-edited with Michael Kenneally. She has recently completed a monograph entitled Language, Life and Death: Myles Joyce, James Joyce and the Maamtrasna Murders and was guest editor, with Nicholas Wolf, of Éire-Ireland's special issue on "Ireland and the Contemporary" (Spring/Summer 2017). She has developed a number of digital humanities projects, including the Electronic Version of the Loeber Guide to Irish Fiction and the Digital Platform for Contemporary Irish Writing (http://www.contemporaryirishwriting.ie/)

Cahal McLaughlin visits the School of Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal and gives a guest lecture on 'The Prisons Memory Archive' More information available: http://prisonsmemoryarchive.com/ http://www.concordia.ca/artsci/irish-studies.html

Jim Kelly became Ambassador of Ireland to Canada in August 2016. This is Ambassador Kelly's fourth posting as an Irish diplomat. He previously served as Deputy Permanent Representative at Ireland's Mission to the United Nations in New York (2008-13), and also served at Ireland's Permanent Representation to the European Union in Brussels (2001-05) and at the Embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark (1995-98). Most recently, Ambassador Kelly established and directed the new Policy Planning function at the Foreign Ministry, where he led policy development on key issues such as the implications of Brexit for Ireland, and Ireland's response to the refugee and migration crisis. This podcast was produced by Aaron Lakoff.

Dr. Maureen Murphy, co-director of the undergraduate Irish Studies minor at Hofstra University in Long Island, N.Y., is the current Peter O’Brien Visiting Scholar at the School of Irish Studies. Murphy was the Director of the Great Irish Famine Curriculum Project for the New York State Department of Education. The Great Irish Famine Curriculum (2001) won the Project Excellence Award from the National Council of the Social Studies in 2002. She has served as Vice-President of the New York State English Council. A past president of the American Conference for Irish Studies and a past chair of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures, Murphy has lectured and published widely in Irish literature, folklore, history and American Irish literature and culture. This podcast was recorded and produced by Aaron Lakoff

Dr. Irene Whelan has taught at Manhattanville College since 1990. A native of County Galway on Ireland’s west coast, she was educated at the National University of Ireland - Galway and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied with James S. Donnelly Jr., a leading historian of modern Ireland. Her dissertation on the evangelical movement in Ireland was published as The Bible War in Ireland: The ‘Second Reformation’ and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1780-1840 in 2005. Her scholarly focus is on the intersection of religious and political history at the local, as well as the global level. She is currently engaged in co-editing a volume of essays, Landscape of Promise and Ruin: Culture, Identity and Reality in the Irish West, 1830-1930, as well a book-length study of the concept of an Irish ‘spiritual empire’ in the 19th and 20th centuries. This podcast was produced by Aaron Lakoff.

Peter Behren’s first novel The Law of Dreams won the Governor-General's Award, Canada's most prestigious book prize, and has been published in nine languages. The New York Times Book Review called his second novel, The O'Briens, "a major achievement." Carry Me, his third novel was published in February 2016. He is the author of two collections of short stories, Night Driving and Travelling Light. His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many anthologies. A native of Montreal, he held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University and was a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He teaches fiction and television writing at Colorado College and will teach at the Banff Centre in 2018. This podcast was produced by Aaron Lakoff and Simone Lucas.

Brad Kent is Professor of British and Irish Literatures at Université Laval in Quebec City. In 2013-14 he was Visiting Professor at Trinity College Dublin in the School of English, and in the spring of 2018 he will be the C.P. Snow Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, where he was the Hobby Fellow in the spring of 2009. His recent publications include George Bernard Shaw in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and The Selected Essays of Sean O'Faolain (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016). He is currently general editor of an eight-volume series of Shaw’s writings that will be published by Oxford World’s Classics in 2021. At present he is working on a monograph entitled ‘Literature, Censorship, and the Cultural Politics of Affect in Ireland,’ which is supported with a major grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This podcast was recorded and produced by Aaron Lakoff and Simone Lucas.

Marina Carr’s works consist of 13 plays including two for children, between 1989 and 2007. In 2015, the Opera Theatre Company toured Ireland with Carr’s contemporary translation of Rigoletto. In November 2016, she wrote an original oratorio for Wicklow County Council, bringing together choirs, solo singers, and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. Her reimagining of Hecuba was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in September 2015, and her reimagining of Anna Karenina played for two months at the Abbey Theatre until January 2017. Carr is the most recent winner of the prestigious literary honour, the Windham-Campbell Prize. Other prizes include The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, The American/Ireland Fund Award, The E.M. Forster Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, The Macaulay Fellowship, and The Puterbaugh Fellowship. She has also taught at Trinity, Villanova, Princeton and currently lectures in the English department at Dublin City University.​ Recorded and produced by Aaron Lakoff and Simone Lucas

Welcome to the very first edition of the Concordia Irish Studies Podcast! Kevin Whelan, Director of the Keough-Naughton Notre Dame Centre in Dublin, has been a visiting professor at New York University, Boston College and Concordia University. He is a prolific writer and editor of books and articles on Ireland’s history, geography and culture, including the bestselling Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape. For many years, Kevin Whelan directed Notre Dame's annual Irish Seminar, the leading seminar in the field of Irish Studies.