Podcasts about scholarcast

This Scholarcast is an extract from Helen Lawlor's book, Irish Harping: 1900-2010 (Four Courts Press, 2012). This study provides a musical ethnography and a history of the Irish harp. It gives a socio-cultural and musical analysis of the music and song associated with all Irish harp styles, including traditional style, song to harp accompaniment, art-music style and the early Irish harp revival.

This Scholarcast is an extract from Helen Lawlor’s book, Irish Harping: 1900-2010 (Four Courts Press, 2012). This study provides a musical ethnography and a history of the Irish harp. It gives a socio-cultural and musical analysis of the music and song associated with all Irish harp styles, including traditional style, song to harp accompaniment, art-music style and the early Irish harp revival.

Movements in ecocriticism that call for links to be made with postcolonialism challenge us, here in Ireland and outside of it, to do work that has not come naturally. As critics like Rob Nixon have pointed out, ecocriticism and postcolonialism were, in fact, often at odds with each other as the fields arose, operating at a disconnect.

This episode argues for a politicization of cultural and literary critiques of environmental issues in Ireland. It demonstrates methods through which Irish Studies can enter into a creative correspondence with the growing field of Environmental Humanities scholarship.

This episode explores the process whereby dance was transformed from a practice enjoyed for its own sake into ‘a conscious symbolic act' of Irish nationhood during the Revival. Drawing on the work of dance scholars and historians, Barbara O'Connor examines the role of the Gaelic League in developing an‘authentic' national dance canon that called for an ideal Irish dancing body.

The fall of the great forests of Ireland provided James Joyce with a rich literary trope laden with cultural memory and socio-political resonances, which he utilized throughout his works and most fully in Finnegans Wake. The trope taps into a chain of historical events well-rehearsed by nationalist rhetoric and thus it is compatible with Joyce's innovative utilisation of repeated motifs with multiple textual resonances.

The episode focuses on one of the most elaborate artworks to be made in Ireland in the 1920s, Harry Clarke's Geneva Window. The work, intended for the League of Nations, illustrates extracts from the texts of fifteen Irish writers. Clarke's innovative approach to the technique of stained glass and his wide knowledge of ancient and modern art and literature made him one of the most remarkable and versatile visual artists of his generation.

This lecture puts forward the idea that Yeats's Revivalism lies at the heart of his modernism rather than at the "pre-modernist" periphery of his early career. For Yeats, as for so many of his contemporaries, Revival was not a form of nostalgia, in which the past was cut off from experience; nor was it nostalgia in the sense of longing of a time that never was. Rather it was a deliberate attitude toward time, in which a "backward glance" brought the past into a present moment of critical reflection.

Examining the infiltration of new notions of urbanism into Irish culture in this era, in particular through the Housing and Town Planning Association of Ireland, this talk looks at the Dublin-based writings of James Stephens to show how revivalist writers were responsive to the peculiarities of Irish urban experience.

In this episode Adam Putz explores complementary representations of labour and poverty in Ulysses which disintegrate category distinctions like human and nonhuman.

One of the most complicated and persistent questions in the study of childhood in the past relates to the experiences of individual children. How can we know how children perceived the world around them when they have left little written evidence of their own experience and interpretations of their world? In this lecture, Riona NicCongáil attempts to address the above question by looking at the everyday lives of Irish-speaking children during the revivalist period.

In this episode Sharae Deckard analyses the unprecedented commoditization of new ecological commons under neoliberal capitalism and reflects on the importance of environmental humanities approaches to historicize conceptions of environment and configurations of environment.

The Van, the final novel in Roddy Doyle's Barrytown trilogy, explores the physical, psychological and social impact of unemployment on the protagonist, Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. Having been laid off from his job as a plasterer, Jimmy struggles to find a new role for himself within the family that is not connected to being the breadwinner.

In spite of the linguistic license that defines Roddy Doyle's The Snapper, the characters maintain crucial silences throughout in relation to meaningful issues. This episode examines the system of self-imposed censorship that operates among the female characters in particular and how it leads to isolation and an absence of true intimacy.

Fredric Jameson proposes that a "utopia" is a political idea that hopes to transcend, or exist outside, politics, but that must, inevitably, begin inside politics – at "the moment of the suspension of the political," the political must inevitably return. This holds true for the utopian imagined community – a "Dublin soul band" – proposed and tested in Roddy Doyle's The Commitments. If the imagined community represented by the band is haunted by the inevitable return of the political, the novel nonetheless embodies a utopia of speech – a Bakhtinian polyphony in which no one voice is figured as the privileged arbiter of meaning.

What has become known as the Barrytown trilogy: The Commitments (1988), The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991), have become iconic in Irish culture. Centred on one family, the Rabbittes, Roddy Doyle makes reference to current events like the 1990 Soccer World Cup, and in dealing with the issues of teenage pregnancy and unemployment captures the mood of a nation requiring something light and entertaining amid the economic and cultural gloom of the late 1980s.

Roddy Doyle is perhaps the single most successful novelist of this period, gaining an audience far beyond the environs of Dublin's Northside where most of his writing is set. Along with the emergence of rock group U2, Doyle represents a brash generational shift, a confident certitude in his generation's worth and ability. His literary focus is not exactly the urban world; rather it is the suburban world.

This episode discusses how and why various Irish nationalist individuals and organisations attempted to engage children and youth in the Irish cultural revival, particularly in the early twentieth century. It also explores the link between the promotion of a specifically Irish cultural identity and the political socialisation of Irish nationalist youth in the same period.

In Irish Studies, the term Irish Revival broadly defines the cultural nationalist movement which thrived in Ireland from the late nineteenth-century up until the establishment of the Irish Free State. It refers to the pre-Independence period when powerful narratives of de-colonization and cultural reaffirmation mobilized communities both locally and internationally. These lectures explore the historic, cultural and and artistic ramifications of the Revival.

Every reader and scholar of Irish literature is familiar with its extensive genealogy of nature writing, and a 'sense of place' found across a great variety of texts. While not unique to Ireland such a rich heritage has produced some of the most enduring and exciting literary and cultural criticisms. However, given our contemporary concerns with environmental issues, of which climate change is one, literary and cultural narratives need to be re-read and re-energized to help us find a language that speaks to current existential anxieties. This series hopes to produce some of the conceptual pathways that might bridge the narrative of climate change offered by climate scientists and economists, and the humanities' deep engagement with the idea of narrative as something that allows conceptual leaps, produces historical, cultural and somatic effects. 

In this episode, Eamonn Ryan deliberates on the collective leap which individuals and nation states need to make for a sustainable, habitable future. He argues that individuals cannot be faced with moral choices about the environment on a daily basis. Instead, he indicates that it is through sound governance that environmental habits are nurtured effectively. Ryan also persuasively demonstrates the importance of everyday language and stories for an environmental consciousness. The task for the individual and the national collective is akin to the leap a salmon makes. A habitable future rests on going against the current of traditional and normative modes of behavior.

In this lecture Paula Meehan delivers the Ireland Chair of Poetry Lecture, 2014. The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust was set up in 1998 and is jointly held between Queen's University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

This talk explores the challenges involved in writing the city of Dublin into poetry. It considers the insights and emotions that emerge from reading the work of these poets as they write to remember, to celebrate and to interrogate Dublin as a place of personal and national significance.

This talk explores some poems by women published in the last one hundred years, from lesser-known figures such as Winifred Letts to contemporaries Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan.

This short talk will consider some of the ways in which poems in the If Ever You Go anthology visualise and present people in the city environment of Dublin. The poems included cover a broad historical range, from Samuel Ferguson to Paula Meehan, revealing the important representation of Dublin people in these texts...

The poems that appear in this anthology reflect the broad spectrum of relationships that exist between the city and those that inhabit, however briefly, its public and private spaces. From speakers who trace their Dublin roots through generations, to those who visit the city for a short time, perhaps to visit a hospital there, these poems express the varying emotions generated by the experience. Featuring reflections on poems by Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Kennelly and John Montague, among others, this talk considers the poetry of the Dublin streets and what it tells us about the relationship between the city and its people.

Irish literature has often been shaped by its relation to the national through land and the consciousness of land.  New perspectives provided by Atlantic studies, however, now allow for new narratives unrelated to land to be put into conversation with older narratives. This lecture examines work by two twentieth-century poets, one early and one late, that offer insight on this.

Belfast, as a city, has come to be represented in recent years by the shadow of its industrial heritage. The Titanic, and the shipyards in which it was built, have become central to the city's attempt to give cultural and economic purchase to its contemporary identity. This lecture uncovers some of the history behind that branding of Belfast. It takes Thomas Carnduff's shipyard poetry, written in the 1920s and 1930s, as a way in which to understand the complexities of labour which underpinned the products of the shipyards and to reconsider the meaning of the shipyards for Belfast today.

This lecture is concerned with the mid-twentieth-century Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson. Far from being a late Lake District poet', Nicholson is chiefly a poet of northern England's Atlantic edge, the Cumbrian coastal strip. Yet his contemplative gaze almost never turns westward. He also refuses to produce a historical narrative of the area: here history is episodic, incoherent. Nor is Nicholson the poet of an `organic community'. He is rather a messianic poet for whom the coastal strip is an absolute boundary and spatial constraint. This forces the mind to think the impossible, vertical transaction, within which the idea of justice is crucial.

In 1722 an anonymous author styling himself with the degree 'A. M. in Hydrostat' published a proposal in Dublin with the title, Thoughts of a Project for Draining the Irish Channel, a satire on both the South-Sea Bubble and Anglo-Irish politics, as well as a comment on the craze for projects and speculation, scientific advances in hydraulics and circulation, resource management and political arithmetic, and improvement and reclamation. The conceptual leap made in Draining the Irish Channel is that the sea can and should be improved: in other words, done away with. The sea could become not only the medium but the very ground of British colonialism; land could be created from unproductive water; the Irish Sea could literally become a new territory. In practical terms, then, the sea is recast as a geography of natural resources that could potentially be pumped, mined, and diverted using locks and drains, all for the health of the British nation.

This lecture explores the Holyhead Road as a cultural corridor along which people, books, and ideas move, and is part of a larger project examining infrastructural links as sites of cultural exchange between Britain and Ireland from Swift to Joyce. The lecture begins by following Buck Mulligan's invitation in the opening of Ulysses to 'come and look' at the sea, and at the mailboat crossing from Kingstown to Holyhead. Looking at the sea takes us to questions of boundaries and connections, to the local, national, and global scales of identity and belonging, and to the contested and diverse meanings of routine journeys between Ireland and Britain. The representation of different aspects of this route by Katharine Tynan, W.B. Yeats, Sean O'Casey, Thomas Kinsella, Emyr Humphries and R.S. Thomas highlights the affective dimensions of the crossings and journeys made through Ireland, Wales and England, and suggests the lines of influence, connection, and contest that travel along these transport routes.

Recent cultural explorations of Ireland's history of institutional abuse have focussed on buildings as ways of creating a commemorative space for this history. Brokentalkers' The Blue Boy (2011), Anu Productions' Laundry (2011), and Evelyn Glynn's Breaking the Rule of Silence (2011) all insist on the visibility and presence of these institutions within towns and communities. All three works foreground the necessary role of active spectatorship in commemorating this traumatic past, and in ensuring it never happens again. This active spectatorship stands in contrast to the patterns of agnosia and amnesia which maintained the system for so long. This lecture discusses the ways in which culture plays a much-needed role in the commemoration of abuse trauma. Yet culture cannot stand alone and the lecture subsequently calls for a state-led official history of Ireland's institutional past which addresses the class and gender-based operation of these institutions in a holistic system of incarceration.

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 Peninsula, north Wales: Tide-race (1962). Beginning with two suggestive examples of Chamberlain's composite graphic cartography, which plot an imaginative ethnography and gendered 'zoning' of Bardsey, the paper considers the Irish (specifically Syngian) alignments of her representations of the island self. The visual-verbal Tide-race is then brought into focus as a text powerfully invested in the process of mapping island space by means of layered (and knowing) folktale fantasies, troubled by thwarted desire and terror. The Syngian genetics of the work are revealed. At stake is the need Chamberlain felt, mid-century, to carve out her own space as a woman writer on a 'deluding scrap of rock and turf'. More generally, the paper seeks to accomplish a necessary reterritorialisation of Welsh Writing in English.

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 discusses the significance of Famine commemoration -- its relationship to a visual culture of Famine representation, and the place of the Famine's memory in contemporary public space and discourse. This study addresses both community and national forms of commemoration and memorialization, investigating the business of their making, the iconography they draw from and create, and the narratives of their becoming.

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 Scottish music. The lecture considers the connections between these works and the coast itself, with its changing history, before moving across the Irish Sea to Ciaran Carson's 1989 collection, Belfast Confetti, which includes a poem about Ruskin, Turner and the modern city, 'John Ruskin in Belfast'. Exploration of the dialogue between different writers on either side of the Irish Sea, and on either side of the Solway Firth allows the area to be viewed temporally as well as spatially. It thus offers a new model for reading landscapes and literature, in which geographical and historical aspects are mutually informing. What may appear to be fixed and unchanging is revealed as being subject to successions of developing technology and economic imperatives; but conversely, the longer view encouraged by returning to the same place over the centuries offers a different perspective on the contemporaneous impulse of contextualisation.

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.

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. Irish culture had its own recent and bitter evidence for the decimation of an imperial attachment. The memory of the famine inhabited the same cultural space as the increasing import of traded goods in the second half of the ninteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. So it is that James Joyce's short story ‘The Dead' pictures the legacy of hunger through the imagination of a meal. If this first wave of globalization came to an end in Britain with the declaration of war in 1914, it suffered fatal arrest in Ireland in 1916. Reaction to the global empire underpinned the cultural and political movements that fed the rebellion. The Easter Rising was a product of the old order and a siren of the revolutions still to come.

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, raised money for the rebel cause and knew several leaders from their visits to America. Joyce Kilmer, who considered himself Irish (though his actual heritage brought that assertion into question), wrote both journalistic articles and poetry about the Rising and its significance for American readers. Woodrow Wilson, U.S. president in 1916 and candidate for re-election that November, sought to avoid international problems with domestic political implications, deliberately keeping his distance from a matter he considered internal to Great Britain. This Scholarcast probes the Easter Rising's American connections.

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 singers and accompanists of his generation he was invited by piper Liam O'Flynn to join Planxty in 1974.  Although deeply committed to traditional music, Brady stresses the importance of individual musical vision and the constant need for renewal and innovation.

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 the poems which draw upon the forecast's daily and nightly ritual of naming the sea areas around Britain and Ireland? How might this maritime and archipelagic imagination of the Isles be related to current post-devolutionary attempts to reconceive the British Isles, both politically and intellectually? All of the poems revel in the forecast's litany of names such as Dogger, Fastnet, Lundy, Heligoland and Finisterre, for example, which do not evoke places so much as they imply ideas of untapped spatial and cultural possibility within the British Isles. Might there be a utopian dimension to some of these poetic visions of the archipelago? On the other hand, some of the poems juxtapose domestic and maritime settings, and dramatise a tension between the safe and comfortable houses or beds in which listeners enjoy the broadcasts, and the exoticised coastal margins of the Isles in which the forecasts may be merely the 'cold poetry of information'.

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 idea of a canonicity – but that the gradual crumbling of British empire after 1919, from the late 1950s, and then during devolution, has re-created England as a place able to overwhelm the British-imperial ideal space which was created for it. The presentation looks forward finally to a more open-ended and action-oriented, and less managerial and imperial, national literature of England.

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 than ever before to the varying ways in which it has been read during the last two thousand years, especially by Francis Bacon and Denis Diderot. This book makes a major contribution not just to the study of the Elder Pliny but to our understanding of the cultural processes of ordering knowledge widespread in the Roman Empire and to the reception of classical literature and ideas.

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 urban and more anonymous. While some fantasized about ways of capturing and holding the attention of the masses, others preferred to make art and literature more exclusive, to shut out the crowd. One path led to 'Sensation'; the other to aestheticism, though there were also efforts to evade this opposition. This book examines the fiction, drama, fine art, and ephemeral forms of these years against the backdrop of Reform. Authors and artists studied include Wilkie Collins, Dion Boucicault, Charles Dickens, James McNeill Whistler, and the popular illustrator, Alfred Concanen.

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.

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.

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 histories of Wales and Ireland, and how are questions of sexual and artistic identity addressed within texts that imagine British-Irish history in gendered terms? This lecture identifies finds evidence of a feminist reimagining of archipelagic relationships by two writers: Munster novelist and playwright Una Troy, and Welsh writer Menna Gallie, born into a mining community on the western edge of the South Wales coalfields. Both Troy and Gallie wrote novels that deploy plots of female friendship to interrogate the relationship between gender and national affiliation in a four nations context.

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 deixis, the term assigned by cognitive linguists to words which point or position. The few existing studies of deixis in poetry typically presume on its unvarying functional effect: to situate and anchor the voice(s) and environment(s) of the poetic text. Interestingly, poets like Catherine Walsh and Zoe Skoulding, writing out of Ireland and North Wales respectively, call that assumption into question. Both these poets use deictic signifiers in ways which deliberately, arguably self-protectively, fail to fix their texts in a range of potential cultural contexts.

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 at a time when a national agenda for national identity is more urgently damaging than ever, turning to the embedded traces of different, pre-industrial pasts, offers modes of perception and representation that are based on equalities, rather than hierarchies of difference.

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 MacNeice’s Carrick Revisited (1945). For Longley, the poems’ deeper aesthetic dynamics epitomise how influences move around within the archipelago, and she particularly emphasises serial transformations of Wordsworth and Yeats. She sees archipelagic and national paradigms as complementary, but criticises the way in which national poetic canons marginalise border cases’, saying: If a poem doesn’t fit the paradigm, change the paradigm. She goes on to suggest that, in the mid twentieth century, the aesthetic significance of Yeats’s mature poetry was most significantly absorbed by MacNeice and by English poets such as Auden, Larkin, Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill. She ends by proposing that all this throws light on the archipelagic sources of Northern Irish poetry.

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 a timely and intellectually fruitful assessment of the complex ways in which media forms and national events are currently entangled.The contributors explore how Hurricane Katrina is positioned at the intersection of numerous early twenty-first century crisis narratives centralizing uncertainties about race, class, region, government and public safety.