Events

Irish Studies Events Photo Collage

Spring 2023 Events

Poster for Edel Meade's St. Brigid's Day ConcertBrigid: Pre-Christian Goddess, Saint and Muse

February 1 | 5 PM | 125 Morisson Hall, UC Berkeley
Co-Sponsored by the Departments of Music and English
Join award-winning Irish musician and Fulbright Scholar, Edel Meade for a special St. Brigid’s Day musical performance and discussion celebrating Brigid, the revered pre-Christian goddess and Irish saint. Edel will perform songs from her critically acclaimed album, ‘Brigids and Patricias’ and some of her favourite women’s songs from the Irish song tradition.
“A fearless delivery that celebrates womanhood”  SUNDAY BUSINESS POST
“Most courageous Irish album of the year” THE IRISH TIMES

Poster for Inaugural Tracy Lecture with Claire ConnollyImproving Ireland: From Maria Edgeworth to Sally Rooney

February 7, 2023 | 5pm | Maude Fife Room, Wheeler Hall
Inaugural Tracy Lecture with Speaker Claire Connolly
Claire Connolly is Professor of Modern English at University College Cork, Ireland where she runs the Ports, Past and Present(link is external) research project. She is the author of A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790-1829 and is currently writing a book on Irish romanticism for Cambridge UP. Her talk will look at the longer history of links between discourses of modernisation and women’s writing in Ireland.

Engraving of the Molly MaguiresThe Molly Maguires: Transatlantic Irish Protest and Class Conflict in the Nineteenth Century

April 6 | 4 p.m. | 300 Wheeler Hall
Speaker: Kevin Kenny, Glucksman Professor of History, New York University

Twenty Irishmen were hanged in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania in the late 1870s, convicted of a series of sixteen killings allegedly committed under the cover of a secret society called the Molly Maguires. Hostile contemporaries described the Molly Maguires as inherently savage Irish immigrants who imported a violent conspiratorial organization that had no place in industrial America. Challenges to this nativist myth produced a counter-myth transposing the category of evil from the immigrants to their exploiters, casting the Irish as innocent victims of economic, religious, or ethnic oppression. Neither interpretation makes historical sense. The Molly Maguires were not depraved killers, but neither were they figments of the nativist or anti-labor imagination. They never existed as the conspiracy imagined by their enemies, but they did use violence to combat exploitation. Who were the Molly Maguires, what did they do, and why did they do it? Why did contemporaries describe them in such luridly hostile ways? And what do their actions tell us about transatlantic protest and class conflict in the nineteenth century?

Irish Studies Events Archive

Irish Studies Events Photo Collage
  • New Frontiers in Language Technology for Minority Languages, with Kevin Scannell (Saint Louis University)
  • The Present and Future of the Irish Language, panel discussion
  • Q&A with Irish novelist John Connolly
  • False Comfort: Sex, Prayer, and Modernism in Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, with Paige Reynolds (College of the Holy Cross)

  • In the Name of Peace: John Hume in America, with Robert O'Driscoll (Consul General of Ireland in San Francisco)
  • Seamus Heaney: The Berkeley Years, with the poet's son Michael Heaney and poet Tess Taylor
  • Ireland - The EU – Brexit, with Mark Bevir (UC Berkeley) and Colum Hatchell (Vice Consul of Ireland in San Francisco)
  • Brexit and the Northern Irish Vote, with Máirtín Ó Muilleoir (Minister of Finance in the Northern Ireland Assembly)
  • That Other Irish Literature: The Best Books in Irish, 1893-2016, with Philip O'Leary (Boston College)

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UC Berkeley Visit of His Excellency, Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland