The transnational mobility of cheap print: British chapbooks in Italy, 1800-1850
My project compares British and Italian repertoires of popular publishing to determine how and to what extent translation is responsible for the similarities and differences that exist between them. Specifically, it tracks and analyses translations of British chapbooks published in nineteenth-century Italy, mainly between 1800 and 1850. The analysis of the Italian versions and their sources is carried out using an interdisciplinary approach that integrates translation studies with theories of textuality and the histories of the book and of reading. While contributing to translation history and to the bibliographical and historiographical survey of cheap print, my research enhances our awareness of the transnational dimension of popular publishing. This sheds new light on the processes that led to the formation of a shared European heritage of popular culture.
Representing difference: Issues of identity and cultural encounters in the Italian translations of Seamus Heaney
Dr. Biancheri’s research area is literary translation, and her main objective is to investigate to what degree source texts might be transformed by manifold cultural and social aspects inherent to the context of reception that also figure into the specific interpretive inscription of a translation. The focus of her project funded by the Irish Research Council is the critical analysis on the poetry of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, and its reception in Italy in particular. The goal is to demonstrate that given target texts only corresponds to one interpretation of their sources, and to establish how this interpretation is influenced by factors transcending linguistic constraints. It is questioned, for instance, to what extent translated texts might challenge, or else conform to a given international construction of Irish and Northern Irish identity. This research, by way of a thorough engagement with literary texts in translation, contributes to the understanding of the cultural dialogue between European countries. The work resulting from this research provides a relevant intervention to topical debates in the area of translation studies, as well as to the ongoing discussion about Heaney’s poetic legacy in Ireland and abroad.
RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women's Writing, 1550-1700 is an ERC-funded project led by Marie-Louise Coolahan, involving seven postdoctoral researchers and two doctoral students. The project is producing a large-scale, quantitative analysis of the reception and circulation of women's writing from 1550 to 1700. The results will enable analysis of how texts, ideas and reputations gained traction in the early modern period. The focus includes writers who were read in Ireland and Britain as well as women born and resident in Anglophone countries; the subject of study is not limited to authors who wrote in English. RECIRC is organised in four interlocking work packages: transnational religious networks; the international republic of letters; the manuscript miscellany; and book/manuscript ownership. See www.recirc.nuigalway.ie.
Dr. Conor McNamara
Dr. Conor McNamara is the 1916 Scholar in Residence for 2016 at the Moore Institute. This year he has spoken at over seventy academic conferences, community events and schools on the topic of the Easter Rebellion. He is the co-curator of the University's flagship centenary exhibition, A College in War & Revolution 1913-19; The University Experience, currently on display in the Hardiman Library. He is currently compiling a directory of archives covering the revolutionary period in the west of Ireland and is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on the Revolutionary period in the west.
Dr. Conor McNamara NUI Galway, 1916 Scholar in Residence, 2016 Author: Easter 1916: A New Illustrated History (2015) Editor: The West of Ireland: New Perspectives on the Nineteenth Century (2011)
Dr. Laura Branch
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Intra-European Fellow
Networks of Trade and Religion in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589, 1598-1600).
This project investigates the relationship between trade and religion in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589, 1598-1600), a vast repository of documents concerned with early modern commercial and colonial expansion. The study has two central objectives: the first is to introduce a more sophisticated understanding of religious identity into the discussion of Hakluyt and his sources. Traditionally, scholars have labelled Hakluyt a staunch Protestant, but I argue that his anti-Catholic rhetoric simply reflected state policy, while the extensive material he included in his collection features an important array of interactions between traders of different faiths, suggesting a more diverse, flexible and pragmatic world of commerce. The second objective is to re-establish the centrality of England’s long-distance trading empire to Hakluyt’s vision by considering trading missions to Russia, Persia, and the Levant. Scholars have devoted disproportionate attention to the material relating to the Americas despite the fact that it comprises just one third of the text. This research takes a nuanced approach to cross-confessional trade by considering not only how Protestants traded with Muslims and Orthodox Christians, but also how English Catholics lived and worked alongside English Protestants and how far their attitudes differed towards other faiths. The project is interdisciplinary in engaging with aspects of early modern trade, religion, culture and literature; and blends methodologies of textual analysis with prosopography and social network theory.
The Hibernicising of the Anglo-Irish Playwright, 1904-2013
This project aims to demonstrate that, since the opening of the Abbey Theatre in 1904, Irish theatre-makers have frequently imposed Irish elements onto the English-set plays written by the great, London-based, Irish Protestant playwrights.
As discerning critics have long recognised, George Farquhar, Oliver Goldsmith, R.B. Sheridan, Oscar Wilde, and Bernard Shaw frequently signalled their Irish origins in their plays. Often cited are their satirical portraits of the English, their subversive use of Stage Irishmen, and their inclusion of Irish topical references. In the decades since the Revival, however, Irish theatre-makers have not been satisfied with such coded expressions of Irishness. As an expression of their own cultural nationalism, theatre-makers have made the Irish characters in these plays more central; they have had certain English or continental European characters played with Irish accents; they have re-set plays in Ireland; and they have even included the Irish playwrights in the on-stage action.
This tendency to crudely “Hibernicise” these plays reflects the discomfort that Irish theatre practitioners feel with the Irish-British cultural hybridity of these playwrights. Being from Church of Ireland backgrounds, these writers self-identified as Irish and even possessed what Elizabeth Bowen referred to as the “subtle anti-Englishness” of the “Anglo-Irish”; however, they were also aware that they were, on some level, British (in the same way that a Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish person might consider themselves British today). I will argue that, in the wake of the Good Friday agreement (and for historical accuracy’s sake), critics and theatre-makers must understand and analyse the Irish-British hybridity of Irish Protestant writers, including those covered in this project.
Dr. David Clare is an Irish Research Council-funded postdoctoral research fellow based in the Moore Institute at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His first book, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in November 2015, and his journal articles on important figures from Irish literature and drama have appeared (or will soon appear) in the Irish Studies Review, the New Hibernia Review, the Irish University Review, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, the Irish Review, Studies in Burke and His Time, and Emerging Perspectives.
Dr. David Clare IRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow Moore Institute Room 2007, Floor 2 Hardiman Research Building NUI Galway Galway
I am currently in receipt of a one-year Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, which is focused on publishing a monograph arising from my doctoral research. My research examines the practices of begging and alms-giving in pre-Famine Ireland ( c. 1815-45). Section I considers the challenges in defining and measuring beggary in this period, while also analysing the varied ways in which beggars were perceived - as deviant, benign or just simply ubiquitous. Section II explores the roles of lay charities and civil parish vestries in responding to begging and beggars; in the instance of charities, I am undertaking a case study of the mendicity society movement which spread throughout Ireland and Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. Given the centrality of religion in the practice of charity and philanthropy in this period, Section III analyses how Roman Catholics and Protestants (of different denominations) viewed and negotiated begging and alms-giving, and to what extent can differences or similarities be attributed to confessional affiliation.
The Tuke Irish in Minnesota: a transnational analysis of assisted emigration to the American Midwest, 1880-1930.
Between 1882 and 1884 over 9,000 people from the Clifden, Oughterard, Belmullet and Newport Poor Law Unions left the west of Ireland as part of James Hack Tuke’s assisted emigration schemes. Of these, an estimated 800 emigrants settled in the US Federal State of Minnesota. Accordingly, this study considers the origins of an Irish emigrant community in the west of Ireland, discussed in tandem with the unique characteristics of their immigrant experience in the American Midwest. The project explores and chronicles the lives of Tuke’s assisted emigrants from counties Galway and Mayo and examines their experience through social, cultural, economic, political and religious lenses. This provides a narrative of the transnational nature of migration and its ability to forge global connections. Ultimately the study reveals some the challenges and opportunities faced by the Irish emigrants to the American Midwest during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Contact Details:
Regina Donlon, Moore Institute, Hardiman Building, NUI Galway, Galway.
Virtual landscapes? New media technologies and the poetics of place in recent Irish poetry
Irish Research Council and Marie Skłodowska-Curie ELEVATE postdoctoral fellow
Project:
The project focuses on the impact of new media technologies on literary representations of landscape in Irish poetry and poetic culture. It addresses the relationship between new media and poetry both thematically, and through the aesthetic and cultural implications of new forms of dissemination. Works included have been published in print as well as in digital formats, and the project also covers poetry’s engagement with visual and audiovisual arts, music, and other forms of artistic production.
Bio:
Anne Karhio is a holder of the Irish Research Council’s ELEVATE International Career Development Fellowship, co-funded by the European Commission via Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. In 2014-2016, she is based in the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway, where she is a member of the Electronic Literature and Digital Culture research groups. She is a graduate of the University of Helsinki and the National University of Ireland, Galway.
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