USIHS J.C. Beckett Memorial Lecture 2024

Dr Clodagh Tait: ‘Margaret Isabella and the fairy in the churn: Women’s folklore and girls’ histories’

Thursday 9 May at 6pm. Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 2 Titanic Boulevard Titanic Quarter Belfast BT3 9HQ (and online via Zoom)

The Ulster Society for Irish Studies (USIHS) and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) would like to welcome you to the annual 2024 Beckett lecture, in memory of the late Professor J. C. Beckett. This year’s talk will be by Dr Clodagh Tait of Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. The lecture is free and open to the public.

The last decades have seen a flourishing of studies of Irish women’s history and writing, providing new insights into women’s roles in politics, communities and domestic life, and greater understanding of how they grappled with the strictures placed on their freedoms. However, some women are inevitably less visible than others in the surviving sources. The Irish folklore collections (compiled from the 1930s), publications on folklore and folklife, and a variety of other sources, can help to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge about women’s experiences, customs and worldviews. In this paper I will discuss women’s folklore, considering in particular stories told by girls and women about the ways of the ‘good people’, or about childhood experiences interpreted as being encounters with fairies. Worn smooth and warm with retelling (though there are hints at sharp edges too), these stories assist us in reconstructing supernatural beliefs and the actions they prompted. And they also reveal something about how narratives about fairies were shaped by community input, how personal pasts were recollected, and how girls’ histories were handed down.

Clodagh Tait lectures in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. She has written extensively on early modern Irish social and cultural history, including the history of women and men; pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing; death, violence, martyrdom and protest; religious devotion; and the history of emotion. Her recent articles include studies of a Cork ghost story from 1688-9, of accounts of ‘crisis apparitions’ in Ireland and the USA, and of the magical and supernatural labours of women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is working on an anthology of women’s folklore and a book on cursing and blessing in Ireland over 400 years. She is joint editor of Irish Historical Studies.

Please register at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/margaret-isabella-and-the-fairy-in-the-churn-tickets-880652063027

USIHS Lecture : Joe Curran

‘Castle and City: Dublin Castle in its urban context, 1801-1923′

Thursday 18th April at 6pm. This talk will take place in person at Queen’s University Belfast (Institute for Irish Studies, 27 University Square) and online. If you are planning on attending in person, please remember that the carpark by the McClay Library is open and free to everyone from 4.00pm each day.

Dr Joe Curran is currently a postdoctoral researcher on Maynooth University’s PARISH (Preserving and Recording Ireland’s Sacred Heritage) Project in collaboration with the University of Notre Dame.
He previously worked as an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. This project ‘An Urban History of Dublin Castle’, explored the economic, social, and cultural interactions between Dublin Castle and Dublin city during the British-Irish Union.

You can find out more about the talk, or sign up online, here.

All welcome!

USIHS Lecture: Stephen Scarth

Stephen Scarth (PRONI): ‘From the Ashes: A history of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland’

Thursday 15 February 2024, 6.00pm – ONLINE and IN-Person at 27 University Square 01/003, QUB

Stephen is Head of Public Services at PRONI and leads on the marking of PRONI’s 100th anniversary programme of activities and events.

Stephen will explore how the new northern record office responded to the loss of eight centuries of records and evolved into a repository of national significance with over 3 million documents.

All welcome: register at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/from-the-ashes-a-history-of-the-public-record-office-of-northern-ireland-tickets-801100672677

USIHS Lecture: Dr Bronagh McShane

‘Praying hearts, praying minds: enclosed orders and online religion‘

Wednesday 13th December at 6pm (QUB – Meredith Room, 23 University Square and online via Zoom)

In 2018 Pope Francis issued the instruction, Cor Orans (‘Praying Heart’), which gave official sanction for the use of digital media by cloistered nuns. The publication of Cor Orans was a major step-change in Vatican directives regulating religious life for enclosed nuns since it was the first time that use of digital media by cloistered communities of women was given official sanction. But the pontiff’s authorisation was not unqualified since it urged the women to use technology with ‘sobriety and discretion not only with regard to the contents but also to the quantity of information and the type’. To date, we lack any critical assessment of how communities of nuns themselves have responded to the pontiff’s instruction at a local level (if in fact they have responded at all). This paper begins an initial assessment of this subject by presenting a case study of the Order of St Clare (OSC), established in 1221 by St Clare of Assisi (1194-1253). How do women for whom strict removal from the outside world is at the very heart of their identity, contend with the vast opportunities for outside communication offered by digital media? What tensions arise between ‘online’ presence and ‘offline’ communal and individual religious identities and affiliations and how can these tensions be mediated? As one of the most austere religious orders in the Roman Catholic Church, the order is an ideal case study for investigating the acute tensions that can arise between the religious ideal of enclosure and withdrawal from the world and the potential for infinite engagement offered by digital and social media.

Dr Bronagh McShane is a Lecturer in History at the University of Limerick.

You can sign up to the online event here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/proni/1067648

USIHS Lecture: Dr Tim Murtagh

‘Apprenticeship to Revolution: Workers and Tradesmen in the 1798 Rebellion’

Thursday 9th November at 6pm (QUB – 27 University Square 01/003 and online via Zoom)

By the end of the eighteenth century, the Irish elite were acutely aware of the dangers of a growing population of urban workers, whether they be in Belfast, Dublin or Cork. This was to be the age of the ‘radical artisan’: skilled, mainly urban, craftsmen, who were highly literate and politically engaged. Unsurprisingly, it was these workers who would provide some of the most dedicated recruits to the cause of the United Irishmen during the 1790s. Yet these artisans never lost their own fierce sense of political independence, often holding socio-economic viewpoints that were very different from those of the middle-class republican leadership. This talk examines the political views, activities, and organizations of these Irish tradesmen in the years running up to the 1798 Rebellion, as well as examining some of the consequence of that rebellion for the country’s urban workers.

Tim Murtagh is a graduate of TCD, completing his PhD in 2015. . He is currently a Research Fellow with the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, an all-island project to digitally reconstruct the records of the Public Record Office of Ireland that were destroyed in 1922.

REGISTER AT: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/proni/1040610

USIHS Lecture: Dr Immo Warntjes (TCD)

‘Heinrich Zimmer and the beginning of Patrician scholarship in the late 19th century’

Thursday 12 October 2023 at 6pm

All seminars will take place in person (Institute for Irish Studies, 27 University Square, QUB) and online by registering at at: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/proni/1027500

Dr Warntjes is the author of The Munich Computus: Text & Translation. Irish computistics between Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede and its reception in Carolingian times (Stuttgart 2010).

USIHS Programme – Autumn 2023

Please find this semester’s USIHS seminar series dates and subjects. We hope to see you at as many as possible!

12 October: Immo Warntjes (TCD), ‘Heinrich Zimmer and the beginning of Patrician scholarship in the late 19th century ‘.

9 November: Tim Murtagh (Independent), ‘Apprenticeship to Revolution: workers and tradesmen in the 1798 Rebellion’.

14 December: Bronagh Ann McShane (Limerick), ‘Praying hearts, praying minds: enclosed orders and online religion’.

All seminars will take place in person (Institute for Irish Studies, 27 University Square, QUB) and online (links to follow), starting at 6pm

J.C. Beckett Memorial Lecture: ‘Ancestral Voices: Dillon and Parnell’

by Prof. Paul Bew

Thu, 19 May 2022, 19:00 BST at Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast

The Ulster Society of Irish Historical Studies (USIHS) and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) are delighted to invite you to the 2022 annual J.C. Beckett lecture which takes place onsite at PRONI.

The scale of John Dillon/Charles Stewart Parnell tension has been downplayed for far too long. Even before the divorce crisis there were numerous explosions. The complex social and family background is relevant. After Parnell’s death in 1891 , the career of Dillon is analysed in the context of the efforts made by other nationalists to offer a strategy of Parnellism without Parnell.

Paul Bew is Emeritus Professor at the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast and a life peer in the House of Lords.

Image: “Force no Remedy” (Charles Stewart Parnell; John Dillon and an unknown policeman) by Harry Furniss chromolithograph, published in Vanity Fair 7 December 1881

NPG D44043 © National Portrait Gallery, London

THIS IS A FREE EVENT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, BUT REGISTRATION IS ESSENTIAL AT: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/jc-beckett-memorial-lecture-ancestral-voices-dillon-and-parnell-tickets-324938639217?aff=ebdssbdestsearch