Annual QUB Irish Studies Lecture
The QUB Annunal Irish Studies Lecture 2011
The 2011 QUB Annual Irish Studies Lecture will be given by Professor Conor Gearty. Professor Gearty is Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, London School of Economics. Professor Gearty has published widely in the fields of terrorism, civil liberties and human rights. He has approached all these subjects in an inter-disciplinary manner, and in particular has sought to locate them in their legal and political and historical contexts. Details of all his professional activities and publications can be obtained via his website, www.conorgearty.com
On Thursday 19th May, Professor Gearty will speak on the subject of: 'After Saville'
Venue: Seminar Room 1, Institute of Irish Studies 53-67 University Road 5pm
The QUB Annual Irish Studies Lecture 2010
The 2010 QUB Annual Irish Studies Lecture will be given by Professor Elizabeth Malcolm. Elizabeth Malcolm is the Gerry Higgins Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne. Professor Malcolm works mainly in the field of Irish social history and has published on topics, such as: temperance, drink and pubs; popular culture; asylums and mental illness; hospitals and disease; crime and policing; women’s and gender history; and migration. She has also written about recent Irish historiography and the development of Irish Studies.
On Thursday 21 October 2010, Professor Malcolm will speak on the subject of: 'From Famine to Fever: the Irish and the Australian Gold Rushes, 1850-70'
This lecture will examine the Irish who took part in the main Australian gold rushes of the 1850s in the new colony of Victoria. It will investigate in particular how their experiences of living in famine-ravaged Ireland and then immigrating to Australia in the fevered atmosphere of the early gold-rush period affected their physical and mental health. Only perhaps 20 per cent of miners made any money, so what happened to the rest who arrived with such high hopes of wealth? And what of their families in Ireland expecting to receive large remittances? Significant numbers of Irish women as well as men went to Victoria during this period. Did they work on the gold diggings or marry miners? Most Irish settled eventually, and the 'gold-rush generation' has been hailed in Australia as a success story. But what of those who didn't succeed or settle and instead became casualties of gold fever?
Venue: Bell Lecture Theatre, Pysics Building, 5pm
Professor Richard English, QUB, Professor Joep Leerssen, University of Amsterdam, Professor Ed Larrissy, QUB
The QUB Annual Irish Studies Lecture 2009:
The Irish Studies International Research Initiative held its second QUB Annual Irish Studies Lecture on 4th March 2009. The lecture was delivered by Professor Joep Leerssen (University of Amsterdam), one of the wold's most distinguished Irish Studies scholars. The lecture was titled:
'Cultural Transfer By A Commodious Vicus of Recirculation'
Joep Leerssen is Professor of Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam. Professor Leerssen studied Comparative Literature and English at the University of Aachen and Anglo-Irish Studies at University College Dublin; he took his PhD in 1986 at the University of Utrecht. In that year he was appointed at the University of Amsterdam, where he obtained the chair in Modern European Literature in 1991.
He served as director of the Huizinga Institute (Dutch National Research Institute for Cultural Studies) from 1995 until 2006. He held the Erasmus Lecturership at Harvard University in 2003, and was awarded the Spinoza Prize in 2008.
Professor Richard English, QUB, Professor Joe Lee, NYU, and Professor Peter Gregson, QUB
Professor Joe Lee, Glucksman Professor for Irish Studies and Director of Glucksman Ireland House at New York University, in addition to being a politician and award-winning author, delivered the first Annual Irish Studies Lecture at Queen’s University Belfast, on Thursday 8 May 2008, on “The Future of Irish Studies”.
Professor Lee’s first two books, The Modernization of Irish Society, 1848-1918 (Dublin, 1973) and Ireland, 1912-1985: Politics and Society (Dublin, 1989) both helped confirm his place as one of the world's leading authorities on Irish history. Indeed, Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society (1989) has enjoyed wide critical acclaim, winning the Irish Independent/Irish Life Prize for History in 1991; and both the Aer Lingus/ Irish Times Prize for Literature (non-fiction) and the J.S. Donnelly, Snr. Prize for History and Social Sciences in 1992.
Professor Lee’s columns have been collected and published as The Shifting Balance of Power: Exploring the 20th Century (Sunday Tribune, 2000), and he has recently edited, with Marion R. Casey, the massive Making the Irish American: The History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States (NYU Press, 2006).
Professor Lee’s research interests include 19th and 20th Century Irish and Irish American history and politics; Irish Diaspora; Nationalism, imperialism and post colonialism; and he has a long-term interest in Northern Ireland. He is a former member of the Upper House of the Irish Parliament, and a former member of the British-Irish Parliamentary Body.