This talk will assemble Irish cultural artifacts to explore not only how plantation mentalities shaped the politics of liberation in Ireland, but also how these legacies continue to infiltrate global trends, from oppositional politics and public-facing debates over divisive histories, to misinformation about climate change. Obsessions with bogs, forests, rivers, and other fragile native ecosystems in Irish writing urge contemporary audiences to refocus on the environments we share, as climate disruptions undercut human presumptions of profit, ownership, and control. Plantations can only continue to have serious social and environmental costs if cultural norms permit the commodification of human and non-human life into abstract resources that fuel profit. Insights from Irish artists, writers, and thinkers challenge assumptions that plantations must remain the default social architecture, that segregation and exploitation are normal features of contemporary life, or that the future is set.

 Dr Jessica Martell is associate professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. She is the author of Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire (2020) and the co-editor of Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant Garde (2019). In 2025-6, she is a Visiting Fellow at the QUB School of HAPP, and the Fulbright-QUB Scholar in Irish Studies.

This seminar will be available in hybrid form, in-person and online via Teams. Please indicate your preference when registering. All welcome.

This is a joint event with the Centre for Public History; it will be followed by a drinks reception to mark the 60th anniversary of the Institute of Irish Studies at QUB.