There is an Interest in This: The Future of Irish Studies Conference 2024
Clodagh McEvoy-Johnston '25 is a global affairs and peace studies major with a minor in civil and human rights, studying at the Keough School of Global Affairs. During her summer internship with the ARINS Project, as part of the Notre Dame Dublin Irish Internship Program, she attended the 2024 Future of Irish Studies Conference.
“You don’t have to be Irish to do Irish Studies, you don’t even have to belong to the Catholic Church” said Guy Beiner of Boston College in the kick-off panel of the 2024 Future of Irish Studies Conference. The Conference took place at Queen’s University Belfast in Belfast, Northern Ireland and was co-hosted by the University of Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and Queens’ Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice.
Opening with a panel entitled ‘Global Irish Studies’ is not how one would anticipate an area studies conference to begin. Yet, that was exactly the point of this 2024 symposium: the future of Irish Studies no longer follows the beaten path.
In the opening session, scholars Guy Beiner of BC and Ian McBride of University of Oxford made the case that in order for Irish Studies to remain relevant, it must detach itself from the rigid confines of the island. Beiner in particular argued that unidisciplinarity is a thing of the past. Instead, Irish Studies must move into more interdisciplinary and comparative forms to reach its full potential. Hedwig Schwall of the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies supported these claims with evidence of the ways Irish Studies has taken shape on the continent of Europe. She cited the international workshops, multidisciplinary conferences, book clubs, and writer’s fests that her university supports.
In lieu of rigid area studies boundaries, McBride, Beiner, and Schwall all claimed that Irish Studies must be interwoven into critical analyses of global migration, trade, colonialism, language, and liberation. The field must become ‘Global’ Irish Studies. Not only that, but these scholars argued that Irish Studies must become a lens through which other fields, like medicine or anthropology, can be understood.
The Future of Irish Studies, proclaimed the opening panel scholars, is about understanding an ever-changing face of Ireland within multi- and interdisciplinary contexts. It is about hailing a new era of scholarship and study. Closing out the first panel with a bang, Ian McBride proclaimed that “part of our job is to ring in a new era of Irishness.”
The first panel of the day certainly left listeners with a sense of hope and ambition for the revival of Irish Studies. We felt as if we were implicated in the reimagination of the field. Considering the audience was comprised of some of the foremost scholars and department heads in the field, many of us truly were.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the grandeur of the first panel, the audience was also left without any real sense of where Irish Studies is going. Being “Global” is in fact not a very specific blueprint. As we were left with our thoughts during the coffee break, one also began to worry whether Irish Studies will be subsumed entirely by other disciplines.
It is here that the second panel, ‘Disciplinary Irish Studies,’ offered listeners some answers. Chaired by Eve Patten of Trinity College Dublin, the second session could be understood in both conjunction and opposition to the first panel. In her opening statement, Patten asked the poignant question, "are we at the point in Irish Studies that it is no longer particular in any sense, but is in fact paradigmatic?"
Taking up this torch, scholars Alvin Jackson of the University of Edinburgh, Anne Goarzin of the University of Rennes 2, and Dominic Bryan of Queen’s University Belfast delved into the ways that Irish Studies can and must maintain its status as a specific discipline. This is not to say that these scholars refuted the conclusions of the previous session. All three in fact supported the field’s move towards interdisciplinarity. In no small way, however, these scholars made the case that Irish Studies should not be seen as a mere lens by which to understand other fields. Instead, it must be a primary discipline that maintains its attractivity in very specific ways.
In one particularly riveting moment, Dominic Bryan commented on the proclivity of US universities in Ireland and Irish Studies. From Bryan’s vantage, contemporary Irish Studies must grapple with its primary audience: American students wanting to study so-called Irishness. Moreover, the field must deal with the underlying tension of both US and Irish universities marketing their programmes towards a primarily American audience.
It was at that moment that Bryan offered both an answer to Patten’s question about the paradigmatic nature of Irish Studies and a subtle rebellion to the pervasive Americanness in the field. The move was simultaneously unanticipated and captivating. Yet there was no real animosity in Bryan’s comments. He did as all scholars should do: make us question our reality.
Taking the buck from the earlier speakers, the panelists of the post-lunch session, ‘Organising Irish Studies,’ helped the audience through Bryan’s comments on the inextricability of Irish Studies and Americanness.
In his opening statement, Professor Michael Brown of the University of Aberdeen offered the following: “I think we can highlight two things that give Irish Studies its strength: the diaspora and the language... the Irish abroad and their descendants now support Irish Studies.” At this line, a nearly unanimous node went through the crowd.
Brown proceeded to depict the Irish diaspora as both the genesis and savior of the field of Irish Studies, particularly during and after the Northern Irish Troubles. Without the guarantee that Irish universities will continue to support Irish Studies, Brown argued that the fiscal support of Irish-Americans and American Universities is essential. Without money, as Eugenio Biagini of the University of Cambridge candidly followed, Irish Studies cannot and will not be able to survive.
In the final eponymous session of the day, Peter Gray of Queen’s, Matthew Reznicek of the University of Minnesota, and Siobhra Aiken of Queen’s gave their thoughts on where Irish studies can go, with particular reference to the Irish language. Aiken proclaimed that “we are seeing an incredible revival in the Irish language across the city [Belfast].” Naturally, the final session was an uplifting one. Though, as an audience member, I must interject that I could not help but wonder why the programme didn’t offer any Irish translation.
In that vein, the most important questions of the day were the ones posed by the audience. It is here that I think of Dr. Chanté Mouton Kinyon of the University of Notre Dame, who raised her hand and wondered why we had only touched on race once or twice in the panels. As an audience member, my cheeks burned with shame that Mouton Kinyon, the only Black person in the audience, had to ask that question. For all our talk of the changing face of Ireland and Irishness, race was left almost entirely out of the conversation. In truth, there was no sufficient answer to her poignant question. Again, as scholars must do, Mouton Kinyon helped us to question the underlying dynamics of this field.
With the last words of the day, University of Notre Dame’s Colin Barr left us with the following: “There is an interest out there. There is an appetite for this.” In those words, it felt as if the audience took a collective sigh of relief. Though we were all sitting in that gallery in Belfast to critically analyze the future of Irish Studies, Barr’s words were what every scholar wants to hear. The time and effort that every member of the audience committed to Irish Studies was not for not. There is a Future for Irish Studies because there is a want for Irish Studies and, above all, that was the most exhilarating takeaway of the 2024 Conference.
Originally published by at irishstudies.nd.edu on July 08, 2024.