Author: Ivar McGrath

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, Australia.My research focus is on the concept of charity as reflected in the writings of John Donne and Jonathan Swift, and more generally the intersection of religion, law and literature in Anglophone cultures of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Favourite archive:
I'm hoping to find a favourite archive in Ireland!  Visiting the library at Trinity College in Dublin is a must-do, but I've also heard very good things about Marsh's Library.

Favourite gallery/museum/heritage centre:
I love the Friends Room at the State Library of New South Wales.  It is a little oasis of calm in the midst of the busyness of Sydney.  A perfect place to sit and read.

Most exciting place/time period in the 18th century:
Revolutionary France in the 1790s was quite transformative for the world (but it would be exciting and terrifying in equal measure!).

Best online resource for 18th century:
I'm returning to scholarship after twenty years doing other things, so have been amazed by what is now available online.  I tend to use OUP Academic Online most frequently.

Best book/history of 18th-century interest:
Gulliver's Travels.  It really is a tale that keeps on giving!  You can read it at different ages and stages of your life and always find something new or curious in its pages.

What eighteenth-century figure would you most like to have a drink with?
Maybe not Swift, I would feel a little intimidated by him!  I do like the idea of chatting to William Wilberforce, who by all accounts was a thoroughly decent human.

What will you be talking about at the ECIS Annual Conference?
My doctoral thesis considers the inter-relationship between John Donne's and Jonathan Swift's sermonic and other writings through the conceptual lens of Christian charity.
   I view charity's presence and prominence in both Donne's and Swift's work―particularly in its adjectival form, 'charitable'―as suggestive of it being a perennial concept, recurrent in literature, which resists periodization.  This is a different, if not wholly oppositional, perspective to that expressed in recent early modern scholarship, which has tended to emphasise charity's linguistic properties as a polysemic and evolving word.
   At the upcoming ECIS conference, I will be focusing on Swift's understanding of charity in A Proposal for Giving Badges to Beggars.  This text has at times been offered as proof of Swift holding beliefs that are the very antithesis of Christianity.  However, Swift's views about the unsanctioned poor―beggars whom he perceives as lacking 'a proper Title to our Charity'―are actually similar in some surprising respects to those expressed by Donne, over a century before.
   Whether Donne and Swift are exceptionally aligned on the specific issue of begging, or evince some broader, potentially unacknowledged continuity when it comes to the practice of charity, is a question that I am looking forward to exploring in Galway.

I am a PhD student in Roinn na Gaeilge in Mary Immaculate College. My topic of research is the life and work of Éadbhard de Nógla.

Favourite archive:
The British Library.

Favourite gallery/museum/heritage centre:
Kylemore Abbey (not too far for conference attendees).

Most exciting place/time period in the 18th century:
Meeting the aboriginal peoples of New Zealand and Australia on Cook’s expedition 1768-1771.

Best online resource for 18th century:
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Best book/history of 18th-century interest:
Breandán Ó Buachalla’s Aisling Ghéar: na Stíobhartaigh agus an tAos Léinn (1996).

What eighteenth-century figure would you most like to have a drink with?
Giacomo Casanova.

What will you be talking about at the ECIS Annual Conference?
My current research focuses on editing the literary works of the eighteenth-century Irish language Cork poet, Éadbhard de Nógla (c.1710-1782) and providing a study of them from literary and historical perspectives. The conference paper discusses de Nógla’s only political poem to be composed in the famed aisling genre: ‘Maidin aoibhinn ar bhuíochaint gréine’, a typical aisling style song which uses similar language found in Aogán Ó Rathaille’s famous aisling ‘Mac an Cheannaí’.

I am a DPhil student in English Language and Literature at the Queen’s College, University of Oxford. My thesis explores the literary connections between Italy and Ireland in the Romantic Period. It hinges on the recuperation of previously unexamined manuscript material that circulated across literary coteries in Ireland, England, and Italy, with a focus on the neglected Irish members of the Byron-Shelley circle: Lady Mount Cashell, George William Tighe, and John Taaffe.

Favourite archive:
The Royal Irish Academy

Favourite gallery/museum/heritage centre:
The Uffizi gallery

Most exciting place/time period in the 18th century:
The Moira House salon, Dublin, in the 1790s

Best online resource for 18th century:
‘Dined’ (dined.qmul.ac.uk), a database of the dinner book kept at Holland House between 1799 and 1806. It’s a great resource to explore the dynamics of sociability and exchange of ideas in the context of one of the leading coteries of the period.

Best book/history of 18th-century interest:
Joep Leerssen’s Mere Irish & Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Literary Expression and Development

What eighteenth-century figure would you most like to have a drink with?
Definitely Lady Mount Cashell.

What will you be talking about at the ECIS Annual Conference?
The Irish Catholic writer John Taaffe (1782-1864) was a member of the Byron-Shelley circle in Pisa and is now remembered, if at all, as the author of the first critical commentary of Dante’s Comedy in English. My paper places Taaffe’s A Comment on the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1822) in a tradition of a distinctly Irish reception of Dante dating back to the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when the members of the Whig Moira House circle in Dublin pioneered the recuperation of the Italian literary canon and contributed to the explosion of interest in Italy in British and Irish Romanticism. I argue that Italian scholarship developed alongside the recuperation of Irish Gaelic antiquities in the Moira Circle, weaving a hitherto neglected thread of cosmopolitanism through Irish Romantic literary culture which also shaped Taaffe’s critical approach to Dante in his Comment.

I am a doctoral candidate in Irish Literature at the University of Vigo, Spain, with research interests that lie at the intersection of literature, feminism, and environmentalism. My Ph.D. project, entitled “An Ecofeminist Analysis of Eighteenth-Century Gothic Fiction Written by Irish Female Authors” aims to provide an ecofeminist approach to Irish Gothic Fiction, with a specific focus on female authors of the eighteenth century, namely Elizabeth Griffith, Regina Maria Roche and F.C. Patrick. 

Favourite archive:
When considering archives, there’s absolutely no question for me: The British Library reigns supreme.

Favourite gallery/museum/heritage centre:
As a proud Galician, the Domus museum holds a special place in my heart, always bringing out my inner child and sparking joy with every visit. Venturing beyond Spain, however, my top picks would include the National Museum of Ireland, the Museum of Broken Relationships in Croatia, and, unsurprisingly, the British Museum.

Most exciting place/time period in the 18th century:
Dublin, 1770s.

Best online resource for 18th century:
Without a shadow of a doubt: The Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Best book/history of 18th-century interest:
Based on my research interests, Christina Morin's The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760–1829.

What eighteenth-century figure would you most like to have a drink with?
Elizabeth Griffith.

What will you be talking about at the ECIS Annual Conference?
At the 2024 ECIS conference, I will delve into the remarkably favourable portrayal of the Irish landscape in Elizabeth Griffith’s Gothic novel, "The Story of Lady Juliana Harley" (1776). Against the backdrop of both Ireland and England, I'll demonstrate how Griffith's narrative challenges conventional tropes and stereotypes within the English Gothic tradition, presenting a nuanced depiction of Ireland that defies simplistic categorizations.

The 2024 Annual Conference of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society/An Cumann Éire san Ochtú Céad Déag is taking place in the University of Galway on 20-21 June 2024.

The conference will feature keynote addresses from Professor Tríona Ní Shíocháin (Maynooth), Professor Emerita Gillian Russell (York), and Professor Jim Watt (York).

The conference programme is now available here.

For Registration, accommodation and travel options, please see here.