Category: News & Events

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.

‘Irish People in Great Britain (1689-present): An Interdisciplinary Symposium’, will take place from 9am – 6pm on Tuesday, 12 March 2024 at Mary Immaculate College, South Circular Road, Limerick. The keynote speaker will be Dr Sonja Lawrenson (Manchester Metropolitan University).

Proposals are now invited for papers that explore the lives, struggles and achievements of Irish people who settled in Britain, as well as their descendants.

Please follow this link to download the full Call for Papers.

Martin McMahon is completing an MA in Irish History at University College Dublin. His research explores the impact of the military on Irish urbanisation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He will be speaking about his research at the ECIS Annual Conference on 16-17 June 2023. You can follow him on Twitter @MartinMc1404

Favourite archive:
Many archives like the British Library, TNA in Kew and the Dublin’s National Archives are purpose built, state of the art facilities. However, my favourite has to be Marsh’s Library, where the building itself, its interior and environment are an integral part of the archive. This is no better place to contemplate ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, in such a wonderful surrounding.

Favourite museum, gallery or heritage site:
I can be found every Sunday morning in the Hugh Lane Gallery on Dublin’s Parnell Square, where the gallery hosts an eclectic blend of classical music – from the seventeenth century to contemporary. Located in the 1^st Earl of Charlemont’s mansion, in the midst of eighteenth century architecture and modern art, there is no better way to spend a Sunday morning.     

Most exciting place or time in the eighteenth-century:
Dublin, 1740-1760.

Best online resource:
It’s hard not to think of ECCO as the first port of call.

Best book of 18th century interest:
Anthony Malcomson’s Nathaniel Clements (1705-77): Politics, fashion and architecture in mid-eighteenth century Ireland.

What eighteenth century figure would you most like to have a drink with?
James Butler, 2^nd Duke of Ormonde.

What will you be talking about at the ECIS Annual Conference?
I’ve spent the last two years researching the Dublin Barracks, the precursor to Collins Barracks. At the time, a unique and innovative facility, it was reputedly capable of accommodating up to 4,000 people.  Built at a time of great political and financial pressures within the Irish Establishment, my paper focuses on how these pressures effected the approach of Thomas Burgh, the Surveyor-General, and discusses how this might have impacted on his legacy as one of the country’s first Irish architects.

Luke Murphy is a PhD candidate at Dundalk Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the history of cartography and landed estates in the region of north County Louth. He is particularly interested in why estate maps and surveys were being commissioned at certain moments in time, their uses in estate management and how estate cartography both captured, and contributed to, changes taking place on landed estates during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He will be speaking about his research at the ECIS Annual Conference on 16-17 June 2023. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeMurphy16.

Favourite archive:
I would have to go with Louth County Archives. Sitting in a nineteenth-century jail makes research that bit more atmospheric.

Favourite museum, gallery or heritage site:
I love an open-air museum so the Ulster Folk Museum in Cultra is up there. Also, the Dublin Writers Museum and the National Gallery of Ireland.     

Most exciting place or time in the eighteenth-century:
For cartography it has to be Dublin in the 1750s with the arrival of the French school of land surveyors.

Best online resource:
The Longfield Map Collection (NLI) and the Irish Historic Towns Atlas.

Best book of 18th century interest:
John Andrews Plantation Acres, a book that should most definitely be reprinted!

What eighteenth century figure would you most like to have a drink with?
I’m obliged to say John Rocque, but outside of my research, Henry Joy McCracken.

What will you be talking about at the ECIS Annual Conference?
With the consolidation of landed estates at the beginning of the eighteenth century and the changing social, political and economic landscape, there came an increasing importance placed on accurate property boundaries. Landlords and agents were interested in who held land, its location, and the quality and quantity of their holdings. This resulted in a demand for maps that developed into a new genre of cartography. Estate mapping became a competitive private enterprise with an expanding market and a growing profession of land surveying which boomed from the 1750s onwards.

Based on a corpus of over 90 manuscript estate maps documented as part of ongoing PhD research, my paper will look at the role of estate cartography in estate management, focusing on the eighteenth-century Anglesey, Fortescue and Tipping estates in north County Louth. Furthermore, I will discuss the regional importance of north Louth and the estate landscape that emerged from the events of the seventeenth century. Due to the very nature of these maps, there is a need to delve deeper into ancillary sources, namely the material found in estate archives, which reveal why maps were being made and what they capture at certain moments in the history of the estates. By taking these alternative routes to contextualise and understand estate maps, this consequentially allows us to investigate maps as tools in estate management, and tap into the lived experience of the region’s strata of inhabitants.

Applications for the next A. C. Elias, Jr. Irish-American Research Travel Fellowship are now being accepted. The deadline for applications is 15 November 2022.

The ASECS’ A. C. Elias Irish-American Research Travel Fellowship, with $2500 in annual funding, supports “documentary scholarship on Ireland in the period between the Treaty of Limerick (1691) and the Act of Union (1800), by enabling North American-based scholars to travel to Ireland and Irish-based scholars to travel to North America for furthering their research.” Projects conducting original research on any aspect of 18C Ireland qualify for consideration, but recipients must be members of ASECS who have permanent residence in the United States or Canada or be members of its Irish sister organization, The Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society, residing on the island of Ireland.

Follow this link for further information about the fellowship and application process.

Richard Robinson, Archbishop of Armagh founded the library in his cathedral city in 1771 and saw it as embodying the 18^th-century spirit of enlightenment, discovery and learning.

Armagh Robinson Library hosts over 40,000 literary gems – from medieval Books of Hours and early editions of the Bible to classic literature, books on science, mathematics, art, music and travel.

Now it is seeking support from individuals, families, groups or businesses to help it to continue developing, conserving and protecting these treasures. It has set up an Adopt-a-Book scheme with a range of options to choose from – from £50 to £1000 – and until late 2023 the National Lottery Heritage Fund is matching every donation, which means your donation will go much further to help the Library and, if you are a UK taxpayer, Gift Aid will provide an additional cash boost.

For example, a donation of £100 will attract Gift Aid of £25; this is matched by the NHLF and will generate £250 for the library. If you are a higher-rate taxpayer you can claim back the Gift Aid, which means that your £100 will only cost you £75.

All donors to the Adopt-a-Book scheme will receive a certificate recording their donation and a bookplate will be inserted inside the cover of the book you have adopted.

If you would like to help the Library achieve its goals, please visit the website:
armaghrobinsonlibrary.co.uk/adopt, email: [email protected] or call the Library on 028 3752 3142.

Kristina Decker is a PhD researcher at University College Cork. Her research explores women and the culture of Improvement in Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Her broader interests include women’s history and the cultural history of the long eighteenth century, country house and material culture studies, and animal histories. She will be speaking about her research at the ECIS Annual Conference on 17-18 June 2022. You can follow her on Twitter @kristina_decker

Favourite archive:
The British Library practically feels like a second home, but I also love the National Library of Wales where I was able to sift through boxes of uncatalogued materials relating to Mary Delany’s family.

Favourite museum, gallery or heritage site:
The V&A because of its amazing textile collections. Also the Sir John Soane Museum, National Portrait Gallery, and Delany’s ‘Paper Mosaicks’ at the British Museum

Most exciting place or time in the eighteenth-century:
The Duchess of Portland’s Bulstrode Park

Best online resource:
ECCO and Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online (EMCO

Best book of 18th century interest:
Amanda Vickery’s The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England and Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England.

What eighteenth century figure would you most like to have a drink with?
It has to be Mary Delany!

What will you be talking about at the ECIS Annual Conference?
My PhD thesis, titled ‘Women and Improvement in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: the Case of Mary Delany’, explores the many ways in which Mary Delany participated in the culture of improvement during the time that she lived in Ireland, including such areas as education, sociability, landscape, and female ‘accomplishments’. At the 2022 ECIS conference I will be examining Mary Delany’s sketches and written descriptions of her house, Delville, and the wider landscape of Glasnevin, Co Dublin. My paper will explore Mary Delany’s discussion of the Irish landscape and how it reflected her other interests – particularly the culture of Improvement – and, ultimately, how she used these discussions to navigate and situate herself within the Irish landscape.

Andrew Dorman is a doctoral candidate in the DCU School of History and Geography. His research considers the soldier’s experience in eighteenth-century Ireland. He will be speaking about his research at the ECIS Annual Conference on 17-18 June 2022. You can follow him on Twitter @andydormann.

Favourite archive:
The National Army Museum in Chelsea. My inner 9-year-old appreciates an archive with a tank in the car park.

Favourite museum, gallery or heritage site:
Hôtel National des Invalides in Paris. My inner 9-year-old also appreciates a museum with a tank in the car park

Most exciting place or time in the eighteenth-century:
Dublin City, at any given moment. Exciting? Certainly. Safe? Certainly not.

Best online resource:
The Irish Newspaper Archives, and their British equivalent

Best book of 18th century interest:
Based on my research interests, J.A. Houlding’s Fit for Service or Ilya Berkovich’s Motivation in War.

What eighteenth century figure would you most like to have a drink with?
Every figure I study seems repugnant, but if I had to choose one, I’d say King George II. Might as well start at the top and work down!

What will you be talking about at the ECIS Annual Conference?

My research explores the experience of soldiering in Ireland in the eighteenth century, examining the army-societal relationship and the unique challenges presented by deployment in Ireland. It moves military history away from the battlefield and instead looks at the social dynamics of Irish service, such as diet, relationship with the wider population, housing, protest and more.

The paper I will be presenting will explore the phenomena of recruitment and desertion in the army in Ireland in the eighteenth century. It will consider the pattern and practice of recruiting, and the creative ways by which junior officers circumvented anti-Irish recruiting legislation in a bid to keep their regiments fully manned. In addition, it shall distinguish between Protestant and Catholic recruitment and trace the contributions of these groups to the military throughout the entire century. The antithesis of recruitment was desertion, and most histories of the army in Ireland argue that soldiers based on the island were more likely to desert. My paper aims to challenge this traditional narrative and evaluate how serious an issue this was for the army in Ireland in the eighteenth century.

Maria Zukovs is a PhD Candidate at the University of St Andrews. Her research explores Dublin press coverage of the French Revolution and the impact it had on contemporaneous society, culture and politics. She will be speaking about her research at the ECIS Annual Conference on 17-18 June 2022. You can follow her on Twitter @m_zukovs.

Favourite archive:
The pandemic has made accessing archives difficult and I have done a good portion of my work using online resources. The British Library, however, provided me the first opportunity to work with physical copies of the newspapers I study, which was a really special experience.

Favourite museum, gallery or heritage site:
I don’t think I can choose just one, it is a tie between the memorial of the Battle of Waterloo, Titanic Belfast or the National Museum of Ireland – Archaeology.

Most exciting place or time in the eighteenth-century:
I would have to say the French Revolution, especially around the initial outbreak in June 1789. It would have been fascinating to be a fly on the wall when the Tennis Court Oath was sworn.

Best online resource:
As someone whose primarily field is book history, the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) is the resource I consult most often.

Best book of 18th century interest:
Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley. As a fan of Austen’s work I was intrigued by the approach Worsley took in looking at her life through the houses she lived in. I was not disappointed and I think I read it in about 2 days.

What eighteenth century figure would you most like to have a drink with?
It would have to be either William Drennan or Olympe de Gouges.

What will you be talking about at the ECIS Annual Conference?
My PhD research focuses on Dublin press coverage of the French Revolution between 1788 and 1794. I study both independently-run and government-funded newspapers to understand what, if any, impact the French Revolution had on Dublin society, culture and politics at that time. My project seeks to understand the amount and scope of French Revolutionary news disseminated in Dublin in the early years of the Revolution. Using newspapers as my main primary source allows me to look beyond well-studied figures like Theobald Wolfe Tone and organisations like the Society of United Irishmen and focus more on individuals who have not been the subject of in-depth study. The paper I will be presenting looks at the sources that provided news of the French Revolution to the Dublin press. It will specifically be challenging some long-held notions that much of the foreign news in Irish newspapers was directly copied from London newspapers. Instead, an independent infrastructure allowed news to move between France and Ireland. Ireland had a robust trade with France and there were large communities of French Protestants in Dublin and Irish Catholics in France. Numerous instances exist of newspapers reprinting letters sent from people in France, providing eyewitness account of the Revolution, to their ‘friend in Dublin’. This furthers our understanding of how news moved throughout Europe at a time of significant political change and how news of the French Revolution was able to permeate other nations.

Eliza Spakman is Research MA student in Literary Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her research explores Late Eighteenth-Century Women’s writing, specifically Maria Edgeworth. Her wider interests include the Irish Enlightenment, Female Enlightenment thinking and networks, the Bluestocking circle, and Mary Wollstonecraft. She also wrote a paper on the Great Frost last year in affiliation with the ‘Heritages of Hunger’ project. She loves intellectual history as much as literary studies, secretly. She will be speaking about her research at the ECIS Annual Conference on 17-18 June 2022. You can follow her on Twitter @elizastudying.

Favourite archive:
As an MA student outside of Ireland and the UK, I unfortunately do not have access to many archives, so I do not yet have a fervent favourite, but based on the sources I have used, it would have to be the NLI or the Bodleian Library!

Favourite museum, gallery or heritage site:
Within the Netherlands, the Mauritshuis in The Hague which displays a lot of lovely Golden Age art (Rembrandt, Vermeer, Potter, etc.). Outside the Netherlands, the British Museum, which has something for every mood I could possibly be in.

Most exciting place or time in the eighteenth-century:
I would have to say the 1790s in London or Dublin. It is the period that first got me passionate about the eighteenth century because it is such a turbulent time with so many ideas, opinions, etc. floating around.

Best online resource:
I am going to be boring and say ECCO, which was especially helpful when I was writing a paper on the Great Frost last year!

Best book of 18th century interest:
I like Roy Porter’s Enlightenment, but also Amanda Vickery’s The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. And of Irish interest, I really enjoyed Claire Connolly’s A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790-1829. Sorry, that’s three.

What eighteenth century figure would you most like to have a drink with?
Obviously, Maria Edgeworth. There are so many ideas about what she thought and believed, but I would love to know what she is like as a person!

What will you be talking about at the ECIS Annual Conference?
My paper for the ECIS 2022 conference is based on the first chapter of the dissertation I am writing for my Research MA (though in terms of requirements, the dissertation is more like an MPhil one) on masculinity in the works of Maria Edgeworth. This topic has been studied very little even though masculinity was central to many aspects of eighteenth-century society, from politeness and morality to national identity and politics, and can therefore give us a different perspective on Edgeworth’s works and ideas. My paper is specifically about ‘Forester’, one of Edgeworth’s Moral Tales, which tells the story of a young man who is very sceptical about contemporary social norms and gentlemanliness. Because he is so sceptical, the tale addresses not only what it means to be a good man, but also why. My paper will thus look at what the ideal man is according to this story, and how it engages with contemporary debates surrounding masculinity, particularly those surrounding politeness and primitivism. ‘Forester’ is far from a boring didactic tale, but rather a complex one, that touches on many things Edgeworth felt very passionate about, amongst which, being a proper man and what that looks like, but also empathy, the power of the printing press, and obviously education.

Elisa Cozzi is a DPhil Candidate in English Language and Literature, The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. Her research explores the literary connections between Italy and Ireland in the Romantic Period. Her broader interests include Irish Romanticism, the Byron-Shelley circle, Anglo-Italian literature, the novel, European literary coteries in the long eighteenth century, and poetics of exile and national identity. She will be speaking about her research at the ECIS Annual Conference on 17-18 June 2022. You can follow her on Twitter @_ElisaCozzi.

Favourite archive:
Probably the Weston Library (part of the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford) so far, but I’m heading to the Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library, in a few months and have heard that that’s phenomenal, so this preference might change soon.

Favourite museum, gallery or heritage site:
Newstead Abbey, the Uffizi, the Dublin Writers Museum, Chawton House, Tate Britain, the Pinacoteca di Brera.

Most exciting place or time in the eighteenth-century:
I will have to say Pisa, Italy, in 1820, just after the Shelleys moved there (the ‘long’ eighteenth century, right?). Or Lady Moira’s salon in Dublin in the late 1790s.

Best online resource:
The Shelley-Godwin Archive, Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition, William Godwin’s Diary, Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition (RÊVE).

Best book of 18th century interest:
Again, not quite eighteenth-century, but Will Bower’s The Italian Idea: Anglo-Italian Radical Literary Culture, 1815-1823 is a fantastic work that had a huge impact on me. I should also mention Claire Connolly’s A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790-1828 and Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism.

What eighteenth century figure would you most like to have a drink with?
There are very few things I wouldn’t do in exchange for a pint of Guinness with Margaret King Mount Cashell. I could also do with a coffee with Germaine de Stael in Paris or a glass of local red with Ugo Foscolo in the Euganean Hills.

What will you be talking about at the ECIS Annual Conference?
My paper presents the first in-depth study of the unpublished historical novel North and South; or, the Chieftains of Erin, a Historical Romance of the Days of Queen Elizabeth by the Irish radical writer—and former pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft—Margaret King, Lady Mount Cashell (1773-1835). Thirty years before Walter Scott popularised the genre, Mount Cashell started her historical novel (set in sixteenth-century Ireland on the cusp of the Tudor conquest) in Dublin in the 1790s, when she became involved in Irish revolutionary politics and actively campaigned against the Act of Union. She then interrupted it and resumed it in Pisa, Italy, where she settled in voluntary exile and befriended the Shelley Circle in the 1820s. Mount Cashell’s transnational historical fiction originated at the crossroads of post-Union Ireland and pre-Unification Italy, at a crucial period in the development of the novel as a literary form. First discovered in a private Italian archive in the 1990s, the Chieftains of Erin manuscripts had never been thoroughly examined by literary scholars. My paper will situate Mount Cashell’s work in the field of Eighteenth-century Irish Studies and shed light on neglected Anglo-Irish-Italian literary networks in the early nineteenth century.

The Irish Literature and Periodical Culture Conference will take place in KU Leuven on 1-3 December 2022.

Periodicals have played an important role in the production, mediation, dissemination and reception of Irish literature. By exploring the intersections between Irish writers and the (transnational) periodical press, this conference aims to further scrutinise the ways in which periodical culture in Ireland has impacted writers’ careers, codified the development of literary genres and conventions, and influenced the course of Irish literary history and the canon more generally.

Confirmed plenary speakers will include Professor Frank Shovlin (University of Liverpool), Professor Fionnuala Dillane (University College Dublin) and Professor Stephanie Rains (Maynooth University).

For further information and the call for papers, visit the conference website.

Politics and political culture in Ireland from Restoration to Union, 1660-1800
Essays in honour of Jacqueline R. Hill
Raymond Gillespie, James Kelly & Mary Ann Lyons, editors
Political culture is not an idea that many historians of Ireland have engaged with, preferring more straightforward ways of thinking about the distribution of political power through institutions such as the vice regal court, parliament or the law. The essays in this volume take an organic approach to the way in which power is made manifest and distributed across the social world, considering such diverse themes as the role of political life in identity formation and maintenance, civic unity and the problem of urban poverty in Dublin, the role of money in the exercise of authority by Dublin Corporation, public ritual and ceremony in political culture, rumour and rancour in provincial Ireland, the public and the growth of Dublin city, and the Belfast/Bordeaux merchant, John Black III’s vision of Belfast society in the era of improvement. By focusing on the idea of political cultures and how they intersected with more formal political structures, these essays reveal new and unexpected disjunctions that contemporaries were well aware of, and carefully managed, but which have been marginalized by historians. This volume resituates power where it was exercised on a daily basis and in doing so opens fascinating windows into past worlds in pre-modern Ireland. 

Editors: Raymond Gillespie & Mary Ann Lyons teach in the Department of History, MU. James Kelly teaches in the Department of History, DCU.

Contributors: Toby Barnard, Vincent Comerford, Bernadette Cunningham, Raymond Gillespie, David Hayton, James Kelly, Colm Lennon, Mary Ann Lyons, Brendan Twomey and Jonathan Wright.

Full list of Contents: https://www.fourcourtspress.ie/books/new-year-folder/new-politics-and-political-culture-in-ireland-from-restoration-to-union-1660-1800/contents

Four Courts Press. 256pp. Hardback. 978-1-84682-974-1  €55.00
https://www.fourcourtspress.ie/books/new-year-folder/new-politics-and-political-culture-in-ireland-from-restoration-to-union-1660-1800/

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We have been asked by the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, of which we are an affiliate Society, to circulate the  ‘Statement for Ukraine’ below.

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Dear ISECS National Society representatives / cher.ères représentant.e.s des sociétés nationales de la SIEDS,

[Le message en français suivra]

I write on behalf of Penelope Corfield, ISECS President. We have drafted the following statement, following consultation with our Executive Committee. We would appreciate if you could circulate it, display it on your websites, share it on social media, and draw public attention to it by any means available.

As President of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, on behalf of all our members, I express our total support for the people of Ukraine, its Universities, our Ukrainian colleagues who join us in eighteenth-century studies, and all Ukrainian-born colleagues and students everywhere, in their just resistance to armed invasion. Signed: Penelope J. Corfield.

The statement has already been posted on the ISECS website, as well as our Twitter account, should you wish to share it (the post can be found at https://twitter.com/isecs_sieds/status/1497682146470858757).

Thank you, and best wishes,

Nelson Guilbert

ISECS Communications Secretary

[Français]

Je vous écris de la part de Penelope Corfield, Présidente de la SIEDS. Nous avons préparé la déclaration suivante, en consultation avec notre comité exécutif. Nous vous serions reconnaissants de bien vouloir le diffuser, de l’afficher sur vos sites internet et vos médias sociaux, et d’attirer l’attention du public par tout moyen qui vous semble opportun.

À titre de Présidente de la Société internationale d’étude du dix-huitième siècle, et au nom de tous nos membres, j’exprime notre soutien inconditionnel au peuple de l’Ukraine, à ses universités, à nos collègues de la société ukrainienne d’étude du dix-huitième siècle, et à tous nos collègues et étudiants d’origine ukrainienne à travers le monde, dans leur juste résistance face à l’invasion armée. Signé, Penelope J. Corfield.

Nous avons déjà diffusé la déclaration sur le site internet de la SIEDS, ainsi que sur notre fil Twitter, si vous souhaitez la partager (la publication se trouve à l’adresse suivante : https://twitter.com/isecs_sieds/status/1497682215618109442).

Merci, et bien cordialement,

Nelson Guilbert

Secrétaire aux communications de la SIEDS

Politics and political culture in Ireland from Restoration to Union, 1660-1800
Essays in honour of Jacqueline R. Hill
Raymond Gillespie, James Kelly & Mary Ann Lyons, editors

Political culture is not an idea that many historians of Ireland have engaged with, preferring more straightforward ways of thinking about the distribution of political power through institutions such as the vice regal court, parliament or the law. The essays in this volume take an organic approach to the way in which power is made manifest and distributed across the social world, considering such diverse themes as the role of political life in identity formation and maintenance, civic unity and the problem of urban poverty in Dublin, the role of money in the exercise of authority by Dublin Corporation, public ritual and ceremony in political culture, rumour and rancour in provincial Ireland, the public and the growth of Dublin city, and the Belfast/Bordeaux merchant, John Black III’s vision of Belfast society in the era of improvement. By focusing on the idea of political cultures and how they intersected with more formal political structures, these essays reveal new and unexpected disjunctions that contemporaries were well aware of, and carefully managed, but which have been marginalized by historians. This volume resituates power where it was exercised on a daily basis and in doing so opens fascinating windows into past worlds in pre-modern Ireland. 

Contributors: Toby Barnard, Vincent Comerford, Bernadette Cunningham, Raymond Gillespie, David Hayton, James Kelly, Colm Lennon, Mary Ann Lyons, Brendan Twomey and Jonathan Wright.

Raymond Gillespie & Mary Ann Lyons teach in the Department of History, MU. James Kelly teaches in the Department of History, DCU.
Four Courts Press. 256pp. Hardback. 978-1-84682-974-1  €55.00

Visit the Four Courts Press website for more information:
https://www.fourcourtspress.ie/books/new-year-folder/new-politics-and-political-culture-in-ireland-from-restoration-to-union-1660-1800/

The Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society/An Cumann Éire san Ochtú Aois Déag is pleased to invite applications for 3 postgraduate bursaries for its annual conference in University College Cork, 17-18 June 2022. The bursaries will cover conference registration fees and attendance at the conference dinner. The deadline for applications is 31 March. Application forms should be sent to the Society President, Prof Aileen Douglas ([email protected]) and applicants should also request their referee to send a reference to the same address on or before 31 March. Please note that applicants must also submit their paper proposal to Dr Clíona Ó Gallchoir ([email protected]), and that successful applicants should have a current ECIS membership at the time of the conference.

For more information visit our Annual Conference page.

Members of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society are invited to partake of a special offer on David Dickson, The First Irish Cities. An Eighteenth-Century Transformation, Yale University Press, 9780300229462, hb, 65 illustrations, 352 pages.

The book is now on offer to members of the Society for €25.00 post free within Ireland.

Email Robert Towers, Publishers’ Agent, at [email protected] or telephone 01 2806 532 to avail of this offer.

An online conference ‘Species of Domestic Spaces: House and Home in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’ will be hosted by the UCD Humanities Institute on Friday, 18 June.

For further information, including the programme, visit the conference webpage .

The event is free but requires registration via Eventbrite.

Joel W. Herman has been awarded the A. C. Elias, Jr., Irish-American Research Travel Fellowship for 2021 by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). The award will assist Mr. Herman, a Ph.D. student in history at Trinity College Dublin, in producing his thesis on “Revolutionary Currents: Ideas, Information, and the Imperial Public Spheres in Dublin and New York, 1776-1782″.

The Fellowship was endowed by the renowned independent scholar A.C. Elias Jr (1944-2008). It offers US$2,500 per annum to support “documentary scholarship on Ireland in the period between the Treaty of Limerick (1691) and the Act of Union (1800), by enabling North American-based scholars to travel to Ireland and Irish-based scholars to travel to North America for furthering their research.”

Projects conducting original research on any aspect of eighteenth-century Ireland qualify for consideration, but recipients must be members of ASECS who have permanent residence in the United States or Canada or be members of its Irish sister organization, The Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society, residing in Ireland.

More information Mr. Herman’s project and details of the 2022 Fellowship Competition are available from the Marsh’s Library website.

The Desmond Guinness Scholarship 2020 is currently open for applications.

The scholarship is awarded annually by the Irish Georgian Society to an applicant or applicants engaged in research on the visual arts of Ireland including the work of Irish architects, artists and craftsmen, material culture and design history, 1600-1940.

Applications must be submitted by 2pm, Monday 30 November 2020.

More information is available on the Irish Georgian Society website, at this link.

The Royal Irish Academy is pleased to welcome applications for the R.J. Hunter Research Bursary, for amounts up to a maximum of €2,500 for research on aspects of Ulster history during the period 1500-1800.

The R.J. Hunter Research Bursary scheme 2020/2021 opened on 3rd November and closes on 17 December 2020.

More information is available on the RIA website.

The Eighteenth-Century Urban Cultures Workshop will take place at Queen’s University Belfast on Thursday 27 February 2020, from 10.00-17.30.

Speakers will include: Moyra Haslett (QUB), Jonathan Wright (Maynooth), Sarah McCleave (QUB), Ruth Thorpe (QUB) and Leonie Hannan (QUB), with a keynote lecture presented by Alison Fitzgerald (Maynooth).

For more information and to register, visit: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/urban-cultures-in-the-eighteenth-century-tickets-90634659707

A talk entitled ‘”Rags, Riches and Recycling”; the Dublin Society’s encouragement of Art & Artefacts, 1731-1881’ by Dr Claudia Kinmonth MRIA will take place at 7.30pm, 23rd Jan 2020 at R.S.A.I. 63 Merrion Square S. Dublin 8.

This richly illustrated talk presents the findings of Kinmonth’s 2018 ‘Library & Archives research Bursary’ at the Royal Dublin Society. She researched the first fifty years of the Dublin Society’s existence; using their manuscripts together with their collection of art, sculpture and furniture, to reveal how they boosted ‘Poor Ireland’s’ material culture. They advertised prizes for eg drawing and sculpture, for planting trees, for manufacturing such things as salt, glue, paper or gold lace (which previously had been imported), and their ‘premiums’ helped the working poor and their children. Themes emerge about eg the barter of china for rags, the recycling of rags into paper, re-use of gold lace for re-smelting into jewellery, and the names and appearance of individuals rewarded for inventions. This work is published as an article in ‘Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies’ Vol. XXI (2018).

Theatrical works in the eighteenth-century did not play for continuous ‘runs’ in the manner of modern popular theatre. The key figure is the number of performances in a particular season, making the most successful theatrical work of the British eighteenth century David Garrick’s The Jubilee, with music by Charles Dibdin, which played for 91 performances in the 1769-70 season.

To mark the 250th anniversary of this important musical play, Retrospect Opera has released a recording which includes all the sung music and a good deal of the spoken dialogue. For more information visit:  http://www.retrospectopera.org.uk/CD_SALES/CD_details_Jubilee.html

The Jubilee is a comic representation of Garrick’s Shakespeare ‘Jubilee’ of 1769, a 3-day festival in Stratford-upon-Avon that famously ended up getting washed out, but which achieved unprecedented publicity and represents a milestone in the history of Shakespeare’s reception. It deifies Shakespeare, but at the same time gently pokes fun at the fashion for literary tourism that the festival did so much to promote.

The central character is an Irishman who has traveled all the way to Stratford to see the Jubilee, but who falls asleep at the wrong time, and misses the grand Shakespeare pageant. Dibdin’s songs are richly melodic and extremely memorable, and several of them, celebrating Shakespeare as a sort of folk hero (‘The lad of all lads was a Warwickshire lad’!), enjoyed a long cultural afterlife. 

The Jubilee should be essential listening for anyone interested in the ‘god of our idolatry’ idea of Shakespeare that Garrick bequeathed to the Romantics, and representations of the Irish on the English stage.

Retrospect Opera is constituted as a charity so all profits from the sale of The Jubilee go directly towards making more such recordings possible.

As part of the Jonathan Swift Festival, four leading experts on Swift will present short papers (each of 20 minutes’ duration) on aspects of the great man’s life, writings, and relationships.

Time: 2.00 pm – 5.00 pm

Date: Saturday, 23 November 2019

Location: Marsh’s Library, St Patrick’s Close, Dublin D08 FK79.

Programme

2.00 – 2.15. Welcome by Dr. Bob Mahony of the Swift Foundation, USA.

2.15 – 3.45. Presentations:

‘Swift’s Lost Works and the Confessional State in Queen Anne’s Reign’, by Prof. Ian Higgins (Australian National University, Canberra).

‘Swift in 1719’, by Prof. Norma Clarke (University of Richmond, London).

‘Jonathan Swift and the Pursuit of Happiness’, by Prof. Melinda Rabb (Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA).

‘Swift and Gibbon’, by Prof. Jenny Davidson (Columbia University, New York, USA),

3.45 – 4.00. Break

4.00 – 4.20. Response to the four papers by Dr. Nathalie Zimpfer (Université de Paris IV, France).

4.20 – 4.50. Questions and contributions from the audience

5.00 – 6.00. Reception in Marsh’s Library sponsored by the Swift Foundation.

This event is free of charge and open to the public. No advance booking is necessary.

See www.marshlibrary.ie/swift2019/