New Books in Irish Studies New Books Network

Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530-1700: Suppression, Migration and Reintegration (Boydell & Brewer, 2022) by Dr. Bronagh Ann McShane investigates the impact of the dissolution of the monasteries on women religious and examines their survival in the following decades, showing how, despite the state's official proscription of vocation living, religious vocation options for women continued in less formal ways.
Dr. McShane explores the experiences of Irish women who travelled to the Continent in pursuit of formal religious vocational formation, covering both those accommodated in English and European continental convents' and those in the Irish convents established in Spanish Flanders and the Iberian Peninsula. Further, this book discusses the revival of religious establishments for women in Ireland from 1629 and outlines the links between these new convents and the Irish foundations abroad.
Overall, this study provides a rich picture of Irish women religious during a period of unprecedented change and upheaval.
 This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cian T. McMahon is an associate professor of history at University of Nevada-Las Vegas. His research focuses on the history and identity of the Irish Diaspora. In this interview, he discusses his new book The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine (NYU Press, 2021), a social history of migration during the Great Irish Famine (1845-55).
Drawing primarily on migrants’ diaries and letters, The Coffin Ship reconstructs the experience of leaving Ireland by sea during the cataclysm of the Famine of the late 1840s and early 1850s, when approximately 2.2 million people left Ireland.
With chapters examining “Preparation”, “Embarkation”, “Life”, “Death”, and “Arrival”, McMahon not only provides an intimate account of migrant experiences but also places this migration into its British imperial and Atlantic contexts, tracing maritime routes from Ireland to Liverpool and from there to Quebec, the United States and Australia. McMahon’s book also investigates popular memories of the Famine, not least the assumption that the “coffin ships” that passed back and forth between Ireland and Eastern Canada were sites of mass death.
The Coffin Ship is published by NYU Press as part of their new Glucksman Irish Diaspora Series.
Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this interview, Dr. Nicholas Taylor-Collins discusses his most recent book Shakespeare, Memory, and Modern Irish Literature (Manchester UP, 2022).
Shakespeare, Memory, and Modern Irish Literature explores the intertextual connections between early modern English and modern Irish literature. Characterizing the relationship as 'dismemorial', the book explores how ghosts, bodies, and the land are sites of literary connection through which modern/contemporary Ireland draws on Shakespeare's England.
Dr. Nicholas Taylor-Collins is Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University. His reasearch focuses on Shakespeare and modern and contemporary Irish literature.
Helen Penet is a lecturer in English and Irish Studies at Université de Lille (France).
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marc McMenamin's Ireland's Secret War: Dan Bryan, G2 and the Lost Tapes that Reveal The Hunt for Ireland's Nazi Spies (Gill Books, 2022) is a thrilling account of the true extent of Irish-Allied co-operation during World War II. It reveals strategic Nazi intentions for Ireland and the real role of leading government figures of the time, placing Dan Bryan and G2 - the military intelligence branch of the Irish Defence Forces - firmly at the centre of the country's battle against Nazi Germany.
With the help of over thirty-five hours of previously unpublished audio recordings that were held in storage in northern California for over fifty years, McMenamin reveals the extraordinary unheard history of WWII in Ireland, told from the point of view of the main protagonists.
Fascinating and entertaining, Ireland's Secret War reassesses the legacy of the Irish contribution to the Allied war effort through the voices of those involved at the time.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marion Casey is a professor at Glucksman Ireland House at New York University where she also serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies. She has published widely on various aspects of Irish-American history and in 2006 she co-edited Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States with Joe Lee.
In this interview, she discusses Her most recent book The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image (NYU Press, 2024), which surveys the changing images of Ireland and Irishness in American popular culture.
The Green Space examines the variety of factors that contributed to remaking the Irish image from downtrodden and despised to universally acclaimed. To understand the forces that molded how people understand “Irish” is to see the matrix—the green space—that facilitated their interaction between the 1890s and 1960s. Marion R. Casey argues that, as “Irish” evolved between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, a visual and rhetorical expanse for representing ethnicity was opened up in the process. The evolution was also transnational; both Ireland and the United States were inextricably linked to how various iterations of “Irish” were deployed over time—whether as a straightforward noun about a specific people with a national identity or a loose, endlessly malleable adjective only tangentially connected to actual ethnic identity.

Featuring a rich assortment of sources and images, The Green Space takes the history of the Irish image in America as a prime example of the ways in which culture and identity can be manufactured, repackaged, and ultimately revolutionized. Understanding the multifaceted influences that shaped perceptions of “Irishness” holds profound relevance for examining similar dynamics within studies of various immigrant and ethnic communities in the US.
The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image is published with NYU Press, as part of their Irish Diaspora series
Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

J.N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism (Oxford University Press, 2024) describes the work of one of the most important and under-studied theologians in the history of Christianity. In the late 1820s, John Nelson Darby abandoned his career as a priest in the Church of Ireland to become one of the principal leaders of a small but rapidly growing religious movement that became known as the "Plymouth Brethren." Darby and other brethren modified the Calvinism that was common among their evangelical contemporaries, developing distinctive positions on key doctrines relating to salvation, the church, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the end times.
After his death in 1882, Darby's successors revised and expanded his arguments, and Darby became known as the architect of the most influential system of end-times thinking among the world's half-a-billion evangelicals. This "dispensational premillennialism" exercises extraordinary influence in religious communities, but also in popular culture and geopolitics. But claims that Darby created this theological system may need to be qualified -for all his innovation, this reputation might be undeserved. This book reconstructs Darby's theological development and argues that his innovations were more complex and extensive than their reduction into dispensationalism might suggest. In fact, Darby's thought might be closer to that of his Reformed critics than to that of modern exponents of dispensationalism.
Crawford Gribben is Professor of History at Queen's University Belfast.
Caleb Zakarin is editor at New Books Network.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices