New Books in Irish Studies

New Books Network
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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

  1. 1d ago

    Transcending Disciplinary Confinements With(in) Beckett Studies

    This is Dr. Swati Joshi's inaugural episode on the New Books Network. In this episode, she interviews Dr. Lucy Jeffery about her monograph, Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process (ibidem Press, 2021). She is also co-editor and author of Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production, published by CEU Press and AUP in 2026. She is co-founder of the Replaying Communism project, which received funding from the AHRC SWW-DTP (2023) and the Visegrad Fund (2024). Dr. Jeffery's published research is on Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Ezra Pound, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Magda Szabó. Her monograph—Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process—was published by Ibidem in 2021, and, in 2022, she co-edited a special issue for Green Letters, entitled ‘A New Poetics of Space’.  This episode weaves together Beckett's transdisciplinary creative process with Dr. Jeffery's journey of research, and cogitation over challenges to preserve integrity and creativity of the author's works in the wake of rapidly developing AI tools. Furthermore, the colour blue occupies an integral role in Dr. Jeffery's monograph, so this episode entails analytical segments on pigments used in Beckett's works beyond the black, white, and grey. Dr. Jeffery and I also briefly discuss our ongoing special issue, "A Writer's Palette: Colour in Late Modernist Literature," for Textual Practice. Colleagues interested in sharing their proposal until 12th December, can write to us on latemodernists@gmail.com, for more details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  2. Aug 12

    Bridget Hourican on Frank Callanan's "James Joyce: A Political Life" (Princeton UP, 2026)

    The young James Joyce (1882–1941) was forged in the smithy of Irish political controversies, and he took into his European exile a depth of political insight unrivalled among his fellow modernists. In this biography of Joyce in his youth and early exile James Joyce: A Political Life (Princeton UP, 2026), acclaimed Irish historian and biographer Frank Callanan reveals a Joyce who is markedly more politically conscious, informed and complex than the Joyce of Richard Ellmann’s classic account. Written in a sparkling style and rich with historical insights, Callanan’s deeply researched biography is the first sustained account of how Joyce’s Irish and European political and cultural context shaped his life, thought, and writings.Joyce was eight years old in 1890 when the O’Shea divorce scandal tore Irish nationalism apart, leading to the split in the Irish Parliamentary Party, the death of nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell, and a long, bitter period dominated by the anti-Parnellites. This was the Ireland that Joyce grew up in and rebelled against, and which determined his literary direction. Callanan uncovers a Joyce who was a highly original and dissenting Irish nationalist, who refused to avow or vaunt his nationalism and whose understanding was refined by the experience of living in multicultural Trieste with its fraught ethnic politics and differing models of statehood. Callanan’s Joyce is as heroic as Ellmann’s defiantly modernistic artist but in a more interesting way—a writer who didn’t lack political conviction but whose views didn’t yield to the expectations of his time.Energizing, witty, profound, and elegant, James Joyce: A Political Life is a magisterial biography that will transform how readers look at Joyce and his politics. Frank Callanan (1956–2021) was an Irish barrister and historian. His books include The Parnell Split, 1890–91, a narrative of the last year of Parnell’s life, and T. M. Healy, a biography of Parnell’s principal adversary in the Split. He wrote the entries on Parnell, Healy, John Dillon and Conor Cruise O’Brien for the Dictionary of Irish Biography and edited The Literary and Historical Society 1955–2005, a history of the debating society of University College Dublin, to which James Joyce belonged. He also wrote and produced, with Ruán Magan, the 2022 documentary 100 Years of Ulysses. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  3. Jul 28

    Anna Lively, "Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905-1923" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Anna Lively is a historian of modern Ireland, Britain, and Russia. Awarded her PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh in 2022, she is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at the University of Strathclyde. Prior to this she held the Roy Foster Irish Government Research Fellowship in the History and Culture of Ireland at Hertford College, University of Oxford, and was a Teaching Fellow in Modern History at the University of Aberdeen. She has published in multiple journals on the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and on the Irish Save the Children Fund. From the late nineteenth century, Ireland featured prominently in Russian liberal, conservative, and radical debates about land politics, self-determination, and empire. Equally, Irish commentators from across the political spectrum used Russia as a lens onto questions of imperialism, anti-imperialism, and socialism. But while the Irish and Russian revolutionary contexts are well-studied in isolation, their myriad political, social, and cultural entanglements are not.Drawing on extensive Russian and Irish archival accounts, newspapers, diaries, letters, memoirs, literary, and visual sources, Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905-1923 (Oxford UP, 2026) looks in both directions at Irish responses to Russian revolutionary change and at representations of Ireland in Russian-language texts from the 1905 Russian Revolution to the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923. The result is a unique account of international engagement in revolutionary Russia and Ireland and of how Ireland was imagined beyond the Anglophone world. This mutual, if selective and conditional, engagement reflected wider technological changes in news communication and the expansion of international news agencies. Diasporic networks, including in Britain and the US, helped to shape Russo-Irish relations and Irish publications and political actors engaged with different parts of the Russian empire, including Ukraine, Finland, and Poland.Through five thematic chapters, the book considers Russo-Irish relations from contrasting and often overlooked angles, including Irish eyewitness experiences on the Eastern front during World War One and religious perspectives. Using a transnational methodology and expansive source base, the book offers a fresh angle on the entangled history of revolutions in the early twentieth century and the translation of news and ideas across borders. Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905–1923 will be published in September 2026 with Oxford University Press Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  4. Jul 26

    Patrick Nunn, "Whispers from Celtic Seas: The True Meanings of Ancient Stories from Northwest Europe" (Reaktion, 2026)

    What if the legends of submerged cities, land-making witches and sea-crossing bishops are not mere inventions but echoes of real events? Whispers from Celtic Seas: The True Meanings of Ancient Stories from Northwest Europe (Reaktion Books, 2026) by Professor Patrick Nunn at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia revisits coastal traditions from the Celtic fringes of northwest Europe, showing how they preserve memories of dramatic environmental change—floods, land loss and shifting shorelines—carried forward through oral storytelling for generations. Drawing on cutting-edge geological and archaeological research, this book recasts these tales not as fantasy, but as historical testimony grounded in lived experience. With clarity and insight, it also brings to life the tellers and collectors of these stories, tracing how oral knowledge endured even as literacy spread. A compelling invitation to listen again to old stories, and to hear what the land and sea remember. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  5. Jun 30

    Kevin Reilly, "Gregory Ghosts: Haunting Irishness" (Peter Lang, 2026)

    Kevin P. Reilly is President Emeritus and Regent Professor with the University of Wisconsin System, having served as President from 2004-13. Kevin grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx, and went on to earn his B.A. at the University of Notre Dame, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, all in English. He has published on higher education policy and accreditation, autobiography and biography, and in Irish Studies. In this interview he discusses his most recent book, Gregory Ghosts: Haunting Irishness (Peter Lang, 2026), a creative non-fiction intervention into Irish literary studies. This book is a kind of Irish ghost story. In it the ghosts of Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) and eight of her family members and colleagues look back over their lives—and sometimes forward beyond them—to try to make sense of them, their times, and one another. Theirs were all turbulent lives played out on the western edge of Europe at a time of great change.Lady Gregory helped shape that change at a pivotal moment in Ireland’s development into a modern nation state. The author’s fresh approach questions and complicates the image of her as a prim Victorian workhorse. Setting her in the midst of the personal chatter of her departed family, lovers, friends, and collaborators brings home how the historical Irish moment found her just when it needed her. Gregory Ghosts: Haunting Irishness is published with Peter Lang, as part of their Re-imagining Ireland series Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University and the President of the American Conference for Irish Studies Transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  6. Jun 24

    Cyanne E. Loyle, "Escaping Justice: Impunity for State Crimes in the Age of Accountability" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    Now more than ever, the international community plays a central role in pressing governments to hold themselves to account. Despite pressure to adhere to global human rights norms, governments continue to benefit from impunity for their past crimes. In an age of accountability, how do states continue to escape justice? Escaping Justice: Impunity for State Crimes in the Age of Accountability (Cambridge UP, 2025)presents a theory of strategic adaptation that explains the conditions under which governments adopt transitional justice without a genuine commitment to holding state forces to account. Cyanne E. Loyle develops this theory through in-depth fieldwork conducted over the last ten years in Rwanda, Uganda, and Northern Ireland. Research in each of these cases reveals a unique strategy of adaptation: coercion, containment, and concession. Using evidence from these cases, Loyle traces the conditions under which a government pursues its chosen strategies and the outcomes of transitional justice. Our guest is Professor Cyanne Loyle, who is the Political Science Board of Visitors Early Career Professor of Political Science at Penn State University and a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  7. Jun 13

    Patrick Brodie, "Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland" (Duke UP, 2026)

    In Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland (Duke University Press, 2026), Patrick Brodie maps the shifting fortunes of the Irish economy before the 2008 financial crisis up to 2020, outlining how the Irish state moved from rampant and irresponsible financialized development to incentivizing private media infrastructure and policy as instruments for economic recovery. Brodie contends that while the Irish state’s investment in creative and technological sectors of media was supposed to bring resources back into the country and stabilize the economy, it instead rendered the country even more vulnerable to future instability and transferred wealth into the hands of multinational corporations. Through ethnographic work and close engagement with the Irish state’s policy and planning across a number of key media infrastructure sites, Brodie unfolds the very real environmental and social impacts of Ireland’s naturalized model of financialized, foreign direct investment-led infrastructural development. Richly researched and comprehensively argued, Wild Tides reveals the multifarious, unexpected ways that financialization reaches into the daily life of a nation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  8. May 27

    Judith Hill, "Gothic: Building Castles in Post-Union Ireland" (Four Courts Press, 2026)

    Castles speak. Especially in an age when they are no longer necessary. The Act of Union of 1800, which brought Ireland into closer association with Britain, challenged the status of Irish landed proprietors, and not a few responded by building castles. In Gothic: Building Castles in Post-Union Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2026) Dr. Judith Hill explores the projects of two Irish proprietors: the Burys, later Lord and Lady Charleville, who commissioned Francis Johnston, then Ireland’s most important architect, to design Charleville Castle; and Lawrence Parsons, later 2nd Earl of Rosse, who reimagined seventeenth-century Parsonstown House as early nineteenth-century Birr Castle.  Architecturally the castles belong to Georgian Gothic, a style that in Britain is overshadowed by later nineteenth-century Gothic and is largely overlooked in Ireland. In this fascinating new book, Dr. Hill investigates Georgian Gothic in its own terms as both a British and Irish phenomenon, demonstrating how antiquarian understanding, associative thinking, awareness of family pedigree and historicised design ideas resulted in a uniquely Irish response to the Gothic revival. Using the ample surviving archives related to both families, she argues that these architecturally original and significant castles eloquently expressed their builders’ political and social concerns, making them artefacts of cultural unionism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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About

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

Information

  • Creator
    New Books Network
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    267
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © New Books Network
  • Show Website
    New Books in Irish Studies

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