UCDscholarcast PJ Mathews

This Scholarcast is an extract from Helen Lawlor's book, Irish Harping: 1900-2010 (Four Courts Press, 2012). This study provides a musical ethnography and a history of the Irish harp. It gives a socio-cultural and musical analysis of the music and song associated with all Irish harp styles, including traditional style, song to harp accompaniment, art-music style and the early Irish harp revival.

This episode argues for a politicization of cultural and literary critiques of environmental issues in Ireland. It demonstrates methods through which Irish Studies can enter into a creative correspondence with the growing field of Environmental Humanities scholarship.

This episode argues for a politicization of cultural and literary critiques of environmental issues in Ireland. It demonstrates methods through which Irish Studies can enter into a creative correspondence with the growing field of Environmental Humanities scholarship.

This episode explores the process whereby dance was transformed from a practice enjoyed for its own sake into 'a conscious symbolic act' of Irish nationhood during the Revival. Drawing on the work of dance scholars and historians, Barbara O'Connor examines the role of the Gaelic League in developing an'authentic' national dance canon that called for an ideal Irish dancing body.

The fall of the great forests of Ireland provided James Joyce with a rich literary trope laden with cultural memory and socio-political resonances, which he utilized throughout his works and most fully in Finnegans Wake. The trope taps into a chain of historical events well-rehearsed by nationalist rhetoric and thus it is compatible with Joyce's innovative utilisation of repeated motifs with multiple textual resonances.

The episode focuses on one of the most elaborate artworks to be made in Ireland in the 1920s, Harry Clarke's Geneva Window. The work, intended for the League of Nations, illustrates extracts from the texts of fifteen Irish writers. Clarke's innovative approach to the technique of stained glass and his wide knowledge of ancient and modern art and literature made him one of the most remarkable and versatile visual artists of his generation.