
Fall 2009 Course Descriptions are now available online.
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The Keough-Naughton Institute is pleased to announce a new blog and RSS feed which will announce lectures and cultural events that reference Ireland and Irish Studies at Notre Dame. Join us there to subscribe to the Rss feed and stay up to date on the latest events.


Please visit the University of Notre Dame home page to view the video.
The Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center bring the best from recent Irish cinema to the Browning Theater March 20th, 21st and 22nd. MORE...
Please visit Public Lectures in the sidebar for the Spring 2009 schedule.
The Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and the Department of Irish Language and Literature in cooperation with the Fulbright Commission, the State Department and the International Educational Exchange will host an orientation workshop for Foreign Language Teaching Assistants this August. This orientation workshop offers the teachers introductions to language methodology, university practices, academic and university life and United States culture prior to taking up positions at universities and colleges across the United States. The workshop is directed by Professor Brian Ó Conchubhair. Please visit the FLTA website here
Donald and Marilyn Keough Chair of Irish Studies Maud Ellmann has just completed a fellowship from the National Humanities Research Center in North Carolina. Educated at Cambridge, Oxford and the Université de Paris, Sorbonne and formerly a Reader in Modern Literature at King's College, University of Cambridge, Ellmann is a leading literary scholar whose publications include The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (1987), The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment (1993) and Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (1994). Her latest book, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (2003) was awarded the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for 2004 for the book of the year on a literary topic. Full story here
Thomas and Kathleen O’Donnell’s sponsorship of a second faculty position, the Patrick B. O’Donnell Chair in Irish Studies, will enable the Institute to bring in a visiting faculty member to the Irish Studies program, particularly in untaught or under-taught fields. This year’s Patrick B. O’Donnell Chair is noted Irish folklorist Diarmuid Ó Giolláin from University College Cork. Dr. Ó Giolláin’s visit is also funded in part by the Donald Keough Fund for Irish Studies. Full story here
The Department of Irish Language and Literature is delighted that Dr. Bríona Nic Dhiarmada has accepted an offer to join our faculty as The Notre Dame Chair of Irish and Concurrent Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre. Full story here
John and Lenore Madden have funded the new endowed Chair in Irish Studies to be housed in the History Department and College of Arts and Letters. Full story here
This award, named in honor of the Institute’s founding benefactors, Donald and Marilyn Keough, is given to an outstanding graduating senior and Irish Studies Minor every year. In a short ceremony in the Institute this May and at the College of Arts and Letters Awards Convocation, senior Michael O’Connor was honored with the award for his outstanding contributions to the study of Ireland at Notre Dame. A native of Kingston, Pennsylvania, Michael has worked with the Institute throughout his undergraduate career. He volunteered at conferences, served as a student worker, participated in the Dublin Program and was awarded an extremely competitive Dublin Internship, where he worked for the Institute’s Field Day Publications. Michael wrote a superior capstone essay that dealt with Irish language and culture in Irish-American journalism.
The Brother Simeon Prize commemorates the Holy Cross brother who taught Irish language classes at Notre Dame in 1868. This year’s prize for outstanding study in the areas of Irish Language and literature was awarded to Ellen Fitzsimmons.
Public lectures for the Spring 2008 semester can be found here.
Ireland in Transition: From Emigration to Immigration was offered for the first time as a jointly listed course in Irish Studies and Sociology in Fall 2007. Mary P.Corcoran, a visiting Professor from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth taught the course which offered a sociologically informed overview of emigration out of and immigration into Ireland in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Students were given a general insight into the history of contemporary Irish emigration and its key demographic features. The transition to immigration that has occurred since the 1990s, was explored through analysis of the experiences of returning Irish emigrants and new immigrants groups in Ireland. The course raised issues to do with race, ethnicity and identity in the context of transnational communities, using Ireland as a particular case study. All students wrote a final term paper on a topic of their choice as part of the course requirements. Mary has selected four papers which are available on the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies website as examples of the breadth and quality of student work on the course.
Kate Dugan identifies the various factors associated with the Celtic Tiger economic boom that gave rise to high rates of immigration in the early years of the twenty-first century in Ireland. Sean Wieland looks explicitly at on particular immigrant group in Ireland, the Poles, and assesses their prospect for integration in the host society. Gwen Rugg’s paper explores the historical evolution of travelers as an indigenous ethnic group, and assesses their social location in Irish society today. Finally, Cynthia Curley’s essay focuses on the concept of Irishness and how it has gained and retained currency in the global marketplace of consumption.
On Thursday, June 28, 2007, Ireland elected its first black
mayor, Rotimi Adebari, a Nigerian who arrived seven years ago
as an asylum seeker. This event points to the rapid population
change the country is experiencing. Ireland has undergone profound
changes in the last decade, not simply by reversing a long
history of emigration, but also by attracting hundreds of thousands
of new immigrants, many of these from Eastern Europe, Africa,
and Asia. The arrival of over 207,000 Poles alone in the last
decade is changing the face of the Irish nation and the Irish
Catholic Church. The world accepted the Irish. Will the Irish
accept the world? That is the question the Notre Dame Keough-Naughton
Institute conference on Race
and Immigration in the New Ireland
(October 14-17) will address. Register.
More
Information and complete schedule.
The Keough-Naughton Institute is accepting proposals for a grant of up to $5,000 the development of a new Irish studies course. The Institute is an interdisciplinary project devoted to teaching and research in Irish culture and society in all of its internal aspects and external relations. Consequently we define Irish Studies in broad terms and encourage applications from Teaching-and-Research and Special Professional Faculty interested in all fields of study. More.
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