Seminar Structure

At the beginning of the NEH Seminar, each participant will be asked to outline a research project that links his or her scholarly or teaching interests with the Seminar's topic. Each will also be expected to make progress on the independent project and, at an appropriate time to de determined with the Director, make a Seminar presentation of the work in progress.

Participants will convene for Seminar discussions three mornings a week in the conference room of the Keough-Naughton Institute, located on the University of Notre Dame's campus. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, participants will meet for regular Seminar discussion sessions of three hours in length which will feature discussions of exemplary texts and critical readings. The sessions will also include opportunities for individual presentations and scholarly exchange and analysis of the participant's own work-in-progress, and opportunities to respond first-hand to visiting faculty experts.

Sessions will be scheduled in the morning, leaving afternoons free for independent reading, research, writing, and consultation with colleagues, the director, and visitors. This will also provide time for Seminar members to use Notre Dame's extensive Irish collections and other rare materials in the Hesburgh Library. The director will be available afternoons for consultation throughout the Seminar and will meet individually with each NEH Seminar member. The Seminar will be held in the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies on the University of Notre Dame campus. In the Keough-Naughton Institute, seminar participants will have access to the R. C. Sweetman Reading Room and several designated NEH faculty offices, with computers and internet access. Seminar participants will also enjoy Visiting Faculty status and have access to all of Notre Dame's facilities, including the over 3,000,000 volumes in the University's Hesburgh Library, which is about a three minute walk from the Institute. In addition to these privileges and use of the Hesburgh Library's electronic catalogues and services, NEH Seminar participants will have full access to the Resources in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.

Weekly Curriculum

During our first week, Seminar members will look at constructions of identity in English accounts of the Irish, and of the English in Ireland, with special attention to Edmund Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) written during the initial phase of Tudor colonialism, and published posthumously in 1633.

During the second and third weeks, Seminar members will move to later views of Anglo-Irish identity in William Molyneux's Case of Ireland Stated, and in writings of Swift and Berkeley and their assertions of identity and articulations of resistance to British colonial policy during the politically and economically tempestuous decades of the early eighteenth century.

In the fourth week, on "Upheaval and Revolution: The Later Eighteenth Century," the group will examine several key works of Edmund Burke. We will be concerned here with how the construction of Anglo-Irish identity was affected by the profound political and social trauma of the French Revolution and the Great Irish Rebellion of 1798. We will also touch on the radical response to Burke including that of Mary Wollstonecraft.

During the fifth and final week, we will focus on Maria Edgeworth's attempt to recover or reformulate the Irish and British national characters from the fallout of the 1798 Rebellion and, with the Act of Union in 1801, the loss of hope for Irish parliamentary sovereignty.