The following pages reiterate, for your convenience, the information contained in the "Dear Colleague" letter, which can be downloaded from Application Procedures .

The Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame is delighted to host a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University teachers from June 22 to July 24, 2009.

The interdisciplinary Seminar, entitled "Anglo-Irish Identities," will explore the complex and contested cultural, political, and ideological identities of the group known variously as the Anglo-Irish, the English in Ireland, or the Protestant Ascendancy. Colin Kidd notes that "the contentious role played by ethnic identity in the history of Ireland makes it easy to forget that the Irish, like other nations, have played out their conflicts in a world of imagined communities." Within this context, how did the Anglo-Irish come to define themselves as a group? How did they differentiate themselves from the native population or "meer Irish" or from the so-called "Old English," the Norman descendants of Strongbow? From the Presbyterians, Baptists, and other Dissenters, or from the English themselves?

Our five-week Seminar will examine this question of identity and difference in some representative writers who have dominated the teaching and understanding of Irish history and literature of this critical period--Edmund Spenser, William Molyneux, Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley, Maria Edgeworth, and Edmund Burke. Close readings from the works of these figures will take place with a discussion of their historical, political, and ideological contexts, which have connections to our larger understanding of the construction of identities in colonial and post-colonial worlds.