Cambridge-Edinburgh joint irish history conference 2017

7th-8th December 2017

The Conference met over two days and included an opening roundtable on new approaches to Scottish and Irish History – the overarching theme of the conference – and four main sessions with twelve papers by as many graduate students from the two universities, as well as from Aberdeen, University College Dublin and Endicott College (South Korea). The student presentations covered a wide range of research areas from different angles. Special emphasis was placed on the transnational dimension of Irish IMG_0773history and the light it sheds on the history of the rest of the people of these Western-European Isles. There were papers exploring commemoration and the overlap between history and public policy in recasting of British-Irish relations in the twenty-first century, others on violent separate nationalism across Europe and North America, and others about gendering anti-Semitism, reading the regional appropriation of Catholic social teaching in late-nineteenth century Ulster and Poznania and assessing the impact of standardised ‘clock time’ on social relations in early nineteenth-century Cork. Employing methods and interpretative concepts at the cutting edge of the field, students debated what “Irish”, “Scottish”, “Welsh”, “English” and indeed “British” history should include. For the first time M.Phil. students were fully involved: not sufficiently advanced to give papers, they chaired sessions and steered the discussion.

The roundtable was the only part of the conference which saw senior academic in action. These included Ewen Cameron (Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Paleography and Head of School), Enda Delaney, Alastair Reid and Eugenio Biagini. The idea of a roundtable was a new development (in previous years senior academics had limited themselves to some introductory and concluding remarks), but was welcome by the students, who “grilled” the four senior scholars for the best part of an hour, with perceptive questions which paved the way to the main sessions of the conference.

One very positive development emerging from the Conference is the way in which, starting from Irish history, a younger generation of scholars have begun to recast the history of the Welsh, Scottish and indeed the English peoples in all their diversities and complexities. This will push the historiographical agenda beyond the “Four Nations” agenda, towards a new paradigm shift, one which some of them are already working in their current PhD thesis.

The Conference was a great success and we are deeply grateful to the Chair of the Cambridge History Faculty, the Head of the School of History and Paleography of Edinburgh University and one anonymous Irish benefactor for sponsoring the event.

This was the third of our Joint Conferences. Last year we met in Edinburgh, and the previous year at Sidney. The Fourth Conference will be held at Edinburgh again. We plan to invite scholars and students from two other universities – Leiden and Trinity College Dublin, which hosted a smaller-scale interim seminar, with the participation of Cambridge and Edinburgh contingents in November.

Details and Speakers

Thursday 7 December

1 pm — Lunch

1:45 pm —Opening remarks

2 pm —Roundtable discussion with Professor Eugenio Biagini, Professor Ewen Cameron, Professor Enda Delaney, and Dr Alastair Reid

3:15 pm — Panel A —Chair: Dexter Govan

Bethan Johnson (University of Cambridge), Militant separatism in Western Europe and North America in the long ’68

Dr Thomas Dolan (University of Edinburgh), “Evolving a mini-Republic”: Prison, Partition, and the Past in the Republican vision of Gerry Adams articulated as ‘Brownie’.

Charlotte Kenealy (University of Cambridge), Commemoration, Reconciliation and the Peace Process: World War Remembrance in Ireland, 1994-2016

4:45pm – Break

5.00 pm – Panel B — Chair: Maddy Redmayne

Trisha Kessler (UCD), ‘The Mayo girl won hands down!’: an industrial contest in Verviers, 1939

Dr Pete Hession (University of Cambridge), “Cork time” and Popular Time: rewinding the peasants clock’

Anna Lively (University of Edinburgh), The Impact of the Russian Revolution on Revolutionary Ireland, 1917-1919

7.30 pm — Conference dinner Pizza Express, Jesus Lane

Friday 8 December

9:00 am – Panel C — Chair: Cara Pacitti

Christopher Morash (University of Cambridge), ‘Our mental self-reliance is an essential condition of our political independence.’ The Young Ireland generation, nationalism, and changing communications technology.

Rose Luminiello (University of Aberdeen), Rerum Novarum and the People: Legitimizing Protest in Ulster and Poznania

Hugh Hanley (University of Cambridge), Lone wolves, rebels, and outsiders: intellectuals in post-revolutionary Ireland

10:30 am – Break

10:45am – Panel D — Chair: Max Lambert

Dr Andrew Phemister (University of Edinburgh), “A Picture of Triumphant Anarchy”: Irish Boycotting and Anglo-American Liberalism

Dr Loughlin Sweeny (Endicott College), Closing the Circle: Irish Diasporas in the Pacific World, 1850-1910′

Stuart Clark (University of Edinburgh), “Ireland is not the El Dorado that was supposed”: Scots and the Land in Post-Famine Ireland

12:15 pm – Break

12.30 pm – Closing Remarks

1pm – Lunch

The conference was held in Chapel Court Seminar Room 2 at Sidney Sussex College, the University of Cambridge.