Irish Studies (Book Chapters)

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  • Publication
    'Sick on the Irish Sea, Dancing Across the Atlantic': (Anti)Nostalgia in women's diasporic remembrance of the Irish revolution
    (Indiana University Press, 2021-03-01) Aiken, Síobhra
    The substantial displacement of people following the Irish revolution (1916–1923), particularly of women, has little place in the state-sanctioned commemorative history of the period. This migration poses a number of problems for the ‘social remembrance’ (Beiner) of the revolution. How does a community remember when it no longer exists in the geographic place of origin? Drawing on an array of disparate narratives, including letters, memoirs, and fictional self-representation, this chapter aims to recuperate a number of the counter-memories of female revolutionary émigrées in order to consider the spaces available to women for coming to terms with the past within diasporic communities. Furthermore, it explores how these memories of revolution can oscillate between nostalgic and anti-nostalgic remembrance and how less conventional forms of testimony often offer more complex readings of women’s diasporic remembrance than first-person narrative.
  • Publication
    The women who had been straining every nerve: Gender-specific medical management of trauma in the Irish Revolution (1916-1923)
    (Peter Lang, 2020-01) Aiken, Síobhra
    Female revolutionaries suffered various traumas – including sexual trauma – during Ireland’s revolutionary period (1916–1923). This chapter draws on files from the Military Service Pensions Collection, personal accounts and literary narratives in order to consider the various medical treatments prescribed to women for “exhausted nerves” in the early decades of the Irish Free State. Contemporary understandings of what is now recognized as PTSD were strongly informed by gender ideologies, and women’s mental welfare was routinely connected to the female reproductive system. In contrast to men’s treatment, which aimed to swiftly return the patient to the warzone or workforce, traumatized female revolutionaries were frequently recommended prolonged “rest” treatments which emphasized domestication and re-feminization. These costly therapies reflect the social privilege of many female republicans. Women lacking such familial or financial supports, however, could find themselves committed to the country’s overcrowded mental institutions, while a significant number of female revolutionaries emigrated for medical reasons.
  • Publication
    Locating the centre: Irish traditional music and re-traditionalisation at the Willie Clancy Summer School
    (Irish Academic Press, 2013-05-01) Commins, Verena
    The Willie Clancy Summer School is the foremost school for Irish traditional music transmission and practice in the annual Irish traditional music calendar. !e particular success of the Willie Clancy Week (as it is more commonly referred to) is the result of a synergy of factors, the reverberations of which resonate in a dialectical exchange with the wider community of Irish traditional music practice. In this essay, two inter-related factors which contribute signi"cantly to the production of cultural authority at the school are considered: Firstly, transmission, and the re-traditionalisation of the processes of transmission at the school and secondly, peripherality and how the location of the school, in the west of Ireland, is a constitutive element in legitimating this re-traditionalising process.
  • Publication
    Musical statues: Monumentalising Irish traditional music
    (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015) Commins, Verena
    The year 2016 has generated a considerable degree of both academic and popular interest into processes of remembering and public forms of commemoration which in turn provoke questions about the meaning and interpretation of heritage and culture. Contributing to that conversation, this essay reflects on the commemoration of Irish traditional music and musicians, a practice that has emerged over the past four decades. It gives particular attention to monumentalisation, that is, the material expression of placing statuary and monuments in honour of Irish musicians. Entwining geographical resonances from other 2016 centenaries that pertain to Irish traditional music, this essay considers the ways in which these have become embedded into the cultural and musical identity of contemporary Ireland.
  • Publication
    Place-making: Mapping territories, landscapes, lives
    (Baksun Books and Arts for Social and EnvironmentaL Justice, 2015) Cronin, Nessa; Jennifer Heath
    [No abstract available]
  • Publication
    Cnámh na seisce: crapadh na fearúlachta i ndánta Mháirtín Uí Dhireáin
    (An Sagart, 2014) De Paor, Louis; |~|
    [No abstract available]
  • Publication
    Irish language modernisms
    (Cambridge University Press, 2013) De Paor, Louis; |~|
    [No abstract available]