Center for Irish Teaching and Research • Georgia Southern University
Newton Suite 3302 • Post Office Box 8023 • Statesboro • Georgia 30460 • USA
irish@georgiasouthern.edu • (912) 478-5878 — — — Céad míle fáilte go hIonad um Taighde agus Teagasc Éireannaigh, Ollscoil na Seoirsia Theas
Ag déanamh staidéar ar an saol Gaelach agus Gael-Mheiriceánach
A 20,000-student, Carnegie doctoral-research institution, Georgia Southern is a top Georgia university of choice for HOPE scholars and (according to US News and World Report) among America's ten most popular universities. Unique in the University System of Georgia, the Georgia Southern Center for Irish Teaching and Research helps the university community and the public explore and enjoy both Ireland and Irish-America. Located on a 900-acre, park-like campus in Statesboro—winner of a 2013 Georgia "Renaissance Town" award—the Center's at the heart of a region that boasts exceptionally rich and diverse Irish patrimonies. One faculty member, Dr. Sue Moore, leads an archaeological research group that investigates the Scots-Irish (or Ulster-Scots) frontier settlement of Queensboro, near Louisville, Georgia, which was active in the 1760s and '70s. Two other faculty members, cultural anthropologist Dr. Barbara Hendry and sociologist Dr. William Smith continue to publish their detailed field research into what constitutes Irish identity in present-day Savannah, proud home of the second largest St. Patrick's Day parade in North America. Several past Grand Marshalls of that parade are among the members of the Center's Advisory Board, which currently is embarked on a $120,000 fundraising initiative to support our new Wexford-Savannah research project.
In and beyond the classroom, our Center's work acknowledges the great sweep of Irish experience: ancient Gaelic civilization, of course, but also colonization from the Cambro-Norse invasion of the mid-twelfth century to and beyond Cromwell's paradigm-shifting campaign 500 years later. Aware that over 40% of Georgians claim Irish roots, we pay special attention to Southern dimensions of the worldwide Irish diaspora—by means, for example, of Dr. Jamie Woods' popular course Irish-American History since 1750. And through such courses as International Marketing: Irish Emphases—taught as part of our study-in-Ireland program—we interrogate today's Ireland, a high-tech powerhouse that's profoundly integrated into the global economy. The Center boasts a distinguished record of bringing to Statesboro, Savannah, and the Coastal Empire discipline-leading scholars like Christine Kinealy (history) and Mick Moloney (ethnomusicology) and first-order performers like Cathy Ryan and Seán Ó Sé. In just the last four years, the Center has hosted or co-hosted two conferences and one symposium, and it will co-host two more symposia during summer 2014: one on Scots-Irish heritage; the other (based in Kilkenny, Ireland) on Irish Enlightenment education. Always informing this culture of engagement is our student-centered ethos, manifest in our interdisciplinary Minor in Irish Studies, our highly successful, full-credit study-in-Ireland semester, and our sponsorship of two Irish-themed student organizations.
Early each April, we're delighted to be able to announce the recipients of the Eddie Ivie Scholarship, an endowed fund established to facilitate "study in Ireland by Georgia Southern students." The 2013 winners are Madeline Bunn, an undergraduate student majoring in business management, and Amanda Kinchen, an MA candidate in the Department of History. Both women submitted exceptional application packets, and they are to be congratulated. The 2013 award is $1,000 per student. Donations to the scholarship fund are always welcome, for they expand student opportunities to receive instruction and conduct research in Ireland. Recent gifts include $500 from the members of the Irish Heritage Society of Sun City-Hilton Head in South Carolina, a vibrant organization with which our Center enjoys longstanding, warm relations.
The Eddie Ivie Scholarship honors a noted Savannah restaurant-owner, chef, and entrepreneur. A graduate of the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, Eddie Ivie visited Ireland regularly due to his passion for its stunning landscapes, welcoming people, and rich culture. In addition to his culinary and business skills, Eddie was also a talented musician and lover of the spoken word. His favorite verse was "Pegasus" by Patrick Kavanagh, the great Co. Monaghan poet. The work's concluding lines capture Eddie's spirit and ethos. They declare, "...he [my horse/soul] grew | Wings upon his back. Now I may ride him | Every land my imagination knew."
We Study the Twelfth-Century
Cambro-Norse Invasion of Ireland
at Europe's Oldest Working Lighthouse:
Hook Head, Co. Wexford
INTERNATIONALIZATION: A FIRST-ORDER PRIORITY FOR GEORGIA SOUTHERN
The Center for Irish Teaching and Research Delivers!
"The leaders' expertise, thoughtfulness, and attention to detail made every day of this trip enjoyable. Their enthusiasm for the program and the students shines through. Thanks to the Eddie Ivie Scholarship, I had an educational experience that's changed my life. Now I feel ready for success in the world"—Natasha Zomcik, 2010 Eddie Ivie Scholar
You can donate online (see the box on the right), but we also invite you to discuss with us other giving options—from an annual commitment to a major gift—in support of the Eddie Ivie Scholarship. Please contact Sue Bunning, the development officer in the Dean's Office, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. Sue's telephone number is (912) 478-2435; and her email address is sbunning@georgiasouthern.edu.
The interdisciplinary Minor in Irish Studies is a smart educational choice, for it powers up your academic credentials. More than ever, employers and graduate and professional programs are seeking individuals with an international edge, and Irish Studies provides just that, not least because present-day Ireland is the West's most global economy and first in the world for Foreign Direct Investment. In addition, Ireland has long been a major international phenomenon in that millions of its people have settled abroad. Around 36,279,000 US citizens self-identify as Irish, with a further 3,538,500 or so self-identifying as Scots-Irish. Approximately 14% of Canadians and 10.5% of Australians consider themselves Irish; and Argentina is home to the planet's fifth-largest Irish community. In recent years, five Georgia Southern students with a Minor in Irish Studies have gone on to Master's level education in Ireland, one of them winning a $25,000 Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship.
Our Minor requires five courses (at least three of which must be at the 3000 level or above), and it may be assembled from any approved courses. During Spring 2013, courses with significant Irish content were Introduction to Ireland and Irish Studies, Irish Theater, British History since 1603, and Irish Literature before 1850. Between campus and our study-in-Ireland program, we feature a dozen full-credit Irish Studies courses over Summer 2013, two of which are in business. The Center for Irish Teaching and Research helps students plan their progress through the Minor; simply email the office to set up an advising appointment (irish@georgiasouthern.edu). Also use that service should you have any difficulties with registration. The following Fall 2013 courses are pre-approved for the Minor, but other courses may also be sanctioned, provided they include a sufficient number of Irish or Irish-American modules.
Cultural Anthropology of Europe • Barbara Hendry PhD ••• Tu & Th • 3:30 - 4:45 PM • Carroll 2255
Offered under two codes • IRSH 3090-C (CRN 87532) • ANTH 4431-A (CRN 82385)
Irish Women Writers• Howard Keeley PhD ••• Tu & Th • 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM • Newton 2203
Offered under one code • ENGL 5238-A (CRN 89238)
World Literature 2: Irish Emphases • Howard Keeley PhD ••• Tu & Th • 8:00 - 9:15 AM • Business Administration 3340
Offered under one code • ENGL 2112-H (CRN 81555)
Summer 2013 marks the fifth anniversary of the study-in-Ireland program created by the Georgia Southern Center for Irish Teaching and Research in cooperation with the European Council of the University System of Georgia. This five-week, full-credit program regularly receives top assessment grades for student satisfaction, not least because of the quality of the accommodations, meals, classrooms, technology, and transportation at our "home away from home": the doctoral-degree-granting Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT). Boasting a state-of-the-art campus in Waterford, Ireland's oldest city, WIT serves around 10,000 students, most of whom are off-campus during our program, which runs throughout Summer Term B: 20 June - 25 July 2013 (and 19 June - 24 July 2014). Among other advantages, participants benefit from small-group instruction, with an average 8:1 student-to-teacher ratio.
A defining feature of the experience is two high-quality educational fieldtrips each week. Included in the program cost, these provide students with over 800 miles of travel, plus résumé-building opportunities for participative learning. A must-see destination for students in our religious studies and literature courses is the Chester Beatty Library within the walls of Dublin Castle. There, one of the program's Irish partners—Dr. Cathriona Russell of the Univeristy of Dublin-Trinity College—exposes us to the oldest extant copies of the four canonical gospels, the Pauline epistles, and other New Testament books. Over the years, our theater students have not alone witnessed performances upon storied stages like Dublin's Abbey, Gate, and Project, they've also enjoyed an extended conversation with playwright Brian Friel (sometimes called the Irish Chekhov) and a half-day workshop with Jim Nolan, the Waterford-based author and director of award-winning drama. All students taste Irish life firsthand: In addition to formally learning about the late-nineteenth-century revival of traditional Irish sports as part of the program's mandatory (and popular) single-credit-hour Irish Culture course, our 2012 participants watched the south-of-Ireland provincial hurling final, traveling from Waterford city on buses chartered by local clubs. It proved a joyful, communal experience that the young Americans won't forget.
How you amass 7 credits: take the 1-hour Irish Culture course and then select a 3-hour morning course and a 3-hour afternoon course. For Summer 2013, we offer lower- and upper-division options in art (drawing), business, literature, political science, psychology, and theater. Good news: Georgia Southern students who register for the Ireland program (or who intend to pursue Georgia Southern-sanctioned research in Ireland) are eligible to apply for the Eddie Ivie Scholarship for Study in Ireland, endowed by the Center in cooperation with generous donors. Each year, the application deadline is 15 March, with the award annoncement following on 1 April. Generally, two unrestricted awards of $1,000 each are made.
READ MORE redirects to program website (www.irishgeorgia.com)
READ MORE redirects to Eddie Ivie Scholarship webpage
View our informational video; just click the image above
In 2012, the Center for Irish Teaching and Research inaugurated at the faculty and graduate-student levels a Summer Research Fellowship program in Ireland. This important internationalizing initiative, which parallels (but is distinct from) the study-in-Ireland program, advances the mandate that Georgia Southern enhance research productivity. The debut Fellows were Dr. Bob Batchelor of the Department of History and MA candidate in public history Shay Meredith. From their base at the Waterford Institute of Technology, the two exploited the rich archives overseen by the Waterford Museum of Treasures. They also traveled beyond Waterford city to advance their scholarly inquiry into the role of Ireland's private libraries—particularly the international correspondence networks they sustained—during the long eighteenth century. Marsh's Library in Dublin was one scene for research, but so too was the less famous Bolton Library in Cashel, Co. Tipperary. Batchelor and Meredith's work is part of the Irish Enlightenment Project, a research cluster at the Center for Irish Teaching and Research.
Our faculty Summer Research Fellow for 2013 is Dr. Dustin Anderson, a scholar of the Nobel Prize-winning Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. Thanks to additional support from various partners, we're able to announce a trio of graduate fellowships this year. Tiffany Manning explores intersections between fiction and the all-too-real tragedy of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries. Her fellow literature student Landon Way examines how his Irish heritage, especially childhood years with his Quaker family in Waterford city, affected the great American crime novelist Raymond Chandler. And history MA candidate Amanda Kinchen inquires into the Sherwood Foresters: a British army unit sent to put down the 1916 Rising. Specifically, she seeks to deepen understanding of what the regiment’s members experienced in and around Dublin—and how they’re commemorated.
Now by popular demand on campus (having twice been taught as part of our study-in-Ireland program): Dr. Bill Eaton's course The Irish Philosophical Tradition (PHIL 3030-B; CRN 54050). Irish university monasteries—like Lismore, Co. Waterford, and Clonmacnoise, Co. Offaly—kept European learning alive after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and Irish philosophical thought has remained hugely influential ever since. In the early eighteenth century, the Scots-Irish philosopher Frances Hutcheson developed the concept of "unalienable rights" and a discourse on social happiness: matters transmitted to Thomas Jefferson (at the College of William and Mary) by Hutcheson's acolyte William Small. In his autobiography, Jefferson credited Small with "probably fix[ing] the destinies of my life." Also crucial in the field of political theory is the Dublin native Edmund Burke, often characterized as the founder of modern conservative philosophy.
This exciting, useful course considers Irish philosophy up to the present. Only recently deceased, the Irish religious philosopher John O'Donohue inspired many with books like Anam Cara ("Soul Friend"), which asserts, ""When you cease to fear your solitude, a new creativity awakens in you. Your forgotten or neglected wealth begins to reveal itself." A particular focus of the course is the empirical (or experimental) philosophy of the Irish Enlightenment, whose stars include Robert Boyle (the subject of Eaton's first book): a pioneer of the scientific method and the founding genius of chemistry as we know it today. Concerning one of Boyle's Irish philosopher contemporaries, Eaton likes to reflect, "George Berkeley was a 22-year-old college student when he discovered, to his horror, that the evidence for a physical universe was incredibly flimsy!" For more information, email Eaton directly: weaton@georgiasouthern.edu.
In a May 2011 speech in Dublin, President Barack Obama reflected: "Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and our great abolitionist, forged an unlikely friendship...with [Ireland's] great liberator, Daniel O'Connell. His time [in Ireland], Frederick Douglass said, defined him not as a color but as a man. And it strengthened the non-violent campaign he would return [to America] to wage." While we sometimes forget the fact, it is the case—as our distinguished speaker, Christine Kinealy, observes—that "by 1845, the Irishman [Daniel O'Connell] was the most influential and outspoken critic of slavery in the world." Douglass asserted that O'Connell's "voice made American slavery shake to its center." He continued, "I am determined wherever I go, and whatever position I may fill, to speak with grateful emotions of Mr. O'Connell's labors." Born in Liverpool, England, to Irish immigrant parents, Kinealy brings a keen sense of multiculturalism to her work, and she sees the intersection of Douglass and O'Connell as an object lesson in common cause across nations to advance human rights.
With 18 books to her name (from such houses as Cambridge University Press), Christine Kinealy is one of the most respected historians of Ireland. She holds a chair in history at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Arguably, she is the foremost living authority on the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, and she is in addition a major scholar of Daniel O'Connell, the dominant Irish statesman of the first half of the nineteenth century. It is an honor to welcome Dr. Kinealy to Georgia Southern University. Her lecture will draw from her most recent book, The Saddest People the Sun Sees: Daniel O'Connell and the Anti-Slavery Movement (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011). Kinealy's research is widely praised for its meticulous attention to documentary evidence, such as shipping manifests, and also for its privileging of complexity over ideology. Respecting O'Connell, Kinealy laments that while he composed "some of the finest statements" ever made against slavery, his seminal aboltionist work has "largely been written out of history." By contrast with most of his peers, O'Connell opposed gradualism: the piece-by-piece dismantling of the slave system over time. Instead, he pushed for the immediate and absolute emancipation of victims of (what he labeled) "the most hideous crime that has ever stained humanity—the slavery of men of color in the United States of America."
In 2012, not for the first time, Ernst & Young deemed the economy of the Republic of Ireland the West's "most global." Despite challenges, the nation remains a highly competitive industrial researcher, producer, and exporter, particularly in the fields of Information & Communications Technology (ICT) and Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology. Most of earth's top corporations in those areas—the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Pfizer—have selected Ireland as headquarters for the economic super-region called EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa). In fact, thanks to its low corporate tax regime and highly educated workforce, Ireland ranks first in the world for Foreign Direct Investment. But Ireland's global story doesn't end there! Irish agriculture is an international pacesetter, remarkable for value-adding while retaining a family-farm base. Less than half the size of Georgia in area, Éire ranks fourth in the world for beef exports; and the overall contribution of agri-food to the country's GVA (Gross Value Added) exceeded US$11billion in 2012. Tourists from all corners of the globe, not least members of the massive Irish diaspora, highlight friendliness, scenery, and culture as primary qualities they enjoy about the Emerald Isle, whose state-of-the-art facilities include T2 at Dublin Airport; CCD (Convention Center Dublin); and the Tyndall National ICT Research Institute, Cork. A significant Eastern European population continues to enrich the Irish scene.
The 2013 ACIS-South Conference casts a scholarly eye on transnational and global phenomena, such as those rehearsed above. The academic experts enrich analysis of Ireland in the world by applying methodologies and perspectives drawn from a range of disciplines: history, epigenetics, economics, and more. Contributors from the US, Canada, Britain, and Ireland present over three packed days, and graduate students are afforded opportunities to interact with leading experts in the Irish Studies community. Our Center for Irish Teaching and Research is delighted to partner with Emory University's Center for Irish Studies to host the event, based primarily at the Courtyard by Marriott in the in-town Atlanta suburb of Decatur. One graduate student and five faculty members from Georgia Southern offer research papers during the conference, a reflection of the healthy state of Irish scholarship on our campus.
The Conference business luncheon, at noon on Saturday, features Paul Gleeson, Ireland's Consul General for the Southeastern US (whose official 2011 debut in Savannah was facilitated by the Irish unit at Georgia Southern). We're particularly delighted that the Friday keynote address—on the "archival turn" in Irish pedagogy and research—comes from Ron Schuchard, Goodrich C. White Professor of English at Emory and one of the most visionary, accomplished, and generous academics in Irish Studies. Dr. Schuchard's labors have secured for Emory's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library an exceptional collection of Irish materials, including major W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Seamus Heaney holdings. On Saturday afternoon, conference attendees hear from Seamus Heaney, the native of Co. Derry who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. When making its award, the Nobel Committee cited Heaney's "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." Heaney has opined about aspects of so-called Celtic Tiger Ireland, particularly the construction of an interstate-type road near Tara, an ancient religious and administrative complex: "Tara means something equivalent to me to what Delphi means to the Greeks....It's a word that conjures an aura...what they call in Irish dúchas, a sense of belonging, a sense of patrimony."
Center for Irish Teaching and Research • Georgia Southern University
Newton Building 3302 • Post Office Box 8023 • Statesboro • Georgia 30460 • USA
irish@georgiasouthern.edu • (912) 478-5878
redirects to program website (www.irishgeorgia.com)
