So hope for a great sea-change

On the far side of revenge.

Believe that a farther shore

Is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

And cures and healing wells.

Seamus Heaney

From The Cure at Troy

Since 2012, Ireland’s Decade of Centenaries has seen us examine and explore the series of seminal events that, politically and socially, shaped our island a century ago. From the introduction of the third Home Rule Bill and the Ulster Covenant in 1912, through the first World War and the Easter Rising of 1916, and onto the formation of the first Dáil and the onset of the War of Independence in 1919, we have marked crucial moments, recognising that the shared historical experiences of those years gave rise to very different narratives and memories.

Over the coming months, Ireland’s Embassy and Consulates across the United States will join with the American Conference for Irish Studies & Irish Studies programmes across many of this nation’s leading Universities to host a series of lectures and panels reflecting on the final – and perhaps most contested – years of this formative decade. Our reflections will cover: the war of Independence; the emergence of Northern Ireland; the negotiations and debate of the Anglo-Irish Treaty; the foundation of the Irish State and the Civil War. We will consider how these seismic events were viewed across the Atlantic and the role the United States - and Irish-America - played in shaping them, recognising that, for many Irish emigrants, independence was a farther shore they strove to reach.

This first seminar of our series – ‘Was it for this’ - focuses on the aftermath to 1916, the renewal of Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers, the conscription crisis, the election of 1918 & the First Dáil. Hosted by Boston College, in association with the ACIS New England Region & the Consulate General of Ireland in Boston, it features a range of outstanding scholars - Marjorie Howes (Boston College); Rob Savage (Boston College); Fearghal McGarry (Queens University); Bridget Keown (University of Pittsburgh), and Mike Cronin (Boston College) – as well as Ireland’s Ambassador Daniel Mulhall. From there, we will host webinars monthly through the first half of the year, in partnership with universities across America, leading up to the ACIS annual conference in early June.

Join us and many of the world’s leading scholars of Irish politics and culture as we reflect on a formative period in our nation’s history.

Biographies

Daniel Mulhall has been Ireland’s Ambassador to the United States since 2017. His previous Ambassadorial postings were in Kuala Lumpur, Berlin and, more recently, London, with other diplomatic assignments in New Delhi, Vienna, Brussels (EU) and Edinburgh. Born and brought up in Waterford City, he studied history and literature at University College Cork. He has been awarded Honorary Doctorates by the University of Liverpool and Chatham University (Pittsburgh) and has received the Freedom of the cities of London and Waterford. He has lectured and published widely on Irish history and literature. Honorary President of the Yeats Society (Sligo), he is devoted to Irish literature and, for more than six years now, has tweeted a verse of Irish poetry each and every day.

Marjorie Howes is Associate Professor of English and Irish Studies at Boston College. She is the author of Yeats's Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness and Colonial Crossings: Figures in Irish Literary History. She is the co-editor of Semi-Colonial Joyce, Yeats and Afterwords, and A Complex Revival. She is the series editor, with Claire Connolly, of the 6-volume Irish Literature in Transition, which was published by Cambridge in 2021.

Rob Savage is interim director of Irish Studies and a professor of history at Boston College. He has written widely about twentieth century Irish history including The BBC’s Irish Troubles: Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland which was short-listed for the 2018 Christopher Ewart-Biggs Literary Award; and A Loss of Innocence? Television and Irish Society 1960-1972, which won the 2011Donnelly Prize for best book in History and the Social Sciences from the American Conference for Irish Studies. He has been awarded Visiting Fellowships at the University of Edinburgh, Trinity College, Dublin, the National University of Ireland, Galway and Queen’s University.

Fearghal McGarry is professor of modern Irish history at Queen’s University Belfast and currently the Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies at Boston College. Author of The Rising. Ireland: Easter 1916 (2010), he has written widely on the Irish revolution. He has been extensively involved in commemoration of Ireland’s ‘Decade of Centenaries’ including working with the Irish Post Office to develop its GPO Witness History museum. Collaborating with partners at the University of Edinburgh and Boston College, he currently leads a major research project, A Global History of Irish Revolution, 1916-23, investigating how Ireland’s struggle for independence was shaped by international currents.

Bridget Keown is a lecturer in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. Bridget earned her PhD in history at Northeastern University, where she was named the Dean’s Graduate Fellow to the Humanities Center for the 2018-9 academic year. She received her Master’s degree in Imperial and Commonwealth History from King’s College London, and her BA on History and Russian Literature from Smith College. Her research focuses on the experience and treatment of war-related trauma among British and Irish women during the First World War and Irish War of Independence, and the construction of history through trauma. She has written blogs on this research for the American Historical Association and Lady Science, and is a contributing writer for Nursing Clio. She is also currently researching the history of kinship among gay and lesbian groups during the AIDS outbreak in the United States and Ireland. Bridget is a co-chair of the Gender and Memory Working Group of the Memory Studies Association and serves on the Executive Council of the American Conference for Irish Studies, as well as the Editorial Board for the Close Encounters in War Journal.

Professor Mike Cronin has been the Academic Director of Boston College Ireland since 2005. He was educated at the University of Kent and Oxford University where he was awarded his D.Phil. He has published widely on various aspects of Irish history, and is a renowned scholar in the area of sport. He is a regular media commentator on aspects of Irish and sporting history. While at BC, Professor Cronin has developed a series of major public history projects based around Irish topics including the 2008-12 GAA Oral History Project, and since 2013, the major online repository and real time history project for the Irish Decade of Centenaries, Century Ireland