Irish Studies: Ideas and Institutions after the Crash

'Irish Studies: Ideas and Institutions after the Crash' is the first of a series of events organized by a group of academics at NU1 Maynooth as part of a project entitled 'Crisis', Culture and Commemoration' (or 'The Rocky Road to 2016'). The aim of this initiative is to encourage a response from literary and cultural critics in Ireland to the upcoming centenaries of the Easter Rebellion and of other key events in modern Irish history. A related purpose is to consider the history and possible futures of Irish Studies, which was pioneered in the 1980s and 1990s as a new kind of enterprise for Irish intellectuals. Cultural critics associated with Irish Studies, influenced by international developments in the humanities, analysed the preoccupations and innovations of Irish artists, philosophers and political thinkers, especially in relation to Ireland's traumatic experience of modernization as a colony of Britain. Irish Studies tried to match the sophistication and ambition of early twentieth-century Irish modernist writers such as Yeats and Joyce in its own critical work. It seemed to promise that, in part by looking back to earlier moments of crisis and experiment, cultural studies or theory could help to produce new ways of thinking about the ongoing problems of conflict in Northern Ireland and of political and economic stagnation in the Republic. Reprinted by permission of Cork University Press