Author: ECIS

The Irish Protestant Playwrights Conference, will be held at the Moore Institute, NUI Galway on 1-3 June 2016.

The conference will feature papers on a number of dramatists from the long eighteenth-century, including George Farquhar, Charles Macklin, Arthur Murphy, Elizabeth Griffith, Oliver Goldsmith, various Sheridans (to be precise, Thomas, Jr., Frances, and Richard Brinsley), and Maria Edgeworth.

Keynote speakers will include Professor Seán Kennedy (St Mary’s University, Halifax) and Dr Emilie Pine (UCD).

Further details about this event can be found on the Irish Protestant Playwrights website.

The launch of Finnian Ó Cionnaith’s new book Exercise of authority: Surveyor Thomas Owen and the paving, cleansing and lighting of Georgian Dublin is taking place on Wednesday 10 Feb at the Mansion House, Dublin. The book considers the work of the Dublin Paving Board and the ways in which this organisation controlled and maintained the streets of Georgian Dublin. It is the second in a series of books sponsored but Dublin City council on the history of engineering in the city. The Lord Mayor and Dr. Kieran Feighan of Engineers Ireland will be speaking at the launch.

• Follow this link to download an invitation to the launch.
• Follow this link for further information about Exercise of authority from the Four Courts Press website.

A conference entitled ‘Theatre in the Regency Era: Plays, Performance, Practice 1795-1843’ will take place in Downing College, University of Cambridge, on July 29-31, 2016. Early bird rates are available until 30 January 2016.

This conference will explore the Regency Era’s dance, music and drama from a wide range of historical and methodological perspectives. The keynote address will be given by Celina Fox (The Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment), and historical gesture specialist Jed Wentz (Conservatorium van Amsterdam) will present a lecture-performance. In addition, the conference will open with an introduction by Iain Mackintosh (Architecture, Actor and Audience) at the remarkable Cambridge Festival Theatre (built in 1814), providing a rare opportunity for conference attendees to see an original surviving Regency three-level horseshoe auditorium.

For further details and to book the conference, please see: www.regencytheatre2016.com

Dr Eoin Kinsella (Irish Association of Professional Historians) will be presenting a paper entitled ‘Testing the limits of the penal laws’ at the next meeting of the Irish Historical Society on 17 November 2015.

The meeting will be held at 7.00 p.m. in the Centre for Irish Programmes, Boston College Dublin, 43 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2.

All are welcome.

The Dutch-Belgian Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (DBSECS) annual conference will take place in Brussels on 10-11 March 2016.

The theme of the conference will be ‘Flavours of the Eighteenth Century’. The organisers have been in touch to encourage ECIS members with an interest in the subject to consider participation.

Click on this link to download the Call for Papers, which is open until 23 November.

The Limerick Early Modern Studies Forum will host a two-day conference on 20-21 November on the theme ‘Moments of Becoming: Transitions and Transformations in Early Modern Europe’.

The conference takes place at the University of Limerick.

Further information is available on the Forum’s website at https://emslimerick.wordpress.com/moments-of-becoming-conference/

The fourteenth Dublin International Symposium on Jonathan Swift will take place from 2 pm to 5 pm on Saturday 17 October 2015 at The Deanery, Upper Kevin Street, Dublin 8.

Speakers

Professor Michael Brown, (History, University of Aberdeen), “How English was Jonathan Swift?”

Professor Aida Ramos (Economics, University of Dallas), “Swift’s Economics: An Alternative to English Mercantilism”

Dr. Charles Ivar McGrath (History, University College, Dublin), “The Grand Question Debated: Swift, Army Barracks and Money”

Professor Moyra Haslett (English, Queen’s University, Belfast), “Singing at the Club: Songs on the Wood’s Halfpence Affair, Dublin 1724-25”

Respondent: Dr. Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Department of English, UCC.

To register please telephone 01 453 9472 or email [email protected]

Sunday 18 October 2015 – 15.15

Annual Service in Commemoration of Jonathan Swift; Saint Patrick’s Cathedral Dublin

Address: Dr. Aileen Douglas, Associate Professor of English, Trinity College, Dublin.

Tomorrow evening in the Royal Irish Academy member’s room, John Gibson, Chairman of the Dublin Decorative and Fine Arts Society, will give a talk entitled ‘Toile and Trouble: The Story of Toile de Jouy’.

Ever since it’s invention by Francis Nixon in Drumcondra in 1752, Toile de Jouy has been more than just a home furnishing fabric. It has chronicled the leisure and interests of the bourgeoisie of the period, from the pastoral ideal of picnicking in the countryside, to hot air ballooning, contemporary literature, opera, and theatre. It has also been used by those seeking to subvert the establishment, as reflected by American revolutionary and other republican designs. New generations of designers continued this tradition, from Ireland’s Sybil Connolly to New Yorker Sheila Bridges, whose Harlem Toile is pictured above. Our chairman, John Gibson, will explore the Irish origins and continuing relevance of this most unlikely of contested grounds.

• Wednesday the 7th of October, The Royal Irish Academy, 19 Dawson St.
• Doors open at 6.30 pm and the lecture begins at 7 pm sharp.
• Please R.S.V.P. to [email protected]

In the summer 1706, three Protestant refugees from the last French war of religion arrived in London to prophesy the fall of Rome and Christ’s imminent Second Coming. They claimed to be inspired by the Holy Spirit, experienced bodily agitations and sought to revive the apostolic Church. Within two years, these ‘French Prophets’ counted nearly 500 followers, including Huguenots, Anglicans, Philadelphians, Quakers, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quietists and even Jews. Their movement launched missionary tribes after failing to resurrect one of their members from the dead and spread across Europe. They remained active in Britain until the late 1740s, reappearing sporadically among the first Methodists, Moravians and Shakers.

The French Prophets sparked one of the greatest controversies in eighteenth-century England, marked by a prodigious battle of pamphlets on revealed religion and miracles, violent riots and a political trial. They were branded as ‘enthusiasts’, then a derogatory label for religious fanaticism, but one whose modern representation largely draws upon the hostile discourse of Augustan moralists.

In his new book, Enlightening Enthusiasm: Prophecy and Religious Experience in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester University Press, 2015), Lionel Laborie examines the nature of religious enthusiasm against the backdrop of the early English Enlightenment. It offers the first comprehensive approach to enthusiasm by looking at this multifarious issue from a social, religious, cultural, political and medical perspective. Based on new archival research, it challenges our modern understanding of this originally infamous term by dissociating religious experience from millenarianism, radical dissent and popular religion, to shed new light on the reality of enthusiasm in early Enlightenment England.

The book can be ordered from Manchester University Press. Follow this link for further information.

The first collected edition of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, The Works of Ossian was published in two volumes in 1765. To mark the 250th anniversary of this significant cultural event and the development of a new online resource, Ossian Online, a one-day symposium and public lecture will be held in the Royal Irish Academy, 19 Dawson street, Dublin on Friday 4 September 2015.

Reflecting the diversity of Ossian’s appeal, the symposium will feature speakers from a range of disciplines, presenting papers on new and recent research on Macpherson’s work. These talks will present new perspectives on familiar topics such as the role and meaning of Ireland in Ossian and Gaelic sources for the poetry, alongside considerations of the current status of Ossian studies in the academy and its potential place in public humanities. Digital humanities projects that focus on Ossian are represented by presentations on Ossian Online and on network analysis of the Ossian corpus. The symposium concludes with a public lecture by James Mulholland (North Carolina State University) on “Ossian and the Global Crisis in Authenticity”.

Attendance is free, but delegates are asked to register for the symposium on the Eventbrite website where you can also access the full programme.

This symposium is supported by the Irish Research Council’s New Foundations Scheme. Ossian Online is supported by the Moore Institute; School of Humanities, National University of Ireland, Galway; and the National Library of Scotland.

The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies will hold its annual meeting in Pittsburgh, PA on 31 March to 3 April 2016.

The Irish Caucus is given two panels at the annual ASECS meeting.  Please see the descriptions of these panels below and consider proposing a paper for one of them.  Graduate students and junior scholars are especially encouraged to submit proposals. Abstract of your paper (approximately 300 words) can be sent to [email protected] by 15 September 2015.

Panel 1: The Irish Enlightenment VIII

Over the past decade, scholars of the Enlightenment have increasingly recognized the contributions of Ireland to broader strands of eighteenth-century thought and the place of Irish thinkers’ work within the context of European and Atlantic intellectual movements.  This research has spawned an increasing number of essays, books, and conference panels, illustrating the vitality of debate concerning the Irish dimension of the Enlightenment and collectively helping to define the nature of the Irish Enlightenment.  This panel welcomes participants whose work focuses on Irish thought and/or its relationship to the Enlightenment world, especially papers that utilize new methodological approaches to the study of intellectual history; including (but not limited to) models drawn from the digital humanities, global history, and/or gender studies.

Panel 2: Conflict and Violence in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

During the long eighteenth-century, warfare and violence was inscribed upon Ireland.  The century began in the wake of the Battle of the Boyne and ended with the aftermath of the Rebellion of 1798.  Between these irruptions of conflict, Irish life was transformed by a series of internal rebellions and international wars.  This panel welcomes papers that explore how these destructive forces shaped the lives of people in Ireland during this period (politically, religiously, economically, socially) and/or how they were represented in popular culture (theatre, literature, history).

Follow this link to visit the ASECS website for further information.

Philip Walsh is currently a doctoral student at UCD finishing his PhD thesis on ‘The Blakes of Ballyglunin: Catholic merchants and landowners of Galway Town and County in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’. He will be speaking at the 2015 Annual Conference in Cork.

What is your favourite museum, gallery or heritage site?
The Battle of the Boyne site does a great job of bringing history to life for all ages.

What is your favourite online resource?
Eighteenth-Century Collections Online is indispensable for anyone studying the eighteenth century.

Your favourite book/poem/painting/object of 18th century interest?
Gulliver’s Travels is a great read and has hardly dated.

What 18th century figure would you most like to have a drink with?
Meeting up with Turlough O’Carolan on some back road pub, with his tunes and undoubtedly stories, would be a fascinating experience.

What will you be talking about at the ECIS Annual Conference 2015?
Younger sons posed a challenge for the remaining Catholic landowners of Ireland in the eighteenth century, whether from a feeling of familial obligation or the cold hard reality of estate management. For the Blakes of Ballyglunin, County Galway the second son from the first two generations of the eighteenth century were given a substantial child’s portion and sent to the West Indies to make their fortune. Both did this to great effect. When these younger sons had made their fortune, they did not return to Ireland but to England, where subsequent generations were knighted and became part of the English gentry. I will be exploring the effect of this on the wider family, the financial implications and the continued links between the families in Galway, the West Indies and England.