Concordia Irish Studies Podcast: Recent Episodes
Concordia Irish Studies Podcast
The Concordia Irish Studies Podcast highlights the annual lecture series of the School of Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Join us as we hear from engaging writers, academics, politicians, and public intellectuals from Ireland, and from the diaspora.
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For more information, contact irishstudiespodcast@gmail.com
Over the last three seasons, we've explored just how much Irish immigrants and their descendants have shaped Canada over the past 250 years, in so many ways. In this concluding episode to the podcast, Jane looks back at some of her favourite moments from the show, wonders why certain bloodthirsty tales are eternally popular, takes a stand on cancel culture, and gives James FitzGibbon one last shout-out.
Ah, Emily Murphy... where do we begin?! Maybe with the salient fact that this first female magistrate in the British Empire and driving force behind the Persons' Case of 1929 was also the grand-daughter of Ogle Gowan, the founder and Grand Master of the Orange Order in Canada. In terms of having an Irish pedigree, she definitely had one, though how many of her fans knew that her great-grandfather was the leader of Co. Wexford's notorious Black Mob after the 1798 Irish Rising? Emily Gowan Ferguson Murphy was a lightning rod for controversy during her lifetime, and she remains so to this day. But, why? How does her story fit within the larger conversation in the 2020s regarding who should be remembered in Canadian history?
Nellie McClung was a provocative woman, stirring up controversies and column inches in her own lifetime and in all the years since she died. Arguably Canada’s most famous first-wave feminist, her efforts guaranteed that Manitoba’s women won the provincial vote in 1916, a first in Canada. She was also one of The Famous Five, the group of activists who won the right for Canadian women to be considered as legal ‘persons’ under the law. On the other hand, Nellie is also the first woman we’ve featured on this podcast to have been literally burned in effigy—and many of her opinions from the 1910s and 1920s are roundly criticized today. Controversial? Chances are, Nellie ‘Shanty Irish’ McClung wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Considering everything she did in her life – as a teacher, an author, a political activist, an archivist, private secretary to the premier of Alberta, and a journalist – we should be much more familiar with the name of Katherine Hughes. Most people, however, are unaware of everything she achieved and helped to create in the first decades of the twentieth century, in part because of some of the controversies surrounding her, the most notable of which was her strident and vocal support for Irish republicanism. In the first of three episodes about controversial Irish Canadian women, we’re going to discuss the life and times of Katherine Hughes, and why, until recently, she has remained fairly forgotten in the history of Irish Canada.
So far, we’ve talked about famous and infamous people in Irish Canadian history. But, what about those who weren’t so extraordinary? What was it like to be one of them? Today, we’re following one Irish family from Co. Limerick to Canada as they lived through times of war, eviction, violence, and change. Join us as we explore the history of the Dulmage family, Irish immigrants and their Canadian descendants who aren't necessarily in the history books, but whose experiences were full of drama, tragedy, and upheaval.
Who was the most important Irish person in Canadian history? Or perhaps the most frustrating? In today’s episode, Jane makes a case for Sir Guy Carleton as a serious contender for both titles. Born to an Ulster Protestant military family, Carleton was perhaps an unlikely defender of Catholicism and French-Canadian civil rights, but his unyielding support for the Quebec Act of 1774 laid a blueprint for modern Canadian identity that still can be felt 250 years later. And just wait until you hear about his love life!
In the summer of 1847, over 100,000 refugees from the Great Irish Famine poured into Canada, making their way up the St Lawrence River to Grosse Île, Québec, Montréal, and Toronto. Others arrived at Partridge Island, the quarantine station just outside the harbour of Saint John, New Brunswick. This is the story of two Irish Canadians — one in Toronto, and the other in Saint John — who tried to help as best they could, with tragic results.
When the Brock Monument exploded at Queenston Heights on 17 April 1840, the colonial authorities quickly decided upon the identity of the guilty culprit: the notorious Irishman, Benjamin Lett. A follower of William Lyon Mackenzie, Ben Lett unleashed a campaign of terror and violence in the years following the failed 1837 Upper Canadian Rebellion. To some, he was a Robin Hood figure, “the Rob Roy of Upper Canada” who continually evaded capture; to others, he was a dangerous rebel who needed to be stopped.
To end our second season, Jane is revealing some of her exclusive research from the Gender, Migration & Madness Project: the mystery surrounding the death of Mary Boyd. Mary was an Irish Quebecer who found work as a young maid in a Toronto doctor’s household in 1868. But the circumstances surrounding her suicide only a few months later caused a major scandal in the city about sex, virginity, pregnancy, medical experimentation, mental illness, and the immense power men had over women’s bodies.
NB – This episode contains graphic discussions of mental illness, sexual assault, and suicide. Listener discretion is advised.
Few people in Canadian history have created more division than Louis Riel. At the time of his death in 1885, he had been found guilty of high treason, but even the jury who condemned him agreed that something else in Riel’s past was why he was killed: the execution of Thomas Scott. Who was Thomas Scott? Why was he executed in Winnipeg during the Red River Resistance, and why did Riel feel fifteen years later that he was going to be hanged because of an Irishman?
NB – This episode contains explicit language
Wild hogs eating corpses on a battlefield, women shot in the face, Irish soldiers strung up by their heels and mutilated, hangings, deportations, and ghosts… Does this sound like Canada to you? Despite appearances of gentility in Upper Canada, the Battle of the Windmill was anything but – and for a Canadian battle, it was chock-full of Irishmen. At the tiny hamlet of New Wexford in November 1838, all sorts of horrible things happened; this week, we’re talking all about it.
The 1837 Lower Canadian Rebellion was as close as the Canadian colonies ever came to revolution. Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan – doctor, politician, and notable newspaper editor in Montreal – was Louis-Joseph Papineau’s right-hand man in the tense years leading to the battles between les patriotes and the British Army. As the editor of The Vindicator, O’Callaghan became the most powerful Irishman in Montreal, trying to create a Canadian republic through the power of his printing press.
Ellen Cashman was born during the era of the Great Irish Famine in Co. Cork. As a young woman, she left with her family for Boston and then the Wild West. A businesswoman, prospector, philanthropist, and literal trailblazer, “Irish Nellie” was a notable female figure in an extremely masculine world. Join us as we explore the exploits of this singular Irish woman who found fame (if not fortune) in British Columbia and the Canadian north as “The Angel of the Cassiar.”
The Franklin Expedition looms large in Canadian myths and legends, in large part because of what happened to the doomed crews of the HMS Erebus and Terror… or what we think happened. But at the heart of this story of the Canadian north is an Irishman from Co. Down who lived through the worst that the unforgiving winters had to offer, and then led the survivors as they abandoned the ships and wandered off into the ice. But who was Francis Crozier, and what do we know about the man at the heart of the mystery?
Our final episode this season recounts the tale of Mary Gallagher, Montreal’s ‘Ghost of Griffintown,’ and the gory murder that has had her ghost searching for her lost head for the nearly 150 years. Well known to Irish Montrealers but not to many who live outside of the city, the story of Mary Gallagher and Susan Kennedy Myers – the woman who allegedly murdered her – brings together themes of Irishness, alcoholism, sexism, violence, and the supernatural. We’re also not necessarily convinced that Susan was the murderer…
The Gender, Migration & Madness Project (www.gendermigrationandmadness.ca) is our focus this week: a multi-year investigation Jane has been leading that explores how the Irish were treated in Canadian colonial lunatic asylums in the mid-nineteenth century. Did negative stereotypes about the Irish affect the ways in which they were treated once they were institutionalised? And what led to them being confined in asylums in the first place?
In another country, the dark legends about The Shiners might never have been forgotten. But in Canada? How many people today are aware that one of the most dangerous cities in North America used to be…Ottawa? Not many – and yet, it was. The Shiners – violent, intimidating, criminal Irish lumberjacks living along the Ottawa River in the 1830s – fly in the face of every image of Canada as ‘the peaceable kingdom’. That might be why they’ve been usually overlooked in Canadian history – until now.
Jane gets a bit carried away this week, but we can see why. James FitzGibbon was one of the best known Irishmen in pre-Famine Canada as a hero of the War of 1812, the defender of Toronto, and a one-man riot-squad brought in to stop sectarian violence. He was beloved, trusted, and a friend to all Irish immigrants and the colonial establishment. So, why has he now become one of the more forgotten characters from Canada’s past?
Ogle Gowan was an Orangeman, a politician, a journalist, a rabble-rouser, and the illegitimate son of one of Co. Wexford’s most notorious anti-Catholics. His use of violence to achieve political ends in Upper Canada made him a hero to some, and a villain to others – even members of his own family. This episode explores Ogle Gowan’s life and career, and also investigates some very passionate love letters written by his wife…to his cousin.
The Orange Order – an Irish Protestant fraternal association founded in the 1790s – was hugely popular in English-speaking Canada in the nineteenth century, although it’s mostly forgotten today. How did Orangemen become so successful, both politically and culturally? Why did they take root so firmly in parts of Upper Canada? And what did this success in Canada have to do with the 1798 Irish Rising?
Epidemic, pandemic, quarantine – these are words we’re very used to now, in a way that we arguably haven’t been in nearly 200 years. In 1832, Irish immigrants flooded into the Canadas, fleeing for their lives as cholera, a highly contagious and deadly disease, ravaged Europe, Britain, and Ireland. They didn’t receive the warmest of welcomes.
In late July 1843, the colony of Upper Canada was stunned with the news of a bloody double-murder. Thomas Kinnear had been shot and Nancy Montgomery – his housekeeper and pregnant mistress – had been strangled and dismembered. The two people accused of the murders were Kinnear’s Irish servants: James McDermott and the teenager, Grace Marks. Grace’s story has since become one of the most famous fictionalised episodes from nineteenth century Canada, but what was the real Grace like?
Jane offers a brief overview of who we are, what we hope to achieve with this podcast, and a few of her inspirations for the first season of the show.
Rhona Richman Kenneally is a Professor and former Chair in the Department of Design and Computation Arts, and a co-founder and Fellow of the School of Irish Studies at Concordia University. Her work crosses the domains of design justice, critical materiality, food studies, and the architecture and design of the built environment. Recent publications explore food-related activities, especially in the home, in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, and a new research thread investigates textiles and clothing through the lens of material ecocriticism, to acknowledge the power of wearables as agents in their own right in the material world. Rhona has served as editor of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies through eight annual volumes of that periodical. She is also co-editor of an upcoming special issue of CJIS, devoted to Ireland’s Repeal the Eighth Amendment referendum of 2018.
Kevin Barry is an award-winning Irish writer. His novel City of Bohane was the winner of the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His 2015 novel Beatlebone won the Goldsmiths Prize, and is one of seven books by Irish authors nominated for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award. At the Canadian Association for Irish Studies 2019 conference, Kevin read from three of his works – including an extract from his latest book Night Boat to Tangier, available September 2019.
Sexual violence is an essentially contested concept. Exploring the competing meanings of violence presents formidable challenges, which increases in difficulty when we wander back in time. What do we find when we explore the different meanings attached to sexual violence in 19th and early 20th century Irish history? How did conceptions of such forms of violence change?
About Joanna Bourke: Joanna Bourke is a professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a fellow of the British Academy. She is the prize-winning author of 13 books that examine histories of Ireland, modern warfare, military medicine, psychology and psychiatry, violence and emotions, and rape, as well as more than 100 articles in academic journals. Bourke is the principal investigator on a five-year Wellcome Trust-funded project entitled "Sexual Violence, Medicine, and Psychiatry."
Eimear McBride grew up in the west of Ireland and trained at Drama Centre London. Her first novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing took nine years to find a publisher and subsequently received a number of awards, including the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, and the Goldsmiths Prize. Her second novel The Lesser Bohemians won the 2017 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2017 she was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship of the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading. In a 2018 Times Literary Supplement poll of 200 critics, academics and fiction writers, McBride was named one of the 10 best Irish and British novelists writing today.
Clíona Ó Gallchoir is a Lecturer at the University College Cork. Her research interests include Irish women's writing, Irish and British eighteenth and nineteenth-century writing, the figure of the child in eighteenth-century Ireland, the novel in Ireland, and children's literature. Most recently, she has co-edited with Heather Ingman, A History of Modern Irish Women's Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Dr Ó Gallchoir is an expert on the work of Maria Edgeworth, who is the subject of her monograph, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (2005). In addition, she has published essays and articles on other women writers such as Sydney Owenson, Germaine de Stael, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mme de Genlis.
Margaret Kelleher is Professor and Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. Her books include The Feminization of Famine (published by Duke UP and Cork UP, 1997), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (2006), co-edited with Philip O'Leary, and Ireland and Quebec: Interdisciplinary Essays on History, Culture and Society (Four Courts Press, 2016), co-edited with Michael Kenneally. She has recently completed a monograph entitled Language, Life and Death: Myles Joyce, James Joyce and the Maamtrasna Murders and was guest editor, with Nicholas Wolf, of Éire-Ireland's special issue on "Ireland and the Contemporary" (Spring/Summer 2017). She has developed a number of digital humanities projects, including the Electronic Version of the Loeber Guide to Irish Fiction and the Digital Platform for Contemporary Irish Writing (http://www.contemporaryirishwriting.ie/)
Cahal McLaughlin visits the School of Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal and gives a guest lecture on 'The Prisons Memory Archive'
More information available: http://prisonsmemoryarchive.com/ http://www.concordia.ca/artsci/irish-studies.html
Jim Kelly became Ambassador of Ireland to Canada in August 2016. This is Ambassador Kelly's fourth posting as an Irish diplomat. He previously served as Deputy Permanent Representative at Ireland's Mission to the United Nations in New York (2008-13), and also served at Ireland's Permanent Representation to the European Union in Brussels (2001-05) and at the Embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark (1995-98). Most recently, Ambassador Kelly established and directed the new Policy Planning function at the Foreign Ministry, where he led policy development on key issues such as the implications of Brexit for Ireland, and Ireland's response to the refugee and migration crisis.
This podcast was produced by Aaron Lakoff.
Dr. Maureen Murphy, co-director of the undergraduate Irish Studies minor at Hofstra University in Long Island, N.Y., is the current Peter O’Brien Visiting Scholar at the School of Irish Studies. Murphy was the Director of the Great Irish Famine Curriculum Project for the New York State Department of Education. The Great Irish Famine Curriculum (2001) won the Project Excellence Award from the National Council of the Social Studies in 2002. She has served as Vice-President of the New York State English Council. A past president of the American Conference for Irish Studies and a past chair of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures, Murphy has lectured and published widely in Irish literature, folklore, history and American Irish literature and culture.
This podcast was recorded and produced by Aaron Lakoff
Dr. Irene Whelan has taught at Manhattanville College since 1990. A native of County Galway on Ireland’s west coast, she was educated at the National University of Ireland - Galway and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied with James S. Donnelly Jr., a leading historian of modern Ireland. Her dissertation on the evangelical movement in Ireland was published as The Bible War in Ireland: The ‘Second Reformation’ and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1780-1840 in 2005. Her scholarly focus is on the intersection of religious and political history at the local, as well as the global level. She is currently engaged in co-editing a volume of essays, Landscape of Promise and Ruin: Culture, Identity and Reality in the Irish West, 1830-1930, as well a book-length study of the concept of an Irish ‘spiritual empire’ in the 19th and 20th centuries.
This podcast was produced by Aaron Lakoff.
Peter Behren’s first novel The Law of Dreams won the Governor-General's Award, Canada's most prestigious book prize, and has been published in nine languages. The New York Times Book Review called his second novel, The O'Briens, "a major achievement." Carry Me, his third novel was published in February 2016. He is the author of two collections of short stories, Night Driving and Travelling Light. His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many anthologies. A native of Montreal, he held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University and was a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He teaches fiction and television writing at Colorado College and will teach at the Banff Centre in 2018.
This podcast was produced by Aaron Lakoff and Simone Lucas.
Brad Kent is Professor of British and Irish Literatures at Université Laval in Quebec City. In 2013-14 he was Visiting Professor at Trinity College Dublin in the School of English, and in the spring of 2018 he will be the C.P. Snow Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, where he was the Hobby Fellow in the spring of 2009. His recent publications include George Bernard Shaw in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and The Selected Essays of Sean O'Faolain (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016). He is currently general editor of an eight-volume series of Shaw’s writings that will be published by Oxford World’s Classics in 2021. At present he is working on a monograph entitled ‘Literature, Censorship, and the Cultural Politics of Affect in Ireland,’ which is supported with a major grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
This podcast was recorded and produced by Aaron Lakoff and Simone Lucas.
Marina Carr’s works consist of 13 plays including two for children, between 1989 and 2007. In 2015, the Opera Theatre Company toured Ireland with Carr’s contemporary translation of Rigoletto. In November 2016, she wrote an original oratorio for Wicklow County Council, bringing together choirs, solo singers, and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. Her reimagining of Hecuba was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in September 2015, and her reimagining of Anna Karenina played for two months at the Abbey Theatre until January 2017. Carr is the most recent winner of the prestigious literary honour, the Windham-Campbell Prize. Other prizes include The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, The American/Ireland Fund Award, The E.M. Forster Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, The Macaulay Fellowship, and The Puterbaugh Fellowship. She has also taught at Trinity, Villanova, Princeton and currently lectures in the English department at Dublin City University.
Recorded and produced by Aaron Lakoff and Simone Lucas
Welcome to the very first edition of the Concordia Irish Studies Podcast!
Kevin Whelan, Director of the Keough-Naughton Notre Dame Centre in Dublin, has been a visiting professor at New York University, Boston College and Concordia University. He is a prolific writer and editor of books and articles on Ireland’s history, geography and culture, including the bestselling Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape. For many years, Kevin Whelan directed Notre Dame's annual Irish Seminar, the leading seminar in the field of Irish Studies.