New Books in Irish Studies Podcast By New Books Network cover art

New Books in Irish Studies

New Books in Irish Studies

By: New Books Network
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Interviews with Scholars of Ireland about their New BooksNew Books Network Art Literary History & Criticism Political Science Politics & Government World
Episodes
  • Páraic Kerrigan, "LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland" (Routledge, 2020)

    Páraic Kerrigan, "LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland" (Routledge, 2020)
    Nov 16 2025
    “We know what we want, and one day, our prince will come,” says Toby, the bicycle-shorts-wearing, double ententre-making, unacknowledgely-gay neighbor in RTE’s Upwardly Mobile. Though the first queer characters in Irish entertainment television were tropes and stereotypes, they represented an important shift in LGBTQ visibility in Irish media. The road to early representations in entertainment media was a hard road paved by gay rights activists, AIDS stigma, and production teams looking for sensationalism. In LGBTQ Visibility, Media, and Sexuality in Ireland, Páraic Kerrigan explores the dynamics of queer visibility and sexuality in Ireland through televised media between 1974 and 2008. Tune in for our chat about Gay Byrne and the Late Late Show, queer soap stars, the AIDS crisis and globalization of Ireland, and the LGBTQ rights tug-of-war that played out in turn-of-the-century television. Avrill Earls is the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast (a narrative history podcast, rather than interview-based), and an Assistant Professor of History at Mercyhurst University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 14 mins
  • 159 Glenn Patterson: You Can Choose Who You Are (JP, DC)

    159 Glenn Patterson: You Can Choose Who You Are (JP, DC)
    Oct 30 2025
    In Belfast, good fences can make for bad neighbors. David Cunningham ( Wash U. sociologist, author of There’s Something Happening Here and Klansville, U.S.A and frequent RTB visitor) joins John to speak about the Troubles and their aftermath with the brilliant Northern Irish novelist/essayist/memoirist Glenn Patterson. His fiction includes The International (1999) and Where Are We Now? but the conversation’s main focus is his two collections of short non-fiction, Lapsed Protestant (2006) and Here’s Me Here (2016). Glenn has lifetime of insights about the boundary markers and easy to miss shibboleths that define life in divided places--and in divided times. In Belfast, everyone learns to use words without being marked out: how do you avoid uttering "the one word that gets you killed"? But Troubles that go cold also have a way of heating up again, if we forget, as Glenn puts it, that you can choose who you are. China Mieville's brilliant novel The City and the City is, says Glenn, an allegory for places like Belfast itself, where you have to learn to “unsee” residents of "the other city" even in shared areas. That kind of unseeing, in fiction and in real life, leads to distorted mental maps. Glenn sees the so-called “softening” of the peace walls as among the most pernicious occurrences of the last 40 years, since softening coupled with notion that you simply belong to one of two "communities" is what makes real traffic, real conversation, harder to achieve. He and David agree that all over the world, in ways the echo Belfast although it is rarely spelled out, all sorts of invisible architectural extensions of the security and segregation apparatus hover unobtrusively. Glenn also riffs on the names people dream up for what might lie beyond a Belfast wall's other side, spinning off writer Colin Carberry's proposal: Narnia. Mentioned in the Episode “Love poetry: the RUC and Me” was Glenn's first nonfiction piece back inthe late 1980s. Robert McLiam Wilson: Glenn's friend and fellow Troubles novelist, whose work includes Ripley Bogle (1989). Eoin Macnamie's work includes Resurrection Man (1994). “The C-word” (2014) Glenn's wonderful essay on the trouble that starts when the word "community" gets subdivided into "communities." Padraic Fiacc, sometimes called ”the Poet oft he Troubles” finally has a blue historical marker. That makes Glenn ask why are there are so many "blue plaques" for combatants, so few for non-combatants? The interface zones and the strategic cul de sacs that continue to divide Belfast neighborhoods have been brilliantly detailed and studied by various historians; eg this tour by Neil Jarman, Glenn compares Civil Rights in Northern Ireland in the 1960s with the US Civil Rights movement and with Paris 1968; the 70’s bombing campaigns lines up with the actions of the Red Army Faction in Germany. Recallable Books Glennn says his inspiration to write on partition comes from reading Salman Rushdie’s Shame and Midnight’s Children. He also praises John Dos Passos USA trilogy. David interested in the long tail of a conflict and aingles out Glenn Patterson’s own novel, The Northern Bank Job as well as Eoin McNamee The Bureau. Inspired by Glenn's account of how resident learn to see and unsee portions of Belfast, John praises Kevin Lynch's 1960 The Image of the City. Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Cassandra S. Tully de Lope, "Masculinity and Identity in Irish Literature: Heroes, Lads, and Fathers" (Routledge, 2024)

    Cassandra S. Tully de Lope, "Masculinity and Identity in Irish Literature: Heroes, Lads, and Fathers" (Routledge, 2024)
    Oct 14 2025
    Masculinity and Identity in Irish Literature: Heroes, Lads, and Fathers (Routledge, 2024) addresses Irish identity in Irish literature, especially masculinity in some of its forms through an interdisciplinary methodology. The study of language performance through literary analysis and corpus studies will enable readers to approach literary texts from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives, to take advantage of the texts’ full potential as well as examining these same texts through the perspective of gender identity. This will be carried out through a specialised corpus composed of 18 novels written by twentieth- and twenty-first-century male Irish authors. Thus, the language and behaviour patterns of contemporary Irish masculinity can be found as part of these male characters’ performance of identity. This book is primarily aimed at undergraduate and graduate students who wish to introduce themselves in the study of gender and identity in an Irish context as well as researchers looking for interdisciplinary methodologies of study. What is more, it can present researchers with varied options of analysis that corpus studies have not yet touched upon so thoroughly such as masculinity and Irish literature. As a monograph meant to show analysts new fields of study in Irish literature, this book will sell to academic libraries and can be used in MA courses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    52 mins
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