The Graduate IRISH Seminar

Since 1999, the Keough-Naughton Institute has sponsored a summer graduate seminar that brings together Irish scholars, graduate students, and faculty in Irish Studies from around the world. An intense intellectual exchange, the seminar has been a formative experience for scores of Notre Dame graduate students and their peers from universities around the world.

Alongside formal sessions, there are readings, theater visits, archive and library visits, and field trips.

The themes of past IRISH Seminars include Ireland and Britain, Classical Influences, Irish Modernisms, Ireland and Rome, and Periphereal Modernities? Ireland, Argentina, and Latin America.

Locations include Dublin, the Notre Dame Kylemore Global Centre on Ireland's west coast, Paris, Rome, Buenos Aires, and Oxford. 

Faculty have included two Nobel Prize winners (Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott) as well as leading academics and writers.

Notre Dame graduate Irish Studies minors receive generous funding to attend the IRISH Seminar. 

For more information, please contact Dr. Julian Dean, postdoctoral fellow, Keough-Naughton Institute (jdean6@nd.edu).

IRISH Seminar Themes 

IRISH Seminar 2023: Ireland and America

• 2022: 1922
• 2021: IRISH Seminar, webinar format with a variety of themes
• 2020: Ireland and the Future (canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic)
• 2019: Ireland and Britain
• 2018: Ireland 1600-1800: Kingdom, Colony, Union, Empire
• 2017: Ireland and Rome
• 2016: Classical Influences
• 2015: Peripheral Modernities? Ireland, Argentina, Latin America
• 2014: The Vernacular Imagination
• 2013: Contemporary Irish Poetry
• 2012: Contemporary Irish Theatre
• 2011: Irish Modernisms
• 2010: The Irish Revival
• 2009: Apocalypse and Utopia
• 2008: Republics and Empires
• 2007: Irish Classics
• 2006: Capitals of Culture: Paris and Dublin
• 2005: Genealogies of Culture
• 2003: The Irish Body2004: Boston or Berlin?
• 2002: Ireland and Globalisation
• 2001: Contemporary Ireland
• 2000: Modern Ireland 1880-1930
• 1999: Memory and History: Ireland 1500-2000

*Ailbhe Darcy, a poet and critic, is Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Communication, and Philosophy, Cardiff University. Her most recent collection of poetry, Insistence (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), won the Wales Book of the Year award and the Piggott Prize for Poetry in association with Listowel Writers' Week. 

Dr. Darcy received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame as well as her doctoral degree in English, with an accompanying Irish Studies minor. In the year of her graduation, 2015, she received the Graduate School’s Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Award in the Humanities, the highest honor bestowed on a Notre Dame graduate student.