Nessa Cronin, Lecturer in Irish Studies, Centre for Irish Studies, and Associate Director of the Moore Institute, NUI Galway, asks important questions on life after lockdown in a commentary published by the Irish Humanities Alliance: What will our world look like after the Great Lockdown? How will it impact us as a nation? And how will it change the very fabric of our daily lives as global citizens?.
Marie Doyle '21 offers her reflections on encountering the poetry of Eavan Boland (1944-2020) while studying abroad in Notre Dame's program at the National University of Ireland Galway and enrolled in the course "The West in the Irish Literary Imagination." In addition to the importance of Boland's work in reflecting women's voices, in the wake of protests against racism sweeping through America and the world, Marie writes: " As many of us begin to confront our nation’s deeply problematic history in earnest, Boland reminds us that it is our ethical duty to tell the 'human truths' of 'an actual past,' no matter how uncomfortable that may be.
We celebrate and honor our 2020 Irish Studies Minors: Mary Hope Clark, Anja Renkes, and Jessica Flynn.
In a piece published by the Irish Humanities Alliance, Professor Daniel Carey, Director of the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway, writes about the work of metaphor in the COVID-19 pandemic.
What can literature offer us during a pandemic? Keough-Naughton Faculty Fellow Barry McCrea, the Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies, and Professor of English, Irish Language and Literature, and Romance Languages and Literatures, taught a new "Literature and Film in Lockdown" course to Notre Dame undergraduates whose study-abroad programs were cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic. That class prompted some reflections in an article in The Irish Times on how fiction can help us survive our current time of fear and uncertainty.
With nearly 27.000 deaths due to COVID-19, Spain has suffered greatly. As the country emerges from lockdown, what are the effects of the virus on Spain's economy and social services? José Brownrigg-Gleeson Martínez, a former Keough-Naughton postdoctoral fellow, posted this report on RTÉ Brainstorm.
In her prize-winning A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Space, 700-1250 (Manchester University Press, 2019), Faculty Fellow Amy Mulligan demonstrates that medieval Irish thinkers and writers possessed a sophisticated consideration of space, place, and identity. Their ideas about place, both religious and secular, circulated throughout Europe and had a great impact from the Middle Ages onward on the “spatial turn” that occurred throughout the globe.
With remarkable ingenuity and creativity, arts organizations throughout Ireland have reached out to citizens isolated in their homes. Yet, lacking live audiences and patrons, the COVID-19 pandemic poses an existential threat to the arts. Catherine Wilsdon, the Keough-Naughton Institute's Dublin Programme Manager & Liaison comments.
How are Ireland and other European governments responding to the widespread increase in domestic violence during the global COVID-19 pandemic? Clare O’Hare, a lawyer and doctoral candidate at the University of Notre Dame Law School as well as an active member of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies Graduate Student Working Group and a Graduate Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, comments.
