Best Elaine Sisson Podcasts (2024)

1
Scholarcast 61: Style and context -Traditional Irish Harping 32:16

7y ago32:16

32:16

This Scholarcast is an extract from Helen Lawlor's book, Irish Harping: 1900-2010 (Four Courts Press, 2012). This study provides a musical ethnography and a history of the Irish harp. It gives a socio-cultural and musical analysis of the music and song associated with all Irish harp styles, including traditional style, song to harp accompaniment, a…

1
Scholarcast 61: Style and context -Traditional Irish Harping 32:16

7y ago32:16

32:16

This Scholarcast is an extract from Helen Lawlor’s book, Irish Harping: 1900-2010 (Four Courts Press, 2012). This study provides a musical ethnography and a history of the Irish harp. It gives a socio-cultural and musical analysis of the music and song associated with all Irish harp styles, including traditional style, song to harp accompaniment, a…

1
Scholarcast 60: On Development, Waste and Ghosts 37:02

8+ y ago37:02

37:02

Movements in ecocriticism that call for links to be made with postcolonialism challenge us, here in Ireland and outside of it, to do work that has not come naturally. As critics like Rob Nixon have pointed out, ecocriticism and postcolonialism were, in fact, often at odds with each other as the fields arose, operating at a disconnect.…

1
Scholarcast 59: Environmental Narratives, Climate Change and Sovereignty Loss 22:49

8+ y ago22:49

22:49

This episode argues for a politicization of cultural and literary critiques of environmental issues in Ireland. It demonstrates methods through which Irish Studies can enter into a creative correspondence with the growing field of Environmental Humanities scholarship.By Malcolm Sen

1
Scholarcast 58: Taking the Floor: Dance, Nation and Gender in the Irish Revival 59:46

8+ y ago59:46

59:46

This episode explores the process whereby dance was transformed from a practice enjoyed for its own sake into ‘a conscious symbolic act' of Irish nationhood during the Revival. Drawing on the work of dance scholars and historians, Barbara O'Connor examines the role of the Gaelic League in developing an‘authentic’ national dance canon that called fo…

1
Scholarcast 57: James Joyce, Treeless Hills and the Night of the Big Wind 45:35

9y ago45:35

45:35

The fall of the great forests of Ireland provided James Joyce with a rich literary trope laden with cultural memory and socio-political resonances, which he utilized throughout his works and most fully in Finnegans Wake. The trope taps into a chain of historical events well-rehearsed by nationalist rhetoric and thus it is compatible with Joyce's in…

1
Scholarcast 56: Revival and Visual Art – Harry Clarke's Geneva Window 45:53

9y ago45:53

45:53

The episode focuses on one of the most elaborate artworks to be made in Ireland in the 1920s, Harry Clarke's Geneva Window. The work, intended for the League of Nations, illustrates extracts from the texts of fifteen Irish writers. Clarke's innovative approach to the technique of stained glass and his wide knowledge of ancient and modern art and li…

1
Scholarcast 55: Yeats, Revival and the Temporalities of Modernism 48:18

9y ago48:18

48:18

This lecture puts forward the idea that Yeats's Revivalism lies at the heart of his modernism rather than at the "pre-modernist" periphery of his early career. For Yeats, as for so many of his contemporaries, Revival was not a form of nostalgia, in which the past was cut off from experience; nor was it nostalgia in the sense of longing of a time th…

1
Scholarcast 54: The Revival and the City in James Stephens's Dublin Fiction 35:32

9y ago35:32

35:32

Examining the infiltration of new notions of urbanism into Irish culture in this era, in particular through the Housing and Town Planning Association of Ireland, this talk looks at the Dublin-based writings of James Stephens to show how revivalist writers were responsive to the peculiarities of Irish urban experience.…

1
Scholarcast 53: Supply Chains: Labour, Poverty, and the the Nonhuman Animal of Joyce's Ulysses 29:40

9y ago29:40

29:40

In this episode Adam Putz explores complementary representations of labour and poverty in Ulysses which disintegrate category distinctions like human and nonhuman.By Adam Putz

1
Scholarcast 52: Gaelic Culture from the Child's Perspective - The Diaries of Kerry Schoolgirls (1916-1918) 26:28

9y ago26:28

26:28

One of the most complicated and persistent questions in the study of childhood in the past relates to the experiences of individual children. How can we know how children perceived the world around them when they have left little written evidence of their own experience and interpretations of their world? In this lecture, Riona NicCongáil attempts …

1
Scholarcast 51: 'The IFSC as a Way of Organizing Nature': Neoliberal Ecology and Irish Literature 43:40

9y ago43:40

43:40

In this episode Sharae Deckard analyses the unprecedented commoditization of new ecological commons under neoliberal capitalism and reflects on the importance of environmental humanities approaches to historicize conceptions of environment and configurations of environment.By Sharae Deckard

1
Scholarcast 50: The Van 23:55

9y ago23:55

23:55

The Van, the final novel in Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown trilogy, explores the physical, psychological and social impact of unemployment on the protagonist, Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. Having been laid off from his job as a plasterer, Jimmy struggles to find a new role for himself within the family that is not connected to being the breadwinner.…

1
Scholarcast 49: Silence and Solitude: The absence of intimacy in Roddy Doyle's The Snapper 21:58

9y ago21:58

21:58

In spite of the linguistic license that defines Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper, the characters maintain crucial silences throughout in relation to meaningful issues. This episode examines the system of self-imposed censorship that operates among the female characters in particular and how it leads to isolation and an absence of true intimacy.…

1
Scholarcast 48: Everybody Speaks: Utopia and Polyphony in The Commitments 21:33

9y ago21:33

21:33

Fredric Jameson proposes that a "utopia" is a political idea that hopes to transcend, or exist outside, politics, but that must, inevitably, begin inside politics – at "the moment of the suspension of the political," the political must inevitably return. This holds true for the utopian imagined community – a "Dublin soul band" – proposed and tested…

1
Scholarcast 47: The Barrytown Trilogy: An Introduction to Roddy Doyle's Dublin 20:53

9y ago20:53

20:53

What has become known as the Barrytown trilogy: The Commitments (1988), The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991), have become iconic in Irish culture. Centred on one family, the Rabbittes, Roddy Doyle makes reference to current events like the 1990 Soccer World Cup, and in dealing with the issues of teenage pregnancy and unemployment captures the mood…

1
Scholarcast Series 13: Dublin, One City One Book 2015 - The Barrytown Trilogy 3:20

9y ago3:20

3:20

Roddy Doyle is perhaps the single most successful novelist of this period, gaining an audience far beyond the environs of Dublin's Northside where most of his writing is set. Along with the emergence of rock group U2, Doyle represents a brash generational shift, a confident certitude in his generation's worth and ability. His literary focus is not …

1
Scholarcast Series 12: Modalities of Revival 2:40

9y ago2:40

2:40

In Irish Studies, the term Irish Revival broadly defines the cultural nationalist movement which thrived in Ireland from the late nineteenth-century up until the establishment of the Irish Free State. It refers to the pre-Independence period when powerful narratives of de-colonization and cultural reaffirmation mobilized communities both locally an…

1
Scholarcast 46: Children and the Irish Cultural Revival 32:04

9+ y ago32:04

32:04

This episode discusses how and why various Irish nationalist individuals and organisations attempted to engage children and youth in the Irish cultural revival, particularly in the early twentieth century. It also explores the link between the promotion of a specifically Irish cultural identity and the political socialisation of Irish nationalist y…

1
Scholarcast Series 11: Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities 2:40

9+ y ago2:40

2:40

Every reader and scholar of Irish literature is familiar with its extensive genealogy of nature writing, and a 'sense of place' found across a great variety of texts. While not unique to Ireland such a rich heritage has produced some of the most enduring and exciting literary and cultural criticisms. However, given our contemporary concerns with en…

1
Scholarcast 45: Salmon Leap 13:48

9+ y ago13:48

13:48

In this episode, Eamonn Ryan deliberates on the collective leap which individuals and nation states need to make for a sustainable, habitable future. He argues that individuals cannot be faced with moral choices about the environment on a daily basis. Instead, he indicates that it is through sound governance that environmental habits are nurtured e…

1
Scholarcast 44: Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them 1:06:46

10y ago1:06:46

1:06:46

In this lecture Paula Meehan delivers the Ireland Chair of Poetry Lecture, 2014. The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust was set up in 1998 and is jointly held between Queen's University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.…

1
Scholarcast 43: Writing the City 31:35

10y ago31:35

31:35

This talk explores the challenges involved in writing the city of Dublin into poetry. It considers the insights and emotions that emerge from reading the work of these poets as they write to remember, to celebrate and to interrogate Dublin as a place of personal and national significance.By Peter Sirr

1
Scholarcast 42: 'Mine by right of love': Women Poets in the City 26:46

10y ago26:46

26:46

This talk explores some poems by women published in the last one hundred years, from lesser-known figures such as Winifred Letts to contemporaries Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan.By Lucy Colins

1
Scholarcast 41: Peopling the Place 25:03

10y ago25:03

25:03

This short talk will consider some of the ways in which poems in the If Ever You Go anthology visualise and present people in the city environment of Dublin. The poems included cover a broad historical range, from Samuel Ferguson to Paula Meehan, revealing the important representation of Dublin people in these texts...…

1
Scholarcast 40: The Lyric Flow of Street 26:56

10y ago26:56

26:56

The poems that appear in this anthology reflect the broad spectrum of relationships that exist between the city and those that inhabit, however briefly, its public and private spaces. From speakers who trace their Dublin roots through generations, to those who visit the city for a short time, perhaps to visit a hospital there, these poems express t…

1
Scholarcast 39: Giving 'A Tongue to the Sea Cliffs': The Landless Inheritance of W.B. Yeats and Eavan Boland 28:27

10+ y ago28:27

28:27

Irish literature has often been shaped by its relation to the national through land and the consciousness of land. New perspectives provided by Atlantic studies, however, now allow for new narratives unrelated to land to be put into conversation with older narratives. This lecture examines work by two twentieth-century poets, one early and one late…

1
Scholarcast 38: 'port-lights/Of a ghost-ship': Thomas Carnduff and the Belfast Shipyards 30:21

10+ y ago30:21

30:21

Belfast, as a city, has come to be represented in recent years by the shadow of its industrial heritage. The Titanic, and the shipyards in which it was built, have become central to the city's attempt to give cultural and economic purchase to its contemporary identity. This lecture uncovers some of the history behind that branding of Belfast. It ta…

1
Scholarcast 37: 'At the Dying Atlantic's Edge': Norman Nicholson and the Cumbrian Coast 31:26

10+ y ago31:26

31:26

This lecture is concerned with the mid-twentieth-century Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson. Far from being a late Lake District poet', Nicholson is chiefly a poet of northern England's Atlantic edge, the Cumbrian coastal strip. Yet his contemplative gaze almost never turns westward. He also refuses to produce a historical narrative of the area: here h…

1
Scholarcast 36: Draining the Irish Channel: Identity, Sustainability, and the Politics of Water 50:31

10+ y ago50:31

50:31

In 1722 an anonymous author styling himself with the degree 'A. M. in Hydrostat' published a proposal in Dublin with the title, Thoughts of a Project for Draining the Irish Channel, a satire on both the South-Sea Bubble and Anglo-Irish politics, as well as a comment on the craze for projects and speculation, scientific advances in hydraulics and ci…

1
Scholarcast 35: Via Holyhead, Material and metaphorical meaings between Ireland and Wales 44:37

10+ y ago44:37

44:37

This lecture explores the Holyhead Road as a cultural corridor along which people, books, and ideas move, and is part of a larger project examining infrastructural links as sites of cultural exchange between Britain and Ireland from Swift to Joyce. The lecture begins by following Buck Mulligan's invitation in the opening of Ulysses to 'come and loo…

1
Scholarcast 34: Commemorating Abuse: Gender Politics and Making Space 31:16

10+ y ago31:16

31:16

Recent cultural explorations of Ireland's history of institutional abuse have focussed on buildings as ways of creating a commemorative space for this history. Brokentalkers' The Blue Boy (2011), Anu Productions' Laundry (2011), and Evelyn Glynn's Breaking the Rule of Silence (2011) all insist on the visibility and presence of these institutions wi…

1
Scholarcast 33: Archipelagic Cartographies: Brenda Chamberlain's 'Western Isle' 38:54

10+ y ago38:54

38:54

This lecture is an exploration of the archipelagic island imagination of artist, poet and writer Brenda Chamberlain (1912–71) under the rubric of literary cartography. Part of a wider study of the literary text's 'mapmindedness' – the ways in which imaginative writing accomplishes specifically cartographic 'work' – the paper examines Chamberlain's …

1
Scholarcast 32: Famine Commemoration and Migration 23:27

10+ y ago23:27

23:27

Since the 150th anniversary of the Irish Famine in the 1990s, the Famine has been the subject of a remarkable commemorative boom, with more than one hundred public monuments newly constructed worldwide. Over the past decade Dr Emily Mark-FitzGerald has completed the first large-scale documentation of worldwide Famine monuments, which includes examp…

1
Scholarcast 31: Writing around the Irish Sea: Inlets, outlets, Firths and Mouths 47:40

11y ago47:40

47:40

The Lecture explores the enduring fascination of the Irish Sea, focusing particularly on the Solway Firth, an area regarded by the nineteenth-century artist, art critic, writer and social reformer, John Ruskin, as second only to the Holy Land in its cultural importance. The ageing Ruskin wrote passionately about the Solway in his autobiography, Pra…

1
Scholarcast 30: Memory Studies and Famine Studies: Gender, Genealogy, History 34:28

11y ago34:28

34:28

This lecture identifies and examines a number of trends in recent historiographical work on the Great Famine including their striking appropriation of narrative and fictive tropes. It explores the existence – or perceived existence – of an 'affective gap' in existing historiography, which is seen to justify this wave of new publications, a gap rein…

1
Scholarcast 29: The Prisons Memory Archive 12:57

11y ago12:57

12:57

The Prisons Memory Archive is a collection of 170 filmed interviews inside Armagh Gaol and the Maze and Long Kesh Prison. Utilising protocols of inclusivity, co-ownership and life-storytelling, the PMA recorded participants, including prison staff, prisoners, chaplains, teachers and visitors, as they walked-and-talked their way around the empty sit…

1
Scholarcast 28: Ireland, Empire and the Archipelago 32:02

11y ago32:02

32:02

By 1916 the British Empire was at a point of crisis. The beginning of the First World War marked the end of a half-century of expansion in trade and speculation that made the empire a global network for the exchange of capital. Consequently, the foundations of Irish separatism were built in movements antagonistic to world trade. Self-help, folk cul…

1
Scholarcast 27: 'All Changed, Changed Utterly': Easter 1916 and America 39:59

12+ y ago39:59

39:59

When P.H. Pearse proclaimed 'The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic' on Easter Monday 1916, he acknowledged that Ireland of the Rising was 'supported by her exiled children in America'. What assistance did these "exiled children" provide, and how did people in America react to the Easter Rising? This Scholarcast considers these questions …

1
Scholarcast 26: Perspectives on Popular Music in Ireland from the 1960s to the mid-1970s 36:02

13y ago36:02

36:02

In this Scholarcast Paul Brady reflects on his early childhood encounters with music and on the importance of popular music in the 1960s to the formation of his own musical consciousness. He recounts his earliest experiences playing with various R ‘n’ B bands during his time as a student at UCD. In 1967 Brady joined The Johnstons whose combination …

1
Scholarcast 26: Perspectives on Popular Music in Ireland from the 1960s to the mid-1970s 36:02

13y ago36:02

36:02

In this Scholarcast Paul Brady reflects on his early childhood encounters with music and on the importance of popular music in the 1960s to the formation of his own musical consciousness. He recounts his earliest experiences playing with various R ‘n’ B bands during his time as a student at UCD. In 1967 Brady joined The Johnstons whose combination …

1
Scholarcast 25: 'Dreaming of the Islands': The Poetry of the Shipping Forecast 35:32

13y ago35:32

35:32

This lecture examines poems which make reference to the Shipping Forecast, as broadcast by BBC Radio Four, including poems by Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Sean Street, Andrew McNeillie, and Andrew Waterman. The aim of the lecture is to consider how both the radio broadcast and the poems it inspired conceptualise the cultural geography of the Bri…

1
Scholarcast 25: 'Dreaming of the Islands': The Poetry of the Shipping Forecast 35:32

13y ago35:32

35:32

This lecture examines poems which make reference to the Shipping Forecast, as broadcast by BBC Radio Four, including poems by Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Sean Street, Andrew McNeillie, and Andrew Waterman. The aim of the lecture is to consider how both the radio broadcast and the poems it inspired conceptualise the cultural geography of the Bri…

1
Scholarcast 24: England Versus English Literature 21:17

13y ago21:17

21:17

This presentation looks at the relationship between England and the British discipline of English Literature, whose origin, it argues, owes much to the state unification of Britain between 1790 and 1815, particularly informed by an anti-French-Revolutionary Burkean philosophy which was defined by opposition to a written constitution, and by opposit…

1
Scholarcast 24: England Versus English Literature 21:17

13y ago21:17

21:17

This presentation looks at the relationship between England and the British discipline of English Literature, whose origin, it argues, owes much to the state unification of Britain between 1790 and 1815, particularly informed by an anti-French-Revolutionary Burkean philosophy which was defined by opposition to a written constitution, and by opposit…

1
Scholarcast 23: Pliny's Encyclopedia: The reception of the natural history 10:38

13+ y ago10:38

10:38

In his episode Aude Doody reads from the Introduction to Pliny’s Encyclopedia: The Reception of the Natural History, published by Cambridge University Press. The Elder Pliny's Natural History is one of the largest and most extraordinary works to survive from antiquity. It has often been referred to as an encyclopedia, usually without full awareness…

1
Scholarcast 23: Pliny's Encyclopedia: The reception of the natural history 10:38

13+ y ago10:38

10:38

In his episode Aude Doody reads from the Introduction to Pliny’s Encyclopedia: The Reception of the Natural History, published by Cambridge University Press. The Elder Pliny's Natural History is one of the largest and most extraordinary works to survive from antiquity. It has often been referred to as an encyclopedia, usually without full awareness…

1
Scholarcast 22: Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s 24:19

13+ y ago24:19

24:19

In this episode Nicholas Daly reads from the Introduction to his book Sensation and Modernity in the 1860's published by Cambridge University Press. This is a study of high and low culture in the years before the Reform Act of 1867, which vastly increased the number of voters in Victorian Britain. As many commentators worried about the political co…

1
Scholarcast 22: Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s 24:19

13+ y ago24:19

24:19

In this episode Nicholas Daly reads from the Introduction to his book Sensation and Modernity in the 1860's published by Cambridge University Press. This is a study of high and low culture in the years before the Reform Act of 1867, which vastly increased the number of voters in Victorian Britain. As many commentators worried about the political co…

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