Irish Studies at Boston College

10/15/2026

Many thanks to program alumna Méabh Ní Fhuartháin for delivering the 2026/2027 Dalsimer Lecture!

10/15/2026

10/13/2026

Irish Institute Event
"The Rise of the Far Right in Ireland"
Wednesday, October 21
5:00 PM
Yawkey Athletics Center, Murray Room

Across Europe, far-right parties and movements have gained new visibility and influence, generating tensions and reshaping political landscapes. Ireland, north and south, is not immune to these wider dynamics and is experiencing developments that echo wider European patterns of far-right mobilization, including anti-immigration protests, disinformation campaigns, online radicalization, and targeted harassment of public figures.

This seminar examines the distinct drivers behind these developments, including anti-immigrant sentiment, economic pressures, local grievances, and cultural anxieties, as well as the influence of transnational and online networks.

Speakers will explore what these dynamics mean for electoral politics, democracy, social cohesion and inter-community relations across Ireland, north and south. With contributions from Professor Lee McGowan (Queen’s University Belfast) and Professor Eoin O’Malley (Dublin City University), the event will provide evidence-based insights and space for informed discussion.

This event is FREE and open to the public and will feature an expert discussion and audience questions, followed by a complimentary reception.

All are welcome, but registration is required. Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScrviVKOt38I45wVxjH1u0fuq3WP2WaOfXV_j-f1odkxyXqeA/viewform?usp=send_form

10/09/2026

10/08/2026

Join us next Thursday, October 15, at 6:30 pm in Connolly House for our first Gaelic Roots concert of the semester!

We will be joined by James Kelly on the fiddle!

The concert is free and open to the public.

10/05/2026

Political and Cultural Refractions in Music: Moving Hearts, Reflecting Minds, Ireland 1981
October 14, 2026
5:00 pm
Connolly House Andover Room

Program alumna Méabh Ní Fhuartháin will deliver this year's Dalsimer Lecture. Titled "Political and Cultural Refractions in Music: Moving Hearts, Reflecting Minds, Ireland 1981," this talk considers the eponymous Moving Hearts album, first released in 1981, to reflect on contemporaneous political, social, and environmental concerns in Ireland at the beginning of a tumultuous decade on the island. Among the concerns are the North of Ireland, climate and fuel instability, colonialism, and landlordism. Creating an innovative soundscape which draws on a range of musical precedents, the album presents a generational response to Ireland and its place in the wider world at that moment in time. Some forty-five years later, thematic resonances with concerns of Irish activists-creatives of the twenty-first century are notable, raising questions about the capacity of the political complex in Ireland to ever resolve these issues satisfactorily.

Specializing in Irish Music and Dance Studies, Méabh Ní Fhurtháin is an Associate Professor in Irish Studies at the Center for Irish Studies, University of Galway. A former graduate student and early-career teacher at Boston College, Méabh's attention to popular music, dance, emigration, and gender in her published work makes her a leader in the interdisciplinary field of Irish Studies. She has co-edited special issues of Ethnomusicology Ireland (2021) and Éire-Ireland (2019) and was subject editor for the Encyclopedia of Music in Ireland (2013). She has edited and contributed chapters to numerous book collections, including handbooks of Irish Studies; published a monograph titled Heading to the Fleadh: Festival, Cultural Revival and Irish Traditional Music 1951-1969 (Cork University Press); is currently General Editor of Ethnomusicology Ireland; and is a Board Director of Music Generation Ireland, the national body for non-curriculum music education in Ireland.

10/01/2026

A full house for Senia Pašeta's Burns Scholar Lecture last night!

She discussed how feminist ideas have profoundly shaped the evolution of modern Ireland.

09/30/2026

Next Wednesday, October 7, is co-sponsoring a Journalism/International Studies event featuring award-winning Irish journalist Sally Hayden.

The lecture will begin at 5:00 pm in Higgins Hall, Room 225.

09/29/2026

For Senia Pašeta, a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford and the Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies at Boston College this semester, the role of women in modern Irish political history is a font of scholarship and a source of endless fascination. She will speak on the history of feminism in modern Ireland at the John J. Burns Library's Burns Scholar Lecture on September 30. https://on.bc.edu/SPaseta

09/23/2026

Senia Pašeta, Burns Scholar Fall 2026: “From Suffrage to Sisterhood: A History of Feminism in Modern Ireland”
September 30, 2026
5:00 pm
Burns Library

Feminist ideas seem to have had a profound impact on the evolution of modern Ireland, especially in recent decades when a number of restrictions on women's personal and public lives were removed. Yet, feminist demands and the women who articulated them were considered to be in conflict with the traditions and institutions of Ireland for most of the country’s history. What has changed? Can we trace continuity as well as transformation within the Irish feminist movement since its emergence in the nineteenth century? This lecture will explore these questions, considering how uniquely Irish circumstances and international influences helped to shape the Irish feminist movement.

Burns Library will host a complimentary reception beginning at 5:00pm, with Prof. Pašeta’s lecture to follow at 6:00pm. All are welcome.

Senia Pašeta is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford and the Fall 2026 Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies. The author of numerous books and essays on the history of feminism, censorship and nationalism in Ireland, including Irish Nationalist Women, 1900-1918 (Cambridge, 2013), she is presently completing an expansive survey of women’s multifaceted political activism, Political Women in Ireland, 1880-1918 (Oxford, 2027). She is also working on a history of feminism in modern Ireland for the Royal Irish Academy and co-editing a Handbook of Women’s Suffrage in the United Kingdom for Routledge.

For further background on Professor Pašeta and her Burns Visiting Scholar residency, please visit the Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies web page.