UCD Clinton Institute for American Studies
UCD, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland | Director: Professor Liam Kennedy
Spring Seminars 2003
Monday 27th January 03 - 'Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study'
Speaker: Professor Kevin Kenny
Venue: ISSC Seminar Room, Arts Annexe
Time: 5pm
In line with recent efforts by American historians to move historical study beyond the confines of the nation state, this paper will seek to place Irish transatlantic migration in a global perspective. The recent literature suggests two broad possibilities. Diasporic approaches to the subject seek to transcend the nation as the primary unit of historical analysis by searching for reciprocal interactions and sensibilities among globally scattered communities. Comparative approaches, by contrast, examine specific similarities and difference between the nations or national regions where migrants have settled. This paper will argue, with particular reference to the United States and Great Britain, that neither perspective on its own will suffice, but that a new combination of the two holds considerable promise for integrating our historical knowledge on Irish global migration.
Biography
Kevin Kenny is Associate Professor of History at Boston College, where he teaches the history of American immigration and labour, with an emphasis on Irish transatlantic migration. He was educated at Edinburgh University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University. His published work includes Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (Oxford University Press, 1998) and The American Irish: A History (Longman, 2000). He is currently researching the history of popular protest movements in eighteenth-century Ireland and America and editing a collection of historical essays, Ireland and the British Empire, for Oxford University Press.
Friday 7th February - "Reception of American Literature and Culture in Eastern Europe, before and after 1989"
Speaker: Professor Josef Jarab
Venue: ISSC Seminar Room, Arts Annexe
Time: 4pm
Biography
Newly elected to the first Czech Senate in 1996, Jarab is rector of Central European University in Budapest. With degrees from Palacky University and Charles University, Prague, he has pursued an international academic career which has taken him to Salzburg, London, New York, Berkeley, Harvard and other centres of learning in Europe and North American. During the Soviet era, he developed a PhD programme in American Literature at Palackeho University. He also studied African-American literature in Harlem and was a Fulbright scholar at Earlham College. Before 1989 he taught philology in the Department of German and English Philology at Pakackeho. He was overwhelmingly elected rector of the University in 1989 where he established the Department of English and American Studies. He has been an active participant in PEN for many years and has served the US Fulbright Commission as the chair of the Czechoslovakia programme. He is also the current President of the European Association of American Studies.
Wednesday 12th February - The Frontier Thesis and The Western
Speaker: Mr. Ed. Buscombe
Venue: ISSC Seminar Room, Arts Annexe
Time: 4pm
The official closing of the Frontier in 1890 has been mythologised in the Western as the fall from Paradise, and from the point of view of its influence on the Western, Turner's 1893 thesis is the single most important piece of writing ever produced about the American past.
This seminar will explore that influence: how an event and an idea imposed a template and a thematic on the American film genre par excellence, with reference to key films and filmmakers, such as John Ford (the Man who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962), Sam Peckinpah (Ride the High County, 1962), Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968) Robert Altman (McCabe and Mrs Miller, 1970) and Michael Cimino (Heaven's Gate, 1980)"
Biography
Edward Buscombe is the editor of The BFI Companion to the Western and also the author of volumes on Stagecoach and The Searchers in the BFI Film Classics series. He was formerly Head of Publishing at the British Film Institute and then Visiting Professor at Southampton Institute. He has taught widely in the USA, most recently at Hollins University, Virginia. His book on world cinema since 1970 will be published by Phaidon in September, and he is currently writing on Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven for the BFI Modern Classics series.
Monday 17th February - Research, teaching and learning in virtual spaces: what can new electronic technologies offer the academic teacher and researcher?
Speaker: Professor Alan Howard
Venue: ISSC Seminar Room, Arts Annexe
Time: 4pm
Despite a good deal of rhetoric about the transformational power of the new technologies in education, very little has emerged that points toward deep, substantive, and significant change in the ways we teach and learn. Four projects at the University of Virginia, however, are exceptions: as they alter the ways in which we create and disseminate knowledge, they are beginning to show that some part of the future of scholarship and teaching might look like. In combination, they suggest a fairly promising paradigm for using the new technologies. They are large, complex, aggregative, and synthesizing virtual spaces that both require and enable a new kind of collaborative culture for research, teaching and learning. They also suggest something about the kind of learning organizations that will be needed in the traditional academic disciplines as they attempt to adjust to new global realities.
Biography
Alan B. Howard grew up on a ranch in Colorado, took his B.A at Princeton in 1961 and his PhD at Stanford in 1967. He has taught in the English Department at the University of Virginia since 1967 specialising in Colonial American Literature, Southern Literature and Non-fictional Narrative and publishing on Colonial historians, Edward Taylor and William Faulkner. Since 1975 he has taught in the undergraduate American Studies Program and in 1990 became its Director. He is currently the Daniels Family Teaching Professor at the University of Virginia. In 1994, unhappy with the job prospects for graduate students in English, he designed an innovative Masters program in American Studies that combined traditional education in the Humanities with training in the new technologies, computers and the internet. Conceived as a terminal degree that would prepare students for work in both academic and non-academic environments, some of the program's graduates have gone on to take the PhD. at U.Va or elsewhere and are now teaching. But the majority have gone to public or corporate information providers like PBS, Microsoft, Educorp, Maryland Public Television, The Kennedy Center, The University of Alabama, the University of Maryland, Teach for America, Sacred Places and NetBeans.
Friday 21st February - American Musicology and "The Archives of Eden".
Speaker: Professor Harry White
Venue: ISSC Seminar Room, Arts Annexe
Time: 4pm
The seminar takes as its starting point George Steiner's famous essay "The Archives of Eden" (1981), which is a startling indictment of American cultural studies, including American musicology. The seminar will examine this indictment, and examines the plural condition of American musical scholarship in an attempt to offer a reading which differs sharply from that of Steiner.
Biography
Harry White is Professor of Music at UCD. His prinicpal research interests are music in Austria and Germany, 1700-1750; the cultural history of music in Ireland, and Anglo-American musical historiography. He is general editor of Irish Musical Studies (Dublin) and corresponding editor of Current Musicology (New York). In 2000, he was appointed to the editorial board of the International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music (Zagreb) and in 2002 he was nominated as convenor of the steering committee of the newly-established Society for Musicology in Ireland. His principal publications include Johann Joseph Fux and the Music of the Austro-Italian Baroque (1992), The Keeper's Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770 - 1970 (1998) and Musical Constructions of Nationalism (2001, with Michael Murphy).
Tuesday 25th March - Seminar on American Literature.
Speaker: Professor Sharon O'BrienPLEASE NOTE THIS SEMINAR HAS BEEN POSTPONED. WE WILL HAVE MORE DETAILS SOON.
Tuesday 8th April - Empire and Nation: Perspectives on Anglo-American History During the Revolutionary Era.
Speakers: Professors Jack Greene and Peter OnufVenue: ISSC Seminar Room, Arts Annexe Building.
Time: 4pm
Professors Greene and Onuf will provide an informal but far ranging discussion of polity (empire, nation, state, province) formation during the era of the American Revolution and the creation of the American national state. The seminar will explore such problems as changing conceptions of empire in the Revolutionary era, the relationship among imperial, provincial and national collective in the creation of the American nation, the nature and significance of the American Revolution, the nature problem of American federalism in the early years of the republic, and the utility of an Atlantic perspective.
Biographies
Jack P. Greene teaches at The Johns Hopkins University, where he has been Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities since 1976. He has had a longstanding interest in the nature of early modern empire and its relationship to independent state formation. Among other works, his books, The Quest for Power (1964), Peripheries and Center (1986), and Negotiated Authorities (1994), provide direct examples of this interest. In addition, his interest in the relationship between corporate identity and polity formation may be seen in various essays in his Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities (1992) and Understanding the American Revolution (1994)
Peter S. Onuf, is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor in the Corcoran Department of History, specializes in the history of the earlyAmerican republic. Educated at The Johns Hopkins University, where he receivedhis Ph.D. in 1973, Onuf taught at Columbia University, WorcesterPolytechnic Institute, and Southern Methodist University before coming toVirginia in 1990. He was also visiting Mary Ball Washington Professor of History in UCD in 1989-90. His recent work on Thomas Jefferson's political thought,culminating in Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood(University Press of Virginia, 2000), grows out of his earlier studies onthe history of American federalism, foreign policy, and political economy.With his brother, political theorist Nicholas G. Onuf, Onuf is now workingon the second volume of their collaboration, Federal Union, Modern World, ahistory of international law and order in the Atlantic states' systemduring the Age of Revolutions and early nineteenth century. Onuf is alsoone of the authors, with Edward L. Ayers, of All Over the Map: RethinkingRegion and Nation in the United States. (Johns Hopkins University Press,1996), the editor of Jeffersonian Legacies (1993), and co-editor of SallyHemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (1999) andThe Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic (2002), allpublished by University Press of Virginia.Wednesday 9th April - "None of these wandering nations has ever been reduced to the faith": Missions and levels of mobility on the Spanish American Frontier.
Speaker: Professor Amy Bushnell
Venue: Theatre 2, Arts Block, North Campus in NUI Maynooth
Time: 6.20pm
Modern scholars critical of early modern missionaries to the Americas have been more ready to blame mission failures on the messengers than to question the cultural fit of the message. Yet, just as all sheep are not of the fold, not all American Indian societies were amenable to conversion. While an invitation to enter Christendom placed a society on the sliding scale of christianization, it might or might not submit to reduction, the fixed residence that was a condition of indoctrination. For the peoples of high mobility, baptism tended to be a survival strategem, while missions served mainly as refugee camps or places to raid. This paper uses nine societies- the Republic of the Guaranís, the peoples of the Llanos de Mojos, the Lowland Maya, the peoples of the Sierra Zapoteca, of Florida, and of the Gran Chichimeca, the Guaycuruans, the Araucanos, and , for contrast, the Hurons and Montagnais of New France - to construct a frontier christianization model consisting of (1) a continuum of mobility on which to rank a given society at the time of contact, (2) a selection of postcontact forces acting to increase or decrease the society's level of mobility, and (3) a scale of christianization, ranging from the resistant to the reduced. In this model, a given society's rising or falling level of mobility, a measure of its readiness to accept fixed residence, is also an indicator of its receptivity to Christian conversion.
Biography
Amy Bushnell is an Adjunct Associate Professor of History at Brown University and a Research Associate at the John Carter Brown Library. A specialist on early modern frontiers of the Americas, her publications include The King's Coffer: Proprietors of the Spanish Florida Treasury, 1565-1702 (1981), Situado and Sabana: Spain's Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida (Anthropology Paper 74, American Museum of Natural History, 1994), and Establishing Exceptionalism: Historiography and the Colonial Americas, ed. (1995). She is presently working on a critical edition of Quaker Jonathan Dickinson's ethnographically rich journal, God's Protecting Providence (1699), preparing an exhibition and narrative catalog of early Florida materials at the JCB, and coordinating a symposium on "Inter-ethnic Frontiers in the Americas (1500-1900): Sources, Themes, and Theories," for the 51st International Congress of Americanists, Santiago, Chile
News & Events
Podcasts, Blogs & Videos
Analysing the latest issues & trends in the US, especialy in US Foreign Policy