Registration begins April 3!
FALL 2024 COURSES
Yeats and Tagore: The Empire Writes Back
Tuesday/Thursday, 10:45-12 pm
Comparative Literature (CMLIT) 205
Prof. Clare Carroll
Both W. B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore wrote great poetry and participated in the anti-colonial struggles of their people. Each was recognized by the Noble Prize for literature, Tagore in 1913, and Yeats in 1923. While Tagore wrote in Bengali, and the monoglot Yeats wrote only in English, both helped create the literature of their emerging nations. Both have been widely written about by the most important critics of colonial and post-colonial studies, including Edward Said, Seamus Deane, Gauri Viswanathan, and Malcolm Sen. The emphasis in this course will be on poetry as a form of music (with many examples of sung verse) as well as on the poets as what Shelley called “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” by which he meant revolutionary political thinkers who challenged the illegitimate authority of empire.
History, Folklore and Memory in Ireland
HI 392W; Monday 1:40-4:30 pm
Prof. Sarah Covington
This course will explore the intersection of folklore and history in the Irish past. Ireland has one of the world’s greatest traditions of folklore, which has woven through and impacted historical changes over centuries; history in turn has become "folklorized," as real figures and events—Saint Patrick, Hugh O’Neill, Oliver Cromwell, the experience of settler colonialism— have entered into the country's oral, popular and elite cultures. Utilizing a series of case studies from the Celtic world through to the present day, we will examine the ways in which the legends, folk tales and myths of Ireland shaped and were shaped by history and memory, and how such phenomena as fairies, ghosts, haunted places and living landscapes impacted the Irish popular imagination. We will also explore how folklore around events such as the famine influenced writers such as Bram Stoker (with Dracula), just as the myths, lore and popular religion of Ireland were used and sometimes “invented” as part of an emerging modern Irish nationalism. Finally, we will track the “migration” of folklore from Ireland across the diaspora, including to Irish America and Australia. Among the sources studied in this interdisciplinary class will be tales, songs, films and the rich body of folklore contained online through Ireland’s National Folklore Collection.
Gender and Sexualities
ENG 225: M/W 1:40-2:55PM
Prof. Red Washburn
This is a course about movement in, between, and beyond identities, spaces, and ideas. The concept of freedom and attendant acts of rebellion will direct our exploration of the borderlands that divide hegemonic expectation and subaltern transgression. We will pay particular attention to what Kate Bornstein has termed “Gender Outlaws”––those identities and bodies that challenge gender binaries and social borders and transcend normative ways of being, as well as what Caren Kaplan has termed “Outlaw Genres”––those texts that transcend culturally acceptable scripts as a means of more accurately expressing and representing the self across genre, medium, and discipline. We will explore the intersecting identities of gender, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, ability, religion, and age in relation to politics of place and space. Of our primary texts we will ask, “How are personal, social, political, and cultural norms established?”; “How are disciplines and transdisciplines created and reproduced?”; “What is a rebel and how does one rebel?”; “What effect does form have on an argument?” For your class projects, you will design a critical paper of your views on one of the class concepts, such as what it means to be free, an outsider, a rebel, or an outlaw, and you also will design a multimodal memoir that illustrates a particular place, moment, or issue that has shaped you as an individual. The course will focus on trans and nonbinary literature from a feminist, postcolonial, and transnational framework, inclusive of Women and Gender Studies and Irish Studies.
PAST EVENTS
Please click here for video of a recent event hosted by Colin Harte, exporing intersections between Irish and Indian music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCZMveMRIVs
Featuring renowned musicians Sameer Gupta (tabla), Jay Gandhi (bansuri), Arun Ramamurthy (violin), Jerry O’Sullivan (Uilleann pipes), and ethnomusicologist Colin Harte (keyboard/bodhrán/voice).
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The Irish Studies program at Queens College is deeply grateful to Eric Patterson for generously donating his impressive collection of Ireland-related books to our program.
These books are treasures of Irish history and culture, and we plan to incorporate them into our dedicated Irish Studies Library, available for check-out by students and researchers, and soon to be located in Rosenthal Library.
Call for oral historians!
Are you interested in gaining training and skills in doing oral history?
Would you like to join an exciting ongoing project funded by the Irish government?
Are you interested in interviewing immigrants of all ages born in Ireland? (being Irish not required!)
Please email sarah.covington@qc.cuny.edu or eileen.sprague@qc.cuny.edu
The Oral History of the Irish in New York is funded by the generous support of the Irish government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and is part of the Queens College Irish Studies program.
Please contact Sarah Covington with any questions: sarah.covington@qc.cuny.edu
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The Irish Studies Program presents:
The Irish in New York Covid-19 Podcast
In the spring of this year, the Irish in New York Oral History project, part of the Irish Studies program, embarked on an undertaking to capture the experiences of Irish men and women whose lives changed in the early weeks of Covid-19. Most stayed in New York, including Queens—the worst-hit borough at the time—while others returned to Ireland. Some lost jobs or witnessed their businesses fall into crisis, while others experienced isolation or were forced to reinvent their lives overnight. We appreciate how willing and generous these men and women were in sharing their stories with us by phone and during a moment when the first wave of the virus was still at its height. Thanks to them, to our interviewers Eileen Colleran Sprague and Liza Engesser, and to our editor and producer Claire Butler, we are grateful to have this historical record of resilience and hope at a unique moment in the lives of the Irish in New York.
Please click below for an excerpt of our interviews:
For an interview with Colm Ó Mongáin of RTÉ radio’s Pandemic series about the QC Irish Studies Covid-19 oral history project, please click on this link:
https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2020/0827/1161740-podcast-ep-56-making-covid-history/
If you are interested in volunteering as an interviewer or interviewee for our Irish in New York Oral History Project, please email Eileen Sprague at woodsidehistory@gmail.com or sarah.covington@qc.cuny.edu
We wish to thank Dr. Maureen Murphy, Professor Emerita at Hofstra University, for her generous donation of Ireland-related books. We are honored to have so many great works from the collection of one of the most eminent scholars of Ireland. We will be launching our Irish Studies library and study space later in the year.
Click here for an article by Carmel McMahon for the Irish Times, covering our oral history project:
