New Books in Irish Studies

Fitness for Freedom: Disability, Degeneration, and Modern Irish Writing  (Syracuse UP, 2025) explores the legacy of intersectional stereotypes of disability, race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion that justified imperial rule in Ireland and the forms of oppression that continued after independence. Marion Quirici identifies models of citizenship and creative autonomy in Irish mode...

Professor Tom Hulme's second book reconstructs the erotic and romantic lives of queer men in Belfast across roughly seventy years, from the recriminalisation of sex between men in the 1880s to the emergence of a mainstream public debate about homosexuality in the 1950s. It follows men cruising the city centre, reading and passing around homosexual novels, forging relationships across the lines of...

Ciara Breathnach is Professor of Irish Gender History at University College Cork. She has published widely on Irish socio-economic, gender, cultural and health history. Her last monograph Ordinary lives, death and social class: Dublin City Coroner’s Court, 1876-1902 ( Oxford University Press, 2022) won the American Conference of Irish Studies, James S. Donnelly Sr. Prize for Books on History and S...

When world kettle-bell lifting champion David Keohan heard the old tales of stone-lifting, he was captivated, setting off on a quest to rediscover these famous stones and attempt the feats of heroes past by lifting them. Guided by a 1930s archive, the dúchas, in which schoolchildren shared their local folklore, Keohan began to travel the country in search of the stones, as documented in The Wind B...

Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Stefan Collini The study and teaching of English literature is generally regarded as one of the central disciplines in the modern university, yet for much of its history it struggled to gain academic legitimacy and was frequently derided as 'a soft option'. Its early professors responded by emphasi...

This is Dr. Swati Joshi's inaugural episode on the New Books Network . In this episode, she interviews Dr. Lucy Jeffery about her monograph, Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process (ibidem Press, 2021). She is also co-editor and author of Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production , published by CEU Press and AUP in 2026. She is co-fou...

The young James Joyce (1882–1941) was forged in the smithy of Irish political controversies, and he took into his European exile a depth of political insight unrivalled among his fellow modernists. In this biography of Joyce in his youth and early exile  James Joyce: A Political Life (Princeton UP, 2026), acclaimed Irish historian and biographer Frank Callanan reveals a Joyce who is markedly mo...

Anna Lively is a historian of modern Ireland, Britain, and Russia. Awarded her PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh in 2022, she is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at the University of Strathclyde. Prior to this she held the Roy Foster Irish Government Research Fellowship in the History and Culture of Ireland at Hertford College, University of Oxford, and was a Tea...

What if the legends of submerged cities, land-making witches and sea-crossing bishops are not mere inventions but echoes of real events? Whispers from Celtic Seas: The True Meanings of Ancient Stories from Northwest Europe (Reaktion Books, 2026) by Professor Patrick Nunn at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia revisits coastal traditions from the Celtic fringes of northwest Europe, sh...

Kevin P. Reilly is President Emeritus and Regent Professor with the University of Wisconsin System, having served as President from 2004-13. Kevin grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx, and went on to earn his B.A. at the University of Notre Dame, and his M.A. and Ph. D. from the University of Minnesota, all in English. He has published on higher education policy and accreditation, autobiography and...

Now more than ever, the international community plays a central role in pressing governments to hold themselves to account. Despite pressure to adhere to global human rights norms, governments continue to benefit from impunity for their past crimes. In an age of accountability, how do states continue to escape justice? Escaping Justice: Impunity for State Crimes in the Age of Accountability (Cambr...

In Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland (Duke University Press, 2026), Patrick Brodie maps the shifting fortunes of the Irish economy before the 2008 financial crisis up to 2020, outlining how the Irish state moved from rampant and irresponsible financialized development to incentivizing private media infrastructure and policy as instruments for economic recovery. Brodi...

Castles speak. Especially in an age when they are no longer necessary. The Act of Union of 1800, which brought Ireland into closer association with Britain, challenged the status of Irish landed proprietors, and not a few responded by building castles. In Gothic: Building Castles in Post-Union Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2026) Dr. Judith Hill explores the projects of two Irish proprietors: the Bur...

During a robbery on 10 March 1844, 14-year-old servant Mary Doherty was murdered in a farmhouse near Culdaff, Co. Donegal. There was no doubt locally about the perpetrator’s identity, but there was insufficient evidence against Daniel McKeeny, and he was eventually transported for a separate offence of sheep-stealing. Based on original research, Finding Mary: The untold story of an Inishowen murde...

A guide for today’s classrooms, this collection from leading Joyce scholars explores innovative pedagogical approaches to the works of this often-challenging writer Teaching James Joyce in the Twenty-First Century (UP of Florida, 2025) presents examples of bold, innovative pedagogical techniques instructors have used to adapt the study of Joyce’s work for the contemporary classroom. Leading Joyce...

At the dawn of history the Celts occupied a vast swathe of Europe from Ireland in the west to lands south of the Black Sea in Asia Minor. The study of this Celtic past has often been a disputed and debated territory and for centuries the true story of these Celtic-speakers of old was obscured by fanciful origin myths. Their origins and subsequent history were slowly revealed when linguistic studie...

From the bodies rotting by the wayside in Famine fiction, Synge's sodden corpses and Joyce's dead, to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's talking corpses and the unburied and dissected remains of Celtic Tiger fiction, the figure of the corpse is ubiquitous in Irish writing. This collection examines the Irish corpse as a conceptually rich centrepoint with multiple differently signifying implications across this...

In Irish Anthropocene, Malcolm Sen traces the ways in which contemporary Irish literature responds to climate breakdown. Drawing upon concepts of sovereignty, precarity, and disaster, Sen examines Irish literary works to reveal how they engage with the entangled relations between ecology, economy, and politics. Irish writers not only critique the association of greenness with Ireland and the corpo...

U2 is a band from the north side of Dublin that became a global phenomenon-and while its four members have traveled the world over for almost fifty years, some of the most critical points on their journey have been in Southern California. The Joshua Tree is the best-known example of U2's artistic immersion in the Golden State, but the band began drawing inspiration from California's landscape as e...

In 1971, the French government announced a massive extension of its military base on the Larzac plateau in southern France. Land was to be expropriated from 107 farms around the small town of La Cavalerie. Limited resistance was expected, but what happened next exceeded all expectations. Local sheep farmers set up protest camps and occupied the land. They soon attracted an astonishing level of sup...

Stories of the Stones: Imagining Prehistory in Britain, Ireland and Brittany (Reaktion, 2026) by Dr. Paul Robichaud explores how ancient monuments – standing stones, megaliths and earthworks – have been reimagined across the centuries in folklore, literature, art and popular culture. From medieval myths to Romantic fascination and from folk-horror cinema to Julian Cope, the powerful stories inspir...

Irish Digital Cultures: Identity, Contexts, Space (Routledge, 2025) explores how questions of Ireland and Irishness are represented in online environments, and what these phenomena say about contemporary Irish identities both within the country and globally. It will interest Irish Studies, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Race, Gender, Identity, and New Media. Learn more about your ad c...

Throughout the twentieth century, many women in Ireland and Britain endured shame and institutionalisation for becoming pregnant outside of marriage. In Single Mothers in Twentieth-century Ireland and Britain: Pregnancy, Migration and Institutionalization (Bloomsbury, 2025), Dr. Lorraine Grimes examines the journeys made by hundreds of pregnant Irish women to Britain as they fled to escape their l...

How can music change people’s lives? In Music Refuge: Living Asylum Through Music (Oxford UP, Press 2025) Ailbhe Kenny, an Associate Professor in Music Education at Mary Immaculate College Ireland, explores music programmes for, with and by people seeking asylum in Ireland and Germany. In doing so, the book offers new understandings of the use, practice and meaning of music in people’s lives, whe...

Empire and imperial frameworks, policies, practices, and cultures have shaped the history of the world for the last two millennia. It is nation states that are the blip on the historical horizon. Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Jane Ohlmeyer re-examines empire as process—and Ireland's role in it—through the lens of early modern...