An Irishman's Diary - Mary Poppins author - PL Travers

PL Travers, circa 1924, source: Wikimedia Commons.

I have just had another 'Irishman's dairy' published in today's Irish Times, Saturday 23 November 2013.

'Mary Poppins - the Irish connection' looks at the links between the author of the Mary Poppins books, Pamela Lyndon Travers (known as PL Travers) and Ireland.

It was through the poet, artist and Co-operative movement supporter, George William Russell (known as AE) that Travers became associated with Ireland. She contributed some of her poems to the weekly arts journal that he edited. Travers' circle of friends in Ireland included others who contributed to the Irish Statesman. 

With articles by writers such as Frank O’Connor and Padraic Colum and artists Paul and Grace Henry, the list of contributors to the Irish Statesman is like a who’s who of literary and artistic Ireland of the time. I cannot help but marvel at seeing such a collection of talented people all in the one place. Lennox Robinson, Jack B. Yeats and W. B. Yeats also wrote for the journal. 

Travers and AE remained close up until he died in 1935. There's a great interview with Travers here from the Paris Review where she discusses her relationship with AE (among other things).

NPHFI Annual Conference 2013

The 2013 annual conference of the Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland took place in Dublin City University on 8 & 9 November 2013.

The theme of the conference was 'Journalists in History: Blackguards, Muckrakers and Crusaders'. Speakers came from Ireland, the UK and North America and delivered papers on a marvelously wide range of journalists and publications. From the provincial and national presses of Ireland to the minority press of black America and lots more besides, the conference provided unparalleled  insights into journalists and journalism history.

I delivered a paper on the French journalist Henri Béraud (1885-1958) who reported from Ireland in the 1920s, and was sentenced to death at the liberation of France for the polemics he wrote during World War 2.

Conference Poster

ADEFFI Annual Conference 2013

The 2013 conference of ADEFFI (Association des Etudes Françaises et Francophones d'Irlande) took place in NUI Maynooth from 18 - 20 October 2013. The theme of the conference, Histoire(s), can be translated into English as both history and a story - giving participants plenty of scope to work with and creating a lively and diverse collection of topics.

The French writer and film director, Philippe Claudel, was the guest of honour at the conference. Unfortunately, I could not attend the conference as I fractured my arm a couple of days before it, but I believe that it was a great success. This a PDF of the conference programme.

This is the conference poster.

Irish Times Article - 14 October 2013

I have just written another Irish Times article. In it I speak about the strange and wonderful things that we come across when carrying out research in a library.

I recently found a lock of hair when going through the Art Ó Bríain papers in the National Library of Ireland. It belonged to Mrs Mac Swiney, the widow of the Lord Mayor of Cork who died on hunger strike in Brixton Prison. Ó Bríain was the spokesman for the First Dáil in London from 1919 to 1922. His job was to spread the word about Terence MacSwiney's hunger strike among newspaper people and news agencies in London. He received correspondence from people all over the world about MacSwiney.

The contents of the Art Ó Bríain papers are truly amazing. Have a look for yourself if you don't believe me: http://www.nli.ie/pdfs/mss%20lists/150_OBriain.pdf

1 Man, 100,000 items - The Jackie Clarke Collection.

While on holidays in County Mayo during summer 2013, I visited the Jackie Clarke Collection in Ballina. The collection is located in a beautifully restored old bank building on Pearse Street in Ballina. I was really amazed at the clever displays of objects of rich cultural history in this treasure trove.

Jackie Clarke was a collector of all things Irish who worked in Ballina. Over the years he amassed a varied collection of approximately 100,000 items including newspapers, books, maps, prints and posters. The Irish state broadcaster RTE has recently devoted some programmes to the Jackie Clarke collection. This one is from the Today programme and this one is from the History Show.

During my visit, I noticed that they have Ernie O'Malley's papers. O'Malley was an IRA leader during the Irish War of Independence. They also have Louis N. Le Roux's papers. Le Roux was a Breton nationalist who wrote a biography of the Irish nationalist leader Patrick Pearse. The Jackie Clarke Collection is well worth a visit because of the wide variety of its collection and the way the material is displayed.

ADEFFI Postgraduate Symposium 2013

As the organisation's postgraduate representative, I helped to organise the 2013 ADEFFI Postgraduate Symposium, which took place in St. Patrick's College, Drumcondra on Saturday, 9 March 2013. It is meant to be a relatively relaxed occasion where postgraduate students working in French or Francophone studies gather to give a presentation on their area of research and discuss it with their peers.

This year we had a wide range of topics from students based in Higher Education institutes in Ireland, the UK, France and Italy. A report on the symposium was published in the French Studies Bulletin [Fr Stud Bull (SUMMER 2013) 34 (127): 44-48].

I would like to thank the Head of the Department of French in St. Patrick's College, Dr Alan English for hosting the symposium and providing refreshments.

An Irishman's Diary - Around the World in 63 Days

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to race around the world?

My Irishman's Diary article in today's Irish Times looks at the case of the Frenchman, Gaston Stiegler, who traveled around the world in 63 days. The year was 1901, and Stiegler was just one of a number of journalists in that year who embarked on an amazing journey that would them take around the globe.

Stiegler brought with him the smallest and lightest camera he could find to document what he saw along the way. It was a Photo-jumelle Carpentier, state of the art technology in 1901. Everyday, articles by Stiegler appeared on the front page of his newspaper Le Matin. The book he wrote based on the journey, Le Tour du monde en 63 jours, is on the www.archive.org website and contains photographs taken by Stiegler of the places he visited and the people he met.

The camera looked like this one in the picture below.


I wonder how long it would take to do such a journey today and how would we record the weird and wonderful sights we witness along the route?

NPHFI 2012 Annual Conference

I presented a paper at the 2012 NPHFI (Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland) conference, which took place in Kingston University, London on 16 & 17 November 2012. The conference theme was "Writing Against the Grain: Dissent, Minorities and the Press in History". A good number of speakers from Ireland, Europe and North America traveled to the conference. They covered a wide range of topics from regional and national Irish press history, to Romanian press history and to the Black press in the USA during the civil rights era. 

My paper dealt with how one French newspaper, L'Oeuvre, treated Ireland during the early 1920s, which was a very important period in Ireland's history. L'Oeuvre was a left-leaning daily newspaper run by Gustave Téry. He sent several reporters to Ireland at this time, including his daughter, Simone Téry. On her arrival in in Ireland in July 1921, Simone wasted no time in getting to the heart of the action, touring the country and interviewing many of the key people on the republican side as well as leaders of the British forces and unionist leaders in the north. Her interviews and her impressions of what was happening on the island featured on the front page of the newspaper for some time.

Along with the articles by Téry, L'Oeuvre also depicted what was happening in Ireland in cartoon form. Highlighting attacks on Irish civilians by Crown forces, such as the burning of Cork in December 1920, these witty little cartoons were able to cut through all the talk and tell the story as it was.

While in London, I was also able to carry out valuable research in the British Library in St. Pancras and the British Library Newspaper Collection in Colindale. My transport fare to London was covered by a UCC School of History postgraduate travel grant, for which I am very grateful.

My article in book "La France et l'Irlande: destins croisés 16e-21e siècles"

I contributed an article to the book La France et l'Irlande: destins croisés 16e-21e siècles. I wrote (en français) about the visit to Ireland in the 1920s of the French journalist Simone Téry (1897-1967). 

Téry, who was writing for the left-leaning newspaper L'Oeuvre, first visited Ireland in July 1921. Her front page articles contain vivid accounts of what life was like in Ireland at this crucial time in its history. She built up great friendships with many of the people she met, including the writer and artist, George Russell, who was known by the pseudonym AE. Téry visited the Soviet Union in 1935 and subsequently began writing for L'Humanité (the paper linked with the French Communist Party). She is a very interesting writer who worked in journalism for four decades and produced several books based on her visits abroad, including Ireland, China and Russia. There's an informative article from L'Humanité about her here that's written in French.

The Irish launch of the book took place at The Alliance Française in Dublin on the 16th of May 2013. Edited by Catherine Maignant and published by Septentrion, it is a book of conference proceeding of the 2011 AFIS (Association of Franco Irish Studies) conference, which took place in the Université de Lille III in May 2011. The book is a fascinating collection of essays on Franco-Irish relations between the 16th and 21st centuries, written by established academics and researchers, as well as those who are in the early stages of their career, ie. me.

bookmark, showing the names of the contributors

EFACIS PhD Seminar in Irish Studies, September 2012

I attended the EFACIS (European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies) PhD Seminar in Irish Studies which took place in the Belgian city of Louvain or Leuven, between 3-7 September 2012.
The links between Leuven and Ireland go back over four hundred years. Those links are being developed further as the historic Irish College in Leuven is now home to The Leuven Institute for Ireland in Europe, which plays host to many different groups from the island of Ireland around the common area of Ireland in Europe.

23 PhD students from universities all over Europe came to talk about their research in many different fields of Irish Studies. We were allowed 20 minutes to make a short presentation about our work. This was a great opportunity for me to think about what's important about my research and answer questions from others working in similar areas. We also attended plenary lectures by academics working in Irish Studies and workshops on themes such as narratology, historiography and publishing.

I want to thank EFACIS for providing a scholarship that paid the registration and accommodation fees and also the UCC College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences Graduate School, who paid my travel costs to Leuven.

ADEFFI 2012 Annual Conference

The annual ADEFFI (Association des Études Françaises et Francophones d'Irlande) conference took place in Galway City from 19-21 October 2012. The theme of the conference was deceleration / décélération and speakers from all over Ireland, as well as Europe and North America contributed to a very successful couple of days. The plenary speech was delivered by the award winning French born author Phillipe Djian.

As the Postgraduate representative of the organisation, I was asked to chair one of the sessions during the conference. This was the first time I chaired a session at a an academic conference and really enjoyed it.

Conference poster below, conference programme here

The Flâneur Abroad International Conference, July 2012

I presented a paper at The Flâneur Abroad conference which took place on 6 & 7 July 2012, in The University of Nottingham, England. Speakers came from many European countries including the UK, Spain, Belgium, France, Germany, as well as the USA and Canada. The flâneur is often associated with the French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire and the German writer Walter Benjamin. They are also associated with, almost exclusively with large, modern, cosmopolitan cities such as Paris or London.

My paper was based on Henri Béraud's visit to Ireland in 1920. Henri Béraud (1885-1958) was a French journalist who coined the term flâneur salarié, or paid flâneur, to describe his job of being paid to wander the streets in search of a news story. Béraud is an interesting character, who was very well known and well thought of in France, during the 1920s and 1930s for his lively reportage from around the world, but fell out of favour when he was writing anti British articles during the Second World War. He was sentenced to death (for the crime of intelligence avec l'ennemi / contact with the enemy) when France was liberated, but this sentence was subsequently commuted to life in prison by General de Gaulle.

Here is a report on the conference: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/art-history/documents/ucn-flaneur-report.pdf

I would like to thank the conference organiser, Prof Richard Wrigley, for providing assistance with my travel and accommodation costs for this conference.

National Library of Ireland - Blog Post on French journalist Simone Téry (1897-1967)

I was recently invited to contribute a blog post about my research on the official blog of the National Library of Ireland (NLI). I wrote about how invaluable primary source material held in the NLI helped me in my research. 

 
The subject of my post was a most unique individual named Simone Téry (1897-1967). She was a French journalist who worked for the newspaper L'Oeuvre and visited Ireland many times during the 1920s. At an important time in modern Irish history, she interviewed key people in the political and artistic spheres and her lengthy descriptive articles appeared on L'Oeuvre's front page.

Click here to view the blog post on the NLI's Official Blog.

 

Photograph of Simone Téry. Image source.

AFIS, Association of Franco Irish Studies, 2012 Annual Conference

I attended the 2012 AFIS, Annual Conference of the Association of Franco Irish Studies, which took place in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick on the 25th & 26th of May 2012.

Photo of King John's Castle on the River Shannon in Limerick.

The conference theme was France and Ireland in the Public Imagination. Speakers from universities in Ireland, Italy, Poland, Macedonia, the United Kingdom and France presented papers on various aspects of how Ireland is and was presented in the French public imagination and vice versa. These included the media, literature, food & drink, politics, music and poetry.

I presented a paper on French newspaper cartoons that I came across while researching articles written by French journalists who visited Ireland during the 20th century. The cartoons, which cast a wry look on how Ireland was being treated by Britain during the early 1920s, are unbelievable in their honesty. I'm sure I'll be talking about them again here sometime soon.

Here's the conference website: http://afislimerick2012.com/

Franco-Irish Literary Festival 2012

The Franco-Irish Literary Festival (which usually takes place in Dublin in April each year) is a great occasion where French and Irish writers, poets and similarly creative people, get together to discuss how they incorporate a particular theme into their work. The theme changes every year. In 2012  the theme was pleasure / plaisir / pléisiúir.

 

I attended some of the panel discussions and enjoyed hearing how writers differed in their responses to the questions from the audience as regards their motivation to write. It's always refreshing to hear someone speak their mind and not just follow along with the consensus, because they think they have to.

 

 

Photo of the gardens at Dublin Castle in Dublin city centre, where the festival usually takes place. The Chester Beatty Library is to the left of this photo (out of shot). A lovely calm atmosphere pervades this art museum and library, which houses amazing examples of Islamic and Western art collected by the mining magnate Alfred Chester Beatty. Entry is free and it's well worth a visit if you are in Dublin.

This is the 2012 festival website: http://francoirishliteraryfestival.com/2012/