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