History

Poem

Affective disruption: Walter Benjamin and the 'history' of Ireland's industrial schools

What role do organizations play in writing history? In this paper, I address the part played by organizations in the enactment of large-scale violence, and focus on the ways in which the resulting histories come to be written. Drawing on the case of Ireland's industrial schools, I demonstrate how such accounts can act to serve the interests of those in power, effectively silencing and marginalizing weaker people. A theoretical lens that draws on ideas from Walter Benjamin and Judith Butler is helpful in understanding this; the concept of 'affective disruption' enables an exploration of how people's experiences of organizational violence can be reclaimed from the past, and protected in a continuous remembrance. Overall, this paper contributes a new perspective on the writing of organizational histories, particularly in relation to the enactment of violence. 

Genealogies of Partition: History, History-Writing and 'The Troubles' in Ireland

Contemporary political disputes have a long history of expression and contestation through the genre of history-writing in Ireland. The role of history writing and political science writing during the nearly 40 years of the so-called 'Troubles' has been no exception to this. Battles between competing versions of what the conflict 'is about', mediated through academic and popular texts have themselves in turn become constitutive of it. This builds upon centuries of the representation of the complicated politics of this island as 'an issue' in British domestic politics - first 'the Catholic question', then 'the Irish question'. The location of political power outside the island for centuries has created successive battles for the representation of sectional interests in a metropolitan centre. The skills of propaganda, history writing, newspaper writing have consequently been deployed at a remarkable level of skill and intensity. In the recent period one of the consequences of this has been the removal from the debate of the actuality of partition; this builds upon a particular historical representation of partition as an historical inevitability. To seek to restore partition to the debate is not to call for its undoing but to recognise that seeking to circumvent debates about its origins in the key period of democratisation in Irish politics (1880-1920) has been counter-productive. This essay examines the genealogies of partition in Irish and international contexts in the light of these battles for representation, and aims to return a lost dimension to the debate about the so-called 'Troubles'in Ireland. The genealogy of partition is the issue that has been marginalised in academic study and this has affected both policy and politics.

Popular Writers: Women Historians, the Academic Community and National History Writing

The research for this paper formed part of the European Science Foundation project on Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Europe. Using data generated by the project, the article traces the emergence of professional academic women historians in twentieth-century European universities. It argues that the marginalisation of women historians in academia until the 1980s led women history graduates to develop research-based careers outside the university. In particular, the ambiguous attitude of academic historians towards popular history writing opened up a space for the woman author. The article analyses the careers and writings of five historians who pursued very successful careers as authors of popular history in England, France, Ireland and Scotland. They were among the first 'public' historians.

“La littérature est la seule patrie”: Nabile Farès and the Poetry of Postcolonial Displacment

Nabile Farès is a key author within postcolonial studies, due in particular to his uniquely expressive writing style. This article discusses writing style in his 1982 text, L’état perdu: précédé du discours pratique de l’immigré. Throughout the mainly French text, different alphabets are woven, alluding to the complexity of Algerian linguistic history and the importance of language in the construction and expression of identity. Meanwhile, the grammar and structure of the French language seems confused and at times illogical, raising further questions about use of a colonial language in a postcolonial context. Farès’s writing style is avant-garde in nature, and deliberate intertextuality with the Surrealists situates the text within an avant-garde tradition in the French language, developing new ideas surrounding the effect of this written genre in the aftermath of colonialism.

A Cambridge History of Irish Working-Class Writing

This 24-chapter edited collection will be the first major study of the history of Irish working-class writing.

Writing the History of the British Stage, 1660-1900

A monograph on British theatre historiography from its emergence in the Restoration to its foundation as an academic discipline in the early 20th century.

Vergilius Redivivus: Studies in Joseph Addison's Latin Poetry

J.W. Binns, Modern Language Review 101.2 (2006), 504-5:
‘This book is an important contribution to the study of Anglo-Latin poetry in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries … ’Haan provides an able and authoritative account …, setting the poems in their contexts, and providing for each a very clear and penetrating analysis which traces the classical well-springs that lie behind much of Addison’s Latin writing, and also calls attention to non-traditional elements’.

Classical Romantic: Identity in the Latin Poetry of Vincent Bourne

This monograph examines a selection of Vincent Bourne's Latin verse in its classical, neo-Latin and vernacular contexts, with particular attention to the theme of identity (and differing forms of identity). Its aim is to initiate the resurrection from silence of an author whose self-fashioning is achieved by investigating the identity of the self in relation to the other and by foregrounding multiple attempts to fashion other selves.

From Back Cover of published book:

Through close and perceptive analysis of Bourne's negotiation of poetic identity, Haan argues in new ways for the blend of classicism and Romanticism informing his marginalized status. As such, the book promises to revive scholarship on Bourne, and to be of use to students and scholars of Latin as well as vernacular verse.
Carla Mazzio, Professor of English, University of Chicago.


Estelle Haan is the UK's most eminent neo-Latinist. Her books with the APS on Milton (From Academia to Amicitia, Transactions 88, part 6) and Addison (Vergilius Redivivus, Transactions 95, part 2) are both important contributions to our knowledge of those authors, and their scholarship is presented in a way that accommodates the growing number of specialists who do not read Latin. Much of the content of this study is entirely new, and it is written in a way that will make it accessible to non-Latinists. The connections with English-language poets that Professor Haan adduces page after page will be a very considerable resource for students of vernacular poetry.
Gordon Campbell, Professor of Renaissance Literature, University of Leicester.


I have long thought that a modern study of Vincent Bourne was very much needed, and am greatly pleased that one has now been written. Estelle Haan offers a thoughtful and sensitive study that has remarkable depth. She capitalizes on the familiarity with other eighteenth-century English poets about whom she has previously written (Cowper, Gray, and most recently Addison) and she makes use of contempoary literary theory without becoming dependent on any single approach or disfiguring her writing with critical jargon. This work will, one hopes, provoke further research into Bourne and his poetry.
Dana F. Sutton, Professor Emeritus of Classics, The University of California, Irvine.