Since 1991, the Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies program has brought to Boston College a long and distinguished series of academics, writers, artists, journalists, librarians, and notable public figures who have made significant contributions to Irish cultural and intellectual life. Burns Visiting Scholars teach courses, offer public lectures, and engage with the rich resources of the John J. Burns Library in their ongoing research, writing, and creative endeavors.
The Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies program is a cooperative venture between Boston College's interdisciplinary Irish Studies program and the Boston College Libraries. It was established by and receives continuing support from the family and friends of the Honorable John J. Burns (Class of 1921), who also generously contributed to the creation of the John J. Burns Library and support the growth of its extraordinary collections pertaining to Irish history, literature, music, and culture. The Burns Visiting Scholar program has also benefited from support from the Office of the Provost.
In recognition of its 25th anniversary, Boston College Communications profiled the Burns Visiting Scholar program in a November 7, 2016 article. In October 2016, Irish America magazine also published a special supplement in celebration of this milestone. Read the article or download a copy.
Burns Visiting Scholar lectures since 2017 have been videorecorded and add the to the Burns Library Lectures playlist on the Boston College Libraries YouTube channel.
Pat Palmer is Professor of English at Maynooth University. She works on cultures in contact in, principally, early modern Ireland, on the conflictual exchange between English colonists and the Gaelic world, on linguistic colonization, the aesthetics of violence, and the politics of translation. There is a strong comparative element to her work: she has written on translations of Ariosto, Ercilla, and Virgil, and on bardic poetry. She is the author of Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabeth Imperial Expansion (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Translating Violence in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2014). She has published articles with English Literary Renaissance, Translation Studies, Renaissance Quarterly, Irish Historical Studies, and Literature Compass. Early Modern Criticism in a Time of Crisis which she edited with David Baker was published in November 2022. Her current book project is a study of the polyphonic and intersecting literary cultures of early modern Ireland, Her current book project is a monograph provisionally entitled The Poetics of Property: Castle Poems and the Invention of Ownership in Early Modern Ireland.
After graduating with an MA from University College Cork, she worked in Athens and Brussels before taking a D.Phil. in English literature at the University of Oxford. She was Senior Lecturer in the University of York (2000-2008) and Reader in King’s College London (2008-2016) and took up the chair of Renaissance Literature in Maynooth in 2017.
She was awarded an Advanced Laureate by the Irish Research Council in 2019 and is Principal Investigator on the MACMORRIS Project, a four-year DH project which maps the full range of cultural activity, across languages and ethnic groups, in early modern Ireland. To learn more, listen to this podcast with Pat Palmer in conversation with Brendan Kane at the 2023 Tudor and Stuart Ireland Conference.
Decolonial Deep Mapping, co-written with Evan Bourke and Philip Mac a’ Ghoill, comes out with Cambridge Elements in early 2025.
Courses:
Reading the Past in an Uncertain Present: The Lessons of Early Modern Ireland and the MACMORRIS DH Project
HIST7705
Thursdays 2:00pm - 04:25pm
Stokes 207S
Enrollment limited to 16
Early modern Ireland is one of the places where modernity is trialled. The extreme violence of the Tudor and Stuart conquest, the settlement of English and Scots in the plantations which followed, the displacement of native lives by an incoming Protestant ascendancy create a template for English/British colonisation in North America and beyond. At the same time, colonial approaches to the land and its resources made Ireland a laboratory for extractive practices which, in time, lead to the Anthropocene. But the fascination of early modern Ireland is that colonial perspectives did not go unchallenged. Irish writers offered very different perspectives on violence, property, the built environment, and the natural world. Those unfamiliar perspectives still have the power to challenge orientations to the world which are as destructive as they are hegemonic.
MACMORRIS, a decolonial DH project led by Prof. Palmer, brings the work figures like Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Herriot together with less familiar voices from early modernIreland, writing in Irish, Spanish, Latin, and Italian (and available in translation on the website).
This course will explore the potential of DH to decolonise the archive and it will explore how that more inclusive and polyphonic record might help us to think not only about the past but the present.
Public Lecture:
"The Poetics of Property: The Ground Possessed and Dispossessed in Early Modern Ireland"
Wednesday, November 13, 5:00pm reception, 6:00pm lecture; free and open to the public
Burns Library
"There cannot be a history of private property law," Brenna Bhandar writes in Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership, "that is not at the same time a history of land appropriation in Ireland, the Caribbean, North America, and beyond." In this lecture, Pat Palmer explores how English colonists in sixteenth and seventeenth century Ireland field-tested strategies for translating land into property. Wheezes like "surrender and re-grant" turned community-held land into the private property of the single individual through Common-Law title. This "invention" of property transformed our engagement with the more-than-human in ways that continue to play out as crises of equality and biodiversity. This lecture asks whether recovering older (here, specifically, Gaelic) ways of engaging with the land as a place of enchantment rather than possession have anything to say to the present.
| Caoimhe Nic Dhaibheid | Spring 2025 |
| Eve Watson | Fall 2025 |
Follow the link below to read about each of the more than forty Burns Visiting Scholars whom we have welcomed to campus since the program began in 1991. For several of our more recent scholars, you will find links to streaming recordings of their public lectures.
