Foreign Tongues – 22 May

The Annual Noel O’Connell Memorial Lecture, a joint venture of the Irish Literary Society and Irish Texts Society will be delivered by Phyllis Gaffney on her recent book Foreign Tongues Victorian Language Learning and the Shaping of Modern Ireland which is the first historical overview of the study of languages in Ireland.

How history shifts languages and languages in turn shape history is a deep-rooted, dynamic process manifest in Victorian Ireland. In Foreign Tongues, Gaffney sheds new light on this period of Irish history, exploring how continental influences that predated the Penal Laws were reinvigorated in the wake of the French Revolution. An influx of foreign teachers and religious orders created institutions for an emerging élite, and University education expanded. At the same time, civil service reforms opened careers across the British Empire to graduates from all religions. The result is that Ireland’s Victorian colleges embraced language study—ancient and modern, Irish and European—more eagerly than their British counterparts.

[Prof. Gaffney] dissects for instance the travails of the Irish language since independence and partition. Its pride of place as a repository of idealism and its status as the country’s first official language coexist with problems on the ground such as well-documented difficulties in teaching it and, one might add, disaffection on the part of many of the young people studying it. .Grace Neville University College Cork,

An adaptive, fast-changing academic landscape laid the groundwork for today’s Ireland—culturally confident, open to Europe and the world—while the dramatic rise of the Gaelic League forged a bond between language, education, and politics with pervasive effects on Irish identities in the twentieth century. Gaffney will outline some profiles of individual professors to reveal pioneering scholarship, precarious careers, sudden scandals, and denunciations and dismissals linked to local conflicts and foreign wars. Her book documents how the advance of women’s education cleared the path for a cohort of notable female professors across modern languages.

Professor Phyllis Gaffney

Phyllis Gaffney

Phyllis Gaffney is a researcher who has taught at Carysfort College of Education and University College Dublin. She is the author of several books, most recently The Medieval Imagination: Mirabile Dictu.