William Carleton Summer School 2010

Professor of Irish History at Queen’s University, Belfast; previously taught at the University of Ulster and worked as an archivist in the Public Record Office of Ireland; editor of the Irish Economic and Social History Journal; principal publications include, as editor, The Oxford Companion to Irish History, and, as author, Religion, Law and Power: the Making of Protestant Ireland 1660-1760, Priests and People in pre-Famine Ireland 1780-1845, Religion and Society in Nineteenth Century Ireland and Contested Island: Ireland 1460-1630.

Teaches at University College Cork; research interests include Irish women’s writing; Irish and British 18th and 19th century writing; post-colonial writing and children’s literature; author of Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation; published essays include ‘Orphans, Upstarts and Aristocrats: Ireland and the Idyll of Adoption in The Work of Madame de Genlis’ in Ireland Abroad: Politics and Professions in the Nineteenth Century.

Director of the Armagh Observatory; taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Sussex, and Liverpool, currently Vice President of the Royal Astronomical Society; publications include numerous articles and papers in scientific journals including those published on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society; author of Tracing the Heritage of the City of Armagh and Monaghan County.

Teaches at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth; research interests include nineteenth and twentieth century Irish writing, modernism, and literary/cultural theory; author of James Joyce and Nationalism, Catholic Emancipations: Irish Fiction from Thomas Moore to James Joyce; editor of Thomas Moore: The Memoirs of Captain Rock; contributions to journals including The British Journal for Eighteenth-century Studies, Éire-Ireland and Field Day Review.

Editorial Secretary, since 1983, of the Royal Irish Academy’s monumental nine volume Dictionary of Irish Biography; contributed to over 550 entries to that work; research interests include genealogy, the history of emigration from Ulster, eighteenth century science, and eighteenth and nineteenth century Ulster poetry, particularly the work of the Ulster-Scots weaver poets.

Writer; his work has received awards as diverse as A Better Ireland Award and an MBE; a Golden Harp and four Peacock awards; a BAFTA and a major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council. In 1994 he was founding director of the charity An Crann [The Tree] which worked to “Help people tell, and hear, the stories of the Troubles”, through the arts.

Author of Crazy for You, Playing the Field and Beyond Sin. The Truth Between and Behind The Scenes are to be published soon; scriptwriter/arts facilitator for Beam Creative Network; writes educational drama pieces and films; Project Manager of Imagine Action: a children’s theatre and sports programme.

Novelist, teacher; author of Oranges from Spain, The Healing, The Rye Man, Stone Kingdoms, The Big Snow, Swallowing the Sun and The Truth Commissioner; has received many prestigious awards including The Authors’ Club First Novel Award, Bass Ireland Arts Award for Literature, The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Award and the American Ireland Fund Literary Award for his contribution to Irish Literature.

Related to the Barnett family at Ballagh, Clogher; she is a Software Development Engineer who writes poetry; other interests include poetry as theatre, and performance, children’s poetry and writing, and humour and nonsense.

Historian; Director of the William Carleton Summer School; editor of The Spark; A local History Review; published and edited and taught local history over much of south Ulster and north Connacht; editor of Studies in Local History: Co Monaghan; other publications include chapters in Tyrone History and Society and Fermanagh History and Society; Chairman of the Ulster Local History Trust.

Poet, dramatist and former teacher; poetry collections are Opposite Walls, Snowfire, Curse of the Birds and The Funeral Game and his plays include Half a Vegetable – based on the writings of Patrick Kavanagh – and Broken Cups which won the PJ Ó Connor RTE radio drama award.

Lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth; writer, broadcaster and tour guide; Chair of the Mullingar Historical and Archaeological Society and President of the Westmeath Historical and Archaeological Society; author of Mullingar: History and Guide and contributor to Mullingar: Essays on the History of a Midlands Town.

Historian: specialises in church history; author of A History of the Church of Ireland, 1691-2001; currently researching the life of Bishop Jebb of Limerick. Now retired, he was previously Headmaster of Portora and later of the King’s School, Parramatta, NSW, Australia; his memoirs Why the Whistle Went were published in 2009.

Formerly Assistant Curator for Emigration History at the Ulster-American Folk Park, Omagh. Since 1998 he is Lecturer and Development Officer at the Centre for Migration Studies, Omagh; lectures in Irish Migration Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast; publications include, with Brian Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 1607-2007.

Summer School Committee member; has rewritten Carleton’s short story ‘The Midnight Mass’ as a radio play for ten characters – it will be performed as part of the open-ended discussion on Thursday afternoon.

Summer School Summer School Committee member; lectures on writers including Patrick MacGill, Oscar Wilde, William Allingham and Anthony Trollope; editor of William Carleton: The Authentic Voice.

Honorary Fellow and former Reader in History at the University of Edinburgh; broadcaster and writer; Honorary Director of the William Carleton Summer School since 1995; published studies of Oscar Wilde, Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, James Connolly, Burke and Hare and Eamon de Valera; published British Children’s Literature and the Second World War; editor of 1916: Easter Rising, Conor Cruise O’Brien Introduces Ireland and Scotland, Europe and the American Revolution; contributed essays to a range of publications including Scotland and Ulster and Fickle Man: Robert Burns in the Twenty-first Century.