Episode 134: Irish Studies at UConn

It is March, which means Saint Patrick’s Day and Irish-American Heritage Month in the United States. Here at UConn, Mary Burke is a professor in the Department of English and oversees the Irish Literature Concentration. She joins us on this episode of the UConn 360 podcast to talk about Irish studies on campus and her background as a scholar and professor. Mary explains the origins of the holiday back in Ireland and some of her own family traditions. If you are interested in learning about Irish literature, but have never studies it, she gives you a few places to start. Mary organizes the annual Gerson Irish Reading event on campus, which takes places this year on Tuesday, April 1, at the UConn Alumni House.

Listen to Episode 134 at Podbeam

Mike: Hello, everybody. Welcome to the UConn 360 podcast. It’s Mike Enright from University Communications along with my co-host Izzy Harris, also of University Communications. Hi, Izzy.

Izzy: Hey, Mike. Funny seeing you here.

Mike: I know. It’s like we do a podcast every other week.

Izzy: I know, right?

Mike: Well, this is a special week because it’s St. Patrick’s Day week.

Izzy: I love St. Patrick’s Day.

Mike: Wow. You were singing.

Izzy: I know. I was singing. I have a pretty good voice. Did you know that’s like one of my hidden talents? I’m actually a really good singer.

Mike: I did not know that.

Izzy: Well, now you do. If anyone ever wants to hear me sing, let me know. We’ll take song suggestions.

Mike: Well, I, I think that would be a reach for the podcast.

Izzy: Okay, anyways…

Mike: It’s Irish Heritage Month across the United States, and we just had St. Patrick’s Day, and St. Patrick’s Day celebrations are still going on here in Connecticut, with a real heavy concentration of people of Irish descent. So, St. Patrick’s Day is a big deal, and we thought we would do a St. Patrick’s Day version of the UConn 360 podcast.

Izzy: I just want to add that even those who aren’t Irish still love St. Patrick’s Day, like me.

Mike: Absolutely.

Izzy: I don’t have any little bit of Irish in me, but it’s one of my favorite holidays. It’s just so fun. It’s a great way to bring people together. It’s always a fun day.

Mike: Well, our guest today is Mary Burke, a professor of English here at UConn, and she has been here since 2004, when she joined the Department of English. She oversees the Irish literature program here at UConn and organizes the annual Gerson Irish Reading event on campus. Her primary specialty is Irish and Irish American identities and cultures.

She’s written several books, most recently Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History, which came out in 2023. It was her second book from Oxford University Press. The book looks at the legacies, both good and bad, of the Irish presence in the Americas over the last 400 years. It was featured on the RTE website, which is the Irish National Broadcaster, and in The Irish Times.

She’s published on a variety of other topics, from the politics of Irish fashion to J.D. Vance and Catholic Irish America, and on Scottish Gaelic memory in the James Bond film Skyfall. She’s everywhere out there in the media, and we’re glad to have her on the UConn 360 podcast.

She earned her undergraduate degree from Trinity College in Dublin and advanced degrees from Queen’s University in Belfast. Her postdoc was with the Fighting Irish at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend.

So, Mary, it’s great to have you here today on the UConn 360 podcast.

Mary: Great to be with you both, Mike and Izzy, and I’m going to get back to the Fighting Irish. That’s a phrase I love.

Mike: Sounds good. Sounds good. And I, I could sing the Notre Dame fight song, but I’m not going to do that.

Mary: No, don’t do that.

Izzy: Like I said, if anyone’s going to sing, I think it should be me.

Mike: That’s probably a good idea.

So, Mary, tell us a little bit about the Irish Literature program here at UConn. What do students read and study? How many students are involved? And what’s the typical student that’s in the program?

Mary: Well, I guess I’ll start with the last question first, which is the typical student, because I guess there’s now no typical student.

At first, my classes attracted mostly students with Irish surnames. But, you know, more diverse students increasingly took my courses as the years went on. And I think what I found interesting was that they increasingly spoke about their own Irish ancestry during discussions, but sometimes in a tentative tone that suggested it wasn’t always a heritage they thought they could identify with.

I think this slight alienation from Irishness was even evident amongst those whose ancestors came directly from the island, too. And I’m thinking about the descendants of the first wave out of Ireland, which would have been 18th-century Ulster Scots immigrants to the U.S. So, I started teaching Ulster Scots poetry alongside Irish-speaking poets in the classes when we started in the 18th century.

And, you know, it was interesting to get responses from those students. They were often surprised and gratified to have their ancestry discussed at UConn because I think in the Northeast, we don’t have much of a memory of the Irish presence before the 19th century.

And I guess it was that growing sense that Irishness in America was much more varied than the familiar story we have in the Northeast—of white, Catholic, famine immigrant—that came to me gradually and has become part of my work in recent years.

And to get back to the Fighting Irish phrase, I always joke in class that there were tensions, of course. There was a complicated history of Irish relations with Americans of color and with their fellow Irish of differing ethnic and religious identities. And so, the bad joke I always make in class is that the Fighting Irish were often fighting themselves.

Mike: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, it’s not a clear-cut history at all.

Mary: No. I mean, that’s what makes it interesting, right?

Mike: Sure. Sure.

Mary: So, just to get back to the first portion of your question, which was about Irish literature at UConn—what do the students read? What do they study?

So, what I routinely teach are two of the upper-level offerings. They’re currently under the English Department’s new Difference and Diaspora course grouping. I teach Irish Lit up to 1939, and then I teach Irish Lit after 1939.

With the Irish Lit up to 1939, that’s where we do some of the Ulster Scots and the Irish-language material from the 18th century, obviously in translation. And we finish with the early 20th-century Irish Revival. That was a cultural momentum that led to Irish political independence in the 1920s.

So, we pretty much examine all the big names like Swift, Merriman, Wilde, Yeats, Lady Gregory, James Joyce, and Elizabeth Bowen, and think about the literary project to make the new nation by reviving and rewriting the past in various ways, particularly in the early 20th century.

Then, in Irish Lit after 1939, we cover from the early 20th century to the present. We look at how literary narratives and cultural narratives either endorsed or challenged this new independent state. The new state officially stressed that Ireland was ethnically, culturally, and religiously homogenous.

And writers, I begin with somebody like Edna O’Brien, and we finish with big contemporary names such as Sally Rooney and Colm Tóibín.

I guess one thing that really impacts the course—what I put on the syllabus and how we think about it—is that Ireland was partitioned in 1921 into what becomes a predominantly Catholic Republic, the Republic of Ireland, and a predominantly Presbyterian Northern Ireland, which remained within the United Kingdom.

So, we really get at Northern Ireland by looking at the writing of somebody like Seamus Heaney to think about that cultural and political fracture.

Izzy: St. Patrick’s Day, although just one day, feels like one of those holidays that kind of spreads all throughout March. People are wearing their green and all their festive accessories, etc.

What do you think is such a big deal about St. Patrick’s Day inside the U.S. and specifically in Connecticut?

Mary: Well, I guess I’ll start with Ireland because it came to the U.S. from Ireland.

Would you believe that it was originally a religious day of observance? There were church services in honor of St. Patrick, who is Ireland’s patron saint.

Of course, Irish immigrants brought this tradition to the U.S., and here it became a very secular celebration of Irish culture—or maybe of stereotypes of Irishness, depending on which scholar of St. Patrick’s Day you read.

The one I like best is a historian named Mike Cronin. I think he’s probably the foremost contemporary historian of St. Patrick’s Day in America. His suggestion is that the holiday was born in the U.S. to demonstrate Irish American ethnic power.

The first parades were in the 18th century in New York and Philadelphia. That was during the earlier Irish presence I mentioned—the more Protestant Irish presence. Then, in the 19th century, after the 1845 famine, Catholic Irish immigrants gained status through political and cultural organizations. The visibility of the parade in major American cities, especially in the Northeast, was a way to signal and secure status for their ethnicity.

And what Cronin also says—going back to Ireland again—is that contemporary Ireland, its government, and its tourism industries have leveraged St. Patrick’s Day globally to make Ireland a recognizable national brand. Once you read that, you think, Yeah, that’s absolutely true.

Mike:
So we know a little bit about some of the stereotypes surrounding St. Patrick’s Day and the frivolities that go on all over the place. But tell us a little bit about some of the Irish customs you like to celebrate with your family.

Mary:
Well, actually, it’s one that I’ve brought to my students at this stage.

Historically, of course, Ireland was very religious. So, the 40 days leading up to Easter, people tended to do the fast for Lent. For kids, that meant giving up treats. They gave up cookies—what we call “biscuits” in Ireland—and candies, which we call “sweets.”

St. Patrick’s Day always falls during Lent. But because it was a religious holiday, there was a kind of one-day get-out-of-jail-free card for kids from the Lenten fast.

So what would happen was, when visiting relatives, students might have deposited large chocolate Easter eggs and the like in the lead-up to Easter. You would hoard them, and then you would gorge yourself on this one-day reprieve that was St. Patrick’s Day.

I have really fond memories of that from my childhood. So when I teach an Irish Lit class in the spring semester, I bring in candy for the class on the day closest to St. Patrick’s Day. I don’t tell my students what we’re going to do—I just put it on the syllabus that we’ll be doing a genuine St. Patrick’s Day custom.

And so, it’s an authentic custom, and it’s a fun custom. We do it in class.

Izzy:
Mary, I saw that you went to Trinity College in Ireland, which I’ve actually visited. Beautiful campus.

Mary:
Yeah.

Izzy:
I loved it there. That was one of my favorite parts of my trip.

Mary:
Yeah.

Izzy:
So I’m curious—how did you end up in Connecticut?

Mary:
Well, I’m from the west of Ireland originally—from Galway. And I obviously crossed the country to the east coast, to Dublin, for college. That way, my parents wouldn’t see what I was doing.

They assumed I was applying for the University of Galway, which I did not do.

So, Dublin was great. After my BA at Trinity, I lived in Japan for a while. Then, I ended up going to Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland because I was interested, from the start, in understanding the varieties of Irish identity.

There’s an Institute for Irish Studies at Notre Dame in Indiana. They have an NEH fellowship, which was fairly new, I think, when I got it. I was lucky enough to receive that.

I always say I’m an accidental immigrant. I never planned to come to America. But when I saw the advert for the NEH at Notre Dame, at this amazing institute for Irish studies, I said, You know what? I’ll apply.

And when I applied and got there, I really liked American academia. So, I started applying for jobs while I was there, and I was extremely lucky to land the UConn position.

I went back to Ireland, shut up my house, and moved permanently to America. So, it was all pretty much a whirlwind. It’s been fabulous. But as I said, I may be one of the few people from Ireland who ended up in America without planning to do so.

Mike:
One of the areas of study here at UConn is race and Irish America. What does that mean exactly? And maybe tell us a little bit about what life was like for the early Irish immigrants to the country because I don’t think everyone realizes that it wasn’t always a welcoming experience, right?

Mary:
So, the book from 2023 is Race, Politics, and Irish America. I look at three waves of the Irish in the Americas because I start with a really broad canvas covering about 400 years.

I start with the transported Irish in the 17th century. They were forcibly deported, or sometimes they were indentured servants. They were sent to places like Virginia and the wider Americas, including the Caribbean.

I also examine the Scots-Irish—what are called the Ulster Irish in Ireland. These Presbyterians of Scottish descent were the first major wave of Irish to the colonies in the 18th century.

They’re pretty interesting when you think about race broadly because they were called Irish, but they weren’t particularly welcome at first. However, they assimilated and became part of a largely unethnicized white Protestant American population.

Then, the third wave is the one we all think about when we hear the word “Irish in America”—the post-1845 famine Catholic immigrants.

I look at the lives of both Black and white writers and public figures of Irish connection. I examine people like Andrew Jackson, who was the first Scots-Irish president. Then there’s someone like Grace Kelly, who was of famine Irish descent and became Princess Grace of Monaco in the 1950s.

Even Rihanna—the pop star—has Irish descent in her family background in the Caribbean.

The Irish assimilated broadly on America’s frontiers and plantations and on its eastern seaboard, especially with the rise of John F. Kennedy—the first Catholic Irish president. And again, Grace Kelly’s rise to European royalty also helped cement the Irish presence and influence in broader culture.

It’s a mixed picture, though. The Irish came out of a sectarian Ireland—a colonized and often violent Ireland. They brought some of that disorder with them, but they also brought a sense of sympathy and solidarity with oppressed peoples.

So, they were both colluders at times and, at other times, victims of oppression in America.

In my analysis, I saw that this history led to broadly two responses in Irish American writers.

One response was identification with the oppressed, which you can see in the works of Eugene O’Neill, the great Irish American dramatist.

The other response was an attempt to align with dominant white Anglo-Protestant America, which is what you see in someone like Henry James. James was Scots-Irish—the grandson of a small Irish Presbyterian farmer.

Because of the sectarian divide in both Ireland and Irish America, we don’t really think of Henry James as an “Irish” writer in the same way we do someone like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Eugene O’Neill. But he had that heritage.

Izzy:
If someone has never read any Irish literature or poetry before, where would be a good starting point?

Mary:
I always try to bring Northern Ireland into my idea of Irish literature, so I’d start with that.

I’d ease people in with TV—Derry Girls, for example, which many of my students already know when they take my class. There’s also Say Nothing, which is another big show at the moment.

Then, after that, I’d say go read some Seamus Heaney—his poetry deepens your understanding of Northern Ireland and its history.

For the decades after Ireland’s independence in the 1920s, I’d recommend The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien.

Edna O’Brien passed away just last year in her 90s, and she was one of the most prolific novelists of the second half of the 20th century into the 21st.

The Country Girls is a surprisingly fun 1960 novel that was banned in Ireland for depicting the oppression of young girls in mid-20th-century patriarchal Ireland. But it’s beautifully written, funny, and follows two best friends on their misadventures.

It’s always in print, so it’s easy to get a copy.

Mike:
Well, Mary, you do a great job with the students here at UConn, but there are a couple of events you organize every year on campus that the general public is invited to. Tell us a little bit about those.

Mary:
Yes! So, each year, there’s the annual public Gerson Irish Reading, and I also work on three to four smaller public events related broadly to Irish culture.

The Gerson is our big one.

It’s called the Elizabeth Shanley Gerson Memorial Irish Literature Reading, and it was established over a quarter-century ago by her children and her late husband, Lou Gerson, who was a professor in the political science department at UConn.

Elizabeth Shanley Gerson was Irish American, and Lou Gerson funded this event in her honor. It brings a distinguished Irish writer to Storrs every year.

Edna O’Brien was one of the earliest featured authors in the late ’90s. We’ve also hosted writers like Colum McCann and Colm Tóibín.

Last year, our guest was The Irish Times literary editor, Martin Doyle. He wrote an amazing memoir about growing up in Northern Ireland.

This year’s distinguished Irish writer will be an Indian-Irish writer named Kavita Madhavan. I’m teaching her novel The Inheritance this semester.

The novel engages deeply with traumatic colonial history in 17th-century County Kerry, Ireland. It’s mostly set in the 1980s and considers how that 17th-century history continues to haunt the region. The central character is a child who either has delayed speech or refuses to speak, and he is linked across time to a traumatized child from the 17th century with the same condition.

Mike:
And the public is invited? Is there a date and time for that yet?

Mary:
Yes! This year, it will be held on April 1st at 7:00 PM at the Alumni House.

It’s free and open to the public. I’ll be sending out details in the Daily Digest repeatedly in the coming days, so look out for it there.

Mike:
That’s great—it’s coming up soon! So everybody’s invited to that event.

Izzy:
I have a silly question to wrap things up.

Mary: I love silly questions. Go ahead.

Izzy: Okay, wonderful. So, we talked about The Fighting Irish, and I have a two-part question. Where did the idea of luck come into St. Patrick’s Day? How did that tradition start? And second, what’s the deal with leprechauns—how did they become associated with St. Patrick’s Day? Mary: Well, I suppose there are two versions of St. Patrick’s Day traditions, and they kind of go off on different tangents.

You have the original Irish tradition, and then you have the Americanized version, which includes a lot of symbols—or, depending on your perspective, stereotypes—of Irish culture that were layered onto the holiday in the U.S.

So, first, the idea of luck—this actually has a religious origin. It’s not about four-leaf clovers, but rather the shamrock.

Shamrocks have three leaves, and the story goes that St. Patrick used them to teach the pagan Irish about the Holy Trinity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. It was a way to illustrate the concept of three-in-one, which can be difficult to grasp.

Shamrocks are common in Ireland, so on St. Patrick’s Day, people pin live shamrocks to their lapels.

Clover, on the other hand, might be more widespread in America, which is why the four-leaf clover became associated with luck here rather than the shamrock’s religious significance.

Now, about leprechauns—I’m not exactly sure how they gained so much popularity. Was it that breakfast cereal? Lucky Charms? Or maybe Darby O’Gill and the Little People—that mid-century fantasy film set in Ireland?

But in actual Irish folklore, leprechauns are just one minor category of a much broader group known as the fairies.

And fairies in Irish tradition? You don’t mess with them. They’re not cute. Humans keep away from them as much as possible. They’re large, powerful, and sometimes even menacing.

The leprechaun, however, is a mischievous, elf-like fairy. He might have taken off in America because of his small, whimsical appearance and because his image fit certain Irish stereotypes that had been around since the 19th century.

And if you think about the logo for the Fighting Irish at Notre Dame, you see a similar blending of ideas—the leprechaun is depicted as a small but scrappy figure, with a pose that reflects the 19th-century stereotype of the pugilistic Irishman.

Izzy:
So, the whole idea of a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—is that something that was Americanized?

Mary:
Oh, no, that part actually does come from Irish folklore!

There is a long-standing belief that leprechauns hoard gold. That’s absolutely part of the traditional mythology.

But when historians look at Ireland’s colonial history, they often laugh dryly at the idea that the Irish are “lucky.”

Mike:
Well, we were lucky to have you today on the UConn 360 podcast.

Mary:
That was pretty good.

Mike:
That was fast, right? Mary, thanks for joining us.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to everyone! It’s a few days past, but there are still plenty of celebrations happening in Connecticut—some parades still to go!

Mary:
It’s a whole month, right?

Mike:
Enjoy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone! And Izzy, we’ll talk again in a couple of weeks.

Izzy:
Sounds good, Mike. I’ll be wearing green for a little bit.

Mike:
You should. Thanks to everyone for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on the UConn 360 Podcast. Take care.

Mary:
Thank you both! This has been fun.