Join the Department of History for their upcoming seminar: Greater Ireland’s Southern Frontier presented by Colin Barr (University of Aberdeen).
In the 19th century, the Irish Catholic Church created an enduring “Greater Ireland” that bound Irish Catholics and their descendants to one another, to Ireland, and to their fellow Irish Catholics elsewhere in the world.
From Dubuque to Dunedin, Irish Catholics shared the same faith, the same social and sexual disciplines, the same symbols, and the same heroes and martyrs.
They very often had more in common with their co-religionists across the globe than their neighbours across the street.
This was certainly true of New Zealand, where as the writer Dan Davin remarked of his own (lightly fictionalised) childhood on the South Island, “God was green and Irish and a Catholic.”
Yet this phenomenon was not simply the necessary result of migration patterns or demographic realities: it was planned. This paper explains how, by whom, and with what consequences for “Greater Ireland’s Southern Frontier”.
Colin Barr is the author or editor of numerous books on modern Irish history, including Ireland’s Empire: The Roman Catholic Church in the English-speaking World, 1829-1914 (2020).
He has held academic appointments in Ireland, the United States, and Scotland, and been a visiting fellow at Sidney Sussex College,
Cambridge, the University of Newcastle, Australia, and the University of Notre Dame.
He is presently senior lecturer in history at the University of Aberdeen.
This will be a virtual seminar on 5 May at 12pm and can be viewed in Locke 104A or via Zoom https://canterbury.zoom.us/j/96290979078 (ID 962 9097 9078).
