Journal of Contemporary History review of Forgetful Remembrance

New Hibernia Review, 2019

2018

The 2019 Irish Historical Research Prize Lecture by Professor Guy Beiner, marking the award for his book Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford University Press, 2018), which re-examined the history of Ulster through the prism of remembering and forgetting and provided a ground-breaking study of the history of forgetting. In his lecture, Prof Beiner reflected on Ireland’s commemorations of historical events and how this has stimulated many studies on history and remembrance, which have in part contributed to a memory studies internationally. By examining the concept that memory is inextricably intertwined with forgetting, the lecture focused on the original concept of ‘social forgetting’, challenging standard notions of ‘collective memory’, drawing attention to limitations in what historians can do in helping us to understand the past and pointing to the contributions of other disciplines such as sociology and anthropology, in all demonstrating the potential for a more complex understanding of the interplay of history and memory.

The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland, 2017

The long nineteenth century saw the formation of modern Irish memory, although the nature of its novelty is open to debate, as it maintained a continuous dialogue with its traditional roots. A preliminary period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century has been identified by Joep Leerssen – following the German school of history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) pioneered by Reinhart Koselleck – as a Sattelzeit, which accommodated the Anglicisation and modernisation of what had formerly been a predominantly Gaelic society. In particular, antiquarian fascination with the distant past played a key role in re-adapting native bodies of knowledge for Anglo-Irish readerships, whether in the music collecting of Edward Bunting, the song translations of Charlotte Brooke or the writings of Samuel Ferguson, to name but a few. This concept of cultural transition is useful for understanding the changes in memorial practices, which came about through reinvention, rather than simple invention and imposition from above, of Irish traditions. A record of remembrance in the countryside at the time of the transformation was captured between 1824 and 1842 by the Ordnance Survey, which, under the supervision of the noted antiquarian George Petrie, sent out fieldworkers, among them the illustrious Gaelic scholars John O'Donovan and Eugene O'Curry, to compile detailed memoirs of local customs, originally designed as supplements for the topographical maps. Characteristically, the agents of change also engaged in documentation and preservation of traditional memory. Whereas the loss of Irish language has been poignantly decried by Alan Titley as ‘the Great Forgetting’, the modernisation of Ireland was not a straightforward linear progression from a largely Irish-speaking traditional culture, steeped in memory, to an English-speaking capitalist society, supposedly clouded by amnesia. It should be acknowledged that the Irish language maintained a substantial presence well into the nineteenth century. Moreover, during the cultural revival of the fin de siècle, language enthusiasts such as Douglas Hyde collected folk traditions in Irish in order to make them available as a resource for a modern national society. Overall, the increase in literacy in English did not necessarily eradicate oral traditions. Examination of popular print reveals that it functioned as a vehicle for reworking memories, which then fed back into oral culture.

Peace Review, 2001

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Memory Studies , 2008

The commemoration of the participation of Irishmen in the British army in the first World War has reflected the political divisions on the island. This article focuses on the Irish National War Memorial, which was built in the 1930s in Dublin but only officially opened in the 1990s, and analyses the cultural life of this monument in relation to the difficult integration of a marginalized group into the dominant national narrative. The case is used to support a call in this opening issue of the journal Memory Studies for an integrated study of collective remembrance that takes into account both its multi-medial character and the dynamic interplay betweencultural and social processes.

2007

are compound. If questions still abound about our separate cognitive capacity for memory, how can we de ne memory in social contexts, or talk about the way that such a memory might be located in texts, in history, in the physical productions of culture? Does cultural memory depend on memories