Leading speakers lined up for panel discussion event at Thomas MacDonagh Hedge School

THE Thomas MacDonagh Museum honours the life of the poet and patriot MacDonagh, a native of Cloughjordan. It does this by collecting, safeguarding, exhibiting and interpreting material associated with MacDonagh, his family, his activities, his times and his legacy.

Within its archive, the museum holds rare copies of The Irish Review, a literary, and latterly also a political journal, to which luminaries including W.B. Yeats, P.H. Pearse, Lord Dunsany, James Connolly, William Orpen and Jack B.Yeats contributed poems, stories and essays.

At 4pm on Saturday, September 21st, Dr Catherine Wilsdon will chair a discussion between Dr Billy Shortall and Dr Róisín Kennedy on the pivotal role of The Irish Review in the arts and politics of the time and consider such influences today.

Places for this event may be booked from Eventbrite via this link https://ThomasMacDonaghHedgeSchool2024.eventbrite.ie

Dr Catherine Wilsdon is Communications and Public Engagement Manager at UCD Library. She was Creative Producer of a public commemorative initiative called Poetry as Commemoration from 2022-23. Prior to this, she was Programme Manager and Lecturer in Irish Literature for the University of Notre Dame in Ireland. In 2015, she co-organised a symposium and exhibition on Thomas MacDonagh and The Irish Review.

Dr Billy Shortall is a Research Fellow in the Irish Art Research Centre at Trinity College, Dublin. His main research is focused on the intersection between art and politics in post-Independent Ireland and he researched and developed the Seeing Ireland project, a virtual re-creation of the art exhibition and other events associated with the World Congress of the Irish Race held in Paris in 1922, available at www.seeingireland.ie. He researched and developed the current retrospective exhibition on the sculptor Hilary Heron (1923-1977) at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. His current research is on Cuala Industries. Billy is chairperson of the Irish Association of Art Historians.

Dr Róisín Kennedy is a Lecturer in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin. She is former Yeats Curator at the National Gallery of Ireland. She has co-edited several publications on Irish art and visual culture including Harry Clarke and Artistic Visions of the New Irish State (Irish Academic Press, 2018) and Sources in Irish Art 2. A Reader (Cork University Press, 2021). Her monograph, Art and the Nation State, Attitudes to Modern Art in Ireland, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2021.

Book tickets at - https://ThomasMacDonaghHedgeSchool2024.eventbrite.ie .