Patrick O'Sullivan, ed., The Meaning of the Famine, 1997

At the beginning of this year, 2014 - as part of tidying up projects - I put a lot of my earlier work on this free MediaFire cloud storage site...

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/ooj5btdttc9y4/Documents

It has to be a free site - there isn't a budget to do anything else.  It has worked well.

MediaFire gives me a simple download counter - this does not count people who read the texts online, without downloading.  But it is a measure.  And soon we will reach 2000 downloads since this project began, in January 2014.

MediaFire also offer a more complex statistics package, as part of the paid for, premium upgrade.  But...  there isn't a budget...

Pity really, because over the past weeks there has been an odd little anomaly in the download patterns.  Within a few weeks there have been some 200 downloads of one complete book, Patrick O'Sullivan, ed., The Meaning of the Famine, 1997, Volume 6 of The Irish World Wide.  An odd little glitch and difficult to explain.  Some sort of mad robot harvester? - the patterns do not fit.  A seminar group, somewhere, looking at the research literature on the Irish Famine? - the numbers look too big.

The book is in my thoughts because I am in the middle of writing a review article for Irish Historical Studies, about recent developments in the study of the Irish Diaspora, looking especially at the ways in which the Famine has become a central theme.  I need not go over here the problems I had bringing together a volume called The Meaning of the Famine, in 1997 - nor the criticism that my book has faced since then.

I recently read an article by Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley - the historian of famine in China...

Article (Edgerton-Tarpley2013Tough) 

Edgerton-Tarpley, K. 

Tough Choices: Grappling with Famine in Qing China, the British Empire, and Beyond. 

Journal of World History, 2013, 24, 135 - 176

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/journal_of_world_history/v024/24.1.edgerton-tarpley.html

It is a comparative piece, which makes excellent use of my own chapter in The Meaning of the Famine (co-written with Richard Lucking) - my chapter made a good stab at unpacking the coded language of the British mandarin class.

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~histweb/faculty_and_staff/faculty_bios/k_edgerton-tarpley.htm

REPORT: SUPPORTING THE NEXT GENERATION OF THE IRISH DIASPORA

Just come to my attention...

SUPPORTING THE NEXT GENERATION OF THE IRISH DIASPORA
Report of a Research Project Funded by the Emigrant
Support Programme, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade


The Clinton Institute for American Studies is pleased to announce the publication of exciting new research on the topic of the Irish diaspora. More and more, states are seeking to understand the form and functions of diasporas and engage with them to provide new opportunities for knowledge transfer, tourism, conflict resolution, and many other matters. In the context of these emerging interests, Ireland has some prominence as a small nation with an over seventy million strong diaspora. The Irish government, through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), is currently undertaking a comprehnsive review of its engagement with the Irish abroad. This research report scopes the changing profile and needs of Irish emigrants in relation to the Government's strategic objectives in engaging with the diaspora, particularly through the ESP, and considers how best these objectives may continue to be met. 

http://www.ucdclinton.ie/

http://ucdclinton.ie/userfiles/file/Supporting%20the%20Next%20Generation%20of%20the%20Irish%20Diaspora.pdf

TechReport (Kennedy2014SUPPORTING)
Kennedy, L.; Lyes, M. & Russell, M.
SUPPORTING THE NEXT GENERATION OF THE IRISH DIASPORA: Report of a Research Project Funded by the Emigrant Support Programme, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Clinton Institute, University College Dublin, 2014

Gargrave Autoharp Festival, Photographs

There is a small selection of photographs by Andrew Milne, Official Photographer, Gargrave Autoharp Festival, here...

www.yourdemos.co.uk/gaf_2014.htm

Gargrave Autoharp Festival 2014- Arts Council success...

We heard last week that my bid to the Arts Council for funding for the Gargrave Autoharp Festival 2014 was successful. So, success there for the second year in a row.

This is a vote of confidence in UK Autoharps, the Gargrave Village Hall, the Gargrave community and the autoharp community. And certainly gives us a bit of wriggle room. 

There were more complications this year - the application process demanded that there be a lot more information and structure in place. So that the application had to go in much later in the planning process.

We are asked to use the Grant for the Arts logo, as last year...

http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/information-funded-organisations/grant-award-logo-and-guidelines/funding-logos/grants-arts/

I have put the revised versions of the Festival Poster - revised to include the Arts Council logo - on the web in two places, Dropbox and Google Drive. If anyone has problems using these, do contact me, and we will try to think of something else...

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/l6mqp0x54jdlovx/AAAtD4zxf9too8CVLmi7HOp6a/Photos/2014%20Gargrave%20Autoharp%20Festival%20POSTER

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B_p56uOgSVJQZHliZlFPVmpnVFU&usp=sharing

Our thanks to Andrew Milne, of Elemental Ideas, for so promptly revising the Poster...

http://www.elemental-ideas.co.uk/

Patrick O'Sullivan

The Fable of the Autoharp

The Fable of the Autoharp

The Fable of the Autoharp in the North (what I wrote) appeared in the recent issue of Autoharp Notes, edited by Judy Splinder.

The Fable has now also appeared in the latest issue, May 2014, of the Gargrave Village magazine, which has a new and pretty web site...

http://www.gargravemag.co.uk/

Click on the image on the right, Gargrave and Coniston Cold Parish Magazine, and you get a pdf.

The Fable of the Autoharp is on pages 12 and 13.

The Fable was discussed at the Gargrave artists' group, and is illustrated by two Gargrave artists, Jo Ball and Alan Poxon.

(Amongst Alan Poxon's other jobs - he makes kites...)

If you read the rest of the Gargrave and Coniston Cold Parish Magazine you will see what I mean when I say that we are shoehorned into a busy community centre.  Good or bad, depending on your point of view - but it certainly makes the autoharp visible...

Patrick Couton will appear at the Gargrave Autoharp Festival

Patrick Couton will appear at the Gargrave Autoharp Festival, 27, 28, 29 June 2014, Yorkshire, England...

Patrick Couton is the French jazz autoharper - it is a quite different style and approach to the instrument.  Patrick will perform at our Grand Concert on Saturday June 28, will play at our pub music sessions - and will generally be a genial musical presence.

The following weekend, the first weekend in July, the Tour de France starts in Yorkshire - and it seemed sensible to exploit the French connection and give the autoharp some international media attention with this invitation to Patrick Couton.  A local Leeds & Liverpool Canal boat club is sponsoring Patrick Couton's journey to Gargrave...

(Patrick Couton's other job is that he translates Terry Pratchett into French.)

Our other star performers in Gargrave are Mike Fenton, Heather Farrell-Roberts, Nadine White and Ian White, and Guy Padfield.

Patrick O'Sullivan

http://festival.yorkshire.com/events/gargrave-autoharp-festival

http://www.ukautoharps.org.uk/

Emigrant Letters, Symposium and Exhibition, Coventry University May 19-21, 2014

You are invited to ‘Leaving, crossing, arriving’ 19-21 May 2014, funded by the AHRC as part of our ‘Digitising experiences of migration’ project to connect migrant letter collections around the world - see http://lettersofmigration.blogspot.fr.

Events include:

A half-day symposium at Coventry University on Monday 19th May 2pm-5pm), to discuss the outcomes of the project, the digitisation and mark up of historical correspondence, and the importance/challenges/opportunities of interdisciplinary research in diaspora studies (see: http://lettersofmigration.blogspot.fr/p/blog-page.html).

A project exhibition at the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery, Coventry, including activities and lunchtime concerts with Joe O’Donnell – 1.00-2.00 on May 19th and 21st (see: http://lettersofmigration.blogspot.fr/p/symposium-and-exhibition.html).

‘News from Home: Themes and Functions of Letters to Irish Emigrants in Colonial Australia’ on May 19th, 6.30pm - 7.30pm – a talk at Coventry University by David Fitzpatrick, Professor of Modern History at Trinity College, Dublin and author of Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia.

To find book a place in the symposium and/or at the evening talk, see http://www.coventry.ac.uk/leavingcrossingarriving.

---------------------

______________

Emma Moreton

Dept. English and Languages

Coventry University

Priory Street

Coventry CV1 5FB

e: emma.moreton@coventry.ac.uk

s: emma-l-moreton

b: www.lettersofmigration.blogspot.com

b: cuba.coventry.ac.uk/correspondence_corpora