Margaret Coffey
Margaret Coffey
@mcoffey.bsky.social
PhD arguing Ireland/Irish dimensions of early Port Phillip District (Victoria) settler colonialism. As interested in Irish contexts as in Australian. Former ABC Radio National Broadcaster/Programme-Maker.
Great story. Reminder of how sharply this particular colonial legacy bore upon people into the 20th century. Yet MacCarthy's 1992 history of the TCD Estates was written as if he never imagined it being read by former tenants' children/grandchildren, so unexamined was the language of his narrative.
September 16, 2025 at 5:43 AM
Reposted by Margaret Coffey
In 1843 71,000 people lived on the Trinity College Estates which covered 190,000 acres or 1.25% of Ireland. Most of them originated as land grants made as part of the colonial plantation of Munster and Ulster. The history of these lands and the people who lived on them is part of the TCD story
September 15, 2025 at 1:50 PM
Reading in Australia (a land of Indigenous languages loss at scale and contemporary recovery efforts) of language loss in Kerry and what that tells us about nineteenth- and even twentieth-century Kerry emigrants: tintean.org.au/2025/06/10/k...
Kerry Folklore: Na Cruacha Dubha agus Paróiste na Tuaithe: Seanchas agus Scéalaithe
Little of that inheritance was recorded in the new country, but books like this give a vivid impression of what came and what was lost. The Australian links in the material presented here are inter…
tintean.org.au
June 18, 2025 at 11:49 PM
Reposted by Margaret Coffey
In Sydney tomorrow afternoon? Head along to the Chau Chak Wing Museum for a public lecture, "Indigeneity, Mobility and the Age of Revolution", by Princeton historian Elizabeth Ellis! All the details are here: historymatters.sydney.edu.au/2025/05/indi...
Indigeneity, Mobility and the Age of Revolutions - History Matters
Public Lecture and Symposium A Symposium Hosted by the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame, and the History Department of the University of Sydney. Symposium…
historymatters.sydney.edu.au
June 2, 2025 at 1:01 AM
Reposted by Margaret Coffey
"Trump, Musk, and Vance are accelerating the collapse of institutions that have characterized the Western world for more than two centuries."

@massimofaggioli.bsky.social: 'Catholic Universities in the Crosshairs?'
www.commonwealmagazine.org/education-ca...
Catholic Universities in the Crosshairs?
What response can Catholic universities muster to Trump's attack on higher education?
www.commonwealmagazine.org
March 11, 2025 at 11:54 AM
How many have photos like that in their family albums! It's an insightful and also moving meditation on writing history, and about "trueing up" that writing.
History writing as speculative biography, a micro history of one man of the “unconsidered people”; the Irish in 1960s England

My own Dad worked as a bus conductor in 1950s London. He said on the way back to the depot, he’d hang out the back singing rebel songs 🙂

academic.oup.com/hwj/article/...
The Death of an Irishman: A Speculative Biography
In his essay ‘Inventories and Undoings’, the short-story writer Charles Baxter argues that ‘something in the nature of fiction loves inventories and lists’
academic.oup.com
March 12, 2025 at 2:45 AM
Reposted by Margaret Coffey
“I do not admit…that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race [has] come in and taken their place.”
February 5, 2025 at 12:12 PM
Reposted by Margaret Coffey
Re-reading Weil’s The Iliad, or The Poem of Force
October 25, 2023 at 11:58 AM