Seeing Ireland

Ciaran O'Neill is associate professor of nineteenth-century history at Trinity College Dublin. He is the co-director of the Trinity Colonial Legacies Project. His most recent books include Power and Powerlessness in Union Ireland and Ireland, Slavery and the Caribbean (co-edited with Finola O'Kane).Billy Shortall is a research fellow at the Irish Art Research Centre, Trinity College Dublin, and co-developed a virtual re-creation and art exhibition of the 1922 Paris World Congress (www.seeingireland.ie). He recently contributed chapters to the Routledge Companion to Irish Art and Hilary Heron, A Retrospective.

"A superb collection of essays, this book makes a highly original contribution to the study of Irish art." —Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, author of Exotic Dreams in the Science of the Volksgeist"This is a work of high scholarly exigency, which will be precious to anyone who wants to know more about the role played by visual art in the definition of a national identity or to find out more about Ireland's greatest post-independence artists." —Sylvie Mikowski, co-editor of The Book in Ireland"This is the first Irish art history book to set out all the disparate discourses and conflicting claims about national identities aired by politicians, artists, writers, and cultural thinkers at the Irish Race Congress in Paris in 1922 and to examine how contemporary Ireland deals with those expectations in a very different context." —Catherine Marshall, co-editor of Art and Architecture of Ireland

• Foreword by Professor Joe Cleary (Yale)Introduction: Irish Art in Transnational Context, Billy Shortall and Ciaran O'Neill (TCD)1. The International Treaty debates: the Irish Race Congress, Darragh Gannon (UCD)2. Exhibiting Ireland. Art and culture on show in Paris 1922, Billy Shortall. (TCD)3. Dublin, London, Paris: Exhibition Culture and the Shaping of an Irish School, 1842 – 1922, Kathryn Milligan (UCD)4.The Irish Race Congress of 1922 and the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement, Paul Larmour (QUB)5. 'Searching for Truth' From realism to materiality: Visual art in the Post-independent Irish state, Roisin Kennedy (UCD)6. Illustrating the Saorstát Éireann Irish Free State Official Handbook: meaning, making and materiality, Angela Griffith (TCD)7. Artwashing the Nation Brand: the instrumentalization of art during the Decade of Centenaries in Ireland 2012-23, Ciaran O'Neill (TCD)8. A conversation about arts and culture during the Decade of Centenaries, Vera Klute and Martina Devlin