Franco-Irish Studies

The initial Franco-Irish conference in March 2003 was hosted in what was then IT Tallaght and was hailed as an excellent initiative. The collection France-Ireland: Anatomy of a Relationship, edited by Eamon Maher and Grace Neville and with a Preface by Professor Joe Lee, came out the following year and contained extended versions of the papers given at the conference. As a result of the success of this undertaking, it was decided to set up a National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies, and then an ancillary organisation, AFIS (Association of Franco-Irish Studies), which organised conferences and other activities. AFIS has published 18 books to date, most of them appearing in the Studies in Franco-Irish Relations series with Peter Lang.

Franco-Irish Studies plays a significant role in the newly established Centre of Irish Studies, as it was the NCFIS (National Centre of Franco-Irish Studies) that brought together the various specialist areas at the heart of the Centre such as Food Studies, comparative literature, Catholic identity, fictional representations of Catholicism, history, Beverage Studies. Indeed, the NCFIS was very much to the fore in the establishment of the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium and in the publication of a collection, ‘Tickling the Palate’: Gastronomy in Irish Literature and Culture, edited by Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Eamon Maher, which is freely available online at the link above. The NCFIS has now been subsumed into the new TU Dublin Centre for Irish Studies, but AFIS continues to be a vibrant part of the centre's multi-disciplinary offering.