Irish Studies: Legacies and Futures (Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia)

Irish Studies: Legacies and Futures Special Issue 3/2026  Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia   Guest editors Brian Ó Conchubhair (University of Notre Dame) boconch1@nd.edu  Erika Mihálycsa (Babeș-Bolyai University) erika.mihalycsa@ubbcluj.ro   — In December 2024, a group of international Irish Studies scholars gathered in Cluj, Romania to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Babeș-Bolyai University’s MA programme in Irish Studies – to this day the only postgraduate degree offering a cross-disciplinary perspective on Irish culture, literature and history at any Central/Eastern European university. When the MA programme, initially designed as Irish Writing and Its Contexts, was created in 1999, Ireland and Central/Eastern Europe were entering a decade of hopes for deeper European integration and democratisation in their regions and worldwide. It was a time that witnessed the rapid globalising of Irish Studies, backed by Celtic Tiger optimism. However, that decade would also bring in far-reaching changes that prompted, in our domains of knowledge and across the humanities, a thorough overhaul of ways of seeing and framing difference. At the start of the Cluj ISMA, global Irish Studies was dominated by postcolonial rehistoricising and recontextualising approaches pivoting on rigorous archival studies. Importantly, the early 2000s saw a definite decline in the understanding of literary [...]