Joint Editor, Special Issue: Ireland in Transition: Visual Culture, Technology, and Modernity in the Free State

This special issue of Éire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies edited by Roisín Kennedy and Elaine Sisson, advances scholarship on Irish modernism by examining how the nation’s visual culture engaged with and responded to modernist ideas during the pivotal years from 1922 to 1939. Building on discussions from the symposium “Encounters and Collaborations: Ireland and the World. Visual Culture and the Nation State, 1922–39,” held at University College Dublin in January 2022, the collection reconsiders the city as a dynamic arena for sociopolitical transformation, cultural exchange, and technological innovation. Despite the persistent association of Irish identity with rural imagery in twentieth-century literary and political discourse, this issue foregrounds the underappreciated complexities and contributions of Ireland’s urban environments.

Drawing on recent scholarship that challenges the dominance of rural narratives, the articles in this volume interrogate the duality of tradition and innovation, as well as the tension between rural and metropolitan life, to reveal the dual-facing nature of Irish modernism. Through analyses spanning architecture, art, photography, newspapers, and film, contributors demonstrate how the newly established Free State simultaneously drew on shared traditions and embraced the technologies of modernity to assert a forward-looking national identity. Together, these studies illuminate the visual strategies Ireland employed to negotiate continuity and change, and reposition the nation within international currents of modernist thought and culture.