Sean Moore, assistant professor of English, was one of two faculty members the Center for International Engagement named as a recipient of a $2,000 Faculty International Engagement Award funded by the VPAA for 2005-06. Moore just returned from his travels to Germany and Ireland where he attended a series of meetings and continued his research on literature of the 18th century as it relates to the culture and political economy of that time. Below is his report of his trip.

CIE’s Grant to Expand International Engagement enabled me to do just that: reconnect this summer with colleagues from around the world in ongoing scholarly working groups and conferences. I first flew to Düsseldorf via Dublin for the “Fifth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift,” a seminar held every five years at the Ehrenpreis Centre for Swift Studies at the Westfälisce Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany. Despite distraction by World Cup of Soccer fans in the country for that event, I heard the lectures of Swift experts from as far away as Russia and Australia and was able to get feedback on my own presentation, “Swift and Ireland’s Revenue.” The highlight of the week was dinner at Nordkirchen Palace, an aristocratic estate built in the medieval period, renovated in Enlightenment style in the eighteenth century, and now used by the government as a college for tax officials. Given that U. Münster has gathered the largest collection of primary and secondary sources on Swift in the world, a few participants stayed on after the seminar to perform research.

Next, I attended the second meeting of “Money, Power, and Prose,” a colloquium discussing eighteenth-century public finance reconvened at the Armagh Public (Robinson) and Cardinal O’Fíaích libraries and partly sponsored by the Primates of Ireland’s Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church of Ireland. This meeting featured historians, economists, and literary critics exploring the relationship between national debts, war, and propaganda in the period . My paper, “Edmund Burke’s Financial Publicity,” investigated how an Anglo-Irish intellectual whose first work was on aesthetics could become a Member of Parliament and a publicist encouraging investment in British war bonds. The libraries themselves featured a number of rare books, including an early edition of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels with marginal notations in the author’s own hand (photo 3). Also, the Dean of St. Patrick’s Anglican Cathedral organized a rare treat: the performance of an evensong religious ceremony as it was held in the eighteenth century. This mass featured songs based on the seventh chapter of the Second Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, Job 13, Psalm 48, and Psalm 49. Unexpectedly, on our last night in town we were treated to a parade celebrating late seventeenth- century victories of a Protestant religious minority and Dutch king over a Catholic majority and acknowledged native leader of the country. We there in what is called “Marching Season,” when the Orange Order, a Protestant fraternal organization dedicated to the memory of those battles, parades through Catholic neighborhoods to remind the occupants of their right to govern them.

After researching in the libraries of Trinity College, Dublin, I again went to Northern Ireland, this time for the Eighteenth Century Ireland Society annual meeting at the University of Ulster, Magee Campus, in Derry. After delivering my paper, “The Literature of the 1730s,” I toured the fortified walls of the city, famous because Londonderry’s Protestant “Apprentice Boys” of the late seventeenth century defended the gates against the native leader and the army of the majority. The unresolved conflict of that period is still registered in graffiti (photo 4). In fact, Northern Irelanders now wave either the Israeli or Palestinian flags in front of their homes depending on whether they regard themselves as the imperialists or the colonized, respectively. For these reasons, the British government has erected infrared camera and microphone towers in the city, from which they can seen and hear everything said in any house on either side of this four-century old feud. On the last day of the conference, our host took a few of us on a tour of Downhill, a ruined palace on the Atlantic coast originally built by a wealthy and eccentric Church of Ireland bishop in the late eighteenth century (photo 5).

I could not have attended these events without the help of CIE and additional support from the English department and the College of Liberal Arts Faculty Summer Research Stipend. It is my hope that what I have learned will be useful not only in my research, but for students studying abroad and the UNH community at large.