Hey Gang! Welcome to Weird Web Radio! It’s Season Nine!!! We are kicking off this season with Althaea Sebastiani talking about Witchcraft, spirits, spirit encounters, seances, animism, and more! We also get into her new book Alive with Spirits: The Path and Practice of Animistic Witchcraft. I hope you enjoy the show! Althaea’s BIO: Althaea Sebastia…

Hey Gang! Welcome to Weird Web Radio! It's Season Nine!!! We are kicking off this season with Althaea Sebastiani talking about Witchcraft, spirits, spirit encounters, seances, animism, and more! We also get into her new book Alive with Spirits: The Path and Practice of Animistic Witchcraft. I hope you enjoy the show! Althaea's BIO: Althaea Sebastia…

Feminist Discourse in Irish Literature: Gender and Power in Louise O'Neill's Young Adult Fiction (Routledge, 2022) addresses the role of YA Irish literature in responding and contributing to some the most controversial and contemporary issues in today's modern society: gender, and conflicting views of power, sexism, and consent. This volume provide…

From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I (Oxford UP, 2024) tells the story of the troubled accession of England's first Scottish king and the transition from the age of the Tudors to the age of the Stuarts at the dawn of the seventeenth century. From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I tells the…

In the city of New York from the 1930s to the 1990s, Irish attorney Paul O’Dwyer was a fierce and enduring presence in courtrooms, on picket lines, and in contests for elected office. He was forever the advocate of the downtrodden and marginalized, fighting not only for Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland but for workers, radicals, Jews, and Africa…

Dr. Aideen O'Shaughnessy is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Lincoln. She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge, an MA in Gender Studies Research from Utrecht University and a BA in Sociology and French at Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses on gender, health, and social movements and she is particularl…

Addressing questions about what it means to be ‘British’ or ‘Irish’ in the twenty-first century, Migrants, Immigration and Diversity in Twentieth-Century Northern Ireland: British, Irish or “Other”? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) focuses its attention on twentieth-century Northern Ireland and demonstrates how the fragmented and disparate nature of nati…

Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly made time back in 2023 for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and for John Plotz in his role as host for our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue. In this conversation, she reads from The Wren, The Wren and says we don’t yet know if the web has become a space of exposure or of authority. We can be su…

Mary McAuliffe is a historian and lecturer in Gender Studies at UCD. Her latest publications include (is The Diaries of Kathleen Lynn co-authored with Harriet Wheelock) and Margaret Skinnider; a biography (UCD Press,2020). Throughout the Decade of Centenaries 2012-2023 she has been conducting extensive research on the experiences of women during th…

The history of monasticism in early Ireland is dominated by its flourishing during the sixth and seventh centuries, a period dominated by Columba of Iona and Columbanus of Bobbio, and later by the 'reform' spearheaded by Malachy of Armagh during the twelfth century. But what of monasticism in Ireland during the intervening period? Regarded as diffe…

The practice of Partition understood as the physical division of territory along ethno-religious lines into separate nation-states is often regarded as a successful political "solution" to ethnic conflict. In their edited volume Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford University Press, 2019), Laura …

Welcome to Weird Web Radio! This episode features the return of Luxa Strata! It’s been a few years since Luxa was on the show so it is an incredible honor to have her back! Luxa is the host of one of my personal favorite shows, The Lux Occult Podcast. As I say in this episode, each one of her episodes come together like a cool old school variety ra…

Welcome to Weird Web Radio! This episode features the return of Luxa Strata! It's been a few years since Luxa was on the show so it is an incredible honor to have her back! Luxa is the host of one of my personal favorite shows, The Lux Occult Podcast. As I say in this episode, each one of her episodes come together like a cool old school variety ra…

Hollywood is haunted by the ghost of playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde. Wilde in the Dream Factory: Decadence and the American Movies (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Kate Hext is the story of his haunting, told for the first time. Set within the rich evolving context of how the American entertainment industry became cinema, and how cinema …

In The Puppet Masters: How MI6 Masterminded Ireland's Deepest State Crisis (Mercier Press, 2024), David Burke uncovers the clandestine activities of Patrick Crinnion, a Garda intelligence officer who secretly served MI6 during the early years of the Troubles. As the Garda Síochána launched a manhunt for the Chief-of-Staff of the IRA, Crinnion found…

Paige Reynolds's book Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode (Oxford UP, 2023) examines the tangled relationship between contemporary Irish women writers and literary modernism. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Irish women's fiction has drawn widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, with a sur…

Welcome to Weird Web Radio! This is Episode 100! This is so exciting and humbling at the same time! YOU – the listeners – have made all of this possible and worth the time and effort! Thank you all so much for your continued support! This episode features Paige Zaferiou! Paige was my very first guest all the way back on Episode 1. That means this w…

Welcome to Weird Web Radio! This is Episode 100! This is so exciting and humbling at the same time! YOU - the listeners - have made all of this possible and worth the time and effort! Thank you all so much for your continued support! This episode features Paige Zaferiou! Paige was my very first guest all the way back on Episode 1. That means this w…

Shahmima Akhtar is a historian of race, migration and empire and an assistant professor of Black and Asian British History at the University of Birmingham. She previously worked at the Royal Historical Society to improve BME representation in UK History, whether working with schools and the curriculum, cultural institutions, community groups or oth…

In this interview, he discusses his new book The Land War in Ireland: Famine, Philanthropy and Moonlighting (Cork UP, 2023), a collection of interconnected essays on different aspects of agrarian agitation in 1870s and 1880s Ireland. The Land War in Ireland addresses perceived lacunae in the historiography of the Land War in late nineteenth-century…

Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530-1700: Suppression, Migration and Reintegration (Boydell & Brewer, 2022) by Dr. Bronagh Ann McShane investigates the impact of the dissolution of the monasteries on women religious and examines their survival in the following decades, showing how, despite the state's official proscription of vocation living, rel…

Cian T. McMahon is an associate professor of history at University of Nevada-Las Vegas. His research focuses on the history and identity of the Irish Diaspora. In this interview, he discusses his new book The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine (NYU Press, 2021), a social history of migration during the Great Irish Fami…

Welcome to Weird Web Radio! This episode features a very special guest! A real interview with a Witch from the late 1900’s! Thorn Mooney! Thorn and I cover everything from the Paranormal, her dissertation research, religions, mental health, Witchcraft, virtues, community, and plenty of spots where we make light of something for a laugh! Did I menti…

Welcome to Weird Web Radio! This episode features a very special guest! A real interview with a Witch from the late 1900's! Thorn Mooney! Thorn and I cover everything from the Paranormal, her dissertation research, religions, mental health, Witchcraft, virtues, community, and plenty of spots where we make light of something for a laugh! Did I menti…

In this interview, Dr. Nicholas Taylor-Collins discusses his most recent book Shakespeare, Memory, and Modern Irish Literature (Manchester UP, 2022). Shakespeare, Memory, and Modern Irish Literature explores the intertextual connections between early modern English and modern Irish literature. Characterizing the relationship as 'dismemorial', the b…

Marc McMenamin's Ireland's Secret War: Dan Bryan, G2 and the Lost Tapes that Reveal The Hunt for Ireland's Nazi Spies (Gill Books, 2022) is a thrilling account of the true extent of Irish-Allied co-operation during World War II. It reveals strategic Nazi intentions for Ireland and the real role of leading government figures of the time, placing Dan…

Marion Casey is a professor at Glucksman Ireland House at New York University where she also serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies. She has published widely on various aspects of Irish-American history and in 2006 she co-edited Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States with Joe Lee. In this interview, s…

Welcome to Weird Web Radio! Mat Auryn is BACK! And we have great news. Mat has a new book coming out in the fall of 2024! This one is all about becoming the best psychic tarot reader you can be! The book is The Psychic Art of Tarot: Opening Your Inner Eye for More Insightful Readings (Mat Auryn’s Psychic Witch, 3). This whole conversation was a lot…

Welcome to Weird Web Radio! Mat Auryn is BACK! And we have great news. Mat has a new book coming out in the fall of 2024! This one is all about becoming the best psychic tarot reader you can be! The book is The Psychic Art of Tarot: Opening Your Inner Eye for More Insightful Readings (Mat Auryn's Psychic Witch, 3). This whole conversation was a lot…

J.N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism (Oxford University Press, 2024) describes the work of one of the most important and under-studied theologians in the history of Christianity. In the late 1820s, John Nelson Darby abandoned his career as a priest in the Church of Ireland to become one of the principal leaders of a small but rapidly growi…

Exploring both his life and legacy, the first full biography of William Sharman Crawford, the leading agrarian and democratic radical active in Ulster politics between the early 1830s and the 1850s. This biography places the life and ideas of William Sharman Crawford in the context of the development of radical liberalism in Ulster province over a …

St. Brigid is the earliest and best-known of the female saints of Ireland. In the generation after St. Patrick, she established a monastery for men and women at Kildare which became one of the most powerful and influential centres of the Church in early Ireland. The stories of Brigid's life and deeds survive in several early sources, but the most i…

The Irish and the Jews are two of the classic outliers of modern Europe. Both struggled with their lack of formal political sovereignty in the nineteenth-century. Simultaneously European and not European, both endured a bifurcated status, perceived as racially inferior and yet also seen as a natural part of the European landscape. Both sought to de…

Seamus O’Malley is an associate professor at Yeshiva University. His first book was Making History New: Modernism and Historical Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2015). He has co-edited three volumes, one of essays on Ford Madox Ford and America (Rodopi, 2010), a research companion to Ford (Routledge, 2018) and a volume of essays on the cartooni…

Coins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, pigs. Each of these objects were ubiquitous in the premodern cultural representation of the Irish. Through case studies of these five objects, Colleen Taylor’s new monograph Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830 (Oxford University Press, 2024) recovers the sometimes-oppress…

Famine brought ruin to the Irish countryside in the nineteenth century. In response, people around the world and from myriad social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds became involved in Irish famine relief. They included enslaved Black people in Virginia, poor tenant farmers in rural New York, and members of the Cherokee and Choctaw nations, as wel…

The story of Charles Stewart Parnell, one of the greatest Irish leaders of the nineteenth century and also one of the most renowned figures of the 1880s on the international stage, and John Dillon, the most celebrated, but also the most neglected, of Parnell's lieutenants. As Paul Bew shows in Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics: Judging Dillon and …

Welcome to Weird Web Radio! This episode features Diana Helmuth! Diana spent a year exploring Witchcraft and documented her journey for all of us to enjoy! This is exactly the kind of book I wish we had more of in Paganism and the Occult. Her story telling skills are excellent. I hope you enjoy the honesty she exhibits all along the way. The good, …

Welcome to Weird Web Radio! This episode features Diana Helmuth! Diana spent a year exploring Witchcraft and documented her journey for all of us to enjoy! This is exactly the kind of book I wish we had more of in Paganism and the Occult. Her story telling skills are excellent. I hope you enjoy the honesty she exhibits all along the way. The good, …

Francis O’Neill (1848–1936) was a Chicago police officer and a folk music collector. Michael O’Malley connects these two seemingly unrelated activities in his biography of O’Neill, The Beat Cop: Chicago’s Chief O’Neill and the Creation of Irish Music (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Born in Ireland in 1848, O’Neill emigrated to the United State…

The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (Ohio State UP, 2023) dwells on the literal afterlives of history. Reading the reanimated corpses—monstrous, metaphorical, and occasionally electrified—that Mary Shelley, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and others bring …

It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we discuss Prophet Song (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023), Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize winning novel about a totalitarian regime coming to power in Ireland. We discuss the novel’s theorization of individual rights and political power, its success in depicting a family’s unraveling and its failures in telling a broader, …

Welcome to Weird Web Radio! It’s the long overdue return of Laura Tempest Zakroff! Tempest is always fun to talk to about all things. We covered everything from Sigils to Modern Traditional Witchcraft. We got into folklore, stories, art, and all the ways these things intersect with our magical lives. Laura’s BIO: Laura Tempest Zakroff (she/they) is…

Welcome to Weird Web Radio! It's the long overdue return of Laura Tempest Zakroff! Tempest is always fun to talk to about all things. We covered everything from Sigils to Modern Traditional Witchcraft. We got into folklore, stories, art, and all the ways these things intersect with our magical lives. Laura's BIO: Laura Tempest Zakroff (she/they) is…

Empire and imperial frameworks, policies, practices, and cultures have shaped the history of the world for the last two millennia. It is nation states that are the blip on the historical horizon. Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Jane Ohlmeyer re-examines empire as process—and Ire…

In A United Ireland: Why Unification in Inevitable and How It Will Come About (Biteback Publishing, 2017), Kevin Meagher argues that a reasoned, pragmatic discussion about the most basic questions regarding Britain's relationship with its nearest neighbour is now long overdue, and questions that have remained unasked, and perhaps unthought, must no…

Patrick R. O'Malley's book The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy Across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century (U Virginia Press, 2023) analyzes the role of Irishness in nineteenth-century constructions of race and racialization, both in the British Isles and in the United States. Focusing on the years immediately preceding the Ame…

Huw Bennett is a Reader in International Relations at Cardiff Unviersity. He specializes in strategic studies, the history of war, and intelligence studies, and work on both historical and contemporary issues concerning the use of military power. His research focuses on the experiences of the British Army since 1945, in the contexts of British poli…

Despite theories to the contrary, religious nationalism, and the use of religion to determine membership in the national community, has continued to play a role in processes of identification in societies all around the globe ... and such processes seems likely to continue to structure the ways in which communities view themselves even in today’s g…

Welcome to Weird Web Radio! Guess who’s back! Back Again! AIDAN WACHTER is back! Tell your friends! Aidan’s back! Aidan’s back! Aidan’s back! Any fan of this show knows by now that Aidan Wachter is not only a common guest on here, but more importantly, Aidan is among those rare friends I count as found family. When he warned me a long while ago tha…