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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello and welcome to New Books Network. My name is Aidan Beebe. I'm one of the hosts of this channel. Today we're talking to Kevin Riley, President Emerson and Regent professor with University of Wisconsin System where he served as president from 2004 to 2013. Under his leadership at the university, enrollment grew to 182,000, an all time high, and sponsored research continued to expand beyond $1 billion annually. Kevin grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx and went on to earn his BA at the University of Notre Dame and his MA and PhD from the University of Minnesota, all in English. He has published on higher education policy and accreditation, as well as autobiography and biography and in the field of Irish studies. His new book, Gregory Ghost's Haunting Irishness is the basis of our conversation today. Professor Riley has taught the James Joyce course at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and done interview programs for Wisconsin Public Radio on Joyce Yates, Lady Gregory and seamus Heaney. In 2009, he was named one of the top Irish American educators by Irish Voice Weekly. A committed internationalist, he has served on the Higher Education Working Group on Global Issues for the Council on Foreign Relations. He is currently Senior Fellow with the association of Governing Bodies of Universities and Colleges and Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of the Irish American Cultural Institute. Kevin, thanks so much for joining us.
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Happy to be here, Aidan.
B
Thank you. So maybe if we jump straight into talking about this very prestigious background you have and where your work fits in with this larger thrust of your academic work.
A
Sure. Well, to go back a little bit, I earned my PhD in 1979 with a dissertation on Irish literary autobiography. And back then, much like now, I'm afraid there weren't a lot of wonderful tenure track positions teaching Irish studies or English at universities. And I was determined not to take a job teaching five sections of freshman composition each semester on a one year contract. So I said let me look at some other options. So I did go into university administration early on, but all along I kind of kept hold of my interest in literature and Irish studies by my fingertips fingernails, publishing some articles, giving some talks and presentations along the way. And then I did, as you mentioned, have the opportunity to teach the James Joyce course here at the University of Wisconsin while I was president with actually a one of the original sort of James Joyce scholars in America. Phil Herring, who was a retired English professor here, then came out of retirement. We taught the course together. Phil had has the title of one of his articles is one of the great titles about Ulysses, which is the Bedstead fastness of Molly Bloom. So, at any rate, we had a great time teaching that with Phil. And then I started thinking when I was leaving the job of the presidency, around 2014, about this book. And here we are, 1112 years later, and it's finally come out. I was doing a lot of other things along the way, but I always felt, well, I was an administrator, kind of like I was a displaced faculty member. And so keeping up with my interest in Irish studies and scholarship let me feel a little displaced. And as you and other faculty members would know, my teaching the Joyce course while I was president earned me a little deposit of credit with the faculty senators. So that was a good thing as well.
B
So maybe if we could talk a little bit about the book itself, then you describe it as a ghost story. Can you tell us what you mean by that? Because that's obviously a term that could have multiple different meanings.
A
Sure, sure. So the story has. Or the book has 10 chapters. There are nine speakers. Lady Augusta Gregory, the main character, her ghost, has the first chapter in the last. They're all interior monologues by Lady Gregory and her friends, lovers, colleagues, family members. And they're interviewing in a ghostly state. By that, I mean they can see back over their lives, and they can see forward to what happened after they died. So they have this sort of preternatural knowledge of what's gone on after their lives. And they're all movers and shakers in one way or another in the development of modern Ireland. And they don't speak directly to each other because these are interior, ghostly, interior monologues, as I call them. But they certainly mention each other and are wondering about each other's influences on all of this. So this was kind of a fun way to think about doing this. They're sort of competing and complementary voices, maybe not entirely creditable, but they're sort of chatty Irish ghosts that. That get to have some fun thinking about what happened and what didn't happen after they. They died based on what they did in their own lives and on their relationships with each other. So, you know, I hope that kind of a. I guess you could describe it as creative nonfiction approach, let's say. I hope that kind of gets the reader into the inside of what these interesting figures in the development of modern Ireland were thinking and also gives readers a good sense of how this was a complicated communal effort with fits and starts all along the way and with, you know, major tensions among them. One of them being. We'll talk about all this later. I know the Anglo Irish versus the Celtic, Catholic, Irish distinction. The class distinctions that were certainly very apparent between a large estate Irish, Anglo, Irish, Protestant landholder like Lady Gregory, and the Catholic tenant farmers who worked that estate. So a lot of that I can fool around with in kind of recreating what I'll call the cast of mind of these characters. As I see it, I didn't make anything up here about them. It's all based on what they wrote or credible sources wrote about them. So it's a little bit like a portrait gallery in a way that you might see in an art gallery of people who are all involved in a movement at the same time and thinking you're looking at them, but also thinking about what's inside their heads. What would they say about each other if they had the opportunity to do that? So that was kind of the basis for my fooling with this admittedly different kind of genre related to scholarship, but certainly not scholarship in that classic sense.
B
Yeah, I mean, I was going to ask you a little bit about that. Even the way you're describing it now, it seems almost similar to something like Martin o' Kayen's famous book Crane A Killer, where, you know, dead people under the ground are basically narrating their. Their anger at the living world. Or even there's a. I remember once reading a transcript of a broadcast that George Orwell made during World War II where he imagines himself talking to Jonathan Swift, talking about satire, basically, and about the rules of English literature and things like that. And there's obviously things that that does for you, like taking that approach. It allows you to ask questions that a conventional academic book wouldn't allow you to ask. So do you see this as non academic academic adjacent? You use the phrase creative nonfiction. Where would you position this as a work, basically, as a literary piece?
A
Yeah, well, I think academic adjacent is a good phrase. I hadn't thought of that, but I think that's what it is. Interestingly, it's published by Peter Lang as part of the Reimagining Ireland series. It's actually, to my astonishment when I saw it, the 147th book that Lang has published in that Reimagining Ireland series. But when you look back over the titles of the 146 previous ones, or read some of them, they tend to be pretty, well, classic Irish scholarships. So this really is a different kind of way at getting. At Reimagining Ireland, right?
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Yeah. Yeah. I like the idea of not just Reimagining Ireland, but reimagining what A book about Ireland could or should look like true. So, you know, as a, as a historian, obviously I'm, I'm relatively aware of Augusta Gregory. She's a, almost an inescapable person if you write about the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So I sort of have the knowledge about her that, that I think a lot of Irish studies people would have. And then I'll have to admit I knew very little about her family and her family members who obviously feature quite a lot here. Could you tell us a little bit about them and why they matter to you?
A
I will. So there are three of her family members who have their own chapters in this book. Her husband, Sir William Gregory, her nephew Hugh Lane, and her son Robert Gregory. So let's look at each of them in that succession. So William Gregory was Augusta Gregory's much older husband. There are great photos of him, one of which I have in the book. He was a grandly mutton chopped 19th century man, very imposing looking guy, and she was his second wife. When they married he was 63 and she was 27. So a big difference in their ages. He died at age 75, leaving her as a young widow and at 39 to manage the Cool park estate. That was his family estate. His family had arrived in Ireland with Cromwell, his grandfather and his namesake. Another William Gregory was the British Undersecretary for Ireland in the early 19th century. And he interestingly was a gambling addict early in his life. Horse racing was his thing and it took his marriage to his wealthy first wife Lizzie to relieve him of his gambling debt, his debilitating gambling debt. So over the course of his life he traveled very widely. He served two stints in the British Parliament. He was governor of British Ceylon from 1872 to 1877. And that was where actually his first wife Lizzie died. So he became a widower while he was still in that post in Ceylon. And interestingly, Augusta had the last say on him because she edited and then published his, his autobiography after his death. So I don't know if that's a fair thing for a wife to do to a husband, but, but she did, she did do it to him. And this is a little interesting sidelight. So Daniel o', Connell, great liberator, Catholic emancipator, was serving in the British Parliament at the same time as Sir William Gregory. And at this point o' Connell was established and older than Sir William Gregory, but they kind of struck up a relationship. And this is in the book. O' Connell would occasionally call Gregory over to sit next to him and get involved in these animated conversations. And part of it was o' Connell just wanted to get the Tories, the party that Sir William was all upset about, this young up and coming Tory politician talking to in an intimate way to Daniel o' Connell in Parliament. One final thing about Sir William Gregory. So he said that he knew that Irish nationalism was rising and the days of the Anglo Irish Protestants ascendancy beginning to wane when the. The tenants, the workers on his estate would not any longer tip their hats to him when he spoke to them, telling detail. So that's her husband. Let me talk a little bit about her nephew, Hugh Lane, who's an interesting art dealer and was somebody who sort of preoccupied Augusta Gregory throughout her life. So she was his. Hugh Lane was her nephew, son of her older sister Adelaide, who's notoriously beautiful. And by the way, Lady Augusta Gregory was the 12th of 16 children of her father, had two wives. She was a child of the second wife. And her mother liked to tell her that she was nowhere near as good looking as her older sisters, one of which was Hugh Lane's mother. So again, he's an art dealer, impresario. His art collection would preoccupy Augusta for much of her adult life. Hugh Lane died young in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, the German U boat attack, famous attack on the Lusitania. He was raised in England and he always kind of felt out of place when his mother would take him back to the family, the Purse family home in Roxborough, County Galway. That was where Augusta Gregory grew up. But his mother would bring him back, her sister would bring him back occasionally, and his cousins would be out chasing across the grounds and riding horses. He preferred to stay in and look at the pictures and the clothing and the artwork in the home. Lady Augusta Gregory worked very hard for a long time to get his painting collections back from England, where they were, to Ireland. Interestingly, Hugh Lane had left the codicil to his will, which had left the paintings to the National Gallery in Dublin, saying he wanted them. No, he wanted them now to be at the Municipal Gallery in Dublin, not in London. So there's this long back and forth of Augusta Gregory ferociously berating the English government about needing to respect that codicil, even though it wasn't legally incorporated into the will. And finally there was an agreement reached that the paintings would spend half the year at the National Gallery in Dublin and half of the year at the National Gallery in London. I'm sorry. And then the other half of the year at The Municipal Gallery in Dublin, which in 1975 was renamed the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, to, I'm sure, the great excitement and happiness of Lady Augusta Gregory's ghost at the time, because she had worked so hard to do that. So that was Hugh Lane, and then finally her son, Robert Gregory. So this was her only child, the only child of Augusta and Sir William Gregory. And he was killed while flying in the Royal Air Force over Italy in World War I. And he became really an iconic presence in Ireland's literary landscape by virtue of Yeats eulogizing him in two major poems. Yeats wrote, an Irish Airman Foresees His Death, and In Memory of Major Robert Gregory. And those poems were written by Yeats after Lady Gregory twisted Yeats's arm way up high behind his back a number of times to get him to write something that would praise her son. Yeats was not all that enamored of Robert Gregory. He thought he wasn't really a fit heir to everything Lady Gregory was doing. But she was able to convince him to write these poems. And he was a handsome guy, a great athlete. He loved playing cricket at Cool Park. He'd get all. A lot of the workers on the domain there to play cricket with him. He loved horse riding. But as he got older, the responsibilities of overseeing the estate, as he took some of them on, he found annoying. His cosmopolitan wife, Margaret, was not really comfortable at way out in Western Ireland there at Gort and where Cool park is. And they were both artists and painters, and they loved the kind of bohemian life they were able to live with their artist friends in Paris and London. Spent a lot of time away from Ireland, which then, interestingly, resulted in their three children spending a lot of time at Cool park with. With Lady Gregory happily there. And he. He had a somewhat troubled life. He felt he was kind of a grand poseur. He was kind of good at a lot of things, but not really notably good in any one thing. He had a very messy affair that caused great trouble in the family. And he finally decided at a relatively older age, he was in his 30s, I believe, to sign up to go into the war in World War I. And he was going to establish himself that way as a sort of national hero, I think he liked to think of himself being. But he was always uncomfortable with his mother's literary circle. He sort of saw them as sort of, you know, preening phony Irish professionals, I guess I might say. And he was no nationalist. And, of course, he died ironically, defending the British Empire in World War I. There's a famous, sad but celebratory thought about Robert. And Yeats's poem In Memory of Major Robert Gregory. It's the one that says, what made us dream that he could comb gray hair. Which interestingly, was used by Senator Edward Kennedy when he delivered the eulogy at his nephew John Kennedy's funeral. And then in his poem, an Irish airman foresees his death. Yates has Robert think this. Those that I fight, I do not hate. Those that I guard, I do not love. So Robert was always a very uneasy Anglo Irishman in that regard. So those are the three family members who appear in the book in the
B
way that you kind of survey across all three, both in the book and just what you've said just now. In certain different. In different ways, they all seem to imply a certain kind of aristocratic background, either serving in the Empire and going on to become an MP or having a kind of a bohemian lifestyle and serving in the early raf, or being an art collector. And then elsewhere in the book, you explore the middle class iconoclasm of Yates, Joyce and Beckett. So I'm wondering how much does class matter for your work and in what ways, or does it matter at all?
A
I think it matters. And a little anecdote, a friend of mine, after reading the book, thinking about all of this and thinking about the Anglo Irish Protestant ascendancy and saying, well, you know, they were part of this dominance and repression of Irish culture for 800 years that Ireland was part of the British Empire. And then in the late 19th, early 20th century, when the Empire was beginning to come apart a bit, they kind of rediscovered it and took credit for rediscovering and repromulgating it. So that's how those Anglo Irish Protestant work, which I just thought was kind of a funny, interesting way of looking at it, but I think, you know, the class distinctions are important partly because they had their own religious and ethnic dimensions, right? The Anglo Irish Protestants, largely in the upper class, the Celtic Irish Catholics below them, some of them far below them. And there's an interesting instance of this if we go back for a moment to the relationship between Daniel o' Connell and Robert Gregory, or Sir William Gregory, Daniel o' Connell and Sir William Gregory, that I mentioned earlier when they were together in Parliament. And let me give you a snippet of that conversation. So this is meaning Daniel o' Connell told me he had heard we were fair landlords enjoying an attachment between our tenants and ourselves. I responded that I could not escape such an attachment, thinking of them as I do the most lovable and loving people in the world. Then he had me well said he. Has it not often happened to you to see on a Sunday morning this lovable and loving people kneeling outside a miserable chapel while the rain poured on them, there being no room within and they themselves being too poor to make it a commonly decent house of God? I have seen such sights, I replied. And when you have gone to your own parish church on a Sunday, have you found it crowded with worshippers and the rain coming through the roof and no means of making it decent? And do you think a population treated with such unfairness in a matter that goes home to their hearts is loved by those who rule it and can be loving to them? So you get some sense of the sharpness and the importance of the class divide there between the people o' Connell felt he was representing and the people that Sir William Gregory representation was in fact representing in the British Parliament?
B
So as you were reading that, I was thinking how, you know, you have this, like, very intimate depiction of someone like William Gregory and of his potential inner thoughts, or his intimate, most thoughts, but also these much larger questions about the decline of the empire in Ireland, about class, about religion. And in my own work, you know, I've written one fairly conventional biography and then a couple of papers that are quasi biographical. And I've always found that to be one of the hardest things to grapple with. How do you. How do you tell this intimate story that's also this much larger story about. About society in general, about thousands, if not millions of individuals, as well as this one individual within it all? And early in the book in, in your introduction, you quote Barbara Kingsolver and her view that lore translates massive society wide and even global events into what she called the intimate language of human experience. So I'm telling. I wanted to ask you about, in your own work, writing a sort of an autobiographical work taking a quite unconventional approach to it, how did you grapple with these mushroom. Macro level events? Like how did you tell an intimate story that's also a big macro level story?
A
Yeah, it's a good question. And I think all of the people in the book were public people, public figures in one way or another, who were personally and communally grappling with where Irish society and culture were going. How would Ireland fit into this wider developing modern world? It was really quite easy to connect the autobiography with the wider social historical trends because they were always as individuals, as in a group thinking about those and talking to each other about them and writing to each other about them. And I was thinking, as you were talking of Molly Bloom's question in Ulysses, you know, who's he when he's at home? And these folks in the book were always, I think, asking themselves at some level, who am I when I'm out there in this tumultuous moment of Irish history I happen to be living in? That was kind of always on their mind in one way or another. And I think it's fair to say that autobiography as a genre constructs and embodies identity. Right? That's what that genre really does. And you can argue over whether it's how factual those identities are that people construct and say embodies them or not. But that's what that genre does. And these folks were always trying to construct and embody, in one way or another, a new identity for Ireland based in many ways on the older identities that Lady Gregory especially was very involved in, in terms of folklore and the tales going out to the Aran Islands and talking to the native speakers there about all that and trying to capture that in what she wrote, and then really bringing all that into the politics of the moment and hoping it would have a kind of liberating effect on the Irish psyche. Because part of any colonial, as you know, colonial occupation is a repression of the native culture and identity, in some ways successful in Ireland, certainly with the language, but in other ways not successful in Ireland. So there are, throughout all these connections between the autobiographical cells and the. The new identity of the country as it was developing. So I found it. I found that it worked fairly easily for me in that sense to connect those big social sweeping developments with people's individual lives, at least of these people at this time in Ireland.
B
The subtitle of your book is Haunting Irishness. So is it something specifically autobiographical about Augusta Gregory and the other members of her family that is haunting us today? Or is it something bigger that the people like her represented, Whether that was, you know, the. The disappearance of the Anglo Irish aristocracy or. Or female agency, perhaps even.
A
Yeah. Yes. Well, I think a couple things. Clearly, that the relationship of Ireland with England is an ongoing relationship that has changed mightily, but also has some elements that continue to cause tension. The Brexit matter and what would happen with the border in Northern Ireland is a good contemporary example of that. It's still royals and, of course, the whole place of the Anglo Irish who were brought over and placed in control of a lot of land and wealth, and the native Irish at that time displaced from all that by the implanting of the Anglo Irish and and their identity and how that still plays out. Now, who's really Irish, in what terms, haunts both islands? In that sense, you could say so that's certainly true. And then I think of the Ireland that existed in Lady Gregory's time, when women, for instance, could not own property, could not vote, could not own property, so that when her husband died, Sir William Gregory, she would and would say that she was preserving, developing Cool park for her son, and then when he died, for his son, her grandson, because women were legally not able to actually own. Own the property. You think of what's gone on in Ireland from that time to, in terms of women's rights to, for instance, the not all that long ago now change in the abortion law in Ireland. I mean, huge changes. And somebody like Augusta Gregory was one of the first Irish women to really make her presence felt nationally. Right. And I mean, this is a really interesting character. Like I said, a widow at a young age is managing this huge estate in terms of the business skills that took and managing the tensions that were developing with the Catholic Irish tenants who worked the land. And she was dependent on their work to produce the income to maintain this fancy estate in Western Ireland. So, yes, that whole issue of Irish feminism is haunted to some extent, I think, in a positive way, I'd say, by Lady Gregory's life and continued influence. And another way I think we can think about this haunting is just her view of the potential of Ireland as a literary powerhouse, let me put it that way. And you'll know the image that the Irish poet Richard Ryan gave us around in one of his poems as a ragged leaking raft. A ragged leaking raft with a. All of those sharp edges around it. If you think of how it appears, and then the water bubbling up in the bogs in the middle of the country, a ragged, leaking raft. And who would have thought that ragged leaking raft could produce Joyce Yates of Beckett, arguably the most notable writers in English, as a novelist in Joyce and a potent Yates and a dramatist in Beckett, Well, Augusta Gregory thought it could do that, and she was part of making it happen. And, you know, she, in a way, foresaw the incredible continued explosion of literary talent in Ireland. And, you know, I was just thinking of some of the contemporary writers that are still so prominent. You mentioned Seamus Heaney earlier, Cullum Tobin, novelist. And by the way, I should have mentioned this. So Colm Tobin wrote a book good number of years ago called Lady Gregory's Toothbrush. And this is back to the class question. So after one of the attacks on her company at the Abbey Theater because of their putting on sings A Playboy of the Western World, which some found offensive. She wrote to Yates that, well, it's just the old battle between those who use a toothbrush and those who don't. So she was saying, we're the upper class, you're the lower class, and the lower class doesn't understand what we're trying to do. So she lived with that tension all along. But any rate, I just read Emma Donahue's the Paris Express, a great book. And she's, you know, a contemporary Irish writer who is also a screenwriter, Right? Even Boland in poetry, Martin McDonagh in drama. Again, that tradition continues of the place producing such literary talent. And at the. At the end of the book, I wanted to sort of grab ahold of this issue of how she continues and she and these other people continue to haunt Ireland, or at least the Irish literary landscape. And let me read you a little bit of how her ghost is thinking about this at the very end of the book, actually. So she's thinking, this Lady Gregory is Cool Lake at Cool Park. Cool Lake is a turlock from the Irish tor meaning dry, and of course, loch, meaning lake. A dry lake, a contradiction in terms, rather like being Anglo Irish. The lake empties in the summer through swallow hose in its lake bed, cracks in the karstic limestone. The water makes its way from Cool northwest via an alternating series of other turlocks and underground pathways to reach the Atlantic. Finally, at Kinvara, the lake levels will fluctuate more in Cool Lake than any other turlock in Ireland, in excess of 10 meters, refilling itself for the winter. These kinds of seasonal lakes are found in Ireland more commonly than in any other place in the world. It was my favorite place at Coole Park. It seems to me a natural model of what I wanted Kuld to be. My home would summon from across Ireland the best thinking and writing about its past, present and future. From there, it would flow back out across the Irish landscape and onto the rest of the world. Gradually, the world's reaction to it would refill and reshape our own Irish creative energies, with us now as players on the big world's cultural stage, with the world wondering how this divided little island floating out in the daunting Atlantic could have produced such marvels. So that's the way she thought about her haunting at the end of this book.
B
So it's obvious that she still haunts Irishness and haunts maybe the Irish nation, the Irish people. Will she continue to haunt you or will you work in other areas or what are you planning as your next project?
A
Well, thanks, I'm thinking about that. There's an incident that does appear in the book that I think might be worth some more thinking about and maybe writing about. So It's May of 1921. So she is still alive. Her son Robert is dead. He was killed in 1918 in the war. And Margaret, his now widow, Robert's widow, her daughter in law is, is going over to for an afternoon of tennis to Ballyturin the Baggott family. And in riding in the car with her is the district inspector for the Royal Irish Constabulary, the ric. And he happens to be an English native, not born in Ireland, but he's in the ric. He has two of his officers with him and his pregnant wife and Margaret Gregory. So they go over to the Baggots and they have a nice afternoon playing tennis. And toward the end of the afternoon they're coming back out the long driveway and the car and the Royal Irish Constabulary Inspector Blake is driving it and the gate is closed at the end of the long driveway and one of the officers gets out to open the gate and immediately they're fired upon. So this was an IRA ambush, carefully planned at a time when the Black and Tans and the IRA were constantly shooting at each other. And lots of ambushes and reprisals and blaming of one side or the other. But in this particular ambush, everybody was killed but Margaret Gregory, including the Constabulary, the Royal Irish Constabulary inspector's wife, who happened to be pregnant. So he was killed, his pregnant wife and the two officers were killed. The IRA shooters got Margaret Gregory out of the car and walked her back up the driveway to put her in the hands of the Baggots who were running down from their house having heard the shots being fired. So in my mind this is kind of an iconic incident that has a lot to say about the conflict between the Irishness and Englishness. That particular moment of the Anglo Irish aristocracies waning, the beginning of the end that, you know, the War of Independence, the truce was kind of struck later in 21 and then the Civil War of of course began. Margaret Gregory is an interesting character. She went on to marry Guy Gough of a old, very unionist family in Ireland. And they actually bought and lived in Selbridge Abbey, which was the place where Yeats or Swifts famous friend Vanessa lived. So there's all sorts of interesting things that could be brought out, I think about Ireland past, present and future. If I fooled around with that a little more so I'm thinking about that I'll continue my work in higher education. I've got an article coming out in the next issue of Trusteeship magazine aimed at the 50,000 or so people who are trustees of colleges and universities in the United States on government censorship in higher education. So I may be censored myself after this gets out, but we'll see what happens. I'm doing some work on defending democracy with a group called Keep Our Republic, and I also have six grandchildren who live in the area around Madison, Wisconsin now. So I have a lot of distractions from Irish literary and American political issues. But no, I'd like to do something I think that would pick up on the work I've done here. Whether I do it in this creative nonfiction mode or not is something I'm thinking about. But I did enjoy using this mode because it lets you do things with the characters that you can't in traditional scholarship, which we've talked pretty extensively about already.
B
Well, as you've been discussing this, I think as you've shown in your discussion, you are able to ask questions and probe areas that a conventional academic book wouldn't Gregory Ghost's Haunting Irishness is out now with Peter Lang as part of their Reimagining Ireland series. It's definitely worth reading. Kevin Riley, thanks for joining us.
A
Been my pleasure.
C
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New Books Network | Host: Aidan Beebe | Air Date: June 30, 2026
In this episode, host Aidan Beebe interviews Kevin Reilly, a distinguished academic and former president of the University of Wisconsin System, about his new book, Gregory Ghosts: Haunting Irishness (Peter Lang, 2026). The discussion delves into Reilly’s innovative approach to Irish studies, blending creative nonfiction and scholarly insight through imagined ghostly monologues of Lady Augusta Gregory and her circle. The episode touches on issues of class, gender, Anglo-Irish identity, literary innovation, and the enduring presence of these historical figures in contemporary Irishness.
[01:27–03:55]
Reilly describes his background in Irish literary autobiography and his long-held passion for Irish studies, even while serving in high-level university administration.
He shares the story of teaching a James Joyce course with Phil Herring and reflects on feeling like a “displaced faculty member” during his administrative career.
“Keeping up with my interest in Irish studies and scholarship let me feel a little displaced. … My teaching the Joyce course while I was president earned me a little deposit of credit with the faculty senators.”
— Kevin Reilly [03:31]
[04:06–07:33]
Gregory Ghosts is composed of ten chapters, each an interior monologue from Lady Gregory or those in her close circle, all imagined as ghosts who can view their lives both retrospectively and prospectively.
The approach invites readers inside complicated relationships and communal efforts that shaped modern Ireland, especially the Anglo-Irish and Irish Catholic divides.
“They’re kind of chatty Irish ghosts that… get to have some fun thinking about what happened and what didn’t happen after they died.”
— Kevin Reilly [05:29]
Reilly emphasizes that while creatively structured, all content is rooted in documented writings or credible sources.
[07:33–09:09]
The book is “academic adjacent,” blending scholarly research with creative nonfiction and following the tradition of “reimagining” Irish history and figures in new narrative forms.
“When you look back… over the titles… they tend to be pretty well, classic Irish scholarship. So this really is a different kind of way at getting… at Reimagining Ireland, right?”
— Kevin Reilly [08:45]
[09:43–20:00]
Reilly gives detailed portraits of three key family members:
“He [Sir William Gregory] said that he knew that Irish nationalism was rising and the days of the Anglo Irish Protestants ascendancy beginning to wane when the tenants, the workers on his estate would not any longer tip their hats to him…”
— Kevin Reilly [13:37]
“Robert was always a very uneasy Anglo Irishman… he was no nationalist, and of course, he died ironically, defending the British Empire in World War I.”
— Kevin Reilly [18:45]
[20:00–23:24]
“When you have gone to your own parish church … have you found it crowded with worshippers and the rain coming through the roof...?”
— Excerpt read by Kevin Reilly [22:02]
[23:24–27:43]
Reilly discusses the challenge of blending intimate biography with sweeping historical narrative, quoting Barbara Kingsolver’s notion of lore as the “intimate language of human experience.”
Autobiography functions as a genre that both “constructs and embodies identity,” and all the figures in his book are contending with “who am I in this tumultuous moment.”
“These folks were always trying to construct and embody… a new identity for Ireland based in many ways on older identities…”
— Kevin Reilly [25:37]
[27:43–35:49]
The “haunting” encompasses unfinished business: relations between Ireland and England, enduring class questions, expansion of women's rights, and the cultural vibrancy of Ireland despite historic adversity.
Reilly reads from the book’s conclusion, drawing metaphors from the landscape (Cool Lake as a ‘turlock’ — a dry/wet lake), paralleling the fluidity and contradiction of both Irishness and the Anglo-Irish identity.
“Cool Lake is a turlock... a contradiction in terms, rather like being Anglo Irish. … My home would summon from across Ireland the best thinking and writing about its past, present, and future. From there, it would flow back out across the Irish landscape and onto the rest of the world…”
— Lady Gregory’s ghost, read by Kevin Reilly [33:24]
[35:49–40:40]
Reilly contemplates exploring a violent incident involving Margaret Gregory at the height of the Irish War of Independence, reflecting on the ongoing interplay of English and Irish identity.
He’s also active in higher education governance and public advocacy, but remains open to further creative nonfiction projects.
“I'd like to do something I think that would pick up on the work I've done here. Whether I do it in this creative nonfiction mode or not is something I'm thinking about.”
— Kevin Reilly [40:37]
“They're sort of competing and complementary voices, maybe not entirely creditable, but they're sort of chatty Irish ghosts...”
— Kevin Reilly [05:24]
"Academic adjacent is a good phrase. … This really is a different kind of way at getting at Reimagining Ireland."
— Kevin Reilly [08:31]
"Who am I when I'm out there in this tumultuous moment of Irish history I happen to be living in?"
— Kevin Reilly [25:04]
"Who would have thought that ragged leaking raft [Ireland] could produce Joyce, Yeats or Beckett … Augusta Gregory thought it could do that, and she was part of making it happen."
— Kevin Reilly [31:23]
The conversation is intellectually rich but accessible, balancing scholarly rigor with Irish anecdotal warmth and wit. Reilly’s affection for his subjects and for creative scholarly inquiry is evident throughout, and Aidan Beebe’s questions are incisive, framing Reilly’s insights for both academics and lay listeners.
For listeners interested in Irish literature and history—especially those seeking fresh, innovative approaches to biography and cultural studies—this episode and Reilly’s book are essential explorations of how the past continues to “haunt” the present.