Upcoming Events

Sunday September 24, 2023

The Travels of Kathleen M. Murphy, “Ireland’s Super-Tramp”

The ILHS will present a talk by Professor Patrick Bixby entitled The Travels of Kathleen M. Murphy, “Ireland’s Super-Tramp” on Sunday September 24th at 5pm Pacific Time on Zoom.

At the time of her death in 1962, Kathleen M. Murphy was recognized as “the most widely and most knowledgeably travelled Irish woman of her time . . . insofar as she let herself be known to the public at all.” An abiding interest in sacred sites and ancient civilizations took Murphy down the Amazon and over the Andes, into the jungles of Southeast Asia and onto the deserts of the Middle East, above the Arctic Circle and behind the Iron Curtain. After the Second World War, Murphy began publishing a series of vivid, humorous, and often harrowing accounts of her travels in The Capuchin Annual, a journal reaching a largely Catholic and nationalist audience in Ireland and the United States. At home in the Irish midlands, Murphy may have been a modest and retiring figure, but her travelogues shuttle between religious devotion and searching curiosity, primitivist assumptions and probing insights, gender decorum and bold adventuring.

Patrick Bixby is Professor of English at Arizona State University, where his research ranges across mobility studies, modernist studies, and Irish studies. His recent books include Unaccompanied Traveler: The Writings of Kathleen M. Murphy, License to Travel: A Cultural History of the Passport, Nietzsche and Irish Modernism, and, with Gregory Castle, A History of Irish Modernism. Professor Bixby also serves as President of the Samuel Beckett Society, Director of the USAC summer program at NUI Galway, and Chair of the Advisory Board for the Letters of Samuel Beckett Database Project at Emory University.

Sunday September 24th at 5pm Pacific Time on Zoom
Zoom link here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81924555394