INTRODUCTION

Abstract

This special thematic issue of Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia results from a December 2024 gathering of scholars in Cluj, Romania, to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Babeș-Bolyai University’s MA programme in Irish Studies—to this day the only postgraduate degree offering a cross-disciplinary perspective on Irish culture, literature, and history at any Central or Eastern European university. When the MA program, initially designed as “Irish Writing and Its Contexts,” was created in 1999, Ireland and Central/Eastern Europe were entering a decade of hopes for deeper European integration and democratization, both regionally and worldwide. It was a period that witnessed the rapid globalization of Irish Studies, backed by Celtic Tiger optimism. However, that decade would also bring far-reaching changes that prompted, within our domains of knowledge and across the humanities, a thorough overhaul of our ways of seeing and framing difference. At the start of the Cluj Irish Studies MA, global Irish Studies was dominated by postcolonial, rehistoricising, and recontextualizing approaches pivoting on rigorous archival research. Importantly, the early 2000s saw a definitive shift away from understanding literary culture merely as part of the anthropological project of “inventing Ireland”—to quote the title of one of Declan Kiberd’s seminal books that underpins our discipline to this day. Instead, there was a transition from culture understood as projecting a shared sense of national identity and future to After Ireland (to quote another title by Kiberd)—that is, to an understanding of literature as operating in a planetary field, fully enmeshed with other forms and modes of imagining personhood, creaturely life, and vulnerability.