“There cannot be a history of private property law,” Brenna Bhandar writes in Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership, “that is not at the same time a history of land appropriation in Ireland, the Caribbean, North America, and beyond.” In this lecture, Pat Palmer explores how English colonists in sixteenth and seventeenth century Ireland field-tested strategies for translating land into property. Wheezes like “surrender and re-grant” turned community-held land into the private property of the single individual through Common-Law title. This “invention” of property transformed our engagement with the more-than-human in ways that continue to play out as crises of equality and biodiversity. This lecture asks whether recovering older (here, specifically, Gaelic) ways of engaging with the land as a place of enchantment rather than possession have anything to say to the present.

Pat Palmer is Professor of English at Maynooth University and the Fall 2024 Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies. She works on cultures in contact in, principally, early modern Ireland, on the conflictual exchange between English colonists and the Gaelic world, on linguistic colonization, the aesthetics of violence, and the politics of translation. She is the author of Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabeth Imperial Expansion (Cambridge, 2001) and The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Translating Violence in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2014). Her current book project is a monograph provisionally entitled The Poetics of Property: Castle Poems and the Invention of Ownership in Early Modern Ireland. She is Principal Investigator on the MACMORRIS Project, a digital humanities project which maps the full range of cultural activity, across languages and ethnic groups, in early modern Ireland.

For further background on Professor Palmer and her Burns Visiting Scholar residency, please visit the Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies web page. 

Burns Library will host a complimentary beer, wine, hors d'oeuvres reception beginning at 5:00pm, with Prof. Palmer's lecture to follow at 6:00pm. All are welcome.