Spencer collection more than a wee bit Irish
If you’re feeling far from the Irish this St. Patrick’s Day, look no further than Kansas University for some of the best of the Emerald Isle.
Researchers from all over the world find the luck of the Irish at KU’s Kenneth Spencer Research Library.
this pamphlet is one of the many materials that make up what scholars consider one of the best collection of Irish literature outside Ireland. The collection is housed at Kansas University's Kenneth Spencer Research Library.
The library has what many experts call the best collection of Irish literature, political pamphlets and other materials in the United States and one of the best in the world.
“It’s a treasure trove,” said Joan Dean, an expert in Irish literature and theater and a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “I have been amazed amazed at the things I’ve come across there from all sorts of different fields.”
KU’s Irish collection began in 1953 when the university purchased more than 900 works by and about author James Joyce, who is best known for his novels “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake.” The collection had been owned by James Spoerri, a Chicago attorney and book collector.
James Helyar, a library curator, said KU had several faculty members who were interested in Irish literature, and the university wanted to provide them with more materials for their research.
The collection expanded in 1955, when KU purchased a collection of works related to William Butler Yeats, an Irish poet. The collection was from P.S. O’Hegarty, a former head of the Irish Post Office who also was an avid book collector.
Four years later, after O’Hegarty’s death, KU bought the remainder of his book collection more than 25,000 books and other items that chronicle Irish history from the 1600s to the revolutionary movements of the 20th century.
“O’Hegarty was right in the center of things,” Helyar said. “He had a catholic approach to what he collected. He collected everything about Ireland.”
Highlights of the collection include books with the handwriting of Joyce and Yeats, pamphlets and posters advertising emigration trips to the United States during the potato famine of the 1840s.
“We get people in directly from Oxford who have been using collections in England and Ireland,” Helyar said. “We’ve had people who have come directly from Dublin.”
Five years ago, the Irish collection helped attract Kathryn Conrad, an assistant professor of English, to KU. Now she teaches classes in Irish literature and culture, including a seminar class on Joyce.
Often, she sends students to the library for research.
“It’s one thing to deal with these things in the abstract sense and another for students to see this first-hand,” Conrad said. “I see their eyes just light up.”
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Conrad said on Sept. 11, students were completing a study of Yeats’ “Cathleen ni Houlihan,” a play about a man who is a martyr for Ireland. It wasn’t hard for students to see the parallels between the play and the U.S. events of Sept. 11.
“In Ireland, the connection between politics and culture and literature is so present,” Conrad said. “When you look at Joyce and Yeats in particular, you see that.”
Dean, who recently completed a book about Irish theater censorship, also is interested in the intertwining of culture and politics.
“You find a lot of politicians have connections with theater, one way or another,” she said. “To this day, when a new play opens at the Abbey Theatre (in Dublin, founded by Yeats), the president of Ireland shows up.”
Dean said KU was performing an important service by preserving such materials for future scholars.
“It’s fairly rare to find so much material concentrated in one library, much less an American library,” she said.
