The Evenings with History series, sponsored by the UALR History Institute kicks off the 2013-2014 series tonight.  This year’s series will focus on how the study and writing of history is done.

The six sessions of the 2013-2014 Evenings with History series will be on the first Tuesday of October, November, and December of 2013 and February, March, and April of 2014.

They are held at the Ottenheimer Auditorium in the Historic Arkansas Museum at 200 E. Third Street in Little Rock. Historic Arkansas’s downtown location and the museum’s adjacent parking lot at Third and Cumberland make the sessions convenient and pleasant to attend.

Refreshments are served at 7:00 p.m., and the talk begins at 7:30 p.m.

An individual subscription to the series, at $50 annually, includes admission to all six lectures.

Tonight, Moira Maguire discusses “From Kerry Babies to Precarious Childhood:  The Evolution of Research Agenda”

Dr. Maguire’s presentation traces the evolution of one research agenda, from the graduate student essay that formed the basis of a doctoral dissertation to the commissioned research project that led ultimately to the publication of her new book, Precarious Childhood in Post-Independence Ireland. Focusing on issues such as unwed motherhood, neglected and abused children, adoption, and family dysfunction and pointing up the gap between the rhetoric of government and the Catholic church and their policies, her study addresses questions at the forefront of public discourse in Ireland. Producing such a relevant work means that “doing” history also may inform public policy. Her talk will show how her research has figured in the work of two Irish commissions examining the treatment of women and children in state-run institutions in the first half of the twentieth century.

Dr. Maguire came to UALR in 2003. After receiving her Ph.D. from American University in Washing, D.C., she spent six years engaged in teaching and research at the National University of Ireland at Maynooth. She is in charge of the department’s assessment program. Her book, Cherished Equally? Precarious Childhood in Independent Ireland, is under contract with Manchester University Press.

Corporate sponsors for the 2013-2014 season include Friday, Eldredge, & Clark; Union Pacific Railroad; Wright, Lindsey, and Jennings; and the Teaching American History Program of the Little Rock School District.

Support and gifts in kind are provided by the UALR Ottenheimer Library; Historic Arkansas Museum, a museum of the Department of Arkansas Heritage; UALR Public Radio—KUAR-KLRE; UALR public television; and Grapevine Spirits.