Introduction

What an honour it is to take over this reviews section from the ever-excellent Maureen O’Connor – I have big shoes to fill. Irish Studies around the world is growing year on year. I know from my own work on the IASIL committee, where we capture a snapshot of the work happening around the world, that Irish Studies centres are blooming from Taiwan to Tehran. We had 448 events in 23 countries in our report for 2024/25. The Irish Times carried a huge feature on the excellent Irish Studies conference in Mexico lead by Professor Aurora Piñeiro (McCarthy 2025). The conference scene was busy in Irish studies, with events such as IASIL in Galway, AEDEI in Huelva, ACIS in Denver, EFACIS in Turku and an interesting session from LCIS in Leuven and the Keogh Naughton Institute on the Future of Irish Studies Authors such as Sally Rooney, Maggie O’Farrell, Ursula Rani Sarma, Anna Burns, Claire Keegan, Anne Enright, Emma Dabiri, Colm Tóibín and Adiba Jaigirdar are finding, and growing, global acclaim. The range of work is more than Joyce, Beckett, Yeats and Heaney (although the publishing lists might tell you different!).

Part and parcel of the growing interest are more students, more ECRs, and as a result more publications. Despite reports saying the number of humanities graduates is declining (Jaschik 2022), publishing in the humanities continues to grow. This aligns with trends globally: academic publishing is on the rise – with academic publishers making profits that rival some of the tech giants, according to a recent article in The Conversation (Rhodes 2026). The publish or perish mantra has created a monster, and one that is making the publishers very wealthy indeed.

Despite moves to DORA, COARA and narrative CVs, metrics are still king. In the UK, REF dictates the best “outputs” and universities, departments and disciplines are ranked accordingly. Getting the “highest” marks does not guarantee safety however, with many universities cutting highly ranked humanities departments in waves of cuts impacting colleagues in the UK. In interviews, grant applications, and promotions, these numbers are key – what is the impact factor, the H weighting, how many and how often, etc. And while journal publication is growing exponentially, the monograph still holds weight in our discipline.

The pressure to publish, widely, strategically, internationally, regularly is on all of us. I feel particularly for PhD researchers, struggling (if they are lucky on completely outdated scholarships that barely cover rent), working part-time, and full time, taking on the “good for the cv” lectures and classes, and then trying to publish to keep up with their peers. PhD students graduating with more publications than some of the permanent tenured staff in the departments where they studied. The bar continues to be raised higher and higher. However, more is “better” should not be the answer.

Where within this does the review come into play? These are important pieces of scholarship, that continue the peer review process. Reviews let others know about your publication, they list the pros and cons, evaluate and situate the work within the field. With so much work published year on year, how do we separate the excellence from the metrics? This is where reviews are essential. And reviews have different styles and forms even within Humanities – some take a strong critical view, some are more gentle, some take the chance to grind the axe for that time they were slighted by the author, others love finding that one typo and reminding you the best time to copy edit is when it is published. Reviewing work is an essential part of the process, the book is not finished until it has been reviewed, and shared and read. It is also a vital publication route for ECRs, and an opportunity to get to grips with academic publication, the possibility of a free (most likely e)book, and the very important statistic for the CV.

Yet it is much more complex than that. How, for example, do ECRs or precarious academics navigate the process? One thing I have learned is academia is a small place, Irish Studies smaller, and there is no doubt you will some day bump into that person whose book you reviewed. When you criticise – do these things come to mind? Can I critique this stellar scholar in the field? Someone who could review my job/book/grant application later? Us academics are also a fragile bunch. How to you balance good critique with ego, job security, a career?  And this can be obvious in some more established scholars’ reviews of ECRs work too – a number of ECRs have been publicly criticised and attacked. Secure academics pilling on precarious researchers in the name of criticism. It is a difficult line to navigate.

When I was precarious, I was cautious of reviews. Coming from journalism, prior to academia, where I pumped out up to 40 articles a week, I also had, and still do, a different viewpoint on reviews. I am much more conscious of libel laws. Weekly people would appear at the desk to give out about a single word, the position of a picture, the page their article appeared on, and especially when the article did not appear! And telling them it is just “a review” of your court case was not going to solve the issue. It has been interesting seeing all styles of reviews come in, and I wonder about style, and reception, which I hope will evolve during my tenure.

As reviews editor, all these things must come to mind; but one thing I had not considered was the absolute disregard of many publishers for reviews. One publishing conglomerate has a generic online form that has no acknowledgement of your submission. On their website the section that deals with requesting books for review contains no contact details leaving no opportunity to follow up. The only option is to type into the void (the generic online form) regularly hoping that one of the requests to send out a book will reach the right server and the reviewer might receive a copy. One book I entered in 7 times to this form – only for the book to arrive 3 months later. Others refuse to send physical copies. One told me (hopefully not prophetically) that Ireland was no longer in the EU and they could not send a copy to a reviewer in Ireland. Others just never sent out the books and ignored my emails. One reviewer informed me that the book had arrived the day I prepared this for submission. The majority were the “big” publishers. Just to note Taylor and Francis’ parent company Informa reported a revenue growth of 20% in 2025 with revenue of £2,035.9m, adjusted operating profit of around £578.9m and free cash flow of £356.9m (The Bookseller 2025). They are making ginormous profits from publish or perish, literally banking on our need for metrics, all the while cutting back on copy editors and embracing AI, never mind using our work for free to train AI – they can afford to send out a physical copy of the book. We must push back against this, perhaps in our own contracts with them. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this.

Yes, reviewers disappear, but this is academia, we have enough going on. Suddenly you end up with a new job; a move across country; a grant application; admin responsibilities; the one thing your CV needs for that job/promotion/application and you must take it and forget about the review. I know only too well as I write this to procrastinate on an article I desperately need to finish. So, this year if your book did not appear, it may next year, in fact it may not have arrived at the reviewer’s door yet. Be patient – a little slow scholarship is a nice form of resistance to the metrics.

What I will say is Irish Studies is lively, it is global, and researchers are making excellent contributions to knowledge, growing and expanding the definition of Irish Studies, responding to changes, and yes, we definitely have not abandoned Joyce, but we are letting Rooney in on the action. We have room for more though – bring me your books!