The purpose of the Society is to promote research into nineteenth-century Ireland. Its membership is open to scholars both from Ireland and other countries. It welcomes members from a wide range of disciplines: literature, history, economics, geography, sociology, anthropology, theology, women's studies, fine arts, etc. It thus seeks to foster an inter-disciplinary approach to nineteenth-century Irish studies.

The principal activities of the Society are the organising of conferences and the publication of works or collections of papers on Nineteenth-Century Ireland.

To date the Society has held the following conferences:

• Victorian Ireland Revisited (1992)
• The Famine (1994)
• Gender and Nineteenth-Century Ireland (1995)
• Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (1996)
• Regionalism and Nineteenth-Century Ireland (1997)
• 1798, 1848, 1898: Revolution, Revival, and Commemoration (1998)
• Ireland and the Union: Questions of Identity (1999)
• Ireland Abroad (2000)
• Nineteenth-Century Studies in the Twenty-First Century (Symposium, 2000)
• Victoria's Ireland (2001)
• The Irish Revival Reappraised (2002)
• Ireland and Europe in the Nineteenth Century (2003)
• Structures of Belief in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (2004)
• • ‘Across the Water’: Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century (2006)
• Romantic Ireland – from Tone to Gonne (2007)
• Visual, Material and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (2008)

  Volumes of proceedings from most of these conferences are already available. Others are in preparation.