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.