June is here, and with it the summer schools season. Like returning swallows, students and academics from all over the world, but especially the US, flock to Ireland to talk about various figures in its literary canon, its history and, increasingly, about its contemporary economic success and political developments.

For the areas where they take place, the summer schools are certainly a welcome branch of the local tourism industry. But they have become part of a much more significant development - the recent prolific growth of Irish studies as an academic discipline in the US, and the way in which this reflects changes in the Irish diaspora.

The growth itself brings problems of definition. One of the subjects discussed at the annual meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) last April was "Irish Studies: Issues and Perspectives". This was a round-table discussion involving representatives of some of the main institutions involved.

Prof Nancy Curtin, a historian from Fordham University, New York, sums up the dilemma: "Irish studies is perceived as identity-based. The Catholic universities are most likely to have Irish studies programmes because they see it as projecting a Catholic identity. We need financial support from `well-heeled outsiders' who see it as a validation of their ethnic identity. But we also need institutional support from our academic colleagues and, therefore, intellectual respectability."

Prof Adele Dalsimer of Boston College agrees. "Irish studies needs to be related to what Ireland is now," she says. "It must reflect the enormous changes of even the last 10 years. In the US, perceptions often lag behind.

"Look at the ways universities are now structured. We need to make linkages with Afro-American studies, Caribbean studies, etc. All this means we should get away from Irish studies as atavistic."

But, as Prof Curtin points out, those providing the funding are Irish in origin, with their own expectations of the direction the research and teaching they are supporting should take. Those involved in that research and teaching, however, come from a wide variety of backgrounds and are not necessarily interested in what Dr Kevin Whelan of Notre Dame's Dublin campus calls "ethnic massaging".

Some of the most important and innovative people involved in Irish studies have come from outside the ethnic Irish community. Prof Dalsimer, one of the founders of Irish studies in Boston College, is from a Jewish background, as is the president of the ACIS, Prof Lucy McDiarmid, who has done much to raise the profile of women in Irish studies. Dr Liz Butler Cullingford of the University of Texas, who has also bridged the gap between Irish and women's studies, has no ethnic link with the Irish-American community. One of the lecturers in the Irish language in Boston College is Japanese.

People like this have also forged links with a younger generation of Irish academics, such as Declan Kiberd, Luke Gibbons and Kevin Whelan, whose own work explores the links between Irish and other cultures. Seamus Deane, who left UCD to head the new department of Irish studies in Notre Dame, had already gained international recognition among pioneers of post-colonial studies such as Edward Said of Columbia University, New York.

The fecundity of Ireland's literary heritage has long provided a gateway to Irish culture for people far outside it. But the historical experience - of colonialism, of emigration, of attempting to recover from economic underdevelopment, of conflict between tradition and modernity, and, recently, of communal conflict - allows people from a wide variety of backgrounds to find echoes of their own experience.

The growth in Irish studies has been made possible, at least in part, by the fact that a generation of Irish-Americans now has both the money to give to, and an interest in, academic exploration of the Irish experience. People such as Brian Burns in Boston College, Loretta Brennan Glucksman, who funded Ireland House in New York, and Donald Keogh, who funds the Irish Studies programme in Notre Dame, Indiana, have between them spent many millions of dollars supporting Irish studies.

According to the director of Notre Dame in Dublin, Dr Kevin Whelan: "Until recently, Irish-Americans, if they made money, disappeared into WASP-dom in Connecticut. This is the first time that Irish-Americans who do well are doing anything for Irish culture. It is now part of a cultural phenomenon."

Prof Deane says: "The commemoration of the Famine crystallised this for a lot of Irish-Americans. Family stories were often heard for the first time. It was the first Irish-American generation to celebrate their recuperation from the Famine."

However, there are two ways - at least - to look at the Famine. One is to see it as emblematic of the great disadvantage which the Irish had to overcome in order to take their place in the American Dream. The other is to see it as an example of the kind of man-made disaster with which the peoples of colonised countries are regularly afflicted to this day, and to see parallels between it and, for example, the political and economic disasters which drive millions of migrants to Europe and the US.

DR Whelan stresses this aspect. "In Notre Dame we are taking Irish studies out of the ghetto. It is not just ethnic massaging, it can offer to other people a paradigm for the immigrant experience."

Prof James Murphy, who runs the Irish studies programme in Villanova, says that this more nuanced, comparative examination of the Irish experience and contemporary Irish history was not always well received. For example, members of his staff regularly give lectures to local chapters of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. He acknowledges that they are not always receptive to the more complex version of Irish history and contemporary life which these lectures offer.

"Irish studies also has an educative function, one of our constituencies is the Irish-American community," says Dr Whelan. "You have to bring people with you. People are hungry for it."

This tension is also part of the changing class composition of the Irish-American community. A generation has now grown up which has been successful in business, the professions and academic life. The preoccupations of these groups often differ. But there are still large numbers of Irish-Americans in the more traditional occupations - the police, paramedics, services, the construction industry.

According to Dr Phil O'Leary of Boston College, the older Irish-Americans of south Boston, well-known as the heartland of Irish-American pieties, have a derisory term for new Irish immigrants, and the preoccupations they share with the young Irish-American intelligentsia. "They call them the FBIs, for foreign-born Irish," he says. The term is resonant with resentment and ambiguous feelings towards modern Ireland.

Luke Gibbons of Dublin City University, who taught in New York University last year, agrees. "There is a tension between Irish-Americans and the condescension of Irish people towards the diaspora. There's a feeling that the self-image needs to be brought up to that of Celtic Tiger Ireland."

Yet there is still a real fondness among the younger generation of Irish-American intellectuals for the older generations, and more appreciation of their struggles than exists among the Irish in Ireland. For example, Dorothy Hayden Cudahy in New York for decades ran a radio programme of Irish music and has been deeply involved in the campaign to bring the Northern conflict to the attention of American politicians. Her papers, covering her husband's decades of involvement in the GAA as well as her own work, have just been taken by New York University and are seen as an invaluable resource for studying the Irish emigrant experience.

Dr Whelan sees the expansion and development of Irish studies as greater even than putting Irish studies into the forefront of international scholarship. It is part of the new influence of the Irish in American politics, he says, with its impact on events in Northern Ireland.

"Irish studies has been operating in the US for over 20 years. There are a lot of graduates by now, with ideas which are more complex and more interesting than the old pieties. This helped in relation to the recent political process."