Irish Scholar Angela Bourke will present a lecture entitled, "Stories for a New Ireland: Patrick Pearse's Short Fiction," on Friday, March 9 at 4:30 p.m. at the Lewis Center for the Arts' James M. Stewart '32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street. The lecture is part of a series presented by Princeton University's Fund for Irish Studies. The event is free and open to the public.

Bourke is best known for her award-winning, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (1999; American Edition, 2000) about how a young Tipperary woman came to be burned to death by her relatives in 1895. The book was named as one of Twenty-Five Books to Remember for 2000 by the New York Public Library and received The Irish Times Literature Prize for Non-Fiction. Bourke is professor emerita in the School of Irish, Celtic Studies, Irish Folklore and Linguistics at University College Dublin and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. A highly regarded scholar, she has held visiting academic positions at Harvard University, Notre Dame University, and Boston College. She is a frequent contributor to radio and television in Ireland and internationally and has held academic and writing fellowships in the U.S., Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom. Her book, Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker, was published in London by Jonathan Cape in June 2004. Bourke was one of the editors of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, volumes 4 and 5: Irish Women's Writing and Traditions (2002) and is also the author of a well-received collection of short-stories, By Salt Water (1996).

Patrick Pearse, the focus of Bourke's talk, was a teacher of Irish, barrister, poet, and ardent nationalist – and one of the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916. Indeed, by some reports, his colleagues declared him "President of the Provisional Government" of the Irish Republic. Following the collapse of the Rising and Pearse's execution by the British, he came to be seen by many as the embodiment of the rebellion.
Upcoming lectures and events in the Fund for Irish Studies series include:

• Patrick Lonergan from the National University of Ireland, Galway, on "Irish Drama After the Celtic Tiger" on April 13
  
• Brendan Loftus on "Postcards from the Edge of Europe: Confessions of an Irish Genome" on April 20