Tag: 2012-13

Bestselling scholar of Irish history R.F. Foster will present a lecture on “Making a Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1916,” on Friday, April 19 at 4:30 p.m. at the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ’32 Theater at 185 Nassau Street.  Foster’s lecture will cap a year-long series of events presented by Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies.  The event is free and open to the public.

R. F. Foster, the Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford, is widely known as the author ofModern Ireland: 1600-1972, his broad, transformative volume of that nation’s history.  Declared by the Irish Independent as “the best single-volume history of modern Ireland of our time,” Modern Ireland has been a bestseller since its first publication in 1988 and was listed by The Guardian as one of the top 10 books on Irish history.  A well-known critic and broadcaster as well as history scholar, Foster’s work focuses on Irish cultural, social and political history of the modern period.

Foster’s numerous publications include biographies of the poet W.B. Yeats and politicians Charles Stewart Parnell and Lord Randolph Churchill, numerous essays on Irish culture, and The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland (1989).  His book, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (2001), won the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism in 2003. Foster’s most recent book, Words Alone: Yeats and his Inheritances, was published by Oxford in 2011 and presents a re-reading of Irish literary history throughout the nineteenth century.  In 2009 Foster was elected to a three-year Wolfson Foundation Research Chair in order to write a book about the Irish revolutionary generation of 1890-1920.  He will be focusing on this research in his lecture on April 19.

Over the course of his career, Foster has held visiting fellowships at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Princeton University.  He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1989, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1986, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1992, and an honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2011.  His honorary degrees include those from the University of Aberdeen; The Queen’s University of Belfast; Trinity College, Dublin; the National University of Ireland; and Queen’s University, Canada,

The Fund for Irish Studies, chaired by Princeton professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, affords all Princeton students, and the community at large, a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, politics and economics not only of Ireland but of “Ireland in the world.”  Its mission is to coordinate and expand existing courses taught by present members of the faculty and to offer a series of public lectures, literary readings, conferences, exhibitions, screenings and theatrical performances.

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Link to photo:   https://lca.sharefile.com/d/s90fe5e281654389b

Photo caption:  R. F. Foster, the Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford, will lecture on “Making a Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1916” as part of a series presented by the Fund for Irish Studies at Princeton.

Photo credit:  Photo courtesy of Hertford College, Oxford.

Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy will present a lecture entitled, “Grá Agus Bás: Love and Death” on Friday, December 7 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.

Dennehy is an internationally acclaimed Irish composer heralded as one of the best-known voices of his generation. Born in Dublin in 1970, Dennehy completed undergraduate work at Trinity College in Dublin and pursued doctoral work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a Fulbright Scholarship.  In 1997, he co-founded the Crash Ensemble, a renowned contemporary music ensemble for which he serves as artistic director. Dennehy’s music has been featured in such festivals as the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, EXPO, Bang On A Can in New York, and ISCM World Music Days, among others. Currently, Dennehy regularly lectures in music composition at Trinity College and is visiting Princeton as a 2012-13 Global Scholar in the Department of Music.

Dennehy’s lecture is based on his landmark work Grá Agus Bás, which translates as “Love and Death” and explores those same themes. Sean-nós, a type of unaccompanied Irish vocal music, inspired the title piece of Dennehy’s album. Released in May 2011 from Nonesuch Records, Grá Agus Bás features a blend of modern minimalism, traditional Irish, and classical influences. The album received international acclaim, with The Guardian calling the title composition “a piece of startling freshness.”

Pairing visits to Princeton with return visits to Ireland, Dennehy will host Princeton colleagues and students at Trinity College and present a number of events in Ireland featuring the work of Princeton faculty and students. Princeton graduate students will write major works for the Crash Ensemble and will spend time working on the piece with Crash before it premieres.

The Fund for Irish Studies, chaired by Princeton professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, affords all Princeton students, and the community at large, a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, politics and economics not only of Ireland but of “Ireland in the world.”  Its mission is two-fold: to coordinate and expand existing courses taught by present members of the faculty, and to offer a series of public lectures, literary readings, conferences, exhibitions, screenings and theatrical performances.

(Princeton, NJ)  Irish historian and biographer Judith Hill will present a lecture entitled, “Brickbats and Love: Lady Gregory’s Encounter with America on the Abbey Theatre Tour of 1911-12” on Friday, November 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.

Born in London and educated at Girton College, Cambridge, Hill moved to Ireland in 1989 where she works as an architectural historian and biographer. Her books include The Building of Limerick (1991),Irish Public Sculpture: A History (1998), and In Search of Islands – A Life of Conor O’ Brien (2009).  She is a contributor to the Irish Arts Review, The Irish Times, and Times Literary Supplement.

Based on her 2011 biography, Lady Gregory: An Irish Life, Hill’s lecture will explore the intersection of culture and craft that occurred when the Abbey Theatre of Dublin toured the United States during the 1911-12 season, led by Lady Gregory, a surprising, yet defining, figure of the Irish Literary Revival. Lady Augusta Gregory was founder of the Abbey Theatre; patron of W. B. Yeats; and a writer of plays, essays, stories, and translations of Irish legends.  The Irish American News described Hill’s book as, “A lively biography of this amazing person.”

The Fund for Irish Studies, chaired by Princeton professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, affords all Princeton students, and the community at large, a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, politics and economics not only of Ireland but of “Ireland in the world.”   Its mission is twofold: to coordinate and expand existing courses taught by present members of the faculty, and to offer a series of public lectures, literary readings, conferences, exhibitions, screenings and theatrical performances.

Fionna Barber is Principal Lecturer for Contextual Studies at the Manchester School of Art, England. Originally from Portadown, Co. Armagh, she also taught in the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Ulster in Belfast, before moving to Manchester in 1993. A former member of the editorial panel of CIRCA art magazine she has also written catalogue essays for a number of contemporary Irish artists, including Rita Duffy and Alice Maher.  Her recent publications include a special edition of the journal Visual Culture in Britain, ‘After the War: visual culture in Northern Ireland since the Ceasefires’ (guest editor, 2009). She has also contributed an essay on post-conflict memory and visual practice in Northern Ireland to the forthcoming Memory Ireland vol 3: memory cruxes: the Famine and the Troubles, (Syracuse University Press 2013) edited by Oona Frawley and an essay on art in Ireland since the millennium to the collection The Crossings of Art (Peter Lang, forthcoming 2013) edited by Ruben Moi, Charles Armstrong and Brynhilldur Boyce. In 2009 she was the initiator and joint curator with Megan Johnston of the exhibition Archiving Place and Time: contemporary art from Northern Ireland since the Belfast Agreement which showed initially at the Holden Gallery, Manchester Metropolitan University in 2009 before touring both to Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown, NI, then to a further venue in England, Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 2010.

Fionna Barber’s book Art in Ireland since 1910, the first publication to cover art practice from the early years of the twentieth century until the post-millennial period, is published by Reaktion Books, London in early 2013.

Irish scholar Pete Shirlow will present a lecture posing the question: “The End of Ulster Loyalism?” on Friday, October 5 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.

Shirlow is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at Queen’s University in Belfast.  His latest book, The End of Ulster Loyalism? was published earlier this year by Manchester University Press.  He is also the co-author of Belfast: Segregation, Violence and the City (Pluto Press), Beyond the Wire (Pluto Press), Abandoning Historical Conflict (Manchester University Press), and author/co-author of over 70 book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles on conflict in Northern Ireland.  He is currently working on a major study funded by the National Institute of Health with colleagues at Notre Dame University on segregated communities in Belfast and the impact of previous and contemporary forms of sectarian violence.

Ulster loyalism is a political ideology that opposes a united Ireland.  Most loyalists support upholding Northern Ireland’s status as a constituent part of the United Kingdom. Peter Shirlow considers whether this world view may be less and less tenable.

The Fund for Irish Studies, chaired by Princeton professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, provides Princeton students and the community at large a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, politics and economics not only of Ireland but of “Ireland in the world.”

Eve Patten is Associate Professor and Head of the School of English at Trinity College, Dublin, where she lectures on modern British and Irish writing. Her previous publications include Samuel Ferguson and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ireland(2004), That Island Never Found (2007) and Literatures of War (2008), and her monograph Imperial Refugee: The Wartime Fiction of Olivia Manning was published in spring 2012 by Cork University Press. She is a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin and Vice Chair of the Royal Irish Academy Committee for Literature.