Kevin Barry Reads from “Dark Lies the Island”

Author Kevin Barry will read from his new short story collection, Dark Lies the Island, on Friday, October 11 at 4:30 p.m. at the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ’32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street. The reading is part of a series presented by Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies. The event is free and open to the public.

Author Kevin Barry will read from his new short story collection, Dark Lies the Island, on Friday, October 11 at 4:30 p.m. at the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ’32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street.  The reading is part of a series presented by Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies.  The event is free and open to the public.

Barry’s first collection of short stories, There are Little Kingdoms, was published in 2007 and received the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, awarded yearly to an Irish writer under the age of 40.  With descriptions of the everyday painted with colorful local language, his stories examine the transformational and dark forces that may lie within seemingly comic or mundane persons and interactions, often grounded in the country towns and cities of his homeland.  City of Bohane, Barry’s debut novel published in 2011, depicts a fictional west Irish town in dystopian 2053.  Described by Barry as “written in Technicolor,” the book offers a startling treatment of a future without technology where gangs and vice rule the streets.  City of Bohane received the Author’s Club First Novel Award, as well as the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Dark Lies the Island (2012), his second book of short stories, expands upon the author’s gift for witty observation, and one story, “Beer Trip to Llandudno” was selected for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.

Barry’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Granta Book of the Irish Short StoryBest European Fiction, and many other journals and anthologies around the world.  He also works as a screenwriter and a playwright.

Marilynn Richtarik on “Stewart Parker: The Playwright in His Place”

Professor and historian of British and Irish literature Marilynn Richtarik will present a lecture entitled, “Stewart Parker: The Playwright in his Place,” on Friday, September 20 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.

Professor and historian of British and Irish literature Marilynn Richtarik will present a lecture entitled, “Stewart Parker: The Playwright in his Place,” on Friday, September 20 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.

Richtarik received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University in American History and Literature, but focused her research on British works at Oxford University, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar, receiving her Doctorate of Philosophy in 1992. Her interests lie in Northern Irish theatre and drama, and the tumultuous intersection of the country’s politics and arts. In addition to several program notes for American, British, and Irish productions of the plays of Stewart Parker, Richtarik’s publications include Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980-1984 (1995), Counterparts: James Joyce and Stewart Parker (1998), and ‘Ireland, the Continuous Past’: Stewart Parker’s Belfast History Plays (2000). She has contributed to BullánModern Drama, and appeared on Ireland’s RTE Radio One.

Following from her 2012 biography, Stewart Parker: A Life, Richtarik’s lecture will explore the brief but storied career of playwright, poet, and cultural critic Stewart Parker (1941-1988). A writer whose works spanned from a column on popular music in The Irish Times, to poetry, essays, and plays for television, radio, and the stage, Parker is, according to Richtarik, a figure wholly at the influence of the turbulent forces at play in his native Belfast. An Irish Times review described Richtarik’s biography as, “[one] you can trust; it also captures an important chapter of Irish cultural life.”

The Fund for Irish Studies, celebrating its 15th anniversary season and 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.”

Information on the full 2013-2014 Fund for Irish Studies series can be found at fisprinceton.wpengine.com. Other lectures scheduled in the series include:

  • Amy Martin on “The Origins of Irish Internationalism: Violence and Terror in Ireland, India and Jamaica, 1857-1870,” September 27
  • Kevin Barry, reading from his book Dark Lies the Island, City of BohaneOctober 11
  • Performance by Irish jazz singer Christine Tobin of her award-winning settings of poems by W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” October 18
  • Philip King on “The Irish Song Lyric from Tom Moore to Christy Moore,” November 8
  • Tony Award-winning playwright Enda Walsh in conversation with Senior Lecturer in Theater and Lewis Center Chair Michael Cadden, November 15

In addition, the Fund for Irish Studies will recognize this anniversary season by hosting a daylong symposium on Irish culture, politics, history, and life in April 2014.

 

To learn more about the over 100 events presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts, visit www.princeton.edu/arts.

 

Link to photo: https://lca.sharefile.com/d/s5b6b5a9cd1c4af68
Photo caption: Literary historian Marilynn Richtarik lectures on “Stewart Parker: The Playwright in His Place” as part of a series presented by the Fund for Irish Studies at Princeton.
Photo credit: Photo courtesy of Marilynn Richtarik

Amy Martin on “The Origins of Irish Internationalism”

Martin’s lecture is drawn from her current book project: a study of the internationalism central to Irish nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the lecture, she will explore Irish writings on the Sepoy rebellion in India and the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica. By comparing events in these locations to the history of colonialism in Ireland, nationalist writers develop a theory of empire and specifically of imperial violence.

(Princeton, NJ)  Historian and professor of British and Irish literature Amy Martin will present a lecture entitled, “The Origins of Irish Internationalism: Violence and Terror in Ireland, India and Jamaica, 1857-1870” on Friday, September 27 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.

Martin is an associate professor in the English Department at Mount Holyoke College and also lectures at summer programs in Dublin for the Notre Dame Irish Studies Seminar and the James Joyce Summer School.  Her research topics range from post-colonial theory and Victorian studies to British imperial nationalism and the corresponding Irish anticolonial nationalism. Among Martin’s publications are Blood Transfusions: Representing Irish Immigration, the English Working Class, and Revolutionary Possibility in the Work of Carlyle and Engels (2004), and the book Alter-nations: Nationalisms, Terror, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (2012), as well as papers published in various journals.  Martin received her undergraduate degree from Sarah Lawrence College and continued her studies at Columbia University, where she received her Ph.D.

Stemming from her current project, a book that examines internationalism and critiques of empire in nineteenth century Ireland, Martin recently published an article on the subject entitled, Representing the “Indian Revolution” of 1857: Towards a Genealogy of Irish Internationalist Anticolonialism in the Field Day Review.  Her lecture will explore related conflicts in Jamaica and Ireland itself, and reflect on the development of modern ideas of terrorism and the state in Irish thought based on colonial situations in the three nations.  Martin’s scholarly work has been described as “impressive,” “indispensable,” and having an “immediate and lasting impact both on Irish Studies and on Victorian Studies.”

The Fund for Irish Studies, celebrating its fifteenth anniversary season and 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.

Information on the entire 2013-2014 Fund for Irish Studies series can be found at fisprinceton.wpengine.com.  Other events scheduled in the series include:

  • Kevin Barry, reading from his short story collection “Dark Lies the Island,” October 11
  • Performance by Irish jazz singer Christine Tobin of her award-winning settings of poems by W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” October 18
  • Philip King on “The Irish Song Lyric from Tom Moore to Christy Moore,” November 8
  • Tony Award-winning playwright Enda Walsh in conversation with Senior Lecturer in Theater and Lewis Center Chair Michael Cadden, November 15

In addition, the Fund for Irish Studies will recognize this anniversary season by hosting a daylong symposium on Irish culture, politics, history, and life in April 2014.

To learn more about the over 100 events presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts, visit princeton.edu/arts.


Link to photo: https://lca.sharefile.com/d/sd8818db37b84aa08

Photo caption: As part of a series presented by the Fund for Irish Studies at Princeton, historian and scholar of British and Irish literature Amy Martin will lecture on “The Origins of Irish Internationalism: Violence and Terror in Ireland, India and Jamaica, 1857-1870”

Photo credit:  Photo by Paul Schnaittacher