2015-16 Archives - The Fund for Irish Studies at Princeton University

Anne Enright

Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies presents novelist and Ireland’s first Fiction Laureate Anne Enright on Friday, April 8 at 4:30 p.m. in the James M. Stewart ’32 Theater at 185 Nassau Street. Free and open to the public.

Anne Enright, the first Fiction Laureate of Ireland, will give a reading from her latest novel, The Green Road, on Friday, April 8 at 4:30 p.m. at the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ’32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street. Part of the 2015-16 Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University, the event is free and open to the public.

Anne Enright is an Irish writer whose work includes six novels, three short story collections, and one nonfiction book. She was awarded the Man Booker prize for her fourth novel, The Gathering (2007). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she has also won the 1991 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the 2001 Encore Award, the 2008 Irish Novel of the Year, and the 2012 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in literature. Her stories and essays have been featured widely, including in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, the London Review of Books, The Dublin Review and The Irish Times. In 2011, the Irish Academic Press published Anne Enright (Visions and Revisions: Irish Writers in Their Time), a collection of essays on Enright’s work.

The Green Road was published by Norton in 2015 and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. It follows Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigan family, and her four children, who as adults have come back to rural Ireland for a last Christmas before their childhood home is sold. Spanning thirty years, the novel traces back through the Madigans’ lives as they fight, fracture and fall in love. James Wood in his review of the novel for The New Yorker said of Enright, “she is a rich, lyrical prose writer, who cascades among novelties—again and again, she finds the unexpected adjective, the just noun…The Green Road is true and rueful, as terribly adult in its clarity as its battered Madigans.”

The Fund for Irish Studies, chaired by Princeton professor Clair Wills, 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.” This event is the last in the 2015-16 series, which will resume in the fall.

Matthew Campbell on “Volunteer Poetics: Irish and British Poetry in 1916”

Professor of Modern Literature at University of York Matthew Campbell lectures on “Volunteer Poetics: Irish and British Poetry in 1916” on Friday, March 25 at 4:30 p.m. in the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ’32 Theater at 185 Nassau Street.

Matthew Campbell, Professor of Literature at the University of York, will give a talk entitled “Volunteer Poetics: Irish and British Poetry in 1916” on Friday, March 25 at 4:30 p.m. at the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ’32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street. Part of the 2015-16 Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University, the event is free and open to the public.

In “Volunteer Poetics: Irish and British poetry in 1916,” Campbell will examine the poetry that emerged from Ireland in the time of violence and militarism leading up to the Irish Civil War and the poets who produced it, Yeats in particular. This topic builds on his larger research of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry from Ireland and Britain.

Campbell is the author of Irish Poetry under the Union, 1801–1924 (2013) and Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (1999). He is also an editor of The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (2003). Most of Campbell’s work explores British and Irish poetry of the last two centuries, with particular interest in the history of the sounds of poems. More recently, he has been researching the invention of the distinctive music, prosody, and language of Irish poetry in English from 1801 to 1921 and beyond. Campbell publishes regularly on contemporary Irish poetry as well as on Romantic poetry, Celticism, elegy, and war writing. He holds a B.A. from Trinity College Dublin and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.

The Fund for Irish Studies, chaired by Princeton Professor Clair Wills, provides all Princeton students, and the community at large, with 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.”

Ireland and Shakespeare Symposium

Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies and Lewis Center for the Arts presents Ireland and Shakespeare: A Symposium, a one-day symposium of debate and performance centered on Irish versions and adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, with contributions from leading Irish directors, actors and critics: Mark Burnett, Bradin Cormack, Katherine Hennessey, Garry Hynes, Patrick Lonergan, Barry McGovern, Conall Morrison, Fintan O’Toole, Lynne Parker, Owen Roe, Robert Sandberg, James Shapiro, Clair Wills, and Michael Wood.

Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies and Lewis Center for the Arts presents the Ireland and Shakespeare Symposium, a one-day symposium of debate and performance centered on Irish versions and adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, with contributions from leading Irish directors, actors and critics: Mark Burnett, Bradin Cormack, Katherine Hennessey, Garry Hynes, Patrick Lonergan, Barry McGovern, Conall Morrison, Fintan O’Toole, Lynne Parker, Owen Roe, Robert Sandberg, James Shapiro, Clair Wills, and Michael Wood.

Beginning Saturday, March 5 from 9:15 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. in the James M. Stewart ’32 Theater at 185 Nassau Street on the Princeton University campus. A pre-symposium lecture is scheduled for Friday, March 4 at 4:30 p.m. by Columbia University Professor James Shapiro, author of 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear.

Free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations required.

The symposium is presented with support from Princeton University’s English Department, The David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Fund, and Global Shakespeare.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:

Friday, March 4

4:30 p.m. | Fund for Irish Studies Lecture: James Shapiro on “Shakespeare and Ireland”
5:30 p.m. | Reception

Saturday, March 5

9:15 a.m. | Introduction
9:30 – 11:00 a.m. | Staging Shakespeare in Ireland
11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. | Screening of the film Mickey B, directed by Tom Magill
2:00 – 3:30 p.m. | Debating Shakespeare in Ireland
4:00 – 5:30 p.m. | Performing Shakespeare in Ireland

Fund for Irish Studies Lecture by Fintan O’Toole on “Carnival and Ruin: Looting in the 1916 Rising “

Theater critic, scholar, and Lecturer in Theater Fintan O’Toole delivers the annual Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture on “Carnival and Ruin: Looting in the 1916 Rising,” in recognition of the centenary of the 1916 uprising, on Friday, February 12 at 4:30 p.m. in the James M. Stewart ’32 Theater at 185 Nassau Street.

Theatre critic and scholar Fintan O’Toole will present the 2016 Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture entitled, “Carnival and Ruin: Looting in the 1916 Rising,” on Friday, February 12 at 4:30 p.m. at the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ’32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street. Part of the 2015-16 Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University, the event is free and open to the public.

Fintan O’Toole, one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals, has written for The Irish Times, New York Daily News, Sunday Tribune (Dublin), and In Dublin Magazine. His books on theater span a wide range of topics, from his biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan to theater currently appearing on Irish stages. He is the assistant editor, a columnist, and a feature writer for The Irish Times. He also contributes to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and other international publications. In 2011, The Observer named O’Toole one of “Britain’s top 300 intellectuals.” He has received the A.T. Cross Award for Supreme Contribution to Irish Journalism, the Millennium Social Inclusion Award, and Journalist of the Year in 2010 from TV3 Media Awards.

O’Toole’s most recent project, History of Ireland in 100 Objects, covers 100 highly charged artifacts from the last 10,000 years. It has been published in book form by the Royal Irish Academy and as an application for iPad, iPhone and Android devices.

The lecture, presented in recognition of the 1916 uprising or Easter Rising, considers the armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week, 1916. The Rising was mounted by Irish republicans with the intent to end British rule in Ireland and establish an independent Irish Republic while the United Kingdom was heavily engaged in World War I. It was the most significant uprising in Ireland since the rebellion of 1798.

Robert Fagles, for whom the annual Memorial Lecture is named, was a member of the Princeton faculty for 42 years in the Department of Comparative Literature and a renowned translator of Greek classics. His critically acclaimed translations of Homer’s “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” became bestsellers.

The Fund for Irish Studies, chaired by Princeton professor Clair Wills, 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.” The series is co-produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts.