2016-17 Archives - The Fund for Irish Studies at Princeton University

Reading by Kevin Barry from Beatlebone

Author Kevin Barry will read from his novel Beatlebone on Friday, April 28 at 4:30 p.m. at the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ’32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street. The reading, which is free and open to the public, concludes the 2016-2017 Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University.

Kevin Barry’s second novel, Beatlebone, follows a fictional John Lennon as he travels in 1978 to Dorninish, his small private island located off the west coast of Ireland. Legendary Beatles musician John Lennon actually purchased this uninhabited property, known as “Beatle Island” or “Hippie Island,” and owned it until his death in 1980. Yoko Ono, Lennon’s wife, eventually sold the property in 1984.

Beatlebone consists of Lennon’s conversations and adventures with his driver, Cornelius O’Grady, as the pair avoids pitfalls with the weather and the media to deliver Lennon to Dorninish. The Guardian calls the novel “a lyrical exploration of love, fate and death.” Regarding Barry’s writing, The New York Times praises his “razor-sharp prose, powerful poetics and a dramatist’s approach to dialogue unencumbered by punctuation.”Kevin Barry’s second novel, Beatlebone, follows a fictional John Lennon as he travels in 1978 to Dorninish, his small private island located off the west coast of Ireland. Legendary Beatles musician John Lennon actually purchased this uninhabited property, known as “Beatle Island” or “Hippie Island,” and owned it until his death in 1980. Yoko Ono, Lennon’s wife, eventually sold the property in 1984.

In addition to Beatlebone, Kevin Barry is the author of the novel City Of Bohane and the story collections Dark Lies The Island and There Are Little Kingdoms. His awards include the Author’s Club First Novel Award and the prestigious IMPAC Dublin City Literary Award for City of Bohane, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize, the European Union Prize for Literature, and the Goldsmiths Prize. In 2016, he received a Lannan Foundation Literary Award. Barry’s stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, the Stinging Fly, Best European Fiction, and many other journals and anthologies around the world. He also works as a screenwriter and a playwright.

Mary Daly Lectures on “An Irish solution? Contraception, the Catholic Church and Irish Society 1960-1983”

Mary Daly, Professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin, will present a lecture on “An Irish solution? Contraception, the Catholic Church and Irish Society 1960-1983″ as part of the 2016-2017 Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University on Friday, April 14 at 4:30 p.m. at the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ’32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street. This event is free and open to the public.

Drawn from her extensive research, Daly’s lecture will explore Irish family planning and the role of the Catholic Church, focusing on legal and social developments including the impact of Roe v. Wade on Irish debates.

Mary Daly was elected as the first female President of the Royal Irish Academy in its 229-year history in 2014. She is one of Ireland’s most prominent senior historians and is a member of the government’s Expert Advisory Group on Commemorations. She is emeritus professor of history at University College Dublin (UCD) and served for seven years as Principal of UCD College of Arts and Celtic Studies; she has also held visiting positions at Harvard University and Boston College. She has served on Ireland’s National Archives Advisory Council, the Irish Manuscripts Commission, and the Higher Education Authority. In 2015 she was appointed as a member of the Commission of Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes. Daly was involved in the commemoration of the sesquicentenary of the great famine 1995-97, and with Dr. Margaret O’Callaghan she directed a research project on the Golden Jubilee of the 1916 Rising, resulting in the publication of a major edited work: 1916 in 1966: Commemorating the Easter Rising (2007). Over the course of her career, Daly has researched widely and published prolifically, notably: Dublin, the Deposed Capital: A Social and Economic History, 1860-1914 (1984); Women and Work in Ireland (1997); The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920-1973 (2006); with Theo Hoppen, Gladstone: Ireland and Beyond (2011) and most recently Sixties Ireland: Reshaping the Economy, State and Society, 1957 – 1973 (2016). With Eugenio Biagini she is co-editor of The Cambridge History of Modern Ireland, which will be published in May 2017. She is a graduate of UCD and Oxford University and a member of the Acadaemia Europaea.

Words for Music, Perhaps: A Day-long Symposium on Irish Lyric and Song

A Day-long Symposium on Irish Lyric and Song

“Words for Music, Perhaps” features panel discussions by renowned scholars Matt Campbell, Aileen Dillane, Paul Hamilton, Barry McCrea, Maureen McLane, Paul Muldoon, Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, Iarla O’Lionaird, and Dan Trueman, along with musical performances by guest artists John Burkhalter, David Kellett, and Dasha Koltunyuk. The panel begins at 9:45 a.m. on Friday, March 31, in the James M. Stewart ’32 Theater located on the first floor at 185 Nassau Street. Free and open to the public.

**EVENT SCHEDULE*:**

9:45 AM | INTRODUCTION

9:50-11:30 AM | PANEL 1 — NINETEENTH CENTURY SONG

Matt Campbell (University of York) — “Authentic Dross, from Bunting and Moore to Petrie and Joyce”
Paul Hamilton (Queen Mary, London) — “Irish Melodies: Thomas Moore’s lyrical politics in the context of European Romanticism”
Maureen McLane (NYU) — “Ballad Mediality and ‘World Literature’: From 18th C. Antiquarians to Spotify”
Diarmuid Ó Giolláin (Notre Dame) — “Thomas Crofton Croker and the Irish Lament”

12:00-12:45 PM | MUSICAL PERFORMANCE

Thomas Moore’s songs — John Burkhalter, David Kellett, Dasha Koltunyuk

12:50-1:50 PM | BREAK

2:00-3:30 PM | PANEL 2 — TWENTIETH CENTURY IRISH SONG

Dr. Aileen Dillane (University of Limerick) — “Structures of Feeling in Contemporary Irish Song: Old Themes, New Voices”
Barry McCrea (University of Notre Dame) — “Sean Ó Riordáin: The Irish Language as Lyrical Longing”
Paul Muldoon (Princeton) — “The One Burden: Yeats and Song”

4:30-6:00 PM | MUSICAL PERFORMANCE

Olagón, A Cantata In Doublespeak — Paul Muldoon, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Dan Trueman

*schedule subject to change

The Fund for Irish Studies is generously sponsored by the Durkin Family Trust and the James J. Kerrigan, Jr. ’45 and Margaret M. Kerrigan Fund for Irish Studies.

Irish scholar and theater critic Fintan O’Toole delivers the 2017 Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture: “If It Wasn’t for the Irish and Jews”

Irish theater critic and scholar Fintan O’Toole will present the 2017 Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture entitled “If It Wasn’t for the Irish and Jews” on Friday, February 17 at 4:30 p.m. at the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ’32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street. Part of the 2016-17 Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University, this event is free and open to the public.

“If It Wasn’t for the Irish and Jews” explores these ethnic groups as two of the world’s greatest diasporic cultures. Their histories have shared themes of dispossession, discrimination and self-assertion. O’Toole considers how the two cultures have interacted, from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway to struggles for religious emancipation, and from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Abie’s Irish Rose.

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, and has been published in book form by the Royal Irish Academy.

O’Toole will be co-teaching a new course, “Introduction to Irish Studies,” with Clair Wills, Chair of the Fund for Irish Studies, this spring. He will also be co-teaching a Princeton Atelier course with actor Lisa Dwan, “Ill Seen Ill Said: Staging a Beckett Text,” examining Samuel Beckett’s prose writings, specifically the novel Ill Seen Ill Said, and challenging students to find myriad ways to dramatize a work that wasn’t initially meant for the stage.

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.

Richard Kearney and Sheila Gallagher on “Recovering 1916 in Images and Stories”

Writer Richard Kearney and artist Sheila Gallagher will perform their celebrated multimedia talk “Twinsome Minds: Recovering 1916 in Images and Stories” at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, December 9 in the James M. Stewart ’32 Theater at 185 Nassau Street. Part of the 2016-17 Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University, this event is free and open to the public.

“Twinsome Minds: Recovering 1916 in Images and Stories” is a transformative multimedia performance that reimagines the narratives of “twinned” pairs of people who ended up on different sides in 1916. Focusing on Dublin’s Easter Rising and the Belgium front in World War I, the talk combines history, legend, imagination, and memory to present a reinterpreted portrait of an integral period in Irish history. “Twinsome Minds” features text by Kearney, screen projections by Gallagher, and an original score by Dana Lyn.

Kearney is a writer, professor, and cultural organizer of several international projects, most recently “Exchanging Stories, Changing History” (Guestbookproject.org). He has written two novels, Sam’s Fall and Walking at Sea Level, which have been translated into several languages, and a volume of poetry, Angel of Patrick’s Hill. He has also written several books on the role of imagination and narrative in Irish culture, literature, and the arts, most notably The Irish Mind (1984), Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (1988), Post Nationalist Ireland: Culture, Philosophy, Politics (1998), and Navigations: Collected Irish Essays (1976-2006). As a member of the Irish Arts Council, chair of the University College Dublin Film School, and public intellectual and broadcaster, he is actively involved in organizing many national and international cultural projects.

Gallagher is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and professor of art at Boston College. She works in many media including video, smoke, drawing, animation, live flowers, and light projections. She has had numerous solo exhibitions and has exhibited widely at commercial galleries, museums, and universities in the U.S. and internationally, including the Moving Image Festival in London, The Institute of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas, and the Dodge Gallery in New York City. Gallagher is the co-curator of the Becker Collection, a private archive of Civil War drawings, currently touring the U.S. Together with Kearney, she co-directs the Guestbook Project.

The Fund for Irish Studies is generously sponsored by the Durkin Family Trust and the James J. Kerrigan, Jr. ’45 and Margaret M. Kerrigan Fund for Irish Studies. Sponsorship also provided by Culture Ireland.

Iarla Ó Lionáird and Donnacha Dennehy perform and discuss their recent collaboration on a new opera, Hunger

Belknap Teaching Fellow Iarla Ó Lionáird and Assistant Professor of Music Donnacha Dennehy, two faculty members at Princeton University, will discuss and perform excerpts of Dennehy’s new opera, Hunger, on Friday, November 18. The discussion and performance will take place at 4:30 p.m. in the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ’32 Theater at 185 Nassau Street. Part of the 2016-17 Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University, this event is free and open to the public.

Belknap Teaching Fellow Iarla Ó Lionáird and Assistant Professor of Music Donnacha Dennehy, two faculty members at Princeton University, will discuss and perform excerpts of Dennehy’s new opera, Hunger, on Friday, November 18. The discussion and performance will take place at 4:30 p.m. in the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ’32 Theater at 185 Nassau Street. Part of the 2016-17 Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University, this event is free and open to the public.

Hunger, which premiered earlier this year starring O’Lionáird and recently completed a run at the BAM Next Wave Festival, is based on diaries and personal accounts from the period of the Great Famine in Ireland (1845-52). A departure from conventions in which the ensemble is concealed in the orchestra pit, the work integrates the players with the action and storytelling taking place on stage. The production includes video of present-day thinkers who consider the conditions that led to the famine and their implications for inequality in our own time. The Great Famine was a time of major upheaval, the historical significance of which is well documented. At least one million people died and yet another million emigrated. Less well-recorded are accounts of those who directly witnessed and suffered through the famine. At the heart of Dennehy’s Hunger are personal, contemporaneous stories that introduce new dimensions in the tragedy of the famine. The opera also addresses the complex issues of governance and economic policy by complementing these personal, historical voices with video interviews of contemporary economists and political philosophers, such as Noam Chomsky and Paul Krugman. The opera not only recounts history as it happened, but also addresses the current socioeconomic problems of the recent global economic crisis.

Dennehy is an assistant professor of music at Princeton. He has received commissions from Dawn Upshaw, the Kronos Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Bang On A Can, Joanna MacGregor, the Percussion Group of the Hague, and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. His recent opera,  The Last Hotel (2015), met with critical acclaim in the U.K. when it premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival and has had runs at St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York, the Dublin Theatre Festival, and the Royal Opera in London. His new piece for Nadia Sirota and viol consort will premiere at Symphony Space in 2016 and is being recorded for future release by Bedroom Community. Dennehy’s collaborations include pieces with the writer Enda Walsh, the choreographers Yoshiko Chuma and Shobana Jeyasingh, and the visual artist John Gerrard. In 2010, his single-movement orchestral piece Crane was recommended by the International Rostrum of Composers. Dennehy is the founder of Ireland’s renowned music group Crash Ensemble. Alongside the singers Upshaw and O’Lionáird, Crash Ensemble is featured on the 2011 Nonesuch release of Dennehy’s music, entitled Grá agus Bás. Releases of Dennehy’s music include a RTE Lyric FM portrait CD of his orchestral music and a number of works by NMC Records in London and Cantaloupe in New York. Previously a tenured lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, Dennehy was appointed a Global Scholar at Princeton University in 2012. He was has also served as composer-in-residence for the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra in Texas (2013-14). He joined the music faculty at Princeton University in 2014.

Ó Lionáird is a Belknap Teaching Fellow in the Council of the Humanities and in Music and Irish Studies at Princeton. An Irish musician with a focus on traditional sean-nós style, he has carved a long and unique career in music in Ireland and internationally. From his iconic early recording of the vision song “Aisling Gheal” as a young boy to his groundbreaking recordings with Dublin’s Crash Ensemble, he has been widely recognized for his artistic ambition within the Irish music fraternity. Ó Lionáird has worked internationally with renowned composers Nico Muhly, Gavin Bryars, Dan Trueman, and David Lang. He has also performed and recorded with artists such as Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, Nick Cave, and Sinead O’Connor. Ó Lionáird’s unique singing style has carried him to stages and concert halls all over the world, from New York’s Carnegie Hall to the Sydney Opera House. His film credits include The Gangs of New York, Hotel Rwanda, and most recently as a featured vocalist in the films Calvary and Brooklyn. He is also the vocalist of the critically acclaimed Irish/American band The Gloaming. At Princeton, Ó Lionáird is teaching the fall 2016 course, “Sound and Place,” and plans are underway for him to co-teach a spring 2017 course entitled “Introduction to Irish Studies.”

Performance by Award-Winning Musicians Brían Ó hAirt and Len Graham — “The Road Taken: Songs, Music and Dance from the Irish Tradition”

Len Graham and Brían Ó hAirt, two award-winning musicians and proponents of Irish traditional arts, will present a performance entitled “The Road Taken: Songs, Music and Dance from the Irish Tradition” on Friday, October 14 at 4:30 p.m. in Taplin Auditorium in Fine Hall on the Princeton University campus. Part of the 2016-17 Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University, the event is free and open to the public. Taplin Auditorium is a different location than where Irish Studies Series events are usually held.

Graham and Ó hAirt’s personal styles come from very disparate regions of Ireland—Graham’s ballads originate in northeastern Ulster while Ó hAirt’s lyrical sean-nós are from the Irish-speaking regions of the West. Their performance will exhibit numerous aspects of Irish culture and will include dance music on concertina and whistle, puirt-á-beul (mouth-music), and sean-nós dancing. Their traditional Irish songs cover a breadth of styles and subjects: ballads, lyric folksongs, and music hall pieces, which tell of love, emigration, politics, and more. Through many seasons of collaboration, the two have distilled the best of these traditions into a performance that weaves stories, songs, and dance that form the duo’s newest release, The Road Taken.

Graham is a world-renowned Irish singer and author who was crowned as the prestigious All-Ireland Singing Champion in 1971. Since the start of his professional singing career in 1982, he has collaborated with several legendary musicians, poets and storytellers, including the late John Campbell, who shared similar passions for preserving Irish traditional arts. During the years of conflict in Northern Ireland, Graham worked with Campbell on two albums that helped to raise awareness of shared cultural traditions across Ireland. In 2010 Graham released his most recent solo album, Over the Hills and Far Away. He has shared his wealth of talent and knowledge about Irish song, story, and dance at several international literary and folk festivals, as well as on television and radio. Throughout his career, Graham has been recognized for his work with numerous awards, including the 1992 Seán O’Boyle Cultural Traditions Award, the 2008 “Keeper of the Tradition” award at the Tommy Makem Festival of Traditional Song, and the 2011 CCÉ Bardic Award, among others.

Ó hAirt is the only American to have won the coveted senior title in traditional singing at the All-Ireland Fleadh Cheoil in Listowel, County Kerry in 2002. In his teens, his introduction to Chicago’s Irish-speaking community allowed him to cultivate a rich understanding of the sean-nós singing tradition long before his immersion in the language while living in the Connemara region of western County Galway. This experience left him with a vast repertoire of songs and language that continues to inform and inspire his singing. Ó hAirt has taught and performed extensively in North America, including performances at the Milwaukee Irish Festival, the Chicago Celtic Festival, the Ennis Trad Festival, and Sean-nós Milwaukee, a festival he established in 2003. In addition, his vocal recordings have been featured on numerous radio programs in both Ireland and the U.S., including various NPR and RTÉ radio programs. He is also an award-winning sean-nós dancer and accomplished instrumentalist on concertina, accordion, and whistle. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches Irish and helps develop language-learning games for Language Hunters, a non-profit organization.

Fund for Irish Studies presents Lisa Dwan on “Performing Beckett”

Lisa Dwan, internationally acclaimed Irish actress, will give a talk entitled “Performing Beckett” on Friday, September 16 at 4:30 p.m. at the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ’32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street. Part of the 2016-17 Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University, the event is free and open to the public.

In “Performing Beckett,” Dwan will discuss her recent performances of Samuel Beckett’s plays, which have met critical acclaim and have sold out at venues from London’s Royal Court Theatre to New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music. Dwan’s one-woman show has featured three of Beckett’s works: Rockaby, Footfalls, and Not I. She has been performing Beckett since 2005 and was coached by Beckett’s muse, Billie Whitelaw, who collaborated with the author for 25 years and for whom he wrote some of his most experimental plays.

Lisa Dwan has worked extensively in theatre, film, and television both internationally and in her native Ireland. Her film credits include Oliver Twist, Tailor of Panama, and Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain. In 2012, she adapted, produced, and performed the critically acclaimed one-woman play Beside the Sea at the Southbank Centre and on tour, and starred in Goran Bregović’s Margot, Diary of an Unhappy Queen at the Barbican. She recently performed in Ramin Gray’s production of Illusions by Ivan Viripaev at the Bush Theatre. Originally from Coosan, Athlone, County Westmeath, Ireland, she currently lives in London.