Lecture by Alvin Jackson

Friday, April 27, 2018
4:30 p.m.
East Pyne 010
FREE and open to the public

Acclaimed Irish historian and scholar Alvin Jackson will conclude the spring 2018 Fund for Irish Studies lecture series by giving a lecture, entitled “John Redmond and Edward Carson: Bloodshed, Borders and the Union State,” on Friday, April 27 at 4:30 p.m. in East Pyne Room 010 on the Princeton University campus.  The lecture is free and open to the public.

John Redmond and Edward Carson are two of the biggest names in modern Irish history. At the peak of their careers as senior members of the British parliament, they were locked together in combat over the issue of Home Rule. That conflict led to an outcome that neither of them wanted: the partition of Ireland and the creation of a border that, with Brexit, again poses apparently insoluble problems. Jackson’s book, Judging Redmond and Carson, was recently published by the Royal Irish Academy.

Jackson is the Sir Richard Lodge Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh.  He studied Modern History at Corpus Christi College and Nuffield College, Oxford, and completed a D.Phil. in 1986. Previously, Jackson was a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow; Lecturer in Modern History at University College Dublin; Professor of Modern Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast; and the John Burns Visiting Professor at Boston College, Massachusetts. At the University of Edinburgh, Jackson has served as Head of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and recently as Dean of Research and Deputy Head of the College of Humanities and Social Science. Jackson’s research has been supported by three major national awards – a British Academy Research Readership in the Humanities (2000), a British Academy-Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship (2009), and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2014). He is an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Member of the Academia Europaea.

Screening of Song of Granite by Pat Collins

Friday, April 6, 2018
1:00 p.m.
Princeton Garden Theatre, 160 Nassau St., Princeton
FREE and open to the public

Acclaimed filmmaker Pat Collins will screen and discuss his feature film, Song of Granite, a portrayal of the life of sean nós singer Joe Heaney and his music, on Friday, April 6 at 1:00 p.m. at the Princeton Garden Theater, 160 Nassau Street. An audience discussion with the filmmaker will follow the screening. The event, which is free and open to the public, is presented by the Fund for Irish Studies at Princeton University. Guests should note that this event is earlier in the day than usual for Fund for Irish Studies Series events.

Joe Heaney was widely regarded as the greatest practitioner of sean-nòs, a form of traditional unaccompanied Irish singing. Shaped by the myths, fables, and songs of his upbringing in the west of Ireland, his emergence as a gifted artist came at a personal cost. Heaney was said to have a repertoire of over 500 songs in his memory. He became a star in the American folk music revival of the 1960s, first at the Newport Folk Festival and then in various cities across the country, where he performed to sold-out crowds.

The film provides a portrait of the artist, covering his childhood in Connemara in the 1930s, his travels throughout the U.K. and U.S. in the 1960s, and then his reflection on his past and his legacy as an elderly man in the U.S. Collins’ film does not attempt to cover all the details about the singer’s life but rather mirror’s Heaney’s reputation as an elusive and enigmatic man. The film features performances by Colm Seoighe, Macdara Ó Fátharta, Jaren Cerf, Lisa O’Neill, Damien Dempsey, and sean nós singers Mícheál Ó Chonfhaola and Pól Ó Ceannabháin, and black and white cinematography by Richard Kendrick. Song of Granite had its world premiere at the 2017 South by Southwest Film Festival and was Ireland’s official entry as Best Foreign Language Film in the 2018 Academy Awards. The film is presented in both English and subtitled Gaelic. Learn more at http://songofgranite.oscilloscope.net/

Steve Greene of Indiewire notes that the film, “delivers a profile of not just a singer but the country that made him…Song of Granite is a stirring solemn tribute.”

Collins, who directed and co-wrote the film, has been making films since 1998 and has directed over 30 films, including feature films, documentaries and short experimental works. He has made documentaries on the writers Michael Hartnett, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and John McGahern, and he co-directed a documentary on Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.  In 2012, he completed the feature film Silence, which had its international premiere at the London Film Festival and was distributed by Element Films in Ireland and New Wave Films. Song of Granite is his second dramatic feature film. 

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. The spring 2018 edition of the series is organized by Fintan O’Toole as acting chair of the Fund for Irish Studies.

The final event in the 2017-18 series will feature Alvin Jackson, the Sir Richard Lodge Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh, who will present a lecture, “John Redmond and Edward Carson:  Bloodshed, Borders and the Union State,” on April 27.

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.

 To learn more about the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures and special events, presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts, most of them free, visit arts.princeton.edu.

Reading by Sally Rooney

Irish author Sally Rooney, winner of the 2017 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, reads from her work.

Friday, March 9, 2018
4:30 p.m.
East Pyne 010
FREE and open to the public

Irish author Sally Rooney, winner of the 2017 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, reads from her work.


Irish novelist Sally Rooney will present a reading on Friday, March 9 at 4:30 p.m. in East Pyne 010 on the Princeton University campus. The reading, which is free and open to the public, is presented by the Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University.

Sally Rooney’s debut novel Conversations with Friends was published in 2017 and was selected by The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Observer, Daily Telegraph, and Evening Standard as a Book of the Year. The novel has been longlisted for the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted for the 2017 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award: Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year, and the 2017 Books Are My Bag Readers Choice Award. Rooney was the winner of the 2017 Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award. Born in Mayo and now living in Dublin, she is the editor of the literary magazine The Stinging Fly, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Dublin Review and elsewhere. Her new novel, Normal People, is being published in September.

A review of Conversations with Friends in The New Yorker states, “She [Rooney] writes with a rare, thrilling confidence, in a lucid and exacting style uncluttered with the sort of steroidal imagery and strobe flashes of figurative language that so many dutifully literary novelists employ.”

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. The spring 2018 edition of the series is organized by O’Toole as acting chair of the Fund for Irish Studies.

A Reading and Performance by Paul Muldoon with guest appearances by Iarla Ó Lionáird and Dan Trueman

Friday, February 23, 2018
4:30 p.m.
Wallace Theater, Lewis Arts complex
FREE and open to the public

To mark the publication of his new volume Lamentations and the performance in Princeton of Olagón, Paul Muldoon gives a special reading with guest appearances by Irish singer Iarla Ó Lionáird and Princeton University Professor of Music Dan Trueman.


Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon will present a reading from his recent poetry collections joined by acclaimed singer Iarla Ó Lionáird and composer Dan Trueman, in celebration of Muldoon’s latest volume Lamenations and the three artists’ collaboration with Eighth Blackbird, Olagón: a Cantata in Doublespeak. The reading, presented by Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies, will take on place on Friday, February 23 at 4:30 p.m. in the Wallace Theater located at the Lewis Arts complex on the Princeton campus. This event is free and open to the public. Performances of Olagón are being presented on February 22 through 24.

Muldoon will be reading from his recently published collection Lamentations, which presents a translation of a classic Irish poem from the 18th-century and re-envisions the haunted narratives within. He will also read from his lauded Selected Poems 1968-2014, work selected from the past 45 years and drawn from 12 individual collections by the poet, hailed by Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney as “one of the era’s true originals.”

 The reading will include appearances by two of Muldoon’s recent collaborators on Olagón: a Cantata in Doublespeak. This new work is an evening-length collaboration between the Grammy Award-winning sextet Eighth Blackbird, Muldoon, Ó Lionáird, and Trueman. With text written by Muldoon in both English and Irish and based on the classic Irish tale Táin Bó Cúailnge, the cantata paints a narrative of hardship in contemporary Ireland with traditional music, such as sean nós, performed by Ó Lionáird and with stage direction by Mark DiChiazza. Performances will be held on February 22, 23 and 24 at 8:00 p.m. also in the Wallace Theater. Hosted by the Princeton Department of Music, Eighth Blackbird will be in residence at Princeton Sound Kitchen from February 20 through 26.

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen’s University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University and was founding chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. Other awards include the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.”

Iarla Ó Lionáird has carved a long and unique career in music in Ireland. 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 shown a breadth of artistic ambition. He has worked with a number of composers internationally, including Nico Muhly, Donnacha Dennehy, Dan Trueman, Gavin Bryars and David Lang, and he has performed and recorded with such artists as Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, Nick Cave and Sinead O’Connor. His unique singing style has carried him to stages and concert halls all over the world, from New York’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center to the Sydney Opera House, London’s Royal Albert Hall and beyond. His film credits extend from The Gangs of New York to Hotel Rwanda and most recently as featured vocalist in the film Calvary starring Brendan Gleeson and the film adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn starring Saoirse Ronan. Ó Lionáird was a 2016-17 Belknap Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of Music at Princeton.

Dan Trueman is a professor of music composition in Princeton’s Department of Music, Director of the Princeton Sound Kitchen, and a noted fiddler and electronic musician. He co-founded the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, the first ensemble of its size and kind that has led to the formation of similarly inspired ensembles across the world. His compositional work reflects this complex and broad range of activities, exploring rhythmic connections between traditional dance music and machines, for instance, or engaging with the unusual phrasing, tuning and ornamentation of the traditional Norwegian music while trying to discover new music that is singularly inspired by, and only possible with, new digital instruments that he designs and constructs. In addition to Olagón, his current projects include a double-quartet for Sō Percussion and the JACK Quartet, commissioned by the Barlow Foundation; the Prepared Digital Piano project; a collaborative dance project with choreographer and Princeton dance faculty member Rebecca Lazier and Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Naomi Leonard; ongoing collaborations with Irish fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and guitarist Monica Mugan (Trollstilt); and a new collaborative work with Mark DeChiazza for the PRISM saxophone quartet. Trueman is the recipient of a 2016 Bessie Award, a 2015 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, a 2014 Barlow Commission, a 2010 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2008 MacArthur Foundation “Digital Innovations” Grant, and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.

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.”

Fintan O’Toole Lectures on “Brexit, Ireland and the Rise of English Nationalism”

Friday, March 2, 2018
4:30 p.m.
East Pyne 010, Princeton University campus
FREE and open to the public

Theater critic and scholar Fintan O’Toole gives the annual Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture on “Brexit, Ireland and the rise of English nationalism,” at 4:30 p.m. This event is free but there is limited seating on a first-come, first-seated basis.


Irish theater critic and scholar Fintan O’Toole will present the 2018 Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture, entitled “Brexit, Ireland and the Rise of English Nationalism,” on Friday, March 2 at 4:30 p.m. in East Pyne Room 010 on the Princeton University campus. Part of the 2017-18 Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University, this event is free and open to the public.

O’Toole’s writing on Brexit, the prospective withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, has won both the European Press Prize and the George Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2017.

Brexit, Ireland and the Rise of English Nationalism” explores the roots of Brexit in the unacknowledged crisis of English identity, the threat it poses to the hard-won peace in Northern Ireland, and the reasons why Ireland will not follow its nearest neighbor out of the European Union.

Fintan O’Toole, one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals, is a columnist for The Irish Times and Leonard L. Milberg ’53 visiting lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton. He also contributes to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and other international publications. His books on theater include works on William Shakespeare, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Thomas Murphy. His books on politics include the best sellers Ship of Fools and Enough is Enough. 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, the Orwell Prize and the European Press Prize. O’Toole’s History of Ireland in 100 Objects, which covers 100 highly charged artifacts from the last 10,000 years, is currently the basis for Ireland’s postage stamps. His most recent book is Judging Shaw: The Radicalism of GBS, published by the Royal Irish Academy, and he has recently been appointed official biographer of Seamus Heaney.

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. The spring 2018 edition of the series is organized by O’Toole as acting chair of the Fund for Irish Studies.

 To learn more about the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures and special events, most of them free, presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts, visit arts.princeton.edu.