Award-winning writer Anne Enright reads from her work as part of the spring 2019 Fund for Irish Studies event series.
In the James Stewart Film Theater, 185 Nassau Street, Princeton, NJ.
FREE and open to the public.
Photo by Hugh Chaloner
Anne Enright Anne Enright was born in Dublin in 1962, and she lives there still. She has written six novels, two books of short stories and a book of essays about motherhood. Her work appears in many publications including The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Key awards include The Man Booker Prize (2007), The Andrew Carnegie medal for Excellence in Fiction (2012) and the Irish Novel of the year (2008 and 2016). Anne was the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction (2015-2018) and has recently been appointed Professor of Fiction at UCD.
Filmmaker Sinead O’Shea presents a screening of her documentary film, A Mother Brings Her Son to be Shot, at the Princeton Garden Theatre. Screening followed by discussion with writer/director O’Shea and Irish scholar and critic Fintan O’Toole.
At the Princeton Garden Theatre, 160 Nassau Street, Princeton, NJ.
FREE and open to the public.
Presented as part of the spring 2019 Fund for Irish Studies event series; please note different location and time than other series events.
ABOUT THE FILM
One night Majella O’Donnell took her teenage son Philly to be shot in both legs. Majella, Philly and his shooters all live within an extraordinary community in Derry, Northern Ireland. The “Troubles” officially ended in 1998 but this community is still at war. They do not accept the government or police. All this happens within the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. How do you bring your son to be shot? What happens afterwards? How does family life continue? How does a community respond? When do wars really end? For five years Sinéad O’Shea has filmed this shocking portrait of a post conflict society. Watch the trailer
Director Sinead O’Shea
Sinead O’Shea is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist.
Her first feature documentary A Mother Brings her Son to be Shot premiered at the London Film Festival and was one of the most successful documentary releases in Irish cinemas of 2018. The Oscar nominated director Joshua Oppenheimer is executive producer.
A Mother Brings Her Son To Be Shot won a Special Mention Award at the Warsaw Film Festival and has been nominated for a FACT Award at CPH:DOX, Copenhagen, Maysles Observational Documentary Award at the Belfast Film Festival and Best Feature Documentary at the EBS Documentary Film Festival in South Korea and the Budapest Film Festival.
Previously Sinead covered Ireland for The New York Times. She has also directed and produced films with Al Jazeera English, BBC, Channel 4 and RTE. She won an Irish Media Justice Award for Lives in Limbo with The Irish Times and an IFTA for Sampler with RTE. In 2018 Sinead was named as one of the top 10 European female filmmakers to watch by the European Film Promotion network and Sydney Film Festival.
At present Sinead is developing her first drama feature. She is also developing further documentary work on post conflict situations with the help of Screen Ireland and contributes to the Guardian and The New York Times.
Irish scholar Maureen Murphy lectures on “Irish Emigrant Girls in New York” as part of the Fund for Irish Studies series.
Irish scholar Maureen Murphy lectures on “Irish Emigrant Girls in New York” as part of the spring 2019 Fund for Irish Studies series.
In the James Stewart Film Theater, 185 Nassau Street, Princeton, NJ.
FREE and open to the public.
Photo courtesy Maureen Murphy
Maureen O’Rourke Murphy is the Joseph L. Dionne Professor of Curriculum and Teaching in the School of Education, Health, and Human Services at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, New York. A past president of the American Conference for Irish Studies and a past chair of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures, Murphy was one of the six senior editors of the prizewinning Dictionary of Irish Biography published in nine volumes and online by the Royal Irish Academy and Cambridge University Press in 2009. Murphy directed the New York State Great Irish Famine Curriculum Project (2001), which won the National Conference for the Social Studies Excellence Award in 2002; she was the historian of the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park City. She is currently the historian, with John Ridge, of the Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary/Watson House Project.
Murphy edited Irish Literature: A Reader (1987, rev. ed. 2006), with James MacKillop. She also edited Asenath Nicholson’s Annals of the Famine in Ireland (1998) and Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger (2002). She edited Annie O’Donnell’s Your Fondest Annie in 2005. Her biography of Asenath Nicholson, Compassionate Stranger: Asenath Nicholson and the Great Irish Famine was published in 2016.
Murphyhas been awarded honorary degrees by the State University of New York at Cortland and by the National University of Ireland.She received the President of Ireland’s Award for Service in 2015.
Bestselling author Colm Tóibín lectures on “The Myth of Paternity: James Joyce and his father” as part of the spring 2019 Fund for Irish Studies event series. Tóibín’s latest book, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce, was published in 2018.
In the James Stewart Film Theater, 185 Nassau Street, Princeton, NJ.
Colm Tóibín is the author of nine novels, including The Blackwater Lightship; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. Three times shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.
Noted Irish writer and theater critic Fintan O’Toole presents the annual Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture on “Escaping from History: The Dreamworld of Brexit”
Noted Irish scholar and critic Fintan O’Toole presents the annual Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture on “Escaping from History: The Dreamworld of Brexit” as part of the spring 2019 Fund for Irish Studies series.
In the James Stewart Film Theater, 185 Nassau Street, Princeton, NJ.
FREE and open to the public.
Photo by Larry Levanti
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 Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney.
