Alan Hayden (University College, Dublin) lectures on “Irish Archaeology Now” as part of Princeton University’s 2020-21 Fund for Irish Studies series.
This event has been canceled.
Alan Hayden (University College, Dublin) lectures on “Irish Archaeology Now” as part of Princeton University’s 2020-21 Fund for Irish Studies series.
Scholar Tara Guissin-Stubbs, Associate Professor in English Literature and Director of Studies in English Literature and Creative Writing at Oxford University, lectures on “Symbols from Within, and Symbols from Without: The Celtic Revival and the Harlem Renaissance” as part of Princeton University’s 2020-21 Fund for Irish Studies series.
Scholar Tara Guissin-Stubbs, Associate Professor in English Literature and Director of Studies in English Literature and Creative Writing at Oxford University, lectures on “Symbols from Within, and Symbols from Without: The Celtic Revival and the Harlem Renaissance” as part of Princeton University’s 2020-21 Fund for Irish Studies series.
This talk considers James Weldon Johnson’s assertion in his Preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) that the black poet needs to find ‘symbols from within rather than symbols from without’ in order to find a suitable form; in so doing, Johnson contends, the poet will be doing ‘something like what Synge did for the Irish’. It will discuss overlaps between the Celtic Revival and the Harlem Renaissance, to try to understand just what Johnson meant, and what this means for us now.
Guissin-Stubbs is an associate professor in English literature, and director of studies in English literature and creative writing at Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education, and dean of Kellogg College, Oxford. She is the author of a range of publications on Irish and American literature, poetry, and transatlantic culture, including American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910–1955: The Politics of Enchantment (2012); Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture with Doug Haynes (2017); and her most recent monograph, The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion (2020). She is also the book reviews editor for the open access journal International Yeats Studies and a senior fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford. Her next book project will build on her public engagement work on poetry and structure, which discovers analogies for poetry within nature and visual art to find new ways of thinking about poetry, and to break down some of its mystique.
This virtual event is free and open to the public. Join the lecture via Zoom Webinar; registration required.
This event is recorded for archival purposes only and will not be available for viewing after the event.
The event will include live closed captions in English. Patrons can join the Webinar and view captions or connect directly to the captioned event through StreamText. Reference these instructions for using StreamText (PDF).
If you are in need of other access accommodations in order to participate in this event, please contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least 2 weeks in advance of the event date.
Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (“One of the most unforgettable plays in the modern canon.” –The New York Times) is the ultimate emblem of perseverance. Now, in a rare exception allowed only during the country’s theatre prohibition, this modernist masterpiece will be recorded and broadcast online, delicately translated to the screen for its 60th anniversary by artists on the cutting edge of digital theatre. FREE; tickets required.
“The situation is one of the strangest in the whole history of theatre.”
—Katherine Worth, scholar
Something has occurred. And now Winnie can’t leave—can’t see anyone—can’t move—is perpetually stuck. There is little to do but brush her teeth and maintain hope.
Watch the trailer for HAPPY DAYS by Samuel Beckett from wildprojectTV.
Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (One of the most unforgettable plays in the modern canon” — The New York Times) is the ultimate emblem of perseverance. In the iconic playwright’s lifelong pursuit to illuminate consciousness on stage, Beckett devised Winnie: a tour de force of charm and grit, helplessly buried up to her waist in the ground. She endures the wearisome humdrum of endless, interchangeable days. And now, speaking to an audience who has faced a year of quarantine, the play endures too.
To commemorate the play’s 60th anniversary, New York’s the wild project and director Nico Krell are revitalizing this mammoth, mysterious work. In an exception allowed only during the global pandemic, the performance will be recorded and broadcast online, delicately translated to the screen by a team of artists working on the cutting edge of digital theatre.
Krell is a Princeton alumnus, Class of 2018, and the production features alumni Tessa Albertson, Class of 2020, as Winnie, and Jake Austin Robertson, Class of 2015, as her husband Willie. Alumni Jules Peiperl is costume designer and Stanley Mathabane is sound designer, both members of the Class of 2017.
Presented by The Wild Project in the East Village, New York City, in association with Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies. The Wild Project, a nonprofit theater company and venue, was founded in 2007 to support the diverse independent theater, film, music, visual arts and spoken-word artists of New York City. The organization has presented and produced theater that seeks to enrich, educate, and unify its East Village community in an environmentally responsible green space, devoting specific initiatives to supporting LGBTQ+ artists and projects and those of people of color.
Beckett (1906 –1989) was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theater director, poet, and literary translator. His idiosyncratic work offers a bleak, tragi-comic outlook on existence and experience, often coupled with dark comedy. Beckett is considered one of the last modernist writers and one of the key figures of the “theater of the absurd.” He is perhaps best-known for his 1953 play, Waiting for Godot. In 1969 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
This virtual event is free and open to the public. The film will be preceded by an introduction with director Krell and Princeton Professor and Fund for Irish Studies Chair Paul Muldoon. The event will take place on Zoom Webinar; advance registration required.
This event is recorded for archival purposes only and will not be available for viewing after the event.
The film will be closed captioned and the introduction will be live captioned in English. If you are in need of other other access accommodations in order to participate in this event, please contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least 2 weeks in advance of the event date.
Scholar and critic Fintan O’Toole delivers the annual Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture on “1921 and 2021: The Partition of Ireland, Then and Now.”
Scholar and critic Fintan O’Toole delivers the annual Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture on “A Century of Partition” as part of Princeton University’s 2020-21 Fund for Irish Studies series. 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.
In 1921, Ireland was divided by the formation of Northern Ireland as a new political entity in the Protestant-dominated northeastern part of the island. This led to the creation of two sectarian states, each dominated by a single religious culture. The production by the revolutionary James Connolly that partition would create “a carnival of reaction” on both sides of the Border was not far wrong. The Troubles of 1968-1998 served merely to deepen the divide. But Brexit has raised new questions about the future of the UK and therefore of Partition. The contradictions that were frozen in 1921 have emerged anew in 2021.
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, Enough is Enough and The Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism. 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 is the official biographer of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney.
This virtual event is free and open to the public. Join the lecture via Zoom Webinar; registration required.
This event is recorded for archival purposes only and will not be available for viewing after the event.
The event includes live closed captions in English. If you are in need of other access accommodations in order to participate in this event, please contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least 2 weeks in advance of the event date.
The Fund for Irish Studies 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 produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts and the 2020-21 edition of the series is organized by Paul Muldoon.
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.
Laurence Cox (Maynooth University) on “Irish Hobo, Buddhist Monk, Anticolonial Celebrity: The Strange Story of U Dhammaloka/Laurence Carroll.”
Associate professor of sociology at National University of Ireland Maynooth, Dr. Laurence Cox lectures on “Irish Hobo, Buddhist Monk, Anti-colonial Celebrity: The Strange Story of U Dhammaloka/Laurence Carroll” as part of Princeton University’s 2020-21 Fund for Irish Studies series.
Laurence Carroll / U Dhammaloka (1856-1914) was a Dublin-born emigrant, US hobo and Pacific sailor who became a Buddhist monk in Burma and an anti-colonial celebrity active from Sri Lanka to Japan. In this lecture, Cox, co-author of The Irish Buddhist: the Forgotten Monk who Faced Down the British Empire (Oxford 2020), looks at some of the most dramatic moments in Dhammaloka’s extraordinary life and explores how he brought his Irish and American experience to bear on religion, race and the challenge to Empire in Asia.
This virtual event is free and open to the public. Join the lecture via Zoom Webinar; registration required.
The event includes live closed captions in English. Patrons can join the Zoom Webinar and access captions or connect directly to the captioned event through StreamText using the link below.
If you are in need of other access accommodations in order to participate in this event, please contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least 2 weeks in advance of the event date.
Laurence Cox is Associate Professor of Sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth and associate researcher at the Collège d’Etudes Mondiales, Paris. One of Europe’s leading specialists on social movements, his work on U Dhammaloka and other early western Buddhists in Asia is well known as part of the transnational scholarly rethinking of how Buddhism became a global religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Cox has been an invited speaker from Kyoto University to CUNY Graduate Center and from the European University Institute to Ruskin College Oxford. He is founding editor of the global social movement research journal Interface and has twice guest-edited Contemporary Buddhism. In the spirit of Dhammaloka, he has also been a street musician and hitchhiked across Europe, trains activists in the Catalan Pyrenees and runs hot tubs on Dartmoor for Buddhist meditation retreats.
Cox is co-author, with Alicia Turner and Brian Bocking, of The Irish Buddhist: the Forgotten Monk who Faced Down the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2020). He has published over 160 scholarly works: his ten books include Buddhism and Ireland; A Buddhist Crossroads: Pioneer Western Buddhists and Asian Networks 1860 – 1960; Ireland’s New Religious Movements; and Why Social Movements Matter. With Brian Bocking and Yoshinaga Shin’ichi, he also rediscovered the first Buddhist mission to Europe, led by the Irishman Charles Pfoundes in 1889-92.
Learn more:
The Fund for Irish Studies 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 produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts and the 2020-21 edition of the series is organized by Paul Muldoon.
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.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Professor emeritus in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin and winner of the 2020 Irish Times/Poetry Now Award, reads her poetry as part of Princeton University’s 2020-21 Fund for Irish Studies series.
Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies presents a reading by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, award-winning poet and translator, Ireland Professor of Poetry 2016-19, and Professor emeritus in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin, on December 4 at 4:30 p.m. online via Zoom. The reading is free and open to the public.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is the author of numerous poetry collections including The Mother House (2020); The Boys of Bluehill (2015), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection; The Sun-fish (2010), which won the International Griffin Poetry Prize; Selected Poems (2009); The Magdalene Sermon (1989), which was selected as one of the three best poetry volumes of the year by the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Poetry Book Prize Committee; and Acts and Monuments (1966), which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. She translated two books by the Romanian poet Ileana Malancioiu, The Legend of the Walled-Up Wife (2012) and After the Raising of Lazarus (2005), as well as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s The Water Horse (2001), co-translated with Medbh McGuckian. Ní Chuilleanáin’s work has been featured in several anthologies, including The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry, 1967–2000 (1999), edited by Peggy O’Brien. Since 1975 she has edited the literary magazine Cyphers, and she has also edited Poetry Ireland Review.
Ní Chuilleanáin’s honors include the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry in 1973; O’Shaughnessy Prize for Poetry from the Irish-American Cultural Institute in 1992; and election to Aosdána in 1996. The Sun-fish was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2009 and received the Griffin International Poetry Prize in Toronto in 2010. The Boys of Bluehill was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and the Pigott Prize. The Mother House received the Irish Times/Poetry Now Award in 2020.
Ní Chuilleanáin was born in Cork in 1942, educated at University College, Cork, and at Oxford. She is a Fellow and Professor emeritus in the School of English, Trinity College, Dublin.
The Fund for Irish Studies 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 and organized by Paul Muldoon, Princeton’s Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities, Founding Chair of the Lewis Center, Director of the Princeton Atelier, and Chair of the Fund for Irish Studies.
This virtual event is free and open to the public. Join the symposium via Zoom Webinar; registration required.
The reading includes live closed captions in English. Patrons can join the Webinar and connect directly to the captioned event through StreamText. Reference these instructions for using StreamText (PDF).
CONNECT TO THE CAPTIONED EVENT
If you are in need of other access accommodations in order to participate in this event, please contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least 2 weeks in advance of the event date.
The Fund for Irish Studies 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 produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts and the 2020-21 edition of the series is organized by Paul Muldoon.
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.
Bestselling author and staff writer at The New Yorker Patrick Radden Keefe delivers a lecture on “Say Nothing: A true Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland” as part of Princeton University’s 2020-21 Fund for Irish Studies series
Bestselling author and staff writer at The New Yorker Patrick Radden Keefe delivers a lecture on “Say Nothing: A true Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland” as part of Princeton University’s 2020-21 Fund for Irish Studies series.
Keefe’s talk focuses on his international bestseller, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, his true crime narrative on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath. He uses the abduction and murder case of Jean McConville, a 38-year-old mother of ten who was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by violent guerrilla warfare, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with.
Keefe’s work at The New Yorker has received the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and twice been nominated for the National Magazine Award for Reporting. Say Nothing received the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was selected by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade. Keefe is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change. His new book about the Sackler family and the opioid crisis will be published next year.
This virtual event is free and open to the public. Join the symposium via Zoom Webinar; registration required.
If you are in need of access accommodations in order to participate in this event, please contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least 2 weeks in advance of the event date.
The Fund for Irish Studies 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 produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts and the 2020-21 edition of the series is organized by Paul Muldoon.
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.
On November 13, Professor of History Christine Kinealy (Quinnipiac University), author Colum McCann (author of TransAtlantic), and Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies Autumn Womack (Princeton University) lead a symposium on “The 175th Anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s Tour of Ireland,” moderated by Paul Muldoon, Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University. Part of Princeton University’s 2020-21 Fund for Irish Studies series.
The symposium explores the four months Douglass spent in Ireland in 1845, an experience he described as “transformative.” Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, statesman, and former enslaved person. Of his time in Ireland, Douglass reported that for the first time in his life he felt like a man, and not a chattel. He became a spokesperson for the abolition movement during his Irish tour, but by the time he left the country in early January 1846, he believed that the cause of the enslaved was the cause of the oppressed everywhere.
This virtual event is free and open to the public. Join the symposium via Zoom Webinar; registration required.
If you are in need of access accommodations in order to participate in this event, please contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least 2 weeks in advance of the event date.
The Fund for Irish Studies 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 produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts and the 2020-21 edition of the series is organized by Paul Muldoon.
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.
Christine Kinealy is Professor of History and Director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University. At Trinity College Dublin, she completed her doctorate on the introduction of the Poor Law to Ireland. She then worked in educational and research institutes in Dublin, Belfast and Liverpool.
She has published extensively on the impact of the Great Irish Famine and has lectured on the relationship between poverty and famine in India, Spain, Canada, France, Finland and New Zealand. She also has spoken to invited audiences in the British Parliament and in the U.S. Congress.
Based in the United States since 2007, she was named one of the most influential Irish Americans in 2011 by “Irish America” Magazine. In 2013, she received the Holyoke, Mass. St. Patrick’s Day Parade’s Ambassador Award. In March 2014, she was inducted into the Irish America Hall of Fame.
Colum McCann is the award-winning author of three collections of short stories and seven novels, including his most recent work, Apeirogon (2020). His bestselling novel, Let the Great World Spin (2009), won worldwide acclaim including the 2009 National Book Award in the U.S, the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China, the International Impac Award 2011, a literary award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and several other major international literary prizes. His novel TransAtlantic was also an international sensation and became an immediate New York Times best-seller on its release in 2013. It, too, garnered several international awards including the Mondello Citta de Palermo Prize in Italy.
Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, he is the recipient of international honors including a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, election to the Irish arts academy, several European awards, the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China, and an Oscar nomination. In 2017 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts. His work has been published in over 40 languages. He is the co-founder of the non-profit global story exchange organisation, Narrative 4, and he teaches at the MFA program in Hunter College. He lives in New York with his wife, Allison, and their family.
Autumn Womack is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. She earned a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and an MA from The University of Maryland, College Park. Womack’s research is located at the intersection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literary culture, visual studies, and print culture. She is currently at work on two book projects. The first, Un-discipling Data: Race, Visuality, and the Making of African American Literary Aesthetics, 1880-1930 charts the relationship between emergent visual technologies – such as photography, motion pictures, and social surveys — and black literary and intellectual culture. The Reprint Revolution, her second book project, considers the circulation politics and practices that brought many nineteenth-century African American literary texts into the marketplace in the 1960s. At Princeton she teaches classes on 19th and 20th century African American literature and the history of race and media. In keeping with her investment in archival research, her course “Toni Morrison and the Ethics of Reading” makes extensive use of the University’s collections. Womack has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers University’s Department of English and a faculty fellowship at Penn State’s Center for the History of Information.
Professor Womack’s work has been published in Black Camera: An International Film Journal, American Literary History, Women and Performance, J19: A Journal of 19th Century Americanists, andThe Paris Review of Books. An essay on the cultural history of Arno Press and the utility of the black past is forthcoming in American Literary History, while new essays on Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, and the pre-history of data visualization will appear in edited volumes. She serves on the editorial board of The Langston Hughes Review and Aster(ix) Journal.
Deirdre Mulrooney, dance historian, documentary filmmaker, author of Irish Moves, an illustrated history of dance and physical theatre in Ireland, and host of Dance Ireland’s 30th Anniversary podcasts presents a virtual illustrated talk on Irish Dance. Followed by an audience Q&A.
as a part of Princeton University’s 2020-21 Fund for Irish Studies series.
This virtual event is free and open to the public; no registration required.
Join the lecture on Zoom
Meeting ID: 971 9158 0361
Deirdre is author of Irish Moves, an illustrated history of dance and physical theatre in Ireland (2006), and Orientalism, Orientation, and The Nomadic Work of Pina Bausch (2002). Deirdre has contributed to anthologies, and to several books on theatre and dance. A dance historian, as well as her feature radio documentary and short dance film reclaiming Lucia Joyce’s modern dance career, Deirdre has a forthcoming long scholarly essay on the subject. She hosted Dance Ireland’s 30th Anniversary podcasts. She is a sporadic contributor to RTE Sunday Miscellany, and has penned multifarious Arts journalism and writing over many years. Deirdre produces and directs her own creative film documentaries including ‘Dance Emergency’ (TG4), ‘1943 – A Dance Odyssey’ (RTE), the short dance film ‘Lucia Joyce: Full Capacity’, ‘TRUE NORTH’, and many more BAI-funded, commissioned, and Indie projects with her own production company, Out There Productions. In addition to her original academic work, teaching, broadcasting, and original feature radio documentaries, Deirdre occasionally curates exhibitions. Deirdre curated Mother Tongue at Kilkee’s Cultúrlann Sweeney, which is scheduled to travel to UCD Festival, where she is a UCD Creative Fellow.
The Fund for Irish Studies 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 produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts and the 2020-21 edition of the series is organized by Paul Muldoon.
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.