Reading by Danielle McLaughlin

The Fund for Irish Studies presents a reading by Windham-Campbell Prize-winning fiction writer Danielle McLaughlin on April 8, 2022.

danielle mclaughlin smiles with short blonde hair and white knitted sweater — Photo courtesy Danielle McLaughlin

The Fund for Irish Studies presents a reading by Windham-Campbell Prize-winning fiction writer Danielle McLaughlin, whose debut novel The Art of Falling was published in the U.S. February 2021 by Random House. In 2019 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction. Introduced by Professor Fintan O’Toole.

Danielle’s debut collection of short stories, Dinosaurs On Other Planets, was published in Ireland in 2015 by The Stinging Fly Press and in the U.K, the U.S. and Canada by John Murray and Random House in 2016. The collection was shortlisted for the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards 2015 in the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year category and won the Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection 2016. In 2019 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction. She was Writer in Residence at University College Cork in Ireland for 2018-2019. She was the winner of the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2019.

Danielle’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Irish Times, Southword, The Penny Dreadful and in The Stinging Fly. They have also appeared in various anthologies, such as the Bristol Prize Anthology, the Fish Anthology and the 2014 Davy Byrnes Anthology, and have been broadcast on RTE Radio 1 and BBC Radio 4. She has won various awards for her short fiction, including the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Competition, the From the Well Short Story Competition, The Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize, The Merriman Short Story Competition in memory of Maeve Binchy, and the Dromineer Literary Festival Short Story Competition. Danielle was awarded an Arts Council Bursary in 2013.

Tickets & Details

This event will take place in-person (please note the change from past virtual lectures) and is free and open to the public. Advance tickets required; reserve tickets through University Ticketing.

The event will not also be streamed or recorded via Zoom.

Get directions to the James Stewart Film Theater and find other venue information for 185 Nassau Street.

COVID-19 Guidance + Updates

Per Princeton University policy, all guests are required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 to the maximum extent, which now includes a COVID booster shot for all eligible to receive it, and to wear a mask when indoors. Please note that speakers may be unmasked while presenting.

Accessibility

The event space is wheelchair accessible. Visit our Venues and Studios section for accessibility information at our various locations. Guests in need of access accommodations are asked to contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week in advance of the event date.

Lecture by Susan McKay on “From Triumphalism to Desperation — the Fall of Ulster Unionism”

Journalist Susan McKay discusses her new book, “Northern Protestants – On Shifting Ground.” Free and open to the public. This in-person lecture requires free tickets in advance.

susan mckay with brown wavy short hair wearing navy blue polka dot cardigan — Photo by Derek Speirs

Journalist Susan McKay discusses her new book, Northern Protestants – On Shifting Ground (Blackstaff Press 2021), which is a collection of almost 100 interviews with politicians, community workers, religious leaders, former paramilitary members, young people, business people, and other citizens of Northern Ireland from County Antrim to the city of Londonderry, McKay’s hometown. In this follow-up to her book Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People, first published 21 years ago, McKay shares that in 2021 unionists in Ireland attempted to celebrate the centenary of Northern Ireland and then in 2022 they collapsed its government. Political unionism is hardening into a nostalgia for the sectarian state that the Good Friday Agreement dismantled, but McKay’s book explores the surprising diversity of thought among people from a Protestant background who are impatient with narrowness, open to new ideas, and welcoming of the potential for political change. Northern Protestants — On Shifting Ground was described by the Observer as “a fascinating and constantly thought-provoking book” and The Irish Times said it was “vital reading in all senses of the word.”

McKay’s journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, London Review of Books, the Guardian/Observer and The Irish Times. McKay is currently writer-in-residence with Sligo Libraries, working on a project about the legacies of the partition of Ireland in the North West. She is also writing a book about borders for which she received an Arts Council of Northern Ireland major individual award.

Tickets & Details

The event will not also be streamed or recorded via Zoom.

Get directions to the James Stewart Film Theater and find other venue information for 185 Nassau Street.

COVID-19 Guidance + Updates

Accessibility

Lecture by Fintan O’Toole on “Open Secrets: Ulysses at 100″

Fintan O’Toole, Princeton University’s Visiting Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters, delivers the annual Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture as part of the 2021-22 Fund for Irish Studies lecture series.

fintan with greying hair and serious gaze wears glasses and white collar shirt with blazer — Photo courtesy Fintan O’Toole

Fintan O’Toole, Princeton University’s Visiting Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters, delivers the annual Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture on “Open Secrets: Ulysses at 100″ as part of the 2021-22 Fund for Irish Studies lecture series.

James Joyce’s revolutionary novel Ulysses was published 100 years ago in February 1922. In its initial review of the book, The New York Times declared Ulysses “the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the twentieth century.” Through a stream of consciousness writing style, Joyce follows Stephen Dedalus, a 22-year-old aspiring poet and teacher, and Leopold Bloom, a 38-year-old Jewish advertising agent, as they go about nineteen hours of daily life in Dublin, Ireland. Both men grapple with themes of religion, philosophy, remorse, and mortality. In his lecture, O’Toole asks why the book still matters today. It is, he suggests, one of the best explorations we have of the way the local is also universal; of the fluidity of identity; of the fusion of body and mind; and of the possibility of living beyond tragedy.

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.

Tickets & Details

The virtual lecture, presented via Zoom Webinar, is free and open to the public; registration required. Register for the lecture on Zoom Webinar

A recording will not be available to share with the public following the event.

Accessibility

The event will include live closed captions in English. Patrons can join the Webinar and connect to the captioned event through StreamText. Attendees in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week in advance of the event date.

Lecture by Poet James Longenbach on W.B. Yeats

Poet and literary critic James Longenbach, author of Forever and The Lyric Now, lectures on W.B. Yeats’ poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” Longenbach will discuss how the poem assumed the shape it does, and, more importantly, the influence of that shape on subsequent long poems written throughout the 20th century and beyond. Part of the 2021-22 Fund for Irish Studies lecture series. FREE; open to all. registration required.

james longenbach with forward gaze, dark shaggy hair and black sweater — Photo by Adam Fenster

Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies presents a lecture by James Longenbach on W.B. Yeats and his poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” on Friday, January 28, the 83rd anniversary of Yeats’ death, at 4:30 p.m. via Zoom Webinar. Princeton’s Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities and Co-chair of the Fund for Irish Studies Paul Muldoon will provide a welcome and introduction. The event is part of the 2021-2022 lecture series, which will continue virtually for the next few events.

Longenbach will give an account of William Butler Yeats’ (1865-1939) poem, discussing how it assumed its shape, and, more importantly, the influence of that shape on subsequent long poems written throughout the 20th century. Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” was part of his first collection of poems published after the Nobel Prize: The Tower (1928). The Tower contains other long poems that contemplate the state of politics in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence, the mortality of man, and the temporariness of the world, such as “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” and “The Tower.” Like many of the poems in the collection, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” is divided into six parts of unequal length with differing meters and rhyme schemes in each part. Titled after and written about the first year of the Irish War of Independence, the poem grasps at the idealism and nostalgia for “law”, “habits”, and “public opinion” destroyed by war and violence.

Longenbach, a poet and literary critic who received his Ph.D. from Princeton University, is the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester, where he teaches courses on modern and contemporary American poetry, British and American modernism, James Joyce, Shakespeare, and creative writing. His most recent poetry collections include Forever (W.W. Norton, 2021) and The Lyric Now (University of Chicago, 2020). Longenbach has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Mellon Fellow.

Tickets & Details

Please note that this first event of the spring series will remain virtual via Zoom webinar.

The virtual lecture is free and open to the public; registration required. Register for the Zoom webinar

A recording will not be available to share with the public following the event.

Accessibility

The event includes live closed captions in English. Patrons can join the Webinar and connect to the captioned event through StreamText. Attendees in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week in advance of the event date.

Lecture by Cian T. McMahon

Cian T. McMahon, Associate Professor in the Department of History and Honors College at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, lectures on “The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Famine” with introduction by Paul Muldoon as part of the 2021-22 Fund for Irish Studies lecture series.

Cian T. McMahon, Associate Professor in the Department of History and Honors College at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, lectures on “The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Famine” with introduction by Paul Muldoon, Princeton’s Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities and Co-chair of the Fund for Irish Studies, as part of the 2021-22 Fund for Irish Studies lecture series.

McMahon will discuss his new book, The Coffin Ship (NYU Press, 2021), which analyzes letters and diaries of Irish immigrants who fled Ireland during the Great Famine. The Great Irish Famine occurred from 1845 to 1855 as a result of a potato blight that destroyed the Lumper potato crop, robbing more than one-third of the Irish population of its most substantial means of sustenance. According to RTE News, the national news and public broadcaster in Ireland, over a million people died due to the extensive food shortage and subsequent epidemics, and a further 1.25 million people fled Ireland, with over 900,000 Irish immigrants arriving in New York City alone. For McMahon, the standard story of Ireland’s Great Famine exodus is one of tired clichés, half-truths, and dry statistics. The Coffin Ship focuses on the journey across the Atlantic, an oft-ignored but vital component of the migration experience. His transnational history examines the dynamic social networks and connections to the worldwide Irish diaspora that the emigrants built while voyaging overseas. In his book, McMahon makes an argument for placing the sailing ship alongside the tenement and the factory floor as a central, dynamic element of Irish migration history.

cian with dark hair in slight profile view Cian T. McMahon is an associate professor in the Department of History and Honors College at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches courses focusing on society and culture in modern Ireland, immigration and identity in American history, and great migrations in human history. His first book, The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity: Race, Nation, and the Popular Press, 1840-1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), won honorable mention for the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book from the American Conference of Irish Studies. He is a member of the American Conference for Irish Studies, the Immigration & Ethnic History Society, and the American Historical Association.

Join the Event

This virtual event is free and open to the public. Register for the lecture and join via Zoom Webinar.

NOTE: A recording will not be available to share with the public following the event.

Accessibility

The event 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).

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.

Lecture by Brendan O’Leary

Brendan O’Leary, Lauder Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, presents “Irish Reunification: Prospects & Feasible Models,” a lecture drawn from his book-in-progress on questions and issues surrounding the idea of a unification of the island of Ireland. Introduced by Fintan O’Toole.

brendan standing in dark rocky cave Brendan O’Leary is a US, Irish and European Union citizen. Since 2003, he has served as the Lauder Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania—previously he had been Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics & Political Science. He is the author, co-author and co-editor of 28 books, and the author or co-author of over 650 articles, chapters, encyclopedia articles, miscellaneous publications, and op-eds. A Treatise on Northern Ireland (three volumes) was published in 2019. It won the 2020 James S. Donnelly Sr. Prize of the American Conference of Irish Studies for the best book in History and Social Science, and the paperback versions were issued the same year. A Member of the US Council on Foreign Relations and an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, O’Leary was the inaugural winner of the Juan Linz Prize of the International Political Science Association for the study of multinational societies, federalism, and democratization. He is also a founding member of ARINS (Analyzing and Researching Ireland, North and South), sponsored by the Royal Irish Academy and the University of Notre Dame. O’Leary has been a political and constitutional advisor, especially on power-sharing, to the United Nations, the European Union, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq, and during the Irish peace process to the Governments of the UK and Ireland, and the British Labour Party. His degrees are from the University of Oxford (1981, PPE, BA (hons) first class), and the London School of Economics & Political Science (PhD, Robert McKenzie Memorial Prize). He grew up in Nigeria, Sudan, and Northern Ireland.

Join the Event

This virtual event is free and open to the public. Register for the lecture and join via Zoom Webinar.

NOTE: A recording will not be available to share with the public following the event.

Accessibility

Lecture by Nicholas Allen

Scholar and author Nicholas Allen lectures on “Seamus Heaney’s Late Poems” as part of the 2021-22 Fund for Irish Studies lecture series. FREE and open to the public. Register and join via Zoom Webinar. Live closed captions available.

Nicholas Allen, director of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Georgia, discusses poet Seamus Heaney’s later works, one of several Irish writers covered in his latest book, Ireland, Literature and the Coast: Seatangled. Introduced by Lecturer in Theater Fintan O’Toole as part of the 2021-22 Fund for Irish Studies lecture series.

nicholas in jeans seated on couch by lamp in living room — Photo courtesy Nicholas Allen

Nicholas Allen is the director of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, where he holds an endowed Professorship in the Humanities. His latest book, Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled, was published in December 2020 by Oxford University Press. He has been the Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College and has received many grants and awards, including from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Irish Research Council.

Join the Event

This virtual event is free and open to the public. Register for the lecture and join via Zoom Webinar.

NOTE: A recording will not be available to share with the public following the event.

Accessibility

“History of Ireland in 100 (and More) Words” with Máire ní Mhaonaigh and Sharon Arbuthnot

Authors Máire ní Mhaonaigh and Sharon Arbuthnot present on “A History of Ireland in 100 (and More) Words,” with an introduction by Professor Paul Muldoon, as part of the 2021-22 Fund for Irish Studies lecture series. FREE and open to public; register and join via Zoom Webinar.

Maire smiling with chin length auburn hair — Photo courtesy Maire Ni Mhaonaigh

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh is Professor of Celtic and Medieval Studies at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) and a Fellow of St John’s College. She works at the interface of history and literature, her research focusing on medieval constructions of the past. She has published widely on medieval Irish literature and history and on Ireland’s place in the wider world. She has contributed chapters to the Cambridge History of Irish Literature and to the recent multi-volume Cambridge History of Ireland. Among other recent publications are a co-authored volume, Norse-Gaelic Contacts in a Viking World (with Colmán Etchingham, Jón Vidar Sigurðsson and Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, 2019), exploring the cultural and political connections between Norse and Gaelic speakers in the high Middle Ages; and A History of Ireland in 100 Words (co-written with Sharon Arbuthnot and Greg Toner, 2019) illuminating aspects of Ireland’s past through the development of words. She co-led a project on the electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language which resulted in a revised and augmented version of that resource, eDIL 2019; and she is currently directing research on the landscape history of medieval Ireland, ‘Mapping the Medieval Mind: Ireland’s Literary Landscapes in a Global Space’, illuminating medieval dinnshenchas, a literature of place (a Leverhulme Trust project 2020-2025). She chairs the board of the School of Celtic Studies of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, and serves on many other bodies, including the editorial board of Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures and the Advisory Board of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (Hamburg).

JOIN THE EVENT

This virtual event is free and open to the public. Register and join the lecture via Zoom Webinar.

NOTE: A recording will not be available to share with the public following the event.

ACCESSIBILITY

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 2021-22 edition of the series is organized by Paul Muldoon and Fintan O’Toole.

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.

Conversation with Roddy Doyle and Fintan O’Toole

Irish novelist, dramatist, and screenwriter Roddy Doyle joins in conversation with scholar and critic Fintan O’Toole. Professor Paul Muldoon opens the virtual event with an introduction. FREE and open to public; register and join via Zoom webinar.

Irish novelist, dramatist, and screenwriter Roddy Doyle joins in conversation with scholar and critic Fintan O’Toole. Professor Paul Muldoon opens the virtual event with an introduction.

JOIN THE EVENT

This virtual event is free and open to the public. Register and join the lecture via Zoom Webinar.

NOTE: A recording will not be available to share with the public following the event.

ACCESSIBILITY

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.