Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies continues its 2023-2024 series with a talk and reading by Barry McCrea, an award-winning writer and the Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Visiting Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters Fintan O’Toole will introduce McCrea at the event on October 27 at 4:30 p.m. at the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street. The reading is free and open to the public; no tickets are required. The theater is an accessible venue, and guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.
At Princeton, McCrea will deliver a brief talk on “Language and the Irish Novel” followed by a reading from his current novel-in-progress, Miracle at Thorn Island.
As a novelist and scholar of comparative literature, McCrea is the author of three books. His debut novel, The First Verse, won the 2006 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ fiction and a Barnes & Noble “Discover Award.” Published in 2011, his academic book In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust won Columbia University’s Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication in the Humanities. McCrea’s last book, Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth Century Ireland and Europe, was awarded the 2016 René Wellek Prize for an outstanding book in the discipline of comparative literature. As the Keough Family Chair and Concurrent Professor of English, Irish Language and Literature, as well as Romance Languages and Literatures at Notre Dame, he teaches seminars on topics such as James Joyce, the modern European novel, and modern Irish poetry on the university’s campuses in Indiana, Rome, and Dublin. McCrea received his undergraduate degree from Trinity College Dublin and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2004.
Invited by Princeton’s Humanities Council, McCrea spent the spring of 2018 on campus as a Faber Fellow in Comparative Literature, teaching an advanced undergraduate course entitled “Class, Desire, and the Novel.”
Part of the 2023-24 Fund for Irish Studies lecture series.
Tickets & Details
The lecture is free and open to the public. No advance tickets or registration required.
Directions
Get directions and find venue information for the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street.
Accessibility
The James Stewart Film Theater is wheelchair accessible. Visit our Venues and Studios section for accessibility information at our various locations. Guests 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.
Bestselling writer and documentary-maker Manchán Magan presents a lecture entitled “Listen to the Land Speak: Lost Wisdom of the Land and Language of Ireland,” based on his recently published book of the same title. Inspired by language, landscape and mythology, Magan explores the insight and hidden wisdom native Irish culture offers to the people of Ireland and the world. Introduced by Visiting Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters and Chair of the Fund for Irish Studies Fintan O’Toole.
The James Stewart Film Theater is wheelchair accessible. Visit our