Ten years after the death of Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, the Irish Studies Program at Boston College invites scholars and the public to join us in celebrating a poet whose connections to our University remain fresh in our memory. The conference explores new understandings of the poet since his death. Our panels and keynote speakers will celebrate, interrogate, and develop the legacy of the poet as a critic, public intellectual, and major moral and aesthetic force in Ireland. The conference includes an inaugural Lowell Lecture by Fintan O’Toole, Heaney’s official authorized biographer, and a performance by Belfast theater company Kabosh. The conference is honored by the presence of Seamus’s widow, Marie, and his daughter and literary executor, Catherine Heaney.
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The Burns Scholar for 2023–2024 is Claire Connolly, professor of modern English from University College Cork. Connolly has edited or co-edited ten books and authored dozens of book chapters and articles. Her 2011 monograph, A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829, won the Donald J. Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Monograph, awarded by the American Conference for Irish Studies. Scholarly editions include two volumes in The Works of Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl.
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Maeve O’Rourke, a lecturer at the University of Galway’s Irish Centre for Human Rights, visited Boston College as a Burns Summer Fellow. Her research in the Burns Library will inform the writing and development of policy proposals regarding Ireland’s historical social care system.
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Applications are open for the Neenan Fellowship in Irish Studies at Boston College Ireland. The successful candidate will be awarded a stipend of €8,000 and the use of an office at Boston College Ireland on St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin. The application deadline is November 1, 2023, and applications should be emailed to Professor Mike Cronin at croninmr@bc.edu.
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November 29, 5:00–7:00 p.m., Connolly House
Joseph Lennon, director of Irish Studies at Villanova University, offers the metaphor of seed-sharing as a way to foster a dynamic that would benefit Irish cultural organizations and Irish Studies programs. By reading current Irish policy documents alongside contemporary Irish art and literature, his Dalsimer Lecture encourages Irish sustainability initiatives to share seed dispersals across the diaspora.
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November 16, 7:00 p.m., Gasson 100
Fintan O’Toole’s Lowell Lecture heralds the opening of Seamus Heaney’s Afterlives, Boston College’s international symposium marking the tenth anniversary of the poet’s death. O’Toole, an Irish Times columnist and one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals, has been appointed Heaney’s official biographer.
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November 7, 5:30–7:30 p.m., Connolly House
NYU professor Kevin Kenny returns to BC to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his first book, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, in an event co-sponsored by the History Department. Who were the Molly Maguires, what did they do, and why did they do it? And what do their actions tell us about transatlantic protest and class conflict in the nineteenth century?
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November 1, 5:00–7:00 p.m., Burns Library
In this fall’s Burns Lecture, Claire Connolly offers a new account of Irish culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, focusing on the constitutive role of sea crossings. Her lecture examines one singular case: the crossing between Port Patrick and Donaghadee undertaken by a young John Keats in the summer of 1818.
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October 31, 6:00–7:30 p.m., Boston Public Library
David Leonard, president of the Boston Public Library, interviews author and BC philosophy professor Richard Kearney on the cultural and spiritual importance of nature, the notion of divinity, and the origin of Halloween in the Celtic Festival of Samhain. The event also features the singer Noirin Ni Rian, the poet Fanny Howe, and the artist Sheila Gallagher.
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October 13–15, Connolly House
The theme for the 2023 New England & Mid-Atlantic regional meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) is “De-Hibernicizing Irish Studies.” Whereas the Irish Revival was driven by an introspective “necessity for de-Anglicizing Ireland,” it is now timely for Irish Studies to focus on how Ireland and Irish diasporas relate to global/international issues of current relevance. Malcolm Sen and Zélie Asava are the keynote speakers.
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October 4, Connolly House
Marking the 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, Boston College hosts an interdisciplinary panel of leading researchers from Queen’s University Belfast to discuss the relative success of the agreement in ending the conflict in the region, but also the limited reconciliatory effects of the peace process on communities there. The panel features anthropologist Dominic Bryan, legal scholar Cheryl Lawther, and political scientist Peter McLoughlin.
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September 27, Connolly House
Maurice Casey, a researcher at the Queer Northern Ireland project in Queen’s University Belfast, shares some of the LGBTQ histories and sources uncovered by the project, which focuses on everyday experiences of queer sexuality and gender from the 1880s to the 1980s.
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September 20, Connolly House
University of Exeter historian Gemma Clark presents key conclusions from her research on the “everyday violence” that occurred during the military conflict over the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922–23. She discusses new approaches to the Irish Revolution and Civil War, including the mapping, periodizing, and categorizing of violence and warfare.
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November 23–24, Boston College Ireland
BC Ireland hosts a two-day symposium on the lives and the artistic and literary work of Eithne Strong and her daughter Sarah. The event features an extended interview with Sarah Strong.
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December 12, Trinity College Dublin
Boston College’s own Marjorie Howes gives a lecture celebrating the centennial anniversary of W.B. Yeats’s Nobel Prize in Literature at Trinity College Dublin. Howes has published extensively on Yeats’s life and work and recently co-edited The Irish Revival: A Complex Vision.
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December 13, Museum of Literature Ireland
This event brings together a range of scholars and writers to assess and discuss the work of one of Ireland’s foremost academic writers, Angela Bourke, whose published books in both Irish and English include The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (1999) and Maeve Brennan of the New Yorker (2004).
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The Irish Studies graduate students have had busy summers!
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- Rachael Young defended her dissertation, “Less Violent but No Less Visible: Criminalization and Community Murals in Brixton and Belfast, 1970–1989,” on July 20. Young’s dissertation, supervised by Rob Savage, highlights solidarity between Black activism in Brixton and republican activism in Belfast in the late 20th century.
- Tiffany Thompson was awarded both the Ann Owens Weekes Prize and the John & Pat Hume Foundation Fellowship from ACIS.
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