Fund for Irish Studies: “Words for Music, Perhaps”

Matthew Campbell has been Professor of Modern Literature at University of York since 2011. Current projects include A History of Irish Poetry from Charlotte Brooke to Seamus Heaney, and research developed out of published and forthcoming essays on rhyme in contemporary poetry, traditional music and verse, and the poetry of Mangan, Joyce and Yeats. He has also written recently about what Tim Robinson calls ‘geophany’, as well as letter-writing and metaphor. His first book, Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (CUP 1999) was about action and intent as heard in the rhythms of Victorian and early twentieth-century poetry, and he continues to work on English Victorian poetry, particularly with relation to the synthetic forms of a ‘British’ literature written within the four nations of the Atlantic Archipelago. Irish Poetry under the Union was published by CUP in 2013 and an edited book, Irish Literature in Transition, 1830-1880 is currently under contract. Matthew is a regular reviewer of contemporary poetry, and has also published on Romantic poetry, Celticism, elegy, and war writing. Authors to which his criticism returns include Wordsworth, Moore, Tennyson, Browning, Mangan, Hopkins, Yeats, Joyce, Heaney and Muldoon. He studied at Trinity College Dublin and Cambridge University and taught at the University of Sheffield before coming to York.

Dr. Aileen Dillane is an ethnomusicologist, traditional musician, and Course Director of the MA in Irish Music Studies at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick. Aileen has a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago where she was a Fulbright Scholar and Century Fellow. Her research interests include ethnicity, identity, and performativity in traditional, vernacular and popular musics of Ireland, North American and Australia; urban soundscapes and critical citizenship; music and the utopian impulse; and songs of social protest. Aileen has published numerous articles and chapters on Irish music and song. She has also co-edited Public and Political Discources of Migration: International Perspectives (Rowman and Littlefield 2016); David Bowie: Critical Perspectives (Routledge 2015); and Morrissey: Fandom, Representations, Identities (Intellect 2011). She is currently working on her monograph, Irish Music in Chicago: Ethnicity, Identity, Modernity, as well as on the co-edited collection Songs of Social Protest (Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming). Aileen was the 2016 O’Donnell Irish Studies Research Fellow at Newman College, University of Melbourne and is scheduled to be a Visiting Professor at University of Notre Dame, Fall 2017.

Paul Hamilton is Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London. He has previously taught at the universities of Nottingham, Oxford and Southampton. His main work is on Romanticism, British and European. His last two books are Realpoetik: European Romanticism and Literary Politics (2013) and, as editor, The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism (2016). His current research is into relations between the political and poetic imagination in Romantic writers such as, among others, Ugo Foscolo, Kleist, Byron, Felicia Hemans, and Thomas Moore.

Barry McCrea is Keough Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Notre Dame, where he also holds appointments in the departments of Romance Languages and Irish Language. He is the author of a novel, The First Verse, and two books of scholarship: In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust; and most recently, Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in 20th-century Ireland and Europe, winner of the 2015 René Wellek prize.

Maureen N. McLane is Professor of English at New York University. She is the author of Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, 2008), Romanticism and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, 2000), and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry. She has published four books of poetry: Mz N: the serial: a poem-in-episodes (FSG, 2016). This Blue (FSG, 2014), World Enough (FSG, 2010) and Same Life (FSG, 2008) – as well as My Poets (FSG, 2012), a hybrid of memoir and criticism. She has written extensively on romantic mediality, comparative poetics, and contemporary poetries in English. She continues to work on (and with) poets dead and alive.

Paul Muldoon is the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Creative Writing, and Director of the Princeton Atelier in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. His main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006), and Maggot (2010). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. Other recent awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.”

Diarmuid Ó Giolláin is Professor of Irish Language & Literature and Concurrent Professor of Anthropology in the University of Notre Dame. His publications include Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity (2000) and An Dúchas agus an Domhan (2005).

Iarla O’Lionaird is a Belknap Teaching Fellow in the Council of the Humanities and in Music and Irish Studies at Princeton. An Irish musician with a focus on traditional sean-nós style, he has carved a long and unique career in music in Ireland and internationally. From his iconic early recording of the vision song “Aisling Gheal” as a young boy to his groundbreaking recordings with Dublin’s Crash Ensemble, he has been widely recognized for his artistic ambition within the Irish music fraternity. He has worked internationally with renowned composers Nico Muhly, Gavin Bryars, Dan Trueman, and David Lang. He has also performed and recorded with artists such as Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, Nick Cave, and Sinead O’ Connor. Ó Lionáird’s unique singing style has carried him to stages and concert halls all over the world, from New York’s Carnegie Hall to the Sydney Opera House. His film credits include The Gangs of New York, Hotel Rwanda, and most recently as a featured vocalist in the films Calvary and Brooklyn. He is also the vocalist of the critically acclaimed Irish/American band The Gloaming.

Dan Trueman is Professor of Music and Director of the Princeton Sound Kitchen at Princeton University, where he teaches counterpoint, electronic music, and composition. He began studying violin at the age of 4 and decades later fell in love with the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, an instrument and tradition that has deeply affected all of his work, whether as a fiddler, a composer, or musical explorer. Dan has worked with many groups and musicians, including Trollstilt and QQQ, the American Composers Orchestra, So Percussion, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, the Brentano and Daedelus string quartets, the Crash Ensemble, many wonderful fiddlers, and has performed across America, Ireland, and Norway. His explorations have extended into new technologies; Dan co-founded the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, the first ensemble of its size and kind that has led to the formation of similarly inspired ensembles across the world, from Oslo to Dublin, to Stanford and Bangkok. Dan’s compositional work reflects this complex and broad range of activities, exploring rhythmic connections between traditional dance music and machines, for instance, or engaging with the unusual phrasing, tuning and ornamentation of the traditional Norwegian music while trying to discover new music that is singularly inspired by, and only possible with, new digital instruments that he designs and constructs. Dan’s work has been recognized by fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, among others.

David Kellett has been teaching private voice lessons at Princeton University since 1995. He has directed several productions at Princeton, including Mozart’s Magic Flute and Marriage of Figaro, and appears regularly with the Richardson Chamber Players.

Dasha Koltunyuk is a pianist and member or Princeton’s Class of 2015. She won Princeton University Orchestra’s Concerto competition and first place in the New York Chamber Orchestra concerto competition. She serves as Marketing and Outreach Manager for Princeton’s Department of Music and University Concert Series.

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