Scholar of modern Irish history lectures at Princeton University
Mary Daly, Professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin, will present a lecture on “An Irish solution? Contraception, the Catholic Church and Irish Society 1960-1983″ as part of the 2016-2017 Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University on Friday, April 14 at 4:30 p.m. at the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ’32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street. This event is free and open to the public.
Mary Daly, Professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin. Photo courtesy University College Dublin
Drawn from her extensive research, Daly’s lecture will explore Irish family planning and the role of the Catholic Church, focusing on legal and social developments including the impact of Roe v. Wade on Irish debates.
Mary Daly was elected as the first female President of the Royal Irish Academy in its 229-year history in 2014. She is one of Ireland’s most prominent senior historians and is a member of the government’s Expert Advisory Group on Commemorations. She is emeritus professor of history at University College Dublin (UCD) and served for seven years as Principal of UCD College of Arts and Celtic Studies; she has also held visiting positions at Harvard University and Boston College. She has served on Ireland’s National Archives Advisory Council, the Irish Manuscripts Commission, and the Higher Education Authority. In 2015 she was appointed as a member of the Commission of Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes. Daly was involved in the commemoration of the sesquicentenary of the great famine 1995-97, and with Dr. Margaret O’Callaghan she directed a research project on the Golden Jubilee of the 1916 Rising, resulting in the publication of a major edited work: 1916 in 1966: Commemorating the Easter Rising (2007). Over the course of her career, Daly has researched widely and published prolifically, notably: Dublin, the Deposed Capital: A Social and Economic History, 1860-1914 (1984); Women and Work in Ireland (1997); The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920-1973 (2006); with Theo Hoppen, Gladstone: Ireland and Beyond (2011) and most recently Sixties Ireland: Reshaping the Economy, State and Society, 1957 – 1973 (2016). With Eugenio Biagini she is co-editor of The Cambridge History of Modern Ireland, which will be published in May 2017. She is a graduate of UCD and Oxford University and a member of the Acadaemia Europaea.
The Fund for Irish Studies, chaired by Princeton professor Clair Wills, 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.
Information on Fund for Irish Studies series events can be found at fis.princeton.edu. The 2016-17 series, which has welcomed actor Lisa Dwan, musicians Brian Ó hAirt, Len Graham and Iarla Ó Lionáird, composer Donnacha Dennehy, and held a recent symposium on Irish lyric and song, will conclude with a reading by Kevin Barry from his novel Beatlebone on April 28.
