Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies continues its 2022-2023 series with the Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture delivered by Fintan O’Toole, one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals, columnist for The Irish Times, and the Visiting Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters at Princeton University. The lecture will take place March 31 at 4:30 p.m. at the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street. The event 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.
In his lecture entitled “Uneasy Peace: The Good Friday Agreement 25 Years On,” O’Toole examines Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement, which was signed on April 10, 1998. The Good Friday Agreement, also called the Belfast Agreement, was a political deal designed to bring an end to 30 years of violent conflict in Northern Ireland, known as the Troubles. The agreement established three “strands” of administrative relationships: the creation of the Northern Ireland Assembly, an elected assembly responsible for local matters; an arrangement for cross-border cooperation between the governments of Ireland and Northern Ireland; and continued consultation between the British and Irish governments. Over the past 25 years, the deal has touched on every aspect of life in Northern Ireland.
Princeton’s Visiting Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters Fintan O’Toole. Photo credit: Ben Russell
O’Toole will explore the success of the deal, not just in ending the conflict, but in radically reimagining “the Irish question.” He will suggest that it contains the seeds of a much more open and pluralist sense of identity—one that has been undermined by Brexit and the difficulties it creates for Northern Ireland. He will consider whether the promise of a more fluid sense of belonging can be sustained in the coming years.
O’Toole’s books on politics include the recent best sellers We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland and Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain. His books on theater include works on William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Thomas Murphy. He regularly contributes to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and other international publications. 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, 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. He has recently been appointed official biographer of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney.
Robert Fagles (1933-2008), for whom the annual Memorial Lecture is named, was an award-winning scholar, writer and member of the Princeton faculty for 42 years, serving as the Arthur Marks ’1919 Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton. He was widely acclaimed for his popular translations of Homer’s “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” both of which became best-sellers. He also created English renditions of “The Oresteia” by Aeschylus and “The Three Theban Plays” by Sophocles, as well as “The Aeneid” by the Roman poet Virgil. Starting in 1966, Fagles was director of Princeton’s Program in Comparative Literature, which attained department status in 1975. He served as founding chair of the department from 1975 to 1994. Fagles’ teaching and research specialties were the classical tradition in English and European literature; the theory and practice of translation; interrelationships between the arts; and forms of poetry: lyric, tragedy and epic.
The Fund for Irish Studies is chaired this year by O’Toole and affords all Princeton students, and the community at large, a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, and economics not only of Ireland but of “Ireland in the world.” The lecture series is co-produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts.
Information about the lecture series events can be found on the Fund for Irish Studies website. Additional events scheduled for the spring semester include:
- Elizabeth Boyle (University of Maynooth) lectures on “Fierce Appetites: Lessons from My Year of Untamed Thinking” on April 14
- Mary Burke (University of Connecticut) lectures on “Race, Politics and Irish America: A Gothic History” on April 21
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.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events, most of them free, presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts.
