Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies continues its 2022-2023 series with a lecture by Elizabeth Boyle, Lecturer in Early Irish at Maynooth University in Ireland and author of the bestselling essay collection, Fierce Appetites: Lessons from my year of untamed thinking. Boyle will be introduced by Visiting Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters Fintan O’Toole. The lecture will take place April 14 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 Fierce Appetites, Boyle writes accounts of both familiar and obscure ancient stories from Ireland and elsewhere, using her historical learning to grapple with raw and urgent questions she faces—questions, she notes, that have bedevilled people in every age. Throughout the collection of personal essays, she writes on grief, addiction, family breakdown, the complexities of motherhood, love and sex, memory, class, education, travel (and staying put) with unflinching honesty, deep compassion and occasional dark humor. Sharon Arbuthnot, writing for the Irish Times, called the book “unusual, arresting and genuinely enriching,” and acclaimed novelist Hilary Mantel recommended it as “an agile story, irreverent, capacious and constantly surprising: like nothing else you will read.” Published in March 2022, Fierce Appetites became an immediate top ten bestseller in Ireland and was shortlisted for the Nonfiction Book of the Year at the 2022 Irish Book Awards. Boyle’s lecture will expand upon topics from the book.
Elizabeth Boyle. Photo Credit: Bob Foyers
As a medieval historian, Boyle specializes in the intellectual, cultural and religious history of pre-modern Europe. Her research focuses on Ireland, and she has also published on early medieval Wales and England. Boyle’s academic publications include the 2021 monograph History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland and numerous articles in international journals such as History of Religions, The Journal of Medieval Latin, Anglo-Saxon England, and Medium Ævum. Her honors include a prestigious Leverhulme Fellowship at the University of Cambridge and a Marie Curie Fellowship at University College Cork. She earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge in 2008.
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.
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. The spring series will conclude on April 21 with a lecture on “Race, Politics and Irish-America: A Gothic History” by Mary M. Burke, Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.
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.
