Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies continues its 2023-2024 series with a talk and reading by Barry McCrea, an award-winning writer and the Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Visiting Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters Fintan O’Toole will introduce McCrea at the event on October 27 at 4:30 p.m. at the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street. The reading 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.
At Princeton, McCrea will deliver a brief talk on “Language and the Irish Novel” followed by a reading from his current novel-in-progress, Miracle at Thorn Island.
Barry McCrea. Photo Credit: Francesco Giannone
As a novelist and scholar of comparative literature, McCrea is the author of three books. His debut novel, The First Verse, won the 2006 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ fiction and a Barnes & Noble “Discover Award.” Published in 2011, his academic book In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust won Columbia University’s Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication in the Humanities. McCrea’s last book, Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth Century Ireland and Europe, was awarded the 2016 René Wellek Prize for an outstanding book in the discipline of comparative literature. As the Keough Family Chair and Concurrent Professor of English, Irish Language and Literature, as well as Romance Languages and Literatures at Notre Dame, he teaches seminars on topics such as James Joyce, the modern European novel, and modern Irish poetry on the university’s campuses in Indiana, Rome, and Dublin. McCrea received his undergraduate degree from Trinity College Dublin and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2004.
Invited by Princeton’s Humanities Council, McCrea spent the spring of 2018 on campus as a Faber Fellow in Comparative Literature, teaching an advanced undergraduate course entitled “Class, Desire, and the Novel.”
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. In 2023, O’Toole was named an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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.
The Fund for Irish Studies website lists more information about the lecture series. Additional events scheduled for the fall include:
- Louise Kennedy (author of the bestseller Trespasses) reads from her work on November 10
- Caoilinn Hughes (author of The Wild Laughter) reads from her work on December 1
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.
