Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies presents “Dracula and Home Rule: History, Horror and a Dream of Reconciliation,” the Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture by Fintan O’Toole, author, essayist, one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals, columnist for The Irish Times, and former Visiting Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters at Princeton University. Jane Cox, Director of the Program in Theater & Music Theater, will provide a welcome and introduction at the event on March 8 at 4:30 p.m. at the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street. The lecture 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 “Dracula and Home Rule: History, Horror and A Dream of Reconciliation,” O’Toole notes that although Irish-born writer Bram Stoker’s gothic horror novel, Dracula, is not the greatest of Irish literary works, it is the one that has had the most influence on global popular culture. Published in 1897 and set in Transylvania and England, the novel neither mentions Ireland nor is a single character Irish. Yet O’Toole argues that through the novel, Stoker, as a supporter of the contemporary cause of Home Rule for Ireland is, among other things, trying to create a myth in which the recurring divisions of Irish history—the undead antagonisms between Protestant and Catholic—are finally laid to rest. In the face of a greater evil, Stoker’s characters must bring Catholic and Protestant, peasant and aristocrat, tradition and modernity, together. In conclusion, O’Toole proposes that the stake driven through Dracula’s heart is also an imaginary end of Irish history.
Photo credit: Ben Russell
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.
Cox is a lighting designer for theater, opera, dance and music. She is currently lighting Princeton alum Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ acclaimed show Appropriate on Broadway and Teeth by Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs at Playwrights Horizons. She has been nominated for four Drama Desk awards, three Lucille Lortel awards, and in 2013 she was awarded the Henry Hewes Design Award for her work on The Flick. In 2016, Cox received the Ruth Morley Design Award by the League of Professional Theater Women and a British What’s Onstage award for her work on Hamlet. In 2020, she received a special citation from the Henry Hewes Design Awards as part of the design team for María Irene Fornés’ Fefu and Her Friends. A native of Ireland, Cox has taught theater and lighting design at Princeton since 2007 and became Director of the Program in Theater in 2016.
This year marks the ninth occasion in which O’Toole has delivered the Fagles Lecture as part of the Fund for Irish Studies series.
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 ’19 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.
The Fund for Irish Studies 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 and will return with new programming in fall 2024.
For More Information
The Fund for Irish Studies website lists more information about the lecture series, which 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 presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.
