Breandán Ó Buachalla Memorial Lecture

On August 26, 2022, the 2022 Annual Breandán Ó Buachalla Memorial Lecture was delivered by Clíona Ní Ríordáin, professor of English at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, where she teaches Irish literature and translation studies and convenes the Master’s programme in Irish Studies.

In the lecture, Ní Ríordáin looked at the way in which the Irish language has been central to a number of recent books within contemporary English language literature in Ireland. Some examples she discussed were Thirty-Two Words for Field by Manchán Magan, Thin Places by Kerry ní Dochartaigh, and The Colony by Audrey Magee. She will trace the trend back to earlier texts, like The Last Geraldine Officer by Thomas McCarthy, and to one of Seamus Heaney's early poems, “For the Commander of the Eliza.”

On April 6, 2021, Caitríona Ó Dochartaigh, lecturer in the Department of Early and Medieval Irish at University College Cork delivered a virtual lecture in honor of the late Breandán Ó Buachalla.

The theme of Dr. Ó Dochartaigh's lecture — visual representations of the ridiculous — are widespread in the margins of medieval manuscripts, particularly from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, where snails attacking knights, reading monkeys, and armed hares abound. The theme is also widespread in medieval poetry, popular ballads and later folktales, where these impossibilities or wonders grew into a fully-formed comic genre with sequences of impossible or ridiculous images strung together. An obscure Irish poem may be the sole literary witness of such impossibilities in a medieval Irish context. However, the motif reaches a highpoint in Ireland much later in the Amhrán Bréagach genre, a song-type collected in a number of Gaeltacht areas in the twentieth century.

On Feburary 7, 2020, Sarah McKibben, associate professor of Irish language and literature at the University of Notre Dame and a faculty fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, delivered the 2020 Annual Breandán Ó Buachalla Memorial Lecture,

Professor McKibben’s research focuses on Irish poets of the 16th and 17th centuries, who composed compelling artistic expressions of praise and warning — as well as satire — in the face of an antagonistic, expanding Tudor-Stuart state. For her second book focusing on bardic defenses of their practices in the face of attack, she won a fellowship for 2019 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as one in 2018 from the American Council of Learned Societies. McKibben is the author of Endangered Masculinities in Irish Poetry, 1540-1780 (UCD Press, 2010), which received Honorable Mention for the 2010 Rhodes Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Peter McQuillan, associate professor of Irish language and literature at the University of Notre, delivered the annual Breandán Ó Buachalla Memorial Lecture on February 1, 2019.

McQuillan holds a B.A. and M.A. from University College, Dublin, and a Ph.D. in Celtic languages and literatures from Harvard. Before coming to Notre Dame, he held the Sir John Rhys Studentship in Celtic Studies at Jesus College, Oxford University, and taught Irish at the University of Regensburg in Germany and at Harvard.

He has published articles in the Journal of Celtic Linguistics and Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium. He is the author of Modality and the Subjunctive Mood in Irish (2002) and Native and Natural: Aspects of the Concepts of Right and Freedom in Irish (2004), an analysis of the transformation of concepts of rights and freedom as expressed in the Irish language.

On March 2, 2018, Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, chair of the Department of Irish Language and Literature and concurrent Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, delivered the annual Breandán Ó Buachalla Memorial Lecture.

Professor Ó Giolláin's interests include popular religion in Ireland as well as folklore and popular culture in the history of ideas and of institutions. He is the author of Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity (2000), winner of the Katherine Briggs Folklore Prize 2000, and runner-up for the Radcliffe Prize 2001, and An Dúchas agus an Domhan (2005), as well as more than forty articles and papers. Professor Ó Giolláin teaches Irish folklore with an emphasis on narrative folklore.

On February 17, 2017, Bríona Nic Dhiarmada, the Thomas J. & Kathleen M. O'Donnell Professor of Irish Studies and Concurrent Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, presented the annual lecture in honor of the late Breandán Ó Buachalla.

Nic Dhiarmada is originator, writer, producer, and executive producer of the award-winning, multipart documentary series on the Easter Rising, 1916 The Irish Rebellion, and its 86-minute feature version, both narrated by Liam Neeson, that were broadcast and screened internationally throughout 2016 and 2017.

Additionally, Nic Dhiarmada has authored over 35 screen plays and 10 documentaries. She is the author of Téacs Baineann, Téacs Mná: Filíocht Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill as well as numerous articles on Irish language literature and culture. Additionally, she is an editor of The Field Day Anthology and co-editor with Máire Ní Annracháin of Téacs agus Comhthéacs: Gnéithe de Chritic na Gaeilge.

A film about the life of Professor Ó Buachalla preceded the lecture.

On February 18, 2016, Barry McCrea, the Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies and professor of English, Irish language and literature, and romance languages and literatures at the University of Notre Dame, delivered the annual lecture in honor of the late Breandán Ó Buachalla.

On March 31, 2015, Tomás Ó Cathasaigh, Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Irish Studies in the Department of Celtic Languages and Literature at Harvard University, presented the second annual lecture in honor of the late Breandán Ó Buachalla. Ó Cathasaigh used an article written by Ó Buachalla in the Irish literary magazine Comhar as a point of departure for his talk “Man and Bull in Táin Bó Cúailnge.”

Ó Cathasaigh's work focuses on early Irish narrative literature and his most recent book Coire Sois, The Cauldron of Knowledge: A Companion to Early Irish Saga (2013) was published by the University of Notre Dame Press. Given his work on the use of language in literature and his course work in Old and Middle Irish language and literature, Ó Cathasaigh was an ideal representative of the Irish language and O'Buachalla himself.

On March 27, 2014, Cormac Ó Gráda, Distinguished Naughton Fellow and emeritus professor of economics at University College Dublin, delivered the inaugural Ó Buachalla lecture at the University of Notre Dame. Professor Ó Gráda’s major books include Ireland: A New Economic History 1780-1939 (1994), Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce (2006) and Famine: A Short History (2009). Co-editor of the European Review of Economic History, Professor Ó Gráda is a member of the Irish Economic and Social History Society as well as the Royal Irish Academy, where he received the Academy's Gold Medal in 2010.