Seamus Heaney Memorial Lecture

On February 15, 2023, Catherine Flynn, Associate Professor of English and Director of Irish Studies at the University of California Berkeley, delivered the annual Seamus Heaney Memorial Lecture. A scholar of British and Irish modernist literature in a European avant-garde context, her book, James Joyce and the Matter of Paris, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. The lecture took place at the University of Notre Dame.

On November 29, 2021, Roy Foster, former Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and honorary fellow of Hertford College, appeared in conversation with Barry McCrea, Keough Family Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Organized in association with Hertford College and taking place at the University of Oxford, this hybrid event focused on themes in Foster’s recent book On Seamus Heaney(Princeton University Press, 2020).

On May 13, 2021, Rosie Lavan, lecturer, Trinity College Dublin, delivered a virtual Heaney Memorial Lecture for the 2020-2021 academic year, titled “‘Tuning the Medium’: Seamus Heaney and the First-Person Plural.” Her book, Seamus Heaney and Society (Oxford University Press, 2020), aims to re-situate Seamus Heaney’s work in its varied textual, cultural, institutional, and political contexts, paying close attention to his early journalism and work for radio and television, and to his key institutional affiliations in publishing, broadcasting, and education in Ireland, Britain, and the United States. In her lecture, Lavan examined Heaney’s poetry of collective experience during the time of his mid- to late career. Her particular focus was on the poem “From the Canton of Expectation” in The Haw Lantern (1987).

In the Seamus Heaney Memorial Lecture on October 26, 2018, Eve Patten, Professor of English and Director of the Oscar Wilde Centre at Trinity College, Dublin, spoke on “Heaney, Auden, and the Age of Anxiety.” Taking its cue from Heaney’s essay “Sounding Auden,” this lecture revisited Heaney’s complex response to his predecessor W.H. Auden’s “hungering for a form” against a backdrop of world crisis, and considered—seven decades after the appearance of Auden’s “The Age of Anxiety”—the role of poetry in apprehensive times.

Rónán McDonald, Professor of Modern Literature and Director of Irish Studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, delivered the annual Seamus Heaney Memorial Lecture — “Crediting Heaney” — on September 28, 2017. McDonald spoke on the concept of “credit” in Seamus Heaney’s work, both as an ascription of value to art and a wily negotiation of faith and belief. The lecture looked at Heaney’s justifications of poetry and its purpose in his critical essays and in his ars poetica (poems about poetry), alert to various configurations of balance and equilibrium.

Declan Kiberd, the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies, Professor of English and Irish Language and Literature, delivered the annual Seamus Heaney lecture on September 2, 2016. The lecture, titled “Modernism in the Streets: Joyce, Pearse and Stephens in 1916” took place in the Morris Inn at the University of Notre Dame.

Christopher Morash, Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin presented the second annual Seamus Heaney Memorial Lecture, titled “Heaney, Place, and Property”, on September 4, 2015 in the Hesburgh Library, Rare Books and Special Collections.

The 2015 Seamus Heaney Memorial Lecture brought together what at first might seem to be two widely different areas of concern: some of the philosophical consideration of place, particularly as it takes shape in the late work of Heidegger; and, the recent economic crisis of property value in Ireland.

The inaugural Seamus Heaney Memorial Lecture, titled “‘To set the darkness echoing’: in memoriam Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013”, took place on August 28, 2014 in the Morris Inn at the University of Notre Dame. The lecture featured a poetry reading by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and remarks by John Kelly.

Ní Dhomhnaill, renowned Irish language poet, read an elegy she wrote for Heaney as well as two of her poems, “Mo Mhile Stór” and “Féar Suaithinseach,” which Heaney translated into English. Following Heaney, she was the second holder of the Ireland Professor of Poetry at Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and Queen's University Belfast. She is a past Distinguished Professor of Irish Poetry and Naughton Fellow in the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. Her accolades include winning the American Ireland Fund Literature Prize, and her work has been translated into multiple languages.

John Kelly, Emeritus Research Fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford, has written extensively on 19th and 20th-century literature and is General Editor of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, which is being published in 12 volumes. He has also edited and introduced a 12-volume series of Irish fiction, poetry and essays of the nineteenth century, under the title ‘Hibernia: State and Nation’, and his W. B. Yeats Chronology appeared in 2003. He was the Distinguished Donald R. Keough Visiting Professor at the Keough-Naughton Institute in the fall of 2014.