As a Visiting Fellow at the Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute at Trinity College Dublin, Professor Barry McCrea spent Fall semester 2018 researching the relationship between economic life and narrative form in European fiction. Marking the end of his time in the Long Room Hub, Professor McCrea delivered a fascinating lecture entitled "Language and Social Class in the Novel" on the 11th of December in Trinity College. Encompassing a range of writers from James Joyce and Flann O’Brien to Elena Ferrante and Máirtín Ó Cadhain, the lecture focussed on the inability of minor languages to produce a novel tradition. In the course of the lecture, Professor McCrea addressed the question: "What do the difficulties of the Irish language in producing a novel tradition tell us about the novel form?"
During his time in Dublin, Professor McCrea also guided a group of undergraduate students through James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece Ulysses every week at Notre Dame’s Dublin Global Gateway. Students were encouraged to enrich both their lives in Dublin and their engagement with the text by exploring Joycean sites across the city. As the semester came to a close, Bridget Simons, a Notre Dame junior studying at Trinity College Dublin, wrote: ‘I will be forever grateful to Barry for helping me appreciate Ulysses, and to Ulysses for helping me appreciate Dublin!’
Professor McCrea is the Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies and Professor of English, Irish Language and Literature, and Romance Languages and Literatures at Notre Dame.