Sarah McKibben, Associate Professor of Irish Language and Literature and a Faculty Fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, will deliver the 2020 Annual Breandán Ó Buachalla Memorial Lecture, a signature event in the Institute's academic year. The title of her lecture is: "Irish Bardic Poetry and Rhetorical Realpolitik: Early Modern Colonial Maneuvers."
The lecture honors the memory of Breandán Ó Buachalla (1936-2010), who was the inaugural Thomas J. and Kathleen M. O'Donnell Chair of Irish Language and Literature at the University of Notre Dame and was instrumental to the success of both the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and the Department of Irish Language and Literature.
Sarah McKibben joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2002. She received her M.Phil. in Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland, Dublin and her doctorate from Cornell University (2003).
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, tentatively called Tradition Transformed: Bardic Poetry and Colonialism in Early Modern Ireland, c.1560-1660, 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.
Previous honors include the Adele Dalsimer Dissertation Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies in 2004.
Professor 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.