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Seamus Heaney Lecture Series 2015

The biennial Seamus Heaney Lecture Series 2015 will takes place this October, November and December in the Cregan Library, DCU St. Patrick’s Campus.  This series will examine the History of Education, with particular reference to Ireland.  The lectures are free of charge and open to the public.

The first lecture will be delivered by Nicholas Wolf, Glucksman Ireland House, New York University on Tuesday 13th October at 7pm, speaking on the theme of The National School system and the Irish language in the nineteenth century.

One of the puzzles about the growth of primary-school education in Ireland under the Act of Union was the surprising lack of attention paid by its administrators to the presence of Irish-speaking schoolchildren.  While the assumed goal of anglicisation on the part of school authorities certainly had a role to play here, the absence of sustained debate on the matter, given the inherent challenge to effective teaching that Irish-speaking children posed, raises important questions for historians.  How could primary-level institutions sustain this approach well into the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and why did the accommodation of Irish speakers eventually force itself on the national education system in the decades before any formal stirrings of language revival?

Nicholas Wolf is the author of An Irish-Speaking Island: State, Religion, Community, and the Linguistic Landscape in Ireland, 1770-1870 (University of Wisconsin, 2014) winner of the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture and the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Books, both awarded by the American Conference for Irish Studies.  His research on Irish cultural history, with a special focus on language and religion, has been published in Éire-Ireland, the Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, the Journal of British Studies, and New Hibernia Review. He is assistant editor of Eire-Ireland: an interdisciplinary journal of Irish Studies, and is an assistant curator and data services librarian at New York University and a recent faculty fellow at Glucksman Ireland House.

Other speakers in the series include:

Tuesday, 20 October 2015: Ciaran O’Neill (Trinity College, Dublin), ‘European Elites, cultural capital, and intermediate education in the nineteenth century’.

Tuesday, 27 October 2015: James Kelly (St Patrick’s College, Dublin City University): ‘The dawning of mass education in Ireland, 1750-1830’.

Tuesday, 10 November 2015: Audrey Bryan (St Patrick’s College, Dublin City University): ‘Compensating for Society?  (In)Equality of Opportunity and Educational Reform in Ireland since 1965’.

Tuesday, 17 November 2015: Judith Harford (University College Dublin) and Tom O’Donoghue (University of Western Australia), ‘Secondary School Education in Ireland: History, Memories and Life Stories, 1922-1967’.

Tuesday, 24 November 2015: Catherine Burke (Cambridge University), ‘Twentieth-century School architecture’.

Tuesday, 1 December 2015: David Fitzpatrick (Trinity College, Dublin), ‘Knowledge, Belief, and the Irish Revolution’.

To accompany each lecture, the staff of the Cregan Library are putting on an exhibition of school books from the collection to compliment the theme of the evening. This will be in the exhibition area on the ground floor of the library.