Also, please note that O’Donnell Distinguished Visiting Professor of Irish Studies Clair Wills will give a lecture entitled “The Apotheosis of Clay: Beyond Irish Naturalism” at 3:00PM this Friday, April 20th, in 424 Flanner followed by the launch of Faculty Fellow Sara Maurer‘s new book The Dispossessed State: Britain, Ireland, and Narratives of Ownership in the Nineteenth Century in the Institute.

Valerie Sayers, Chair of the English Department at Notre Dame wrote beautifully about Jay: 

Jay’s contributions to this department are legendary, but the chief one was, and remains, his friendship, offered always with the delights of witty literary conversation that, if we were lucky, was spiced up with a good measure of politics.  Officially an Eighteenth Century man, Jay ranged effortlessly across centuries: many of us spent profitable hours hearing him out on Felix Holt and Finnegans Wake, The Golden Bowl and The Golden Notebook.  He was an astute reader and editor of poetry, too, who put together a wonderful collection of Notre Dame poets, The Space Between, and made unsung contributions to the Notre Dame Review.  In addition to his erudite scholarly writing, which includes The King’s Business, a collection of Anglo-Irish political correspondence, and Vision and Vacancy: The Fictions of J.S. Le Fanu, Jay wrote a novel, Margaret’s Book, which remains a marvel of concision and invention, a beautiful balancing act that holds idea and emotion in fearful and delightful tension.  Our best students, undergraduate and graduate, revered him as much for his acerbic bons mots as for his personal generosity.  Toward the end of his career at Notre Dame, Jay made lasting contributions to the Creative Writing Program, which amused and bemused him in equal measure, and to the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, which–I think it is safe to say–just delighted him.  The rest of his career did not end, however: after he retired from teaching, Jay was still writing and reading fiction and criticism.  His writing and his spirit live on, but for the moment, many of us are bereft and a little bewildered.  Life without Jay? Unthinkable.

The family tentatively plans a wake today from 3 to 7 pm at Welsheimer Funeral Home; with ceremonies led by members of the English Department at 6 p.m.

Notre Dame story here.

Obituary here.

South Bend Tribune story here.

All are welcome.

At 6:30PM see a selection of of nine shorts in which talented filmmakers look beyond Ireland to paint big ideas on small canvasses.

At 9:30PM join us for From the Sky Down, a documentary looking back twenty years to U2′s recording of an album that nearly destroyed but ultimately saved Ireland’s greatest rock band.

For tickets and info, visit performingarts.nd.edu.

Professor Canny is a Member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council and Professor Emeritus of History at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he served as Founding Director of the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities, 2000-11, and as Vice President for Research, 2005-8. He was President of the Royal Academy 2008-11. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the American Philosophical Society. An expert on early modern history broadly defined, Professor Canny edited the first volume of The Oxford History of the British Empire (1998)and, with Philip D. Morgan, edited The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, c1450-c1850 (2011). His major book is Making Ireland British, 1580-1650 (Oxford, 2001), for which he was awarded the Irish Historical Research Prize 2003; an award he had previously won in 1976 for his first book The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: a Pattern Established, 1565-76.

All are welcome.

For a complete list of the remaining talks this semester, please click here.

Denise A. Ayo is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame and a member of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. She specializes in British and Irish modernism with an emphasis on print culture and gender issues. Her dissertation, “Constructing and Performing the Modern Woman of Letters: Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Mary Colum,” examines how three prolific critics self-consciously construct and perform competing female critical personae during the interwar period. She received a distinguished pass on her candidacy exams in Spring 2009 and will defend her dissertation in Summer 2012. She has taught an undergraduate course of her own design, “Narrating the Mind in Modern Fiction,” in Fall 2009 as well as three semesters of first year composition. During her career at Notre Dame, she has been awarded a Diversity Fellowship, a Zahm Research Travel Grant, and an Adjunct Teaching Fellowship and has presented papers at the 2008 and 2010 ACIS National Conference as well as the 2007 and 2009 North American James Joyce Conference. She received her B.A. in English and Plan II from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005. Her article “Scratching at Scabs: The Garryowens of Ireland” appeared in the 2010 Joyce Studies Annual and the Journal of Modern Literature will be publishing her article “Mary Colum, Modernism, and Mass Media: An Irish-Inflected Transatalntic Print Culture” in 2012. She is also editing a selected volume of Mary Colum’s critical works and looking for interested publishers. For more information, visit deniseayo.com.
All are welcome.

You are invited to join the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies Today, February 10 at 3:00 p.m. in 424 Flanner Hall for a lecture by Brian Ó Conchubhair entitled “Inscribing the Waterscape in Eighteenth-Century Ireland.” Professor Ó Conchubhair is Associate Professor in the Department of Irish Language and Literature.

You are invited to join the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies in welcoming the inaugural Herbert Allen and Donald R. Keough Distinguished Visiting Professor, Nicholas Canny this Friday, February 3 at 3:00PM in 424 Flanner Hall.

Professor Canny is a Member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council and Professor Emeritus of History at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he served as Founding Director of the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities, 2000-11, and as Vice President for Research, 2005-8. He was President of the Royal Academy 2008-11. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the American Philosophical Society. An expert on early modern history broadly defined, Professor Canny edited the first volume of The Oxford History of the British Empire (1998) and, with Philip D. Morgan, edited The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, c1450-c1850 (2011). His major book is Making Ireland British, 1580-1650 (Oxford, 2001), for which he was awarded the Irish Historical Research Prize 2003; an award he had previously won in 1976 for his first book The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: a Pattern Established, 1565-76.

All are welcome.

Tomás Ó Carragáin is a graduate of University College Cork and the University of York and became a lecturer in the Archaeology Department, UCC, in 2002. His publications include Inishmurray: Monks and Pilgrims in an Atlantic Landscape (Collins Press 2008) and Churches in Early Medieval Ireland. Architecture, Ritual and Memory (Yale University Press 2010), the first in-depth study of Irish architecture from the arrival of Christianity to the early stages of the Romanesque. He is currently working on the Making Christian Landscapes project which is funded by the Heritage Council and considers the impact of Christianity on early medieval landscapes in Ireland and neighbouring countries. A fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA), he won the 2009 Society for Medieval Archaeology Martyn Jope Award, the 2011 Michael Adams Prize in Irish Medieval Studies and the 2011 UCC College of Arts Research Achievement Award.

All are welcome.