Barry McCrea, Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies, has been invited to give a lecture and reading as part of Princeton University's 2023-2024 Fund for Irish Studies. Princeton's visiting Leonard L. Milberg '53 Professor in Irish Letters, Fintan O'Toole, will introduce McCrea, who will give a talk called "Language and the Irish Novel" followed by a reading from his current novel-in-progress, Miracle at Thorn Island. The event will take place this Friday, October 27 at 4:30 p.m. at the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street. The event is free and open to the public.
As a novelist and scholar of comparative literature, McCrea is the author of three books. His debut novel, The First Verse, won the 2006 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ fiction and a Barnes & Noble “Discover Award.” Published in 2011, his academic book In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust won Columbia University’s Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication in the Humanities. McCrea’s last book, Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth Century Ireland and Europe, was awarded the 2016 René Wellek Prize for an outstanding book in the discipline of comparative literature. As the Keough Family Chair and Concurrent Professor of English, Irish Language and Literature, as well as Romance Languages and Literatures at Notre Dame, he teaches seminars on topics such as James Joyce, the modern European novel, and modern Irish poetry on the university’s campuses in Indiana, Rome, and Dublin. McCrea received his undergraduate degree from Trinity College Dublin and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2004.