Was divorce a realistic possibility for Leopold and Molly Bloom? Peter Kuch, the Eamon Cleary Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand, will give a talk Oct. 16 on his groundbreaking book, Irish Divorce/Joyce’s Ulysses (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), which challenges the long-held conviction that prior to 1995 Irish people could not obtain a divorce that gave them the right to remarry. Kuch writes of a forgotten Irish practice of petitioning the English courts for divorce, which casts Ulysses and Ireland’s identity in a new light. Kuch has published widely on Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Irish theater, Irish and Australian film, literary theory and Irish/Australian history. His talk will take place in Connolly House at 4:30 p.m. Sponsor: Irish Studies.
Divorce in the time of Joyce
John Paul II Lecture
Amy-Jill Levine will present “Christian Privilege, Christian Fragility, and the Gospel of John: How American Race Relations Inform Jewish-Christian Dialogue” on Oct. 14 at 4 p.m. in Stokes Hall South Auditorium S195. Levine is University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies and Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and College of Arts and Science; she is also Affiliated Professor, Woolf Institute: Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations, Cambridge University. Her authored and co-authored books include The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus; The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us; The New Testament: Methods and Meanings; The Gospel of Luke, and Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi. The sixth annual John Paul II Lecture is sponsored by the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning.
Posted in Guest Authors
Tagged Center for Christian-Jewish Learning, New Testament, religion
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Playwright Marcus Gardley
Poet-playwright Marcus Gardley will present a talk on “The Black God,” at Robsham Theater on Oct. 11 at 7 p.m. Gardley’s plays and musicals — which often center on African American history and allegory — have been performed around the country and internationally. His works include “Every Tongue Confess,” winner of the 2010 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, “The Gospel of Lovingkindness,” winner of the 2014 Black Theater Alliance Award for best play/playwright, and “The Road Weeps, The Well Runs Dry,” a finalist for the 2014 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History. Gardley’s talk is part of the Matthew R. DeVoy and John H. DeVoy IV Perspectives on Theatre Series, which bring leading professionals and major creative forces in theatre and the performing arts to Boston College. More from BC News.
What happened to the dead?
In the time of the Great Famine in Ireland, the rituals surrounding wakes and burial were often abandoned. Centenary University Associate Professor of History Breandan Mac Suibhne will discuss “Mortuary Practice in the Time of the Famine: Ireland, 1846-52” on Oct. 11 at 4 p.m. in Devlin Hall, room 101. Mac Suibhne is an expert in society and culture in modern Ireland, particularly Ulster, with special interests in the politics of identity in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Great Famine, migration, oral history, Irish America, and the Atlantic. His most recent book is The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland, named the Irish Times Irish Non-Fiction Book of the Year in 2017. He is a co-founder of Field Day Review, a journal of political and literary culture, and co-editor of Ireland’s Great Famine and Popular Politics. Sponsor: Center for Irish Programs.
Canonization in America
Canonization may be fundamentally about holiness, but it is never only about holiness. In the U.S., it was often about the ways in which Catholics defined, defended, and celebrated their identities as Americans. On Oct. 11, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, will present “Superpower Saints: Canonization in America, 1939-1963.” Cummings will discuss how the story of the people who championed, challenged, and invoked canonization candidate Elizabeth Ann Seton between 1939 and 1963 is a case study of how personality and power intersected to shape the afterlife of an American saint. Cummings is the author of New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era and co-editor of Catholics and the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History. Her current book project is Citizen Saints: Catholics and Canonization in America. Her talk will take place in Gasson Hall, room 100, starting at 4 p.m. Sponsors: Catholic Studies and the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life.
From novel to movie screen
The film “Call Me by Your Name” was one of the most successful films of 2017, garnering an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. The movie was based on the best-selling novel of the same name written by André Aciman, who will deliver the Heinz Bluhm Lecture on Oct. 4 at 5 p.m. in Higgins Hall, room 300. Aciman will discuss the process by which a novel is transformed into a movie script. Aciman is also the author of Harvard Square and Eight White Nights, the memoir Out of Egypt, and the essay collections False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory and Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, Granta, and the Paris Review, as well as in several volumes of The Best American Essays. He is the Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the Graduate Center of City University of New York.
Marlon James
Marlon James, winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, will talk about his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, on Oct. 3 at 7 p.m. in Gasson Hall, room 100. A Brief History of Seven Killings explores Jamaican history through the perspectives of multiple narrators and genres: the political thriller, the oral biography, and the classic whodunit. James is also the author of the novels, John Crow’s Devil and The Book of Night Women (winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award), and “From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself,” a widely read essay that appeared in the New York Times Magazine. His book Black Leopard, Red Wolf is forthcoming in 2019. He teaches English and creative writing at Macalester College. Sponsors: Lowell Humanities Series and African and African Diaspora Studies.
Feore Family Lecture on Jesuit Studies
University of Toronto Professor Emeritus of History Paul F. Grendler will deliver the annual Feore Family Lecture on Jesuit Studies on Oct. 2 in the Heights Room of Corcoran Commons. The event will begin with a 4 p.m. reception, followed by his lecture, “A Historian’s Journey to Jesuit Education,” at 5 p.m. Grendler has published 10 books, including The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press 1540-1605 (winner of the Marraro Prize from the American Catholic Historical Association) and Schooling in Renaissance Italy and The Universities of the Italian Renaissance, both winners of the Marraro Prize from the American Historical Association. An internationally renowned historian, Grendler is a recipient of lifetime achievement awards from the Renaissance Society of America and the Society for Italian Historical Studies. In 2014 he received the Galileo Galilei International Prize presented annually to a non-Italian who has made major contributions to Italian scholarship. The event is sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College, which will present Grendler with the George E. Ganss, S.J., Award in Jesuit Studies to recognize his significant scholarly contributions to the field.
Posted in Awards/Honors, Guest Authors
Tagged history, Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, Jesuit
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Dalsimer Lecture & Book Launch
Boston College alumnus Mark Doyle, an associate professor at Middle Tennessee State University, will present the fall Dalsimer Lecture: “Black and Brown Amidst the Orange and Green: Toward a Multiracial History of Ireland” on Sept. 27 at 5 p.m. Doyle’s lecture will explore the deep history of Asian and African immigrants and visitors to Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries. He argues for a new history of Ireland that not only incorporates the experiences of nonwhite people but also uses those experiences to understand Irish attitudes toward race, immigration, and empire in the modern era. Doyle is the author of Communal Violence in the British Empire: Disturbing the Pax and Fighting like the Devil for the Sake of God: Protestants, Catholics, and the Origins of Violence in Victorian Belfast, and editor of The British Empire: A Historical Encyclopedia. The lecture will be followed by the launch of the book Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-First-Century Irish Novel (Syracuse University Press), by BC alumna Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of modern Irish literature at Le Moyne College, and vice president of the American Conference for Irish Studies. In Trauma and Recovery, Costello-Sullivan uses the work of Colm Tóibín, John Banville, Anne Enright, Emma Donohue, Colum McCann, and Sebastian Barry to highligh the power of narrative to amend and address memory and trauma and the possibility of recovery. Her previous publications include Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín. Events take place in Devlin Hall, room 101. Sponsor: Center for Irish Programs.
Posted in Alumni Authors
Tagged book launch, Ireland, Irish history, Irish literature
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Doris Kearns Goodwin
Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin will present “Where Do We Go From Here: Leadership in Turbulent Times” on September 27 at 4:00 p.m. in the Heights Room of Corcoran Commons. Leadership in Turbulent Times (Simon & Schuster, 2018), Goodwin’s most recent book, is a seminal work based on her five decades of studying the presidential leadership of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. Goodwin is also the author of several acclaimed books, including The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys; No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, winner of the Carnegie Medal. Her book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, was the basis for Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated film “Lincoln.” A graduate of Colby College and Harvard University, Goodwin has been honored with the Charles Frankel Prize, Sarah Josepha Hale Medal, New England Book Award, Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and Ohioana Book Award. Sponsor: The Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics’ Clough Colloquium.
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