Glucksman Ireland House Events Calendar Fall 2006

Free admission to Members of Glucksman Ireland House and to all students/faculty with a valid NYU I.D. card.  For all others: $10 donation at the door for regular event series; $15 donation at the door for Blarney Star Concert Series. In order to ensure a seat, please RSVP to 212-998-3950 (except Blarney Star Concert Series; no advance tickets).  All events are held at Glucksman Ireland House unless otherwise noted. All events are supported by members of Glucksman Ireland House. Please click on hyperlinks in event titles for more further information regarding each listing.

September 14:  Thursday, 7 pm, Reading by Barry McCrea Author Barry McCrea reads from The First Verse, a novel set in Trinity College, Dublin and Paris featuring a character obsessed with ciphers and secrets derived from randomly chosen texts. Selected for the Barnes & Noble ‘Discover Great New Writers’ program, McCrea offers the story of a gay protagonist coming of age in Celtic Tiger Ireland yet reaching back to a mysticism often lost in the digital age. McCrea holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and teaches in the Comparative Literature Department at Yale University.

September 21:  Thursday, 7 pm, Viewing of "Jakers! The Adventures of Piggley Winks" and discussion with creator Mike Young More than a children’s animated series, Jakers! The Adventures of Piggley Winks (Winner of two 2006 Daytime Emmy Awards; locally presented by PBS-WLIW) offers entertainment, life lessons and captivating representations of Irish and Irish American identity in the context of its 1950s Ireland setting framed by contemporary America. After screening an episode creator Mike Young will join Professor Marion R. Casey for a lively discussion of issues raised by the episode including new emigration into Ireland and the relationship between Irish immigrants to America and their homeland.

September 22: Friday, 9 pm, THE BLARNEY STAR CONCERT SERIES: Father Charlie Coen  Father Charlie is a multi-talented musical priest originally from Woodford in east County Galway.  He is best known as a player of the concertina (a little squeeze box with hexagonal ends) and as a traditional singer, and is also renowned for his abilities on the flute and tin whistle.  Father Coen, in fact, holds the rare distinction of having won three senior All-Ireland championships in a single day.  Father Coen’s performances in New York City have become rare, not-to-be-missed events.

September 28: Thursday, 7 pm,  Irene Whelan on The Bible War in Ireland Irene Whelan, Associate Professor of History and Director of Irish Studies at Manhattanville College speaks on the early missionary movement in Ireland and the origins of the ‘new’ imperialism of the Victorian period based on her recent book The Bible War in Ireland: The ‘Second Reformation’ and the Polarization of Protestant Catholic Relations 1800-1840, a vivid and compelling account of the evangelical movement and the sources of modern religious and political polarization in Ireland.

October 6:  Friday, 8 pm, THE BLARNEY STAR CONCERT SERIES: BANJAXED! - The Great Irish Tenor Banjo Concert Please note different time and venue: the Moravian Church, 30th St. and Lexington Ave. The first-ever concert in the western hemisphere dedicated to a celebration of  the tenor banjo in Irish traditional music, Banjaxed! will feature some of the top Irish four-string pickers in the US, including Limerick native and NYU professor Mick Moloney, ultra-modern County Cavan plectrum wizard Darren Maloney, Tipperary-born brothers Pio and Donie Ryan, Dubliner Eamon O’Leary, Armagh's Frankie McCormick, Mayo man Dessie Groake, accordion great Jimmy Keane, Blarney Star concert organizer Don Meade, and other special guests. The banjoists will be joined by a variety of other instrumentalists and singers for this unique event, which will be held in the Moravian Church, a great 19th-century acoustic space at the corner of Lexington Avenue and 30th Street.

October 12: Thursday, 7 pm, David J. Cooney, Permanent Representative for Ireland at the UN David J. Cooney, Permanent Representative for Ireland at the UN and recently appointed as co-chair of a key task force on reform, will speak on the role of small nations and of Ireland in particular at the United Nations. The UN occupies a major place in Irish foreign policy and Ireland has always sought to play an active role across the range of UN activities since becoming a member in 1955. Formerly the political director of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Cooney was appointed to his current position in 2005.

October 19: Thursday, 7 pm,  Daniel Cassidy: The Secret Language of the Crossroad: How the Irish Invented Slang Linguists generally hold that relatively few Irish words have been absorbed into standard English. Daniel Cassidy, founder and co-director of New College’s Irish Studies Program in San Francisco argues otherwise based on his research for a new book entitled The Secret Language of the Crossroad: How the Irish Invented Slang which will be published in early 2007. Cassidy will make the case that Irish words and phrases are scattered all across American language, regional and class dialects, colloquialism, slang, and specialized jargons like gambling.

October 25: Wednesday, 6pm,  Donoghue, Harries and Waters on Beckett and Waiting for Godot Please note different day and time To mark the presentation of Ireland’s Gate Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Jack H. Skirball Center for Performing Arts at NYU, three distinguished scholars from the NYU Department of English, Professor Denis Donoghue, Henry James Professor in English and American Letters, Professor Martin Harries and Professor John P. Waters, speak on the significance of Beckett’s work in modern literature and philosophy.

October 26: Thursday, 7 pm,  Conor O’Callaghan and Vona Groarke read from their collections, Fiction and Juniper Street Poets Conor O’Callaghan and Vona Groarke have individually garnered many honors, awards and writers’ residencies. Together they are one of the most distinguished couples in the world of Irish literature. Tonight both will read from their most recent collections, Fiction and Juniper Street respectively. Residents of Dundalk Co. Louth, O’Callaghan and Groarke spent the 2005-2006 academic year jointly holding the Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University. This year they are teaching creative writing at Wake Forest University. This event is co-sponsored by the NYU Creative Writing Program.

November 2: Thursday, 7 pm, THE ERNIE O’MALLEY LECTURE SERIES: William H. Mulligan Jr. on the Irish community of Michigan Copper Country Venue: NYU Helen & Martin Kimmel Center for University Life, 60 Washington Square South, Rm 914 From the Emerald Isle to the Copper Island: The Irish in Michigan Copper Country, 1845-1920. Professor William H. Mulligan Jr., Professor of History at Murray State University, Kentucky, gives the eighth annual lecture in this series endowed by Cormac K. H. O’Malley in honor of his father. Irish miners were among the first to work the mines of Michigan’s Copper Country in the 1840s. When Edward Ryan, the Merchant Prince of the Copper Country died in 1900, he was all but a millionaire. Yet none of his sons made their careers there and by 1920 there were very few Irish in the region. Professor Mulligan, the author of several books and articles on American social and industrial history, will discuss why this particular Diaspora community failed and how its history helps us understand the Irish American experience.

November 3: Friday, 9 pm,  THE BLARNEY STAR CONCERT SERIES: Paddy Keenan Paddy Keenan’s spectacular virtuosity on the uilleann pipes is legendary. He achieved international renown in the 1970s for his solo recordings and his work with the late, lamented Bothy Band, a group that revolutionized the sound of Irish traditional music. Paddy’s piping prowess has not faded over the decades and his talent for up-tempo improvisation on reels, jigs and hornpipes must be heard to be believed. Paddy is also one of the great exponents of the “low whistle,” an instrument with an intimate, breathy tone that makes it a perfect vehicle for slow airs.

November 9: Thursday, 7 pm,  Jim Rooney on the Rooney Family from County Down to the Pittsburgh Steelers Jim Rooney, grandson of ‘The Chief’, Pittsburgh Steelers founder, Art Rooney, and son of Dan Rooney, current chairman and owner of the 2006 Super Bowl champions and co-founder with Sir Anthony J. F. O’Reilly of The American Ireland Fund in 1976, speaks about this remarkable entrepreneurial and philanthropic Irish-American family whose ancestors left County Down in the 1880s.

November 16: Thursday, 7 pm,  Paul Muldoon reads from Horse Latitudes Pulitzer prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon reads from Horse Latitudes. The recipient of numerous awards, honors and prizes, Muldoon has been called “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War” (The Times Literary Supplement). The title refers to the area thirty degrees north and south of the equator in which sailing ships tend to be becalmed, in which stasis (if not stagnation) is the order of the day. Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the BBC. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University and Chair of the University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.

November 18: Saturday, 1-7 pm, Irish Song and Traditional Singing Techniques Workshop with Pádraig Ó Cearúill and Ashley Davis Please join Pádraig Ó Cearúill and Ashley Davis for an afternoon of instruction in traditional Irish singing. Work on repertoire, breathing, technique and pronunciation within the context of the Irish song/language. Knowledge of the Irish language is not essential. This event is free and open to the public, but advance registration via phone or email is required. Limit of 50 places available. Afternoon tea and light refreshments will be provided.  For more information, see event page.

November 30: Thursday, 7 pm, Alice McDermott reads from her new work, After This National Book Award winner Alice McDermott, author of six critically acclaimed novels, reads from her new work, After This, the story of the Keane family of Long Island who get swept up in the wake of the Vietnam War. When Mary and John Keane marry shortly after the Second World War, she is on the verge of spinsterhood, and he is a veteran haunted by the death of a young private in his platoon. Jacob, their first-born, is given the dead soldier's name, an omen that will haunt the family when Jacob is killed in Vietnam. A writer who has been compared to Jane Austen for her grace and powerful observation, she has represented and revealed an Irish America in works that fellow-novelist Anna Quindlen has described as mirroring “the essential truths of existence so sure-handedly that they are neither comedies nor tragedies, but merely true.

December 1: Friday, 9 pm,  THE BLARNEY STAR CONCERT SERIES: Noel Hill Noel Hill is Ireland’s greatest concertina player.  He hails from County Clare, the heartland of Irish concertina music, where he absorbed the influences of the many fine local players before going on to create his own spectacularly virtuosic style. Noel is particularly noted for his adaptation to the concertina of the complex ornamentation and chordal accompaniment used by great uilleann pipers such as the late Séamus Ennis and Willie Clancy. Noel has also made some of the most important  traditional music recordings of the past three decades, including highly praised collaborations with fiddler Tony Linnane and button accordionist Tony MacMahon and his own solo discs The Irish Concertina and The Irish Concertina Two.

December 7: Thursday, 7 pm,  Airneál na Nollag An ever-popular evening of traditional music with NYU Irish Language students to celebrate the advent of the holiday season hosted by Pádraig Ó Cearúill, Irish Language Lecturer at New York University  Bí Linn!

December 8th: Friday, 8pm, Special concert for broadcast in Ireland on Féilte on Irish-language TG4. This special concert will be filmed for broadcast in Ireland on the Féilte program of the Irish-language TG4 network. NYU Irish language instructor Pádraig Ó Cearúill will introduce performances by Dublin uilleann piper Ivan Goff, Sliabh Luachra fiddle stylist Tes Slominski and singing star Susan McKeown, who will be joined by guitarist Eamon O’Leary and other musical guests. Limited seating is available for this show due to the camera equipment; please rsvp to ensure seating: 212-998-3950 or email irelandhouse@nyu.edu to reserve a place.

Free admission to Members of Glucksman Ireland House and to all students/faculty with a valid NYU I.D. card.  For all others: $10 donation at the door for regular event series; $15 donation at the door for Blarney Star Concert Series. No advance tickets. In order to ensure a seat, please RSVP to 212-998-3950 or email irelandhouse@nyu.edu, except Blarney Star Concert Series.  All events are held at Glucksman Ireland House unless otherwise noted. All events are supported by members of Glucksman Ireland House.