Glucksman Ireland House presents
The Ernie O’Malley Lecture:
Professor Charles Fanning presents “A Hidden Flowering: Irish-American Culture in the 1930s”
Thursday, November 5th at 7pm
at Glucksman Ireland House NYU
In the eleventh annual lecture in this series endowed by Cormac K. H. O’Malley in honor of his father, Professor Emeritus Charles Fanning presents “A Hidden Flowering: Irish-American Culture in the 1930s,” an illustrated talk exploring the Irish dimension of some Depression-era accomplishments in poetry, fiction, the comic strip, radio, music, drama, film, and painting. Taken together, these argue for a palpable creative burst that has not been registered as such.
Professor Fanning discovered an authentic Irish-American voice in the persona of the 19th-century, syndicated newspaper humorist Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley (a fictional, Irish-American bar owner from Chicago with opinions on everything). He went on to identify an Irish-American regional literature in the work of Chicago writers like James T. Farrell, author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy and later a distinct Irish-American literature in The Irish Voice in America: Irish-American Fiction from the 1760s to the 1980s.
About Prof. Charles Fanning
Charles F. Fanning joined SIUC’s English department faculty in 1993, began his scholarly career in 1970 focusing on Irish-American literature, but he soon branched out to include history, culture and immigration. Fanning has published 12 books, 16 articles in professional journals, 12 book chapters, nine book reviews and two encyclopedia entries. Fanning has also received 11 fellowships and research awards in 10 years, including a three-year, $240,000 federal grant to underwrite the development of an exchange program with University College in Galway, Ireland.
Fanning grew up in Norwood, Mass., an area settled by Irish immigrants from Galway, earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College in 1964, a master’s from Harvard University in 1966, and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 and 1972. He taught at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts for 21 years and spent two years as assistant to the chancellor of the University of Missouri St. Louis before coming to SIUC.