Hosted in collaboration with the Irish Studies Program, Institute for Liberal Arts, and Consulate General of Ireland in Boston
Thursday, November 16 - Saturday November 18
Boston College (various venues, see schedule for details)
Ten years after the death of Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, the Irish Studies Program at Boston College is proud to invite scholars and public to join us in celebrating a poet whose connections to our university remain fresh in our memory. Bringing together outstanding scholars in the field, Seamus Heaney: Afterlives will explore new understandings of the poet since his death, with particular reference to living poets who continue to be influenced by Heaney’s legacy. Our Friday panels and Saturday’s four keynote speakers will celebrate, interrogate, and develop the legacy of the poet as critic, public intellectual, and major moral and aesthetic force of twentieth and early twenty-first century Ireland.
Outstanding features of the conference include “Political Heaney,” an inaugural Lowell lecture by Fintan O’Toole, Heaney’s official authorized biographer, and a Saturday afternoon performance by Belfast theater company “Kabosh.” The conference is honored by the presence of Seamus’s widow Marie, and his daughter and literary executor, Catherine Heaney.
Uncovering fresh and surprising angles on the poet’s work, this conference will assert his enduring relevance to the aesthetic, political, and ethical questions we face in today’s troubled world.
Please refer to the online conference schedule for details, including registration and parking. Please note that some sessions are limited to the Boston College community or by invitation.
Friday, November 3, 7:30pm
Trinity Chapel, Boston College Newton Campus
This fall concert presented by the University Chorale and Chamber singers will feature premiere performances of new musical settings of selected poems by Dominican-American poet Rhina P. Espaillat by composers Kristin Vining and Mark Popeney. The concert title reprises the title of Espaillat's first collection of poems published in 1992. See above event listing for Espaillat's pre-concert lecture for additional details about her life and work, as well as our recent "Red Shoe Night" program.
Rhina Espaillat
University Chorale Pre-Concert Lecture presented in collaboration with Burns Library
Friday, November 3, 4:00pm
Devlin Hall, Kane Information Room
Education doesn't consist of stern lectures to passive minds, but rather of daily experience interpreted by thought, feeling, and the guidance of elders with the desire and ability to communicate with young strangers undergoing important changes. This lecture will be geared to the needs of new arrivals, be it from abroad, from other parts of the country, or from the many "others" who constitute the population of this complex, multicultural environment. It will also focus on the importance of incorporating arts education in a "STEAM" curriculum, for without arts we cannot teach humanity.
Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic in 1932 and came to the United States as a young girl with her family as exiles from dictatorship, settling in New York City. Following a career as a public school teacher, she returned to writing poetry after attending the first West Chester University Poetry Conference, established in 1995 by New Formalist poets Michael Peich and Dana Gioia.
Author and translator of dozens of award-winning poetry collections, Espaillat is a founding member of the Fresh Meadows Poets and a founding member and former director of the Powow River Poets. A resident of Newburyport since 1990, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Salem State College in 2008, and in 2021, Plough Quarterly established the annual Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award in her honor. She has donated her archives to Boston College's John J. Burns Library.
Harriet Bart and Maxim Shrayer
Thursday, October 19, 3:00pm to 4:30pm
Burns Library
Award-winning artist Harriet Bart will discuss her abiding interest in the personal and cultural expression of memory in her mixed-media work.
Bart recently collaborated with Boston College professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies Maxim D. Shrayer on the creation of an artist book based on Shrayer’s translation of I SAW IT (1942), a powerful poem by Jewish-Russian poet and early Holocaust witness Ilya Selvinsky.
Following a presentation by Bart about her work, Shrayer will join Bart in a conversation about making art from agony moderated by Burns Librarian Christian Dupont. Burns Library has acquired a copy of I SAW IT, which will be on display with other Holocaust-related works.
I SAW IT was recently featured in a BC News article.
Light refreshments will be served following the program. The event is free and open to the public.
Thursday, September 28, 5:30pm until …?
O’Neill Library, main floor reading room
An evening extravaganza of poetry, music, and tributes celebrating Dominican-American poet Rhina Espaillat and the donation of her archives to Boston College, featuring: Dana Gioia, Julia Alvarez, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Nancy Kang, Sarah Aponte, Toni Treadway, Alfred Nicol, John Tavano, Roger Kimball, Riikka Pietiläinen Caffrey, Kristin Vining … and Rhina!
Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic in 1932 and came to the United States as a young girl with her family as exiles from dictatorship, settling in New York City. Following a career as a public school teacher, she returned to writing poetry after attending the first West Chester University Poetry Conference, established in 1995 by New Formalist poets Michael Peich and Dana Gioia.
Author and translator of dozens of award-winning poetry collections, Espaillat is a founding member of the Fresh Meadows Poets and a founding member and former director of the Powow River Poets. A resident of Newburyport since 1990, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Salem State College in 2008, and in 2021, Plough Quarterly established the annual Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award in her honor.
The program will begin at 5:30pm and continue through the evening. Come when you can, leave when you must. Free food and beverages. Books and CDs available for sale and signing. All are welcome. Bring your friends. And put on your red shoes!
Friday, September 29, 12:00pm to 1:30pm
O’Neill Library, main floor reading room
When Dana Gioia's provocative essay "Can Poetry Matter?" was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1991, it received more public response than any other piece in the magazine’s history, sparking a firestorm of debate and discussion over the role of the poet in today’s world. His 2013 essay, “The Catholic Writer Today,” ignited a national conversation about the role of Catholicism in American literature.
Gioia is a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and Poet Laureate of California. He has published six full-length collections of verse, most recently Meet Me at the Lighthouse (2023). His collection 99 Poems: New & Selected (2016) won the Poets’ Prize as the best new book of the year. Interrogations at Noon (2001), was awarded the American Book Award.
Gioia is best known as a central figure in the revival of rhyme, meter, and narrative in contemporary poetry. In recent years, he has emerged as a compelling advocate of Christianity’s continuing importance in contemporary culture.
Lunch will be provided. Books will be available for sale and signing.
Hosted in conjunction with Boston College Arts Festival and Department of English
Friday, April 28, 1:00pm to 3:00pm
Burns Library
Graduating seniors from the Creative Writing Concentration program will read from their portfolios. Light refreshments will be served.
In collaboration with the History Department, Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, and Office of the University Historian
Thursday, April 20, 4:00pm to 6:00pm
Burns Library
Boston College enjoys a rich history – from its founding in 1863 as a small commuter college to educate children of immigrants, to its status 170 years later as a major university of national and international standing. University Historian James O’Toole’s new book, Ever to Excel: A History of Boston College, explores that transformation and the people and events that have shaped it.
This program will engage O’Toole in a conversation with Greg Kalscheur, SJ, dean of the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences, and Margaret McGuinness, emerita professor at La Salle University and a specialist in American Catholic history.
Reflecting together on O’Toole’s book, these three scholars will explore questions such as: Why write the history of an institution? What are such a book’s larger contributions, and those to the university community? What are the advantages as well as the limitations particular to the writing of an institutional history?
The event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow in the Burns Library Irish Room. RSVPs are not necessary but appreciated to assist with catering: https://bit.ly/evertoexcel.
Copies of Ever to Excel will be available for purchase through the Institute of Jesuit Sources.
In collaboration with Boston College Department of English
Wednesday, April 19, 4:30pm to 6:00pm
Burns Library
A kaleidoscopic portrait of one family’s displacement across four countries, Kantika—“song” in Ladino—follows the joys and losses of Rebecca Cohen, feisty daughter of the Sephardic elite of early 20th-century Istanbul. When the Cohens lose their wealth and are forced to move to Barcelona and start anew, Rebecca fashions a life and self from what comes her way—a failed marriage, the need to earn a living, but also passion, pleasure and motherhood. Moving from Spain to Cuba to New York for an arranged second marriage, she faces her greatest challenge—her disabled stepdaughter, Luna, whose feistiness equals her own and whose challenges pit new family against old.
Elizabeth Graver is co-director of the Creative Writing Concentration at Boston College, where she teaches fiction and nonfiction writing workshops. Kantika is her fifth novel.
Light refreshments will be served following the program. Copies of Kantika will be available for sale and signing.
Eunan O’Halpin
Spring '23 Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies
Thursday, March 2, 4:45pm to 7:30pm
Burns Library
Click here to watch the recording (closed captioning provided)
Spring '23 Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies Eunan O’Halpin, Professor Emeritus of Contemporary Irish History at Trinity College Dublin, will challenge the conventional chronology of events in Ireland in 1922-23.
The government’s attack on the Four Courts on 28 June 1922 is generally held to mark the start of the civil war. Yet hundreds of Irish civilians had already been killed in the preceding six months – far more than were to die during the civil war proper, which was almost exclusively a fight between two armed forces. And the majority of those civilian deaths were the result of targeted violence.
O’Halpin will also ask why political violence waned so swiftly and dramatically across the island following the armed conflict. It can be argued that the Cosgrave government’s comparatively tolerant treatment of its defeated foes explains why the new Free State stabilized so quickly. In Northern Ireland, by contrast, policy towards the nationalist minority generally remained unyielding, even when political violence had all but disappeared. But in Northern Ireland, as in the Free State, tranquility quickly succeeded chaos. Why?
The program will begin with a wine, beer, and hors d'oeuvres reception beginning at 4:45pm in the Burns Library Irish Room, with the lecture to follow at approximately 6:00pm in the Thompson Room.
