Notre Dame Enlists an Irish Literature Expert From the Emerald Isle

By Peter Monaghan

Chronicle of Higher Education

Declan Kiberd likes teaching Americans about Irish literature and culture because they may come up with some odd but compelling readings of texts. Some years ago, for instance, one California literature student, taking a course with him in Dublin, asked why Leopold Bloom, the central character of James Joyce's Ulysses, spent so much time walking around Dublin. Was he ill? Walking something off?

Mr. Kiberd, a leading Anglo-Irish literary scholar, expects he will get more queries of that sort when he takes his new post as the endowed, tenured Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Beginning in the spring semester, he'll be presenting early-20th-century Irish life to students from car-crazy America, where, he quips, walking may seem "a strange or perverse activity." Recalling his pupil's puzzlement raises a chuckle from Mr. Kiberd (pronounced KIE-bd), one of Ireland's most prominent intellectuals. He relishes the episode, too: "She ended up writing a wonderful essay showing that Bloom's movements through the city pretty much traced the outline of a question mar. "She persisted in her bafflement to the point it became wise."

Speaking by phone from his office in Dublin, he says it is that kind of insight by partisan reading that he looks forward to in his post at Notre Dame's Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, which boasts the largest program outside of Ireland for teaching and research in Irish language, literature, and life. He will teach Irish literature and culture to students at the institute's Dublin Center each spring and summer, and then on the South Bend, Ind., campus each fall.

Mr. Kiberd follows two other eminent Irish scholars into the professorship: the critic, poet, and novelist Seamus Deane, who held the post from 1993 to 2004, and then Maud Ellmann, now a literary scholar at the University of Chicago. As it happens, Ms. Ellmann is the daughter of Richard Ellmann, a renowned biographer of Irish literary figures who was Mr. Kiberd's doctoral supervisor at the University of Oxford. Announcing Mr. Kiberd's appointment, Christopher Fox, director of the Keough-Naughton Institute, said: "It is not an overstatement to say that his presence on the Notre Dame faculty reinforces our position as the world leader in Irish studies for years to come."

Since 1979, Mr. Kiberd, a Dublin native, has taught at University College Dublin, most recently as professor and chair of Anglo-Irish literature and drama. He has published several books about Irish literature and history, as well as Celtic culture. The literary theorist Edward Said praised Mr. Kiberd's postcolonialist reading of Irish writing, Inventing Ireland: Literature of the Modern Nation (Harvard University Press, 1996), as "a highly readable, joyfully contentious book" of "enormous learning and superb understanding."

As for the institute's accomplishments, it has 400 students enrolled in Irish-language courses and as many as 1,000 undergraduates and 25 graduate students taking institute-crosslisted courses each semester in the departments of anthropology; English; film, television, and theater; Irish language and literature in North America; and political science.

Under Mr. Fox, the institute has recently established a minor in language and literature in the Irish language, and a major is planned. It has 19 permanent, affiliated faculty members, with many distinguished visitors each year.

All that thrills him, says Mr. Kiberd: "I've always been amphibious. I work both in Irish and in English, so this is a great attraction for me, to have students working on the cusp between both languages, and also to be working on the cusp with such disciplines as history, sociology, and political science. "My own work has been very much involved not just with the Irish language but also with postcolonial theory—with comparison of various modernisms in Europe with Latin America and so on. And these approaches are favored by many of the colleagues at Notre Dame."

Notre Dame students interested in Ireland seem to share that orientation, too, he says: "American students—many of whom have an Irish element in their background, often mingled with some other element, too—are natural comparativists and also are often incredibly curious to find out more." He expects to benefit as much as students and fellow researchers at the home of the Fighting Irish. "The emigrant Irish have always held on to many traditions that the homegrown Irish have lost in recent decades," Mr. Kiberd says. "So I expect to reconnect through the students with some of my lost traditions."