Art historian Emily Mark-Fitzgerald will open the 2014-15 Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University with a lecture entitled, “Commemorating the Irish Famine,” on Friday, September 12 at 4:30 p.m. at the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ‘32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street. The event is free and open to the public.

Ms. Mark-Fitzgerald, of University College, Dublin, is the author of Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument (Liverpool University Press, 2013), a book exploring the history of the 1840s Irish Famine in visual representation, commemoration, and collective memory from the 19th century until the present, explaining why since the 1990s the Famine past has come to matter so much in the present. She has also launched a website that catalogues a sample of photographic records and information related to these commemorative monuments in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Britain, and the United States — www.irishfamine
memorials.com.

Speaking and publishing regularly on the subject of public art, memory and commemoration, museology and the visual culture of migration/diaspora, and contemporary Irish and international art, Ms. Mark-Fitzgerald is the recipient of major fellowships and research funding from the U.S.-Ireland Alliance (Mitchell Scholarship), Mellon Foundation/Social Science Research Council, Humanities Institute of Ireland, Royal Hibernian Academy, Royal Irish Academy, Irish Research Council, and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

She is a founding editor of Artefact: the Journal of the Irish Association of Art Historians and the Irish Journal of Arts Management and Cultural Policy.

The Fund for Irish Studies, chaired by Princeton professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, affords all Princeton students, and the community at large, a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, politics, and economics not only of Ireland but of “Ireland in the world.”

Information on upcoming Fund for Irish Studies series events can be found at fis.princeton.edu.