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Professor Tom O’Donoghue is to give the November 2015 Seamus Heaney lecture at St. Patrick’s College, Dublin City University.

Heaney was one of the leading poets of his generation and the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.   Heaney was a professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997. From 1989 to 1994, he was also the Professor of Poetry at Oxford. In 2000, he agreed to lend his name to a public lecture series to be hosted by St. Patrick’s College, a College of Dublin City University. His connection with the college dated from the period of his first academic appointment, as a teacher’s college educator in Dublin.

Professor O’Donoghue feels very honoured and privileged to give the November lecture along with his co-researcher, Dr. Judith Harford at University College Dublin.

Previous lectures in the series have explored the ‘History of Childhood’, ‘Imaging the Future’, ‘Perspectives on Equality’, and ‘Hearing Heaney’. Tom and Judith will talk on ‘oral history, memory and education’.

The focus of Tom’s talk will be the methodological aspects of research.  In 2008 Tom and Judith won an internationally competitive grant from The Irish Research Council for the Humanities and the Social Sciences to begin his research.  In 2013 Tom also won an ARC Discovery grant to conduct research in Australia and Ireland.  Numerous papers in internationally refereed journals and authored books have so far resulted.

"Overall the work is contributing not only to the corpus of work in education and history on ‘memory as a subject of study’, but also to that on ‘memory as a source of study’," says Professor O'Donoghue.

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