Seamus Deane Honorary Field Day Lecture announced

The inaugural Seamus Deane Honorary Field Day Lecture takes place at the Playhouse, Artillery Street, in Derry on Saturday 12 September 2015 at 7pm. Entitled “Republics that were and might be”, it will be delivered by Seamus Deane himself.

Deane has been described by his fellow co-director, Stephen Rea — who will attend the event — as “the finest critical thinker to come out of Ireland in my lifetime. He has provided the intellectual framework of the entire Field Day project since its foundation in 1980 and his ideas have been disseminated throughout the world.”

This new lecture series aims to bring to Derry some of the world’s leading artists and thinkers who have the potential to make the city an international centre of intellectual discovery every year.

Professor Joe Cleary of N.U.I. Maynooth, will introduce the event and host a Q+A afterward. The proceedings of the lecture series will be published in the annual Field Day Review, providing a published record for posterity and establishing a legacy for the future. To buy a ticket (£5 Concessions £3) go to www.derryplayhouse.co.uk.

Seamus Deane has an international reputation in the world of literature and literary criticism. He is professor emeritus at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and has a prolific backlist of publications, most notably the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry, 1992) which remains today the definitive point of reference in Irish literary criticism. He was a shortlisted finalist for the Booker Prize in 1996 for his autobiographical novel Reading in the Dark, which describes his Derry childhood. He is a co-director of Field Day with actor Stephen Rea and editor of the acclaimed Irish studies journal Field Day Review.