Join us for this year’s Mary Power Lecture in Irish Studies on Monday, October 14 at 4pm in the Frank Waters Room, Zimmerman Library, UNM Albuquerque campus. It is free and open to the public. This year, Professor Mary M. Burke of the University of Connecticut will deliver her lecture titled, “Irish Royalty: Grace Kelly, the Kennedys, and Irish-American Assimilation.” As Burke will demonstrate, the WASP persona that movie studio executives created for film star Grace Kelly was meant to diminish the usual associations of her Irish Famine-era Catholic roots. However, her globally broadcast 1956 royal wedding in Monaco transformed her into the “Irish Princess.” Most significantly, her rise to the highest social echelon paved the way for “America’s royals,” the Kennedys, as well as broader Irish-American assimilation.
The English Department will additionally host Professor Burke as the first Irish Studies Scholar-in-Residence for a five-day visit to UNM in mid-October. During her residency, Professor Burke will lead classroom workshops, participate in one-on-one meetings, and deliver the annual Mary Power Lecture. The residency is made possible by the generous contributions of Alyce and Terry Richardson.
Professor Burke is a professor of English and the Irish Literature Concentration Coordinator at UConn. Her research focuses on race and gender in Ireland and the diaspora, with particular emphasis on Irish America and the Traveller community, an Irish minority group. She is the author of Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History (Oxford UP, 2022) and Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller (Oxford UP, 2009), and was contributing editor for the 2022 Tramp Press reissue of Traveller author Juanita Casey’s 1971 novel The Horse of Selene. Professor Burke has held fellowships at the University of Notre Dame and Trinity College Dublin, and her writing has appeared with NPR, the Irish Times, RTÉ, and Faber.
The lecture series is sponsored by the Irish Studies Fund, the UNM English Department, and University Libraries, and it honors Professor Emerita Mary Power, who taught Irish Literature at UNM for over four decades.
