Ten years after the death of Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, the Irish Studies Program at Boston College is proud to invite scholars and public to join us in celebrating a poet whose connections to our university remain fresh in our memory. Bringing together outstanding scholars in the field, Seamus Heaney: Afterlives will explore new understandings of the poet since his death, with particular reference to living poets who continue to be influenced by Heaney’s legacy. Our Friday panels and Saturday’s four keynote speakers will celebrate, interrogate, and develop the legacy of the poet as critic, public intellectual, and major moral and aesthetic force of twentieth and early twenty-first century Ireland. 

Outstanding features of the conference include “Political Heaney,” an inaugural Lowell lecture by Fintan O’Toole, Heaney’s official authorized biographer, and a Saturday afternoon performance by Belfast theater company “Kabosh.” The conference is honored by the presence of Seamus’s widow Marie, and his daughter and literary executor, Catherine Heaney. 

Uncovering fresh and surprising angles on the poet’s work, this conference will assert his enduring relevance to the aesthetic, political, and ethical questions we face in today’s troubled world.

This conference is sponsored by the Institute for Liberal Arts, The Consulate General of Ireland in Boston, the Burns Library, the Irish Studies Program at Boston College. 

More information can be found on the website.