Historian Breandan Mac Suibhne (University of Galway) tells the true stories of the people on whom the characters in Brian Friel's masterpiece Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) are based. His concern is not to measure the actual against the illusion, but to recover the lives of Friel's mother's people, driving deep into the social and cultural history of rural Ireland, illuminating the playwright's own formation.
Mac Suibhne is a leading historian of post-famine Ireland. His The End of Outrage won the Irish Times Book of the Year, among other major awards for nonfiction. He is the founding co-editor of the landmark Field Day Review, a journal of politics and culture.
Breandan Mac Suibhne is author of The End of Outrage, University of Galway.
Sponsored by the Northwestern University Department of History and the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies.