The Marshall University Department of History will present a lecture by Irish historian Dr. Sarah Covington at 3 p.m. Tuesday, Oct.15, in Room 134 of Harris Hall on Marshall’s Huntington campus. She will speak on “The Use of Folklore in Historical Studies.” The event is free and open to all, and will be followed by a Q&A and light refreshments.
“Folklore is an aspect of our rich cultural heritage that we are will familiar with in West Virginia,” said Dr. Greta Rensenbrink, chair of Marshall’s Department of History. “The stories handed down in families and communities tell us something about who we are and what we have inherited. But how do professional historians approach folklore as a source for understanding the past? What does folklore offer as a window into the past? Dr. Covington will explore these issues in her talk.”
Covington teaches at the City University of New York, where she is a professor of history at the Graduate Center and Queens College, and director of the Irish Studies program at Queens College and the M.A. program in biography and memoir at the Graduate Center. Her work focuses on English and Irish history.
Her forthcoming book, Remembering Oliver Cromwell in Ireland, explores the social memory of this most hated enemy in the Irish historical, literary and folkloric imagination over three centuries. It will be published by Oxford University Press at the beginning of next year.
Covington also has co-edited Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods and Perspectives (Routledge, 2018), with Vincent Carey and Valerie McGowan-Doyle. Other publications include The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in Sixteenth-Century England (University of Notre Dame Press, 2004); and Wounds, Flesh, and Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009).
The event is sponsored by the Department of History in the College of Liberal Arts at Marshall University.