We are delighted to announce that the Third Annual Paul Walsh Memorial Lecture will also be the second plenary lecture at this year’s ICM. This year’s lecturer is Professor Richard Sharpe (University of Oxford), and the title of his lecture is “Vexilla Regis: From the Banner of St Peter to the Banners of Rome”. The lecture will take place at 5pm on Friday 30th June in the Iontas Lecture Theatre (North Campus) and is open to the public. Richard Sharpe is Professor of Diplomatic at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College, and is a leading expert in medieval British and Irish history, medieval Latin, historiography, book history, and textual editing.
Fr Paul Walsh (1885-1941) was appointed Lecturer in Welsh at St Patrick’s College Maynooth in 1916, and he subsequently became Professor of Ecclesiastical History there. He was a prolific scholar and historian, with publications ranging across many aspects of Irish history, ecclesiastical history, onomastics, genealogy, and history of scholarship. The establishment of the Annual Paul Walsh Memorial Lecture by the School of Celtic Studies in Maynooth University in 2015 marked both the long history of the discipline of Celtic Studies at Maynooth and the ongoing scholarly collaborations between (the ecclesiastical) St Patrick’s College Maynooth and (the secular) Maynooth University.