Marilynn Richtarik

D.Phil., Oxford University, 1992

20th-Century British Literature, Irish Literature

Dr. Richtarik teaches courses on 20^th-century British, Irish, and world literature and modern drama. She was educated at Harvard (where she earned an undergraduate honors degree in American History and Literature) and at Oxford University, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar. Her research interests center on Northern Irish literature and theatre, where politics and artistic production are intimately related. Her research has been supported by the Rhodes Trust, the Killam Trust, the American Philosophical Society, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Hambidge Center, and the US-UK Fulbright Commission.

Her first book, published by Oxford University Press, focused on the Field Day Theatre Company, founded by playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea in 1980. Author of numerous articles on dramatist Stewart Parker, she has also written program notes for productions of his plays in London, Dublin, Belfast, and Washington, DC. Her critical biography of Parker, which presents the career of this important writer in the context of a discussion of his personal history and of the turbulent times through which he lived in his native Belfast, was published by OUP in the fall of 2012. It won the 2012 Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature from the American Conference for Irish Studies and the 2013 SAMLA Studies Book Award from the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. It was also one of six titles published in 2011 and 2012 to be short-listed for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, instituted in memory of the British Ambassador to Ireland assassinated in 1976 and awarded to works that “promote and encourage peace and reconciliation in Ireland.” In 2017, Dr. Richtarik taught for a semester at Queen’s University Belfast as a US Fulbright Scholar. That spring, Dublin’s Lilliput Press published her edition of Stewart Parker’s autobiographical novel Hopdance, about the amputation of his left leg when he was a university student.

Dr. Richtarik’s most recent book, Getting to Good Friday: Literature and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, intertwines literary analysis and narrative history in an accessible account of the shifts in thinking and talking about Northern Ireland’s divided society that brought thirty years of political violence to a close with the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Interpreting texts by Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Deirdre Madden, Seamus Deane, Bernard MacLaverty, Colum McCann, and David Park within a detailed historical frame, Richtarik demonstrates the extent to which authors were motivated by a desire both to comment on and to intervene in unfolding political situations. Getting to Good Friday suggests that literature as literature—that is, in its formal properties in addition to anything it might have to “say” about a given subject—can enrich readers’ historical understanding. Through engaging narrative, creative writing emerges as both the medium of and a metaphor for the peace process itself.

Dr. Richtarik has brought to Atlanta distinguished scholars and artists such as Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Seamus Deane, Bernard MacLaverty, Lucy McDiarmid, Paul Fussell, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Glenn Patterson, and Roy Foster, who have lectured and performed both at the university and at venues including the Margaret Mitchell House and the Atlanta Celtic Festival. She serves GSU’s Honors College as a postgraduate scholarships adviser and coordinates the Atlanta Irish Studies Group, an Irish-themed book club. Since 2015, she has also worked closely with the Consulate General of Ireland in Atlanta to present public programs dealing with Irish subjects.

On 20 February 2023, 103.2 Dublin City FM radio show Bookbound featured a half-hour interview with Dr. Richtarik about Getting to Good Friday.

On 15 April 2023, Dr. Richtarik discussed Getting to Good Friday in the Irish Times.