Cormac Ó hAodha is the current Lomax Scholar - Lovelace Fellow at the Kluge Center and comes from Cúil Aodha, which is a village in the Múscraí Gaeltacht of Co. Cork in Ireland. He is conducting extensive research in the archive of the American Folklife Center on the Alan Lomax Collection here at the Library of Congress, which includes material Lomax collected some 73 years ago from singers in the Múscraí singing tradition, the same singing tradition he grew up in and is a part of. He will discuss his current project, which focuses on the preservation, publication, availability and sharing of intangible Irish creative heritage, specifically of the Irish song tradition of his native Múscraí in Co. Cork. His research is aimed at digital discoverability and preservation in a global web environment for scholars and citizens alike leading ultimately to ‘Digital Return’ of archival records to the communities from which they were originally collected. As well as being an academic and a researcher, Cormac Ó hAodha is himself a singer in this tradition and will perform several songs during this lecture/performance. The Botkin Lecture series is part of AFC's ongoing public programming activities highlighting the fields of folklife, ethnomusicology, oral history and related disciplines; foregrounding its archival holdings; and fulfilling its congressionally mandated mission.
For transcript and more information, visit www.loc.gov/item/webcast-11303