Ronan McDonald delivered the prestigious Samuel Beckett Lecture at Trinity College, Dublin. This public lecture, entitled 'The Beckett brand', looked at the way in which Beckett's face has operated as a modern icon and how imagery, derived from his plays (e.g. Godot's boots) has circulated and signified through the wider culture, the stuff of newspaper cartoons and advertising campaigns.
In the same month, Ronan was an invited speaker at the Shakespeare Association of America Conference in Washington on ‘Shakespeare and Cultural Value’. His talk drew comparisons between Shakespeare and Beckett as loci of cultural value.
At a paper in the Oxford Beckett Seminar series on 12 June, Ronan drew his two specialist topics, Samuel Beckett and Irish Studies, together in a paper entitled ‘Beckett and Irish studies’.
