O'Curry, Eugene (1796–1862)

Irish scholar. Born in Dunaha, County Clare, he moved to Dublin in the early 1830s. His Lectures on the Manuscript Material of Ancient Irish History (1861) is one of the standard accounts of Irish medieval literature. His On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish appeared in 1873.

O'Connor was employed in the topographical and historical section of the Irish Ordnance Survey under George Petrie in 1835, and met a number of eminent Anglo-Irish scholars associated with Trinity College, Dublin, and the Royal Irish Academy. In 1854 he was appointed the first professor of Irish history and archaeology at the Catholic University of Ireland. O'Curry was a curious mixture, in that he inherited something of the tradition of the Irish scholar and was also, to some extent, a Victorian antiquary.