Eugene O’Curry (born as Eugene Curry; he added the O’ prefix later in life to re-adjust the English name-form to its original Gaelic etymon Ó Comhraidhe; Doonaha, Co. Clare 1794 – Dublin 1862) was born as a farmer’s son and acquired early literacy in Irish Gaelic. Following the breakup of the farm in 1815, he held a variety of employments while gaining some fame for his expertise in Irish. This brought him to the attention of John O’Donovan and the topographical/historical team around the Irish Ordnance Survey project, which he joined from 1835 until the project’s demise in 1843. O’Curry thenceforth pursued the employ common to the few remaining Irish literati: cataloguing and translating manuscript materials for the country’s Anglo-Irish institutions and gentleman scholars. Of great service to subsequent philologists was his catalogue of the Irish MSS in the British Museum library, completed in 1849; he also worked as a copyist for O’Donovan’s edition of the Annals of the Four Masters.

By the 1850s O’Curry was recognized as one of the core scholars, with O’Donovan (whose sister he married) and George Petrie (whom he aided in work on The ancient music of Ireland), in the field of Ireland’s native culture, antiquity, and literary history. This translated into professional security when he was appointed to a professorship of Irish history and archeology in 1854, at the newly-founded Catholic University of Ireland. The lectures given there, published as Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History (1860) provided the raw material for an Irish literary history (Douglas Hyde’s Literary history of Ireland was not to appear until 1906), and alongside Thomas Stephens’s Welsh analogue The literature of the Kymry it was a foundational reference text for the emerging discipline of Celtic studies. O’Curry’s later lectures were posthumously published as On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1873); both books provided a thorough inventory of legendary and mythological material for the poets and playwrights of the Irish Literary Revival.

With O’Donovan, O’Curry was engaged in the transcription work for an ambitious project of an edition of ancient Irish law when he died of a heart attack. (The edition appeared after both had died, without either O’Donovan’s or O’Curry’s name on the title page.) The two brothers-in-law often worked together but later also had their frictions and rivalries; while O’Donovan launched his text editions from the prestigious Irish Archaeological Society, an offshoot of the Royal Irish Academy, O’Curry worked through the slightly less up-market Celtic and Ossianic Societies; and it was O’Donovan who obtained prestigious awards such as the Academy’s Cunningham Medal and a membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Conversely, the professorship O’Curry obtained at the Catholic University was more influential and better remunerated than O’Donovan’s largely honorary professorial appointment at Queen’s College Belfast. Seen jointly, however, the parallel careers of the two brothers-in-law mark the academic professionalization of native-Irish literati in the imperial setting of Victorian Dublin, and the adoption, also among the Protestant and urban English-speaking population, of Gaelic antiquity and culture as the bedrock of an Irish identity.