Sources and Voices: Archives, Writing, and the Irish Diaspora

This webinar draws together academics, archivists, and researchers across a number of disciplines, including History, English, Irish Language, and related disciplines, with a focus on recovering and exploring the connections, voices, and sources of the Irish-American diaspora. Through a number of recent publications and ongoing digital humanities projects, a range of new histories, as explored by the contributors, have drawn on previously neglected or underknown archival sources, providing new insights into the experience and representation of the Irish-American diaspora. This webinar will showcase recent research into these publications, projects, as well as of the sources and voices of the diaspora recovered in the process.

Schedule

2.30pm – Welcome and Introduction

Panel One – 2.40pm

Beth O’Leary Anish : Irish American Fiction in the Post-World War II Years: Representations of a Community in Transition.

Patrick O’Mahoney: The Writings of Eoin Ua Cathail, Gaelic Revivalist and American Frontiersman.

Máire Nic an Bhaird: Douglas Hyde, Ireland, and the U.S.A.

Sophie Cooper (Queen’s University, Belfast) Emerging from the Sidelines: Reconsidering “the” nineteenth-century Irish-American archive.

Chair – Barry Houlihan

Panel Two: 4pm

Letter Writing and the Diaspora – The Kerby Miller Archive at NUI Galway

Daniel Carey (Moore Institute, NUI Galway)

Kieran Hoare (NUI Galway Library)

Breandán Mac Suibhne (Acadamh na hOllscolaiochta Gaeilge / NUI Galway)

Chair – Róisín Healy

5.15pm Closing Remarks

Speaker Biographies

Panel 1:

Dr Patrick Mahoney, or Pádraig Fhia Ó Mathúna, is a researcher on the Fionn Folklore Project at Harvard University and a visiting fellow in Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the editor and translator of Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier: The Prose Writings of Eoin Ua Cathail (UNT Press), which is based on research carried out while a Fulbright scholar at NUI Galway Library Archives.

Dr Sophie Cooper is a lecturer in Liberal Arts at Queen’s University Belfast where she also researches histories of migration, gender and religion, focusing on Ireland and its diaspora. Sophie’s first monograph, Forging Identites in the Irish World: Melbourne and Chicago, c.1830-1922, was recently published by Edinburgh University Press. Her publications also include articles in Social History and Women’s History Review where Sophie uses urban history and material culture approaches to explore the experiences of Irish women at home and abroad.

Dr Máire Nic an Bhaird is a lecturer in Irish Language and Literature and History of Education in the Froebel Department, Maynooth University. Her areas of teaching and research include; the life and work of Douglas Hyde, Censorship of Irish Language Literature (1920-1960), Children’s Literature in the Irish Language, Education for the Science-Society nexus, History of Education. Her teaching is grounded in a pedagogy of community engaged learning and she has won teaching bursaries and awards for the creation of teaching materials and programmes connected with MU modules that she coordinates. Máire is leading the university’s central role in the UCD-led €2 million Horizon Europe EdBioEc project. This multi-actor project comprises a pan-European consortium of 15 partners from across education, science and technology and the wider society.

Dr Beth O’Leary Anish, Ph.D. is Professor of English at the Community College of Rhode Island. Her book Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK: Anxiety, Assimilation, and Activism was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2021. She successfully defended her dissertation Writing Irish America: Communal Memory and the Narrative of Nation in Diaspora at the University of Rhode Island in 2017. She has also been published in the New Hibernia Review. Beth is active in the American Conference for Irish Studies, for which she is currently president of the New England region.

Panel 2

Professor Daniel Carey, MRIA, is Director of the Moore Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies at NUI Galway and Professor of English in the School of English and Creative Arts. He is a Vice-President of the Royal Irish Academy and is current acting Director of the Irish Research Council. He was also Chair of the Irish Humanities Alliance 2014-16.

Kieran Hoare is an archivist at NUI Galway Library.

An tOllamh Breandán Mac Suibhne is a historian of society and culture in modern Ireland (PhD, Carnegie Mellon, 1999). His award-winning book The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland (Oxford University Press) was awarded Irish Times Irish Non-Fiction Book of the Year in 2017. His other publications include two major annotated editions, viz. John Gamble’s Society and Manners in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Field Day, 2011) and, with David Dickson, Hugh Dorian’s The Outer Edge of Ulster: A Memoir of Social Life in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Donegal (2000, 20001). Mac Suibhne is currently at work on two book projects, including a study of Brian Friel’s mother’s people in south-west Donegal and the other concerns what the Irish poor did to and for each other “in the time of the Famine”. Mac Suibhne is also working to develop an online database that will facilitate access to Kerby A. Miller’s vast collection of transcripts of Irish emigrant letters.

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