New Collection: Navigating Historical Crosscurrents in the Irish Atlantic: Essays for Catherine Shannon. Ed. Mary C. Kelly. CUP

This volume takes inspiration from Professor Catherine Shannon’s scholarship on Modern Irish and Irish American history and her advocacy for peace in Northern Ireland and features original research by distinguished scholars and social-justice activists on both sides of the Atlantic. The essays illuminate the historical relationship between Ireland and North America over past centuries. They offer new readings of the transatlantic crosscurrents that shape our understanding of Irish emigration and North American settlement, and constructions of ethnic Irish identities.

This collection brings together respected Irish, British, American, and Canadian historians, literary scholars, and social-justice activists to address the following thematic approaches to the Irish and Irish American historical experience:

• Famine impact and legacy

• Boston Irish political culture

• Irish Revolution-era nationalist activism

• Northern Ireland conflict

Considered from a range of historical, literary, political, and cultural perspectives, the essays collected here examine crucial forces connecting the ancestral home and the adopted homeland over centuries of Irish migration and North American settlement. They revise traditional depictions of ethnic Irishness in explorations of the Famine’s consequence, ethnic Irish prominence in Boston, the 1916-era watershed, and Northern Ireland’s troubled political and cultural landscape–lenses that expose crucial historical navigations across the Irish Atlantic. These new readings of the evolution of the ethnic identity collectively generate a major contribution to modern Irish and Irish American historical scholarship.

Mary C. Kelly, Ph.D., is Professor of History at Franklin Pierce University. She is the author of  Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish American History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). She continues to explore ethnic Irish identity in spheres of political culture, faith, and the enduring relationship with Ireland.

April 2022| 9781782054993 | €39 £35| Hardback | 234 x 156mm | 366 pages | Cork University Press

The case for Catherine Shannon as a significant contributor to the development of the study of the Irish in the Atlantic world is well-made and convincing. That she made a major contribution is beyond doubt and the essays here, in tribute to her work, as well as the editor’s introduction do a very good job discussing her contribution and placing it in a very broad context.
— William H. Mulligan, Jr, Murray State University

In the case of Catherine Shannon, that is a substantial oeuvre. From her works on Balfour and Anglo-Irish politics, to her more popular studies of John Boyle O’Reilly, to her deep interest in the movement of Famine-era Irish to her native Massachusetts, to her scholarly and political engagement with the Northern Ireland Peace Process, Shannon’s career has been remarkable. As these essays make clear, she is a gifted researcher and mentor, who has been a model for engaged scholars and especially for women activists, encouraging deep understanding, empathy, and fierce commitment to their work in every field of endeavour. And as Kelly’s introduction makes plain, the works of this collection are part of the burgeoning transnational study of Ireland and the Irish Diaspora, making manifest previously underappreciated complexities in the Irish Atlantic.
–Timothy G. McMahon, Marquette University

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Notes on contributors

General editor: Mary C. Kelly is professor of history at Franklin Pierce University

Preface: Nicholas Canny is an emeritus professor of history at NUI Galway

Suzann Buckley (1943–2021)

Mary M. Burke is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut

Francis M. Carroll is professor emeritus at St John’s College, University of Manitoba

Mary E. Daly is professor emerita in Irish history at University College Dublin.

David M. Doolin is Newman Fellow at the School of History, University College Dublin

Michael Doorley is associate lecturer in history in the Open University in Ireland

Seán Farren is a visiting professor at Ulster University’s School of Education

Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at UCD

Miriam Nyhan Grey is associate director and the global coordinator for Irish studies at New York University.

Thomas E. Hachey is university professor of history emeritus, Boston College

Christine Kinealy founding director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University.

Rachael Sealy Lynch is emerita professor of English at the University of Connecticut

Margaret MacCurtain, OP (1929–202o), retired from the History Department of University College Dublin

Mark G. McGowan is professor of history at the University of Toronto

Monica McWilliams is emerita professor in women’s studies at Ulster University

Kerby A. Miller is curators’ professor emeritus of history at the University of Missouri

Gerard Moran is a researcher at the Social Science Research Centre at NUI Galway

Matthew O’Brien is a professor of history at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio

Maureen O’Rourke Murphy is professor emerita at Hofstra University

Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh is professor emeritus in history at the National University of Ireland, Galway