Mary Cregan
Barnard College
Mary Cregan is a lecturer in English literature at Barnard College. She is the author of The Scar: A Personal History of Depression and Recovery (W. W. Norton & Lilliput Press 2019), and has written for publications including The New York Times, The Irish Times, and the Financial Times.
A Hundred Years On: Recovering an Irish/American Family Story
The presentation I propose comes out of my current research, which relates to my paternal grandfather’s role in the Irish Volunteers and the IRA between 1916 and 1923, and my effort to recover details of his family’s life in west Limerick before his emigration to Philadelphia in 1924. The larger project, a contribution to Ireland’s decade of centenaries, is an effort to bridge the wide gap between Irish America and Ireland and to illuminate the complex familial, local, and national history behind emigrants who raised American families. I presume that for many descendants of those who fought in Ireland’s struggle for independence and then emigrated, their forebears’ experience before leaving Ireland is largely unknown because it was rarely spoken of to their children and grandchildren.
In the time allotted, I will discuss one or two research challenges that arise from a family photograph taken in 1903 that shows my grandfather with his parents and five of his eleven siblings. I will reflect upon the way in which documentary evidence (photographs, his IRA pension testimony, service medals, passports, census returns, etc.) might be seen as a set of solid stepping stones between which, in order to reconstruct a narrative, I have no choice but to “walk on air,” against my better judgment, in the words of Seamus Heaney.
Michael Silvestri
Clemson University
Michael Silvestri is Professor of History and Coordinator of the Undergraduate Program in History at Clemson University. He is the author of two books, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory (2009) and Policing “Bengali Terrorism” in India and the World: Imperial Intelligence and Revolutionary Nationalism, 1905-1939 (2019).
“A Country that has Served the World Well with Police’: The Irish Policeman in the Nineteenth-Century British Caribbean”
Policing has often been regarded as a quintessentially “Irish” occupation for men of the Irish diaspora. This was true not only in the United States, but across the British Empire, as Catholic and Protestant Irish played prominent roles in imperial policing. Imperial officials perceived Irish policemen as coming from a country in which social and political disorder were endemic and saw their skills in criminal investigation, crowd control and political intelligence as readily transferable to the British Empire. The Irish Constabulary, the police of Ireland within the United Kingdom from 1836 to1922 (renamed the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in 1867), was an armed, semi-military force under centralized control. To British officials, the RIC represented a policing ideal to be replicated throughout the Empire. For colonial subjects, the “Irish policeman” epitomized the violence of colonial rule. The RIC’s role in upholding imperial rule in Ireland and across the Empire continues to be a subject of intense public debate in the Irish Republic.
My current research uses the figure of the Irish policeman to explore the typologies and modes of policing across the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British Empire and to analyze the role of Irish people within the empire. I examine how Irishmen constructed careers in imperial service, the Irish position within the racial hierarchies of the British Empire, how Irish communities contributed to the culture and society of the Empire and how the Irish experience as imperial policemen compared to their role as policemen beyond the Empire’s borders, principally in the United States.
My presentation focuses on the British Caribbean colonies and in particular on Trinidad in order to explore these issues. During the 1870s, Trinidad was one of the first colonies to recruit men from the RIC. Colonial officials hoped that Irish officers would apply the methods and ethos of the Irish Constabulary and instill a sense of discipline and professionalism in the Trinidad Constabulary. Irish officers who transferred to Trinidad faced a radically different environment in their role as imperial policemen, as they attempted to maintain colonial authority in a multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-lingual society. My presentation will address the issue of how these Irish policemen fit into Trinidad’s complex colonial society. It will also discuss how veterans of the RIC perceived parallels between the forms of collective disorder and protest that they faced in Caribbean colonies and their experience of policing agrarian protest, political dissent and sectarian disturbances in Ireland. Officers with experience in in Belfast drew parallels with the policing of Catholic-Protestant conflict in Belfast during the 1860s and sought to apply their experience to urban protests and disorder in Trinidad during subsequent decades.
Kate Costello- Sullivan
LeMoyne College
Kate Costello-Sullivan is Professor of Modern Irish literature at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY. She earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Boston College. She is the author of Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín and edited critical editions of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla and Norah Hoult’s Poor Women!. Her most recent monograph, Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-first-Century Irish Novel , was published in March 2018. Kate is the current President of the American Conference for Irish studies—the largest Irish academic organization in the world— and the first female Series Editor of the Syracuse University Press Irish line.
Disability and Embodiment in Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells
Readings of Caitriona Lally’s award-winning 2015 novel Eggshells consistently betray discomfort in recognizing the valences of Vivian’s disability in the novel, suggesting a fundamental inability for her to be “quirky,” “oddball,” or “beguiling” while also disabled. Vivian’s world view contrasts with how others see—or, perhaps more accurately, do not see—the world, or for that matter Vivian herself, as they seek to measure her on a scale that can tolerate “quirkiness” but not “disability.” Written against the backdrop of the many ways that Irish society historically sought to hide people with disabilities and/or mental illness, Eggshells interrogates the fates of those in Ireland who, while no longer institutionalized and hidden away literally per se, are nonetheless still expected to fit the narrow confines of societal norms–or else to render themselves effectively invisible. Vivian’s apparent integration into society contrasts starkly with the tenuousness of, and resistance to, her assimilation; other characters’ discomfort with Vivian highlights societal uneasiness with those who diverge neurologically from “the norm” and perhaps also their awareness of the inadequacy of their own, and Irish society’s, response. Thus, despite her seeming integration, the troubling history of Ireland’s past treatment of the disabled or neurologically atypical shadows Vivian’s actions and interactions in the novel, as through her repeated references to and enactments of her own burial and in the uncertainty of her naming. Eggshells questions Irish society’s current readiness—or (un)willingness—to integrate diverse neurological perspectives and citizens as it labors under the shadow of their shameful treatment in the past. As a result, the novel challenges how far Ireland has actually come from those dark times of mass institutionalization and abuse to today, in its ability truly to see, and therefore to protect, the Vivians among us.