Periodical Famines: Irish Memories in Transatlantic News Media, 1845-1919

Dr Lindsay Janssen will present a lecture on the intricate paths that famine memory travelled.

The Great Famine (1845–1852), Ireland's greatest demographic disaster in recent history, has shaped Irish identities around the world and remains a crucial part of Irish memory. Lindsay’s book Periodical Famines reveals how, within the transatlantic periodical market, Irish, Irish American, and Irish Canadian newspapers and magazines acted as carriers and shapers of cultural identities. In outlets such as the Dublin-based magazine Young Ireland and the Montreal Witness newspaper, famine memory was deployed transhistorically to help represent other crucial events in Ireland. In newspapers such as Irish World and Industrial Liberator (New York) and the United Irishman (Dublin) this fund of memory was used transnationally to interpret events outside of Ireland, such as labour issues in the United States and the Second Boer War. During her lecture, Lindsay will explore these links across time and space by way of case studies also involving periodicals part of the NLI’s collections. Moving beyond individual writings to interrogate how different texts printed within an issue influenced each other, Lindsay’s contextual approach reveals the intricate paths that famine memory travelled.

Lindsay Janssen is Assistant Professor at Radboud University, where she teaches classes on literature, popular culture and cultural theory. Her research and publications combine cultural memory studies, literary studies, history and literature education, Irish studies, and periodical studies. Between 2017 and 2019, she was affiliated to University College Dublin for the project that led to Periodical Famines (funded by a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Irish Research Council). Among others, Lindsay is co-editor of Global Legacies of the Great Irish Famine: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2014) and Holodomor and Gorta Mór: Histories, Memories and Representations of Famine in Ukraine and Ireland (2012).

Host or Publisher National Library of Ireland