Women and the Great Hunger Conference, Quinnipiac University, June 3-6, 2015.
“Women and the Great Hunger” conference to take place June 3-6, 2015
We are pleased to welcome you to Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute’s conference to be held at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut in June.
The conference will examine the role of women during a period of sustained hunger or famine. We are delighted to have three prominent and distinguished keynote speakers: Jason King, PhD, of Galway University; Ciarán Reilly, PhD, of Maynooth University; and Margaret Ward, PhD, of Queen’s University, Belfast. We look forward to hearing about their research on this largely disregarded topic.
Details of the conference can be found below. Please check back regularly for updates to the program.
Papers are welcome from both established and starting scholars – we hope that you will join us for this exciting and ground-breaking conference.
Professor Christine Kinealy
Founding Director
Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute
Keynote Presenters
As Margaret Ward has demonstrated, Irish women have been systematically “excluded and silenced” in written history, thus denying them their rightful position as agents of change. In regard to Ireland’s Great Hunger, while many contemporary depictions of the Famine have been dominated by female imagery, the involvement of women in other ways (e.g., as landowners, as relief-givers or providers for the family) has received little attention. This conference asks: how did women experience-and shape-the tragedy that unfolded in Ireland between 1845 and 1852? And how does the Great Hunger compare with the experience of women in other famines?
This conference seeks to explore the diverse-and still largely unexplored-role of women during the Great Hunger. Where appropriate, a comparative approach is encouraged. Abstracts of 300 words are invited. Please include a short biography (maximum 50 words) including your institutional affiliation and contact address. Papers should be a maximum of 20 minutes in length with 10 minutes for questions and discussion. Proposals for specialist panels are welcome. Postgraduates also are encouraged to submit abstracts. Selected papers may be published in a collection following the conference.
Abstracts must be submitted online by February 1, 2015.
Suggested themes:
Philanthropy Irish orphan emigration scheme
Relief—victims or victors? Children
Religious orders The Famine queen
The travellers’ gaze Nationalist voices
The big house Memory and memorialization
Visual representations Historiography
Emigration Hidden histories
Women and the workhouse
For academic queries please contact Sarah Churchill at sarah.churchill@quinnipiac.edu
For general information and to submit, please visit http://www.quinnipiac.edu/greathungerconference
Irish Canadian Famine Research 