The papers collected in this volume are a product of the second conference on Ireland's Great Hunger held at Quinnipiac University in 2005. That conference, focused on the themes of representation and preservation, brought together forty-five scholars from around the world to discuss various aspects of the Famine and its aftermath. Following the conference, the complete An Gorta Mor collection of Quinnipiac's famine commemorative art was placed on display for the first time in the University's Alumni Hall. The An Gorta Mor collection is on permanent display in the University's Arnold Bernhard Library and in other buildings across the University's Mount Carmel campus. This volume, focused on the theses of relief, representation, and remembrance, contains essays from a broad range of disciplines including works of history, literary criticism, anthropology, and art history.

This volume of essays is based upon papers that were delivered at Quinnipiac University's Great Hunger Conference in September 2000. It considers the Great Hunger both as a historical moment that had a devastating and enduring impact on Ireland, and as a social, political, and demographic process that shaped the culture and people of both Ireland and North America. The chapters are grouped thematically into three parts. The first, Silence, takes as its point of departure the ways in which the Great Hunger created silences, both at the time of the Famine and in the subsequent historical memory of the Irish people. The second section, Memory, addresses the legacy of the Famine in the lives and work of the generation that lived through it and those who came after, both in Ireland and among the Irish Diaspora. The final section, Commemoration, considers how the Famine has become a focal point during the past decade in popular memory, particularly through varied efforts to memorialize the Famine and to integrate it into educational curricula. The book also includes an introduction by Christine Kinealy that discusses recent historical scholarship on the Famine, and a preface by David A. Valone that describes the ongoing educational and scholarly activities related to the Great Hunger at Quinnipiac University.

This book presents a series of essays that examine the ideological, personal, and political difficulties faced by the group variously termed the Anglo-Irish, the Protestant Ascendancy, or the English in Ireland, a group that existed in a world of contested ideological, political, and cultural identities. At the root of this conflicted sense of self was an acute awareness among the Anglo-Irish of their liminal position as colonial dominators in Ireland who were viewed as 'other' both by the Catholic natives of Ireland and their English kinsmen. The work in this volume is highly interdisciplinary, bringing to bear examination of issues that are historical, literary, economic, and sociological. Contributors investigate how individuals experienced the ambiguities and conflicts of identity formation in a colonial society, how writers fought the economic and ideological superiority of the English, how the cooption of Gaelic history and culture was a political strategy for the Anglo-Irish, and how literary texts contributed to the emergence of national consciousness. In seeking to understand and trace the complex process of identity formation in early modern Ireland, the essays in this volume attest to its tenuous, dynamic, and necessarily incomplete nature.