Periodical Famines

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.