2:00-3:15pm, AUST 217
Mary Burke’s talk will draw from her recent book, Race, Politics, and Irish-America: A Gothic History (OUP, 2023).
Using the words and lives of Black and white American writers and public figures of Irish connection, Burke will discuss the complex cultural and political legacies of centuries of Irish presence in the Americas, from the forcibly transported Irish and Presbyterian Ulster Scots (Scots-Irish), to the Famine immigrant wave. Both colluders and victims within America’s racial structure, the Irish carried sectarianism, settler-colonialism, and trauma with them, “whitening” in the slave-holding Caribbean, on America’s frontiers and plantations, and on its eastern seaboard.
History is Gothic in Irish-American narrative because the undead Irish past replays within America's contexts of race.
This talk is part of the ongoing Scholar Spotlight series under the auspices of the English Department.
FREE & OPEN to all
For more information, contact: Mary K. Becaw Edwards at mary.bercaw_edwards@uconn.edu