Launch of "The Routledge History of Irish America"

Join us for the launch of The Routledge History of Irish America. Editors Cian T. McMahon and Kathleen P. Costello-Sullivan will be in conversation with Kevin Kenny. 

This volume gathers over 40 world-class scholars to explore the dynamics that have shaped the Irish experience in America from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries.

From the early 1600s to the present, over 10 million Irish people emigrated to various points around the globe. Of them, more than six million settled in what we now call the United States of America. Some were emigrants, some were exiles, and some were refugees—but they all brought with them habits, ideas, and beliefs from Ireland, which played a role in shaping their new home. Organized chronologically, the chapters in this volume offer a cogent blend of historical perspectives from the pens of some of the world’s leading scholars. Each section explores multiple themes including gender, race, identity, class, work, religion, and politics. This book also offers essays that examine the literary and/or artistic production of each era. These studies investigate not only how Irish America saw itself or, in turn, was seen, but also how the historical moment influenced cultural representation. It demonstrates the ways in which Irish Americans have connected with other groups, such as African Americans and Native Americans, and sets “Irish America” in the context of the global Irish diaspora.

Cian T. McMahon holds a joint appointment in the Department of History and Honors College at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He has authored or edited three books and over half a dozen scholarly articles on Irish and American immigration history. His book, The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea During the Great Irish Famine, was published as part of the Glucksman Irish Diaspora series with NYU Press in 2021. In The Coffin Ship, McMahon uses emigrants’ own letters and diaries to show how, at every step of the journey—including the treacherous weeks at sea—migrants created new threads in the worldwide web of the Irish diaspora.

Kate Costello-Sullivan is Professor of Modern Irish literature at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, and a past President of the American Conference for Irish Studies.  She has published widely on 19th - 21st century Irish fiction. Her monographs are Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín and Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-First-Century Irish Novel. She has also edited critical editions of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Norah Hoult’s Poor Women! She is the current Editor of Syracuse University Press’s Irish series.

Kevin Kenny, Director of Glucksman Ireland House, is Professor of History and Glucksman Professor in Irish Studies at New York University. His latest book, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Oxford University Press, 2023), explains how slavery shaped immigration policy as it moved from the local to the national level in the period from the American Revolution through the end of Reconstruction.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Glucksman Ireland House NYU, 1 Washington Mews, New York, United States