Dr Brian Jackson, Head of Postgraduate Studies, IT Carlow.

Irish National Institute for Historical Research

4 pm, 21 November 2019

Seminar Room, Tyrconnell Building, School of History, Perrott Avenue, UCC

This paper will explore comparative attitudes towards their large diaspora populations exhibited by Ireland and a number of other states, principally Italy, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  It will also examine the layered, complex and changing nature of diaspora communities by looking at the experience of Irish emigrants in Argentina and it will reconstruct elements of one migrant’s story - Richard Webb.  He emigrated from Cork to Buenos Aires in 1907.  Over a period of thirty-six months, from September 1907 to October 1910, he sent 250 postcards to Sarah White a teenage girl living in Enniscorthy, County Wexford.  In the context of Irish migration history, these postcards constitute an unusual collection and the evidence they present serves to challenge a number of assumptions that are routinely made about Irish migrants, migration and diaspora communities and this, in turn, serves to shape how we choose to represent and commemorate migration within our national narrative.

Dr Brian Jackson is Head of Postgraduate Studies at IT Carlow and was previously Director of the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies at UCD.