As part of the Keough-Naughton Institute's spring 2024 speaker series, Cian T. McMahon, an associate professor in the Department of History and Honors College at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, will give a lecture titled, “‘Those of the Irish nation or extraction’: Using Saint Patrick’s Day to Write a New History of the Irish Diaspora.”
Over the past 300 years, Saint Patrick’s Day has evolved from a religious holiday on a windswept island in the north Atlantic Ocean to an annual festival celebrated by millions of people around the world. The anniversary’s global popularity has gone hand-in-hand with the growth of the Irish diaspora, which is now pegged at around 70 million people worldwide, including over 30 million in the United States alone. Many like to say that “everybody’s Irish” on Saint Patrick’s Day. But how did this come to pass? How can a better understanding of this boisterous holiday teach us something about the tangled relationship between migration and identity in modern human history? McMahon tracks first-hand accounts of Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations in specific times and places as signposts to a new history of the Irish diaspora.
Speaker Biography
Cian T. McMahon is an associate professor in the Department of History and Honors College at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the author of The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine (2021).
Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.