Ruth Duffy, a historian of medical and oral history, and Alison Garden, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and senior lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, will speak on their collaborative project "Acts of Union: Mixed Marriage in Modern Ireland" as part of the Keough-Naughton Institute's spring 2024 speaker series.
This talk will offer an interdisciplinary examination of mixed marriage, and mixed relationships, in twentieth-century Ireland. Taking an all-island approach and looking at a variety of sources—including oral history, popular fiction, poetry, archival materials and more—Duffy and Garden will explore the vast complexities of sustaining a relationship across political and/or religious divides. Despite the relative prevalence of the phenomenon and the vital insight that studying these marriage patterns could give us into an extraordinarily turbulent period in Irish and British history, there has been very limited research on this subject. Drawing from a range of moments across the twentieth century, we will examine how this phenomenon was both imagined and experienced, for individuals and their families, when such relationships have historically been a contentious undertaking.
Speaker Biographies
Ruth Duffy is a historian of medical and oral history. Her expertise lies in modern British and Irish history; the Troubles, medicine, Irish society and culture. Her first monograph, Healthcare and the Troubles: The Conflict Experience of the Northern Ireland Health Service, 1968-1998, will be published with Liverpool University Press in 2024. Ruth is currently a research fellow at Queen's University Belfast in the School of Arts, English and Languages.
Alison Garden is UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and senior lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast. The author of The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899-1916 (Liverpool 2020), she is currently finishing her second monograph, Love Across the Divide: Desire and Colonial Culture in Northern Ireland, 1968-present.
Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.