In the latest episode of the University of Press podcast, The UPside, we sat down (virtually) with Guest Editors Dr. Cian T. McMahon and Dr. Darragh Gannon to discuss a new special issue of Journal of American Ethnic History on “Globalizing Irish America,” as well as trends in global history scholarship, the importance of relationship building in academia, internationalism, and more. You can listen to the podcast here or read below for a transcript of the conversation. 

UIP: Welcome to the University of Illinois Press podcast, The UPside. I’m Mary Warner, the Journals Marketing Assistant for the Press, and today I’m excited to present our podcast highlighting a special issue of Journal of American Ethnic History. “Globalizing Irish America” is the topic of Volume 44, Issue 1, and features articles that explore the links between Irish Americans and their places within global networks and global cities.  

I’m joined today by guest editors, Dr. Cian T. McMahon… 

CM: Hi, how are you doing?  

UIP: …and Dr. Darragh Gannon.  

DG: Hi, very good to be with you.  

UIP: Great to have you both here! Before we dive into our questions, I’d love to give you both an opportunity to introduce yourselves to the listeners. Cian, could you tell us a bit about your background?  

CM: Yes, thanks very much for having me. I’m excited to be here. I grew up in Ireland, in Dublin and lived there until I was a teenager, and I emigrated to Canada. I went to high school in Canada in Winnipeg, Manitoba on the frozen prairies in the middle of nowhere. And I did my undergraduate degree in history there at the University of Manitoba, under the direction of Dr. Francis Carroll, who then put me in touch with colleagues of his at University College Dublin.  

So, I went back to Dublin and did a Master’s at UCD, University College Dublin. Finished that in 2002 and wanted to do something different. You know, wanted to do a PhD, but wasn’t sure what to do. So, I spoke to a mentor there at UCD, Mary Daly, and Mary said, “what about Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh with David W. Miller?” So, I applied and was delighted to go there. And I completed my PhD in Pittsburgh in 2010 on Irish history and then moved out to Las Vegas, of all places. [laughing] Went from Inchicore to Las Vegas, where I’m an Associate Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

UIP: Thank you so much for that introduction. Darragh, you’re up next.  

DG: Sure. So, I’m currently Associate Director of Global Irish Studies and Assistant Professor of Irish History at Georgetown University. And I guess I would say I’m an even more recent migrant than my colleague Cian McMahon, having just returned to Washington, D.C. one month ago. I previously served as Fulbright Irish Scholar at Georgetown between 2022 and 2023. In terms of my areas of research interest, I’ve published widely in British, Irish, and global history, but also my interests extend to things like museums, memory studies, and diaspora policy. I’ve published with Irish Academic Press, the Royal Irish Academy, Cambridge University Press, and the fourth publication, which is ‘forthcoming’, beloved of scholars of history, is with Cambridge University Press’s Global and International History series and the book is entitled Worlds of Revolution: Ireland’s Global Moment 1919–1923, of which this special issue is directly related.  

UIP: Thank you both so much again, and welcome to The UPside.  

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the Journal, the Journal of American Ethnic History (or JAEH) is the official journal of the Immigration & Ethnic History Society. It addresses various aspects of North American immigration history and American ethnic history, including background of emigration, ethnic and racial groups, Native Americans, race and ethnic relations, immigration policies, and the processes of incorporation, integration, and acculturation. You can learn more about the Journal, including how to subscribe, submit your own work, or read online, at go.illinois.edu/JAEH. 

Now that we know a little bit more about the Journal and both of you, can you give us a brief overview of the issue’s focus and some background of how it came to be?  

DG: Well, this is a project very much long in the making. It began in 2019 B.C. (before COVID), when Cian McMahon gave an exemplary presentation to the Institute of Irish Studies at Queens University, Belfast where I was then based. And in the aftermath of the discussion, we talked about mutual research interests and the idea that, I suppose, this emerging trend in history, global history, had not necessarily been addressed in Irish American terms. And we thought that the Journal of American Ethnic History would be an excellent forum in which to explicate some of the theories, concepts, and methodologies pertaining to this new field in history. And essentially from that point we have been dealing with contributors from around the world—seven contributors across four world time zones—leading to an online workshop on the 13th of October of last year, which of course had its own challenges because we had one contributor in Las Vegas, Nevada, and another contributor in far-away Auckland, New Zealand. But that is testament to the power and potential of global history as a field, and we’re both very grateful, of course, to Professor Kevin Kenny, who not only supported this initiative, but also was very generous in his feedback at that online workshop, and of course, to our international peer reviewers who gave such diligent and helpful feedback to our contributors.  

UIP: So interesting to hear about how it all came to be. So, Irish heritage and history gets a lot of attention surrounding St. Patrick’s Day in March and Irish American Heritage Month in October. How can this special issue help our understanding of Irish American culture, identity, and history as an important topic throughout the year? 

CM: That’s an interesting question. You know, it’s true that the questions of Irish heritage and history, as you say, tend to be kind of focused on, in the mainstream media, once or twice a year, especially March with St. Patrick’s Day. But I think that this special issue is important in ways that can inform kind of how we think about history on a day-to-day level. And I should really say that one thing that Darragh and I emphasized amongst ourselves from the beginning was that this special issue was not going to work if it was only going to appeal to historians of Ireland and the Irish, that it’s important that we think about our work and that we articulate our ideas and questions in ways that make sense to historians of other migrant and ethnic groups. So that’s the first thing that I would say, is that one of the contributions I think of this of this special issue is that it addresses questions and issues that historians and social scientists working in various disciplines and subdisciplines can get something out of.  

I think it’s also important that we recognize that on March 17th every year on Saint Patrick’s Day, every major head honcho in the Irish government packs up and leaves the country, and they go to other countries to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day. Now if you stop and think about it, this is an incredibly strange thing. Can you imagine, for example, the president of the United States packing up and going to France or London for the Fourth of July? Like it wouldn’t happen, you know. But it happens in Ireland. And the reason that it happens is because Irish networks, Irish international networks, often rooted in cities overseas, are the ways in which Irish identity and Irish communication have been maintained over the years. And so, our special issue deals with this directly. We’re interested in understanding the ways in which these two concepts, if you will, or these two dynamics—international networks and global cities—have shaped what it meant to be Irish over the past few hundred years. So that’s what I think is the kind of main contribution of this special issue. 

UIP: Your introduction also mentions that there was a previous JAEH issue in 2009 on Irish Americans. How is this issue different and how do you feel that the field of Irish diasporic studies has evolved in the past 15 years?  

DG: Well, as you quite correctly note, this special issue in 2024 is 15 years after the last special issue in JAEH, which was entitled “A Forum on New Directions in Irish Immigration and Ethnic History,” and that consisted of contributions from eight eminent scholars, who have, of course, extensive track records in the field of diasporic studies. And, I suppose, in terms of our particular special issue, we obviously were heavily indebted to scholars and scholarship from that particular collection. Tim Meagher, for example suggested that “is there a way to rethink the melting pot?” Not as an iconic metaphor, but as an actual process in terms of talking about ethnic, cultural legacies and multiethnic places and that was certainly inspiration for my thinking about global cities. But in terms of this special issue, what we’ve really focused on is methodology. So, this is a special issue, in effect, about global history, using the twin track of global networks and global cities. And Irish America is a case study, an empirical case study, by which to understand how the mechanics of global history can work. 

 And I think, to build on what Cian was saying earlier, that’s incredibly important to show. Hopefully students and scholars of Ireland can, ultimately, explore the transnational potential of their field across American, Irish, and global history. You know, for example, the correlate of ethnic nationalism in spatial terms has very often been the study of the nation state, in those kind of fixed boundaries, and I think this special issue, by adopting global history methodologies and transnational approaches, challenges very directly that conventional teleology.  

CM: Yeah, I’ll only add there to Darragh’s point there, or reemphasize Darragh’s point, about the methodological implications of our special issue. So, if you go back and you reread the articles that were published in the JAEH in 2009, that forum to which Darragh referred, you’ll see that there’s a returning question that comes up in a couple of the articles, which is not “why should we study transnational history” but “how should we do it?” And by 2009, there had already been a fair number of important essays in the subject. Of course, Kevin Kenny’s 2003 article in the Journal of American History paved the way for a lot of scholars in and outside of Irish studies. But I would say that since 2009, you see that there’s been a whole host of work by folks like Sarah Roddy, Colin Barr who worked on the Catholic Church, David Brundage, Patrick Mannion, Niall Whelehan on nationalism, philanthropy work by Anelise Shrout. So, these folks have mapped out ways in which we can methodologically approach these questions of understanding the Irish in the context of transnational history. And so, what we tried to do in this special issue was to give voice to the latest and greatest of that work that’s being done today.  

UIP: You both have been through this in a couple answers now, but can you explain a little bit more about why you chose to split the issue into two parts, Global Networks and Global Cities?  

CM: Yeah so, we could have chosen any number of methodological foci, you know, but networks and cities appeal to us partly because it builds on our own research. One thing that that I’ve learned, and I’m sure Darragh would say the same thing, is that when you work as an editor on something, you are really reading and getting the most out of what other people have written, but you’re also constantly in conversation with your own work. So, for myself, I would say, as you said, the special issue is divided into two volumes, Global Networks and Global Cities, and Darragh and I each took the lead, we’ll say—we both worked on both volumes obviously—but we took the lead on one each.  

So, I did Global Networks, and I’m interested in Global Networks because in my own work, I’ve realized the ways in which networks are traditionally thought of as a medium for exchanging ideas and information, right? But if you spend enough time reading and thinking about networks, you’ll actually realize that the medium itself impacts the message. In other words, networks don’t just translate or transfer words and ideas, they actually shape them. The shape of the network impacts the shape of the message. So, I’ve written about this in my own work and my PhD dissertation, which I said I completed at Carnegie Mellon in 2010, looked at the ways in which the rise of an international reading public in the mid-nineteenth century, of an Irish reading public, shaped how Irish people thought of themselves as a community at home and abroad. I was interested in this, and I reached out to three scholars whose work I admired. And I said, would you think about the ways in which the networks that you study shape the messages that are being communicated? And so that’s kind of where the Global Networks came from. 

DG: So, building on that, I would echo Cian’s sentiment with regard to the idea that the special issue, in the best sense of scholarship, is emerging from my own research interests and current preoccupations, specifically in this idea of Worlds of Revolution, the next book. And you know, I’ve been reading a lot of the scholarship in terms of global history about how we can move away from those traditional frameworks of the nation-state as almost this definitive paradigm by which you understand the past. And specifically looking at this concept of territory, which scholars of global history have proposed is simply a spatial construction, to demarcate political control or advantage. And that’s very important, I think, in terms of Ireland, which of course in geographical and spatial terms is seen as a fixed space in historical time. It’s an island or an island story, as Enda Delaney most famously noted. 

And Global Cities, I would argue have been understood as potentially paradigmatic, to the intellectual development of world-making, the subject of my next book, because it allows for example, scholars to enter into a dialogue between the scale of the global territory and the small spaces of the local. Global Cities are a really excellent paradigm by which to explore the scope, but also the limitations of global history. And I think especially in the case of Ireland, that’s very, very important to understand, that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the salience of Ireland or the Irish experience was actually found most prevalently in international spaces, most notably, the major cities of North America. So, by the mid-nineteenth century, by virtue of mass migration, it was estimated that one in five people living in New York was of Irish birth or extraction, and that, by definition, gave New York City a greater preponderance and prevalence of Irishness than, let’s say, even the capital city of Ireland, Dublin. So, I think Global Cities are a very useful, productive, and resonant paradigm for scholars of Ireland and America going forward.  

UIP: And discussing the content of those two parts even more specifically, can you walk us through the articles that are included in this issue?  

CM: Yeah, sure. Part 1 is Global Networks and that’s the one that I mostly edited. One of the best things about a project like this is the relationships that you get to develop with other scholars. And so, when we divide these as Global Networks and Global Cities and that’s Cian’s and that’s Darragh’s, it’s a bit of a conceit, because it was a wonderful sense of collaboration. But anyway, in Global Networks there are three articles, and they cover a span of time and space. 

The first article is by Dr. Muiris MacGiollabhuí, and it looks at the United Irishmen in the United States in the late eighteenth century. The United Irishman started off the secret society in Ireland, a blend of Catholics and Protestants that dreamed of establishing an independent republic in Ireland, independent of Britain and the United Kingdom. Their campaign culminated in a bloody but ineffectual rebellion in 1798 and many of them were exiled to the United States, where they maintained networks of print culture to try and make sense of their place in the United States. Of course, in the United States at the time, in the wake of the American Revolution, there was a strong tendency toward conservatism and fear of revolution. And so, this article examines the ways in which networks of print culture impacted the United Irishman’s message in the United States.  

The second article is by Dr. Sophie Cooper, who works on nuns and religious women in the Irish diaspora. And when you look at the historiography of religious Irish, religious missionaries, you see that it’s often dominated by the stories of men, priests and bishops. In a way, this makes sense because we’re shaped by our sources. And of course, the first thing that historians often do when they’re trying to understand a story is to go to the official archives. The church was very good at maintaining lots of official archives, so there’s lots of work to do, but you mostly get the voices of men, priests and bishops. So, Dr. Cooper’s work flips that narrative. Instead of looking at priests and bishops, her work looks at nuns, and instead of looking at official archives, resolutions, and documents, she looks at letters between nuns on missions outside of Ireland and their authorities back in Ireland. And what Dr. Cooper uncovers is an informal network of letters in which these religious women are sharing ideas both about personal identity, about religious identity, but also in the nitty gritty of life overseas.  

The third article in the Global Network section is by Dr. Tim White. Dr. White looks at the ways in which networks of diplomats and activists in the United States and Ireland during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and ’90s—and in particular, he’s interested in the ways in which these networks of exchange between diplomats and activists shaped the message. So we tend to, for example, think of diplomats on one side, activists on the other, politicians in another, but Dr. White very effectively shows us the ways in which these various players were all parts of a network of communication and conversation, and that because these networks were so complicated, they opened the minds of the folks who were negotiating to a settlement that would work for all sides. And this culminated, of course, in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. So, those are the three articles in the Global Networks issue.  

DG: So, in the Global Cities section of this special issue, we have three formidable articles by four scholars, ranging from established professors to early career researchers. So, in the first article entitled “Global San Francisco and the Irish of the New Pacific,” Professor Malcolm Campbell tracks the migration of Irish communities toward and settlement in the so-called Golden City from approximately the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. And in terms of its conclusion, in terms of its economic orientation, cosmopolitan disposition, and also ethnic alignments toward the Pacific specifically, Campbell suggests that San Francisco was a global city like no other in continental America.  

Now Dr. Margaret Brehony and Giselle González Garcia take us an entirely different direction toward the Hispanic Caribbean in the second article, which is an examination of Irish immigrants in colonial port cities of Cuba, focusing on Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos. In a really fascinating article, which uncovers a lot of new material, especially in terms of gender from the existing archival record, they suggest that the multiethnic urban spaces of Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos facilitated immigrant Irish investment in the transnational economic processes of slavery. 

And our third and final article, which is written expertly by Dr. William Jenkins, takes us from the cosmopolitan enclaves of Cuba up north to Toronto. And in his article entitled “Locating Irishness in the ‘Belfast of this Great Dominion’: Toronto, 1841 to 1926,” the author investigates the intersection of ethnic Irish identities in Toronto across the long nineteenth century. The city, most importantly in terms of this special issue, he argues, was a space of both Irish diasporic and British Imperial importance, signified by the mobilization of political loyalties from the famine period right up to the First World War. So, collectively and also individually, these articles offer new directions of travel in the study of Irish America.  

UIP: Sounds like a really amazing collection of scholarship. In the issue’s introduction, you also discuss new approaches to global history and the trend of turning away from binary interpretive frameworks. Why do you think this trend is happening and how do you predict attitudes in global history scholarship will continue to evolve?  

CM: Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I think as scholars of the humanities and social sciences, we are in many ways studying ourselves and our twenty-first century life. When we study what we might call globalization avant la lettre, before we called it globalization, before folks even thought of it as globalization, we are in many ways studying ourselves. We’re trying to make sense of the ways in which we can understand the networks and cities that we live in today. I found this when I was working on my research on newspapers in the mid-nineteenth century. I was shocked by the degree to which Irish newspapers in, let’s say, Buenos Ares, New York, and Sydney in the mid-nineteenth century, which is a time that I would have, had I not studied it, I would have thought that, you know, someone out in Sydney might go for months without reading something written by a person in Ireland or in Irish America. But in fact, I found that on a weekly basis, newspaper articles, editorials, open letters were being reprinted in the press all around the world, so that somebody could say something in a speech in Dublin, it would be printed in the newspaper in Galway, which made its way over to Boston, where it was reprinted, which maybe found its way down to New Orleans, where it was reprinted, which then sailed out on a ship to Australia where an editor would get a hold of it and read it and reprint it. And so, this told me that there are messages flying around the world. And that there’s actually an international conversation going on.  

What I think is important for us today is, even though the scale and speed of these networks are much slower, in the mid-nineteenth century accounts are being published months later because it’s taken that much time for the information to get there, but I think it’s worth it in our world today, for us to think back on the ways in which these early networks of communication, not only that they existed, not only how they developed, but as you said: the key is to understand the ways in which those networks themselves shape the message that they were transmitting.  

DG: I think global history, much like many fields, is undoubtedly inflected by the contemporary moment. I mean, the emergence of global history in the ’90s and early 2000s, as a standalone field, was informed, shaped, and colored by the inevitable, as many people perceived it, rise of globalization as a kind of force which transcended territories, transcended nation states, and transcended time. However, with the resurgence of nativism over the last ten years in many different countries, we have seen the kind of critical interrogation of the resonance of global history as a field. And I think in terms of the state of the field, “what is global history” has become the recurring question among scholars in that field and, in effect, I suppose the new direction away from kind of binary frameworks of macrohistory, microhistory, integration, disconnection is about giving agency, not only to scholars and how we write, think, and reflect on the past, but also to the historical actors about whom we write. That’s a hugely important evolution in terms of the directions of the idea that, for example, actors in the global south one hundred years ago in the first World War era (of which I specialize), for example: Saad Zaghloul in Egypt, obviously Gandhi in India, have as much agency over their own world and world making, as did American president Woodrow Wilson. So, I think that’s an important trajectory in terms of the field.  

I also think we’ve moved away from this idea of an accepted, empirical truth or narrative or interpretation of the past with the rise of postcolonial scholarship, as I mentioned, the emergence of scholars from the global south who, through the likes of Zoom, have an opportunity to speak in international conferences and so on, and toward a more complicated understanding of the past, even beyond our current special issue relating to Ireland and Irish America. And this idea of multidirectional interpretations and perspectives on the single event or a single historical period without perhaps clear, clean historical explanation of that event or of that period. So, it’s about the interpretation, the historiographical approach, and the methodology, which is actually coming into greater focus, and you can even see this in the journal of record the Journal of Global History; their most recent initiative is a series called Arenas in Global History, which allows scholars to offer a series of positions on a single issue, on themes, actors, the basic methods, in which again there is no single standard explanation for that period of history, but rather a series of political positions or historical understandings of a single event. And so, I think it’s that multiplicity of motivations that really is the mobilizing factor for a new generation of scholars of global history. 

UIP: So, after putting together this issue, what are some next steps or future areas of study in the field of global history or in Irish American history that you believe could still use attention?  

CM: That’s a good question. I’ve been thinking about it a bit over the last little while. In my most recent book, it was called The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea During the Great Irish Famine and it built on maritime social history, the work of folks like Marcus Rediker and others who have painted these incredible social histories of pirates and slaves and mutineers, sailors. But I noticed that immigrants had kind of been left on the sidelines in this in this historiography. And so the book I wrote, along with an article in the American Historical Review on the kind of historiographical implications of this, convinced me that there is much more work to be done on the journey. I think if we take a step as historians of immigration and ethnicity, I think if we don’t get bogged down in the idea of the sea voyage, and we think of it as the journey, I think there is an incredible amount of open field there to work in.  

Darragh’s hit the nail on the head with the issue of the nation state as this frame of reference that for so many years was used as the guiding principle for so much historical work. Of course, focusing on voyages flips that by following the migrants themselves and focusing on their agency. That’s not to say that we ignore the strictures and the laws of the lands through which these migrants travel. But it does allow us to focus on the ways in which migrants work around that. I think, of course, of Erika Lee’s work on paper sons and Chinese immigrants using paper sons as a way to get around immigration laws. So, I read the New York Times and once a month there’s an article in there about the Darién Gap. It’s incredibly moving to read about the journeys that folks are experiencing today. I would love to see more work putting that into its historical context.  

DG: I think what Cian has just mentioned is absolutely invaluable and it’s quite correct to note emerging scholarship which is addressing a number of those themes. In my own work, I suppose, I’ve been increasingly focusing on nationalism’s lesser well-known sister, internationalism. And while nationalism gets a lot of attention, kind of the Cinderella, you might say, of Irish history, is internationalism, and I think that deserves a lot more attention historically, for a number of reasons, because obviously the story of Ireland internationally is in-part, a story of internationalization. But also, if you look at the relatively short twentieth century as Hobsbawm termed it, I mean, Ireland’s story is an international story. Certainly, the success of modern Ireland is built into the infrastructure of international development. Most notably, joining the European Community in 1973, joining the United Nations in 1960, Ireland was a member of the Security Council only a few years ago and led by now Ambassador of the United States, Geraldine Byrne Nason. So, I think, actually, the story of contemporary Ireland, if we may use that term, is the story of internationalism. But that’s not necessarily being given the same historical gravitas as it’s better-known relation, as I mentioned, nationalism. I do, however, want to foreground in some respects some projects which have been really addressing issues pertaining to internationalism, most notably Enda Delaney’s project, “Ireland and Modernity,” based at the University of Edinburgh; Miriam Nyhan Grey, who while she was at NYU did the incredibly important project, “Black, Brown, and Green Voices”; and a really interesting series of conversations derived from a forum at the University of Oxford, led by Ian McBride, entitled, “Decolonizing Irish History.” And I think to take these emerging trends together we have a push toward writing against the nation state as paradigmatic to our historiography, and I think in that regard, it’s really important to think outside the national archival box.  

UIP: So, moving toward the publication process, was this either of your first experience editing a journal issue and did you guys run into any major challenges along the way?  

CM: Yeah, that’s a good question. Well, we had a lot of laughs along the way. [laughing] I’ve got this informal rule where I only work with nice people and I don’t mean “nice” in that terrible way that undermines their scholarly abilities, but they’re nice people, no. What I mean is that so much of what we do in this business is about relationships. And we can forget that. I’m currently the director of graduate studies at the Department of History, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and one of the first things I tell incoming graduate students is that, “yeah, you’re gonna read a lot of books and read a lot of articles and take a lot of notes. But really, one of the main things you’re doing here is developing relationships.” And so, for me, editing this journal issue with Darragh, it was thinking about the ways in which we as scholars communicate with each other in order to get the best out of each other. So, I really enjoyed that. It was my first experience editing a journal issue, but I was at the same time—I know this sounds like I’m plugging, but I’m going to say it anyway—I was at the same time co-editing with Kathleen Costello-Sullivan The Routledge History of Irish America, which just came out a couple of months ago. And it’s over forty chapters, so it’s a lot of authors to work with, but it was the same thing where it was like, if we think about how we’re communicating with each other, we’ll get a lot more out of this experience, not only in a scholarly sense but also in a kind of a in a personal sense. So, that’s what I would say I’ve learned. Thank you.  

DG: Well, I would look like to just echo those remarks and say that this has been a journey. We have survived the pandemic as an editorial team, we have survived multiple time zones in different climates. This began again when I was in rain-soaked Belfast and Cian McMahon was emailing from sun-kissed Las Vegas. So, the cultural backdrop could not have been more different. And Cian most notably took the lead in terms of dealing with the Journal of American Ethnic History and of course, we should echo the idea that Suzanne Sinke was just a pleasure to work with, as was the entire JAEH team, and Cian has just been a pleasure to work with. And as he said earlier, it’s always a delight, not always a given, but always delight when you find that someone whose work you admire turns out to be a great friend, a great collaborator, and a great person to boot. So, I’m delighted to share the editorial duties with Cian on this, and I know that our contributors share that same sentiment.  

UIP: Along with your working relationship, were there any other highlights that stood out from this process for you?  

CM: I would just like to echo what Darragh just said about the efficiency, the professionalism of the JAEH. You know, when I first started in the field of immigration and ethnic history, I had a lot to learn. And I learned and I got caught up, so to speak, by going through back issues of the JAEH. I’ve published in it myself a couple of times*, I’ve worked now with two different editors, and I’ve really had a wonderful experience. I just think that the Journal itself plays a critical role, and while we’re at it, let’s not forget that this is the journal of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, which is a complicated collection of wonderful scholars working in all kinds of fields, most of whom do not work in Irish history, and so their book talks, their meeting at the OAH every year, they have a series of online events and they are really a committed, scholarly community who are also on the cutting edge of the best work, making sense of immigration and ethnicity. So, it’s been a pleasure to make a little contribution to one of the landmark publications in American immigration history.  

UIP: Great. And so, do you have any books, articles, or other resources you would recommend to listeners interested in Irish American history or more broadly in globalization, once they finished reading the special issue?  

DG: I’m happy to take the lead on this, because if Cian McMahon was not going to extol the virtues of his most recent volume, I certainly am happy to do that for him. As Cian very briefly alluded to, the newly published The Routledge History of Irish America, edited by Cian McMahon and Kate Costello-Sullivan, is simply a landmark publication which undoubtedly will stand the test of historical and historiographical time. It is remarkable collection of scholars, public practitioners, interlocutors in the field. And it’s really a testament to Cian’s efficiency and affability as an editor that he was working on that parallel with this particular special issue of the JAEH. So, I’m delighted to see those volumes emerging in 2024.  

I think it’s also important for your listeners who perhaps aren’t familiar with Irish history and Irish American history in the broader sense of the word to recognize the important work done by the American Conference for Irish Studies, or ACIS for short, which meets annually. Next year’s conference is taking place in beautiful Savannah, the Georgia Southern University in fact, in February of next year, so I would encourage your listeners who have not attended before, who have not contributed before, to take a look at the ACIS website and think about speaking at the conference. It’s a wonderful community of scholars.  

And then, I suppose, moving beyond Irish America to looking at global history writ large, an invaluable resource is the Toynbee Prize Foundation, which has an excellent website full of resources, articles, and named after, of course, the doyen of global history, Arnold J. Toynbee, and here you’ll find some of the most cutting-edge research in the field in the form of articles, interviews, media, and so on. So, I think those are important resources to place across the desks of your listeners.  

CM: Yeah. I would just say, thank you for those kind words, Darragh. It’s been wonderful to work with all the authors on that The Routledge History of Irish America and of course, the American Conference for Irish Studies, which has been a home base of mine for years.  

I have a tendency to [laughing] love book reviews. I don’t know why, and I’m currently working on three book reviews, which I thought I’d share under the question of what’s new and cool in Irish American studies. Marion Casey’s book The Green Space, which looks at the Irish image in America—not so much the ways in which Irish people behaved, but the ways in which Irish behavior was interpreted and how that changed over the course of centuries. That just came out with NYU Press as part of the Glucksman Irish Diaspora Series, which is edited by Professor Kevin Kenny. A very exciting series of important books.  

Another book that just came out is Tyler Anbinder’s Plentiful County, which looks at the ways in which the Famine Irish shaped New York. Dr. Anbinder has been working for years with the records of the Emigrant Savings Bank in New York in the 1850s and the things that he’s learned about Irish wealth management and Irish poverty completely overturn many of our comfortable assumptions, so I would encourage your listeners to look out for that one too.  

And then finally, I just got my copy of Mark McGowan’s book on Irish orphans in Canada during the Great Famine. This is an incredibly important book, because it foregrounds a subgroup of people that are often overlooked, and that’s, of course, children. So, Mark McGowan’s work challenges the notion that Irish orphans were kind of warmly accepted into their families and became part of the family, which is part of Canada’s national self-narrative, if you will. McGowan challenges a lot of that. So, those are three exciting new books that I’m really enjoying reading right now.  

UIP: Thank you. Those sound like really fantastic resources. So finally, do either of you have any other projects that you’re working on that you would like to tell our listeners about? 

DG: Well, I think I’d be remiss if I, at this juncture, did not allude to the Global Irish Studies Initiative at Georgetown University, of which I’m Associate Director. And the GIS is actually relatively new in the field of Irish studies by comparison to other institutions. It was established in 2018 and really, its remit is, I think, quite distinctive in the field in terms of its quite deliberate focus on transnational, comparative, and, as I mentioned, global approaches to our understanding of Ireland in all its manifestations. And my thinking certainly has been shaped by initially my Fulbright year at Georgetown, where I worked very closely at the Global Irish Studies Initiative. And I must say, most notably by the ideas of our youngest Global Irish Studies Fellows, who are a cohort of undergraduates and graduates pursuing the latest research in the field. So, I think that’s really, really important to highlight that you know, the Global Irish Studies Initiative at Georgetown is about the Irish diaspora, but it’s also about, like my own work, using Ireland as a case study to examine broader issues such as colonialism and race culture and so on and so forth. So, I would encourage anyone who’s interested to join our mailing list. We have regular events in person and online, and I think it’s really important, again, stepping outside of Ireland, that we can think critically about some of those issues which pertain to modern ideas of Irishness in the twenty-first century.  

CM: Yeah, I would echo all that. I think that it’s a huge boon to Georgetown that Darragh has joined them as the Associate Director. His scholarship, but also his ability to communicate effectively with different groups is a huge boon. For my own part I can only say I’m working on a history of St. Patrick’s Day which connects with those themes that that Darragh just mentioned. We tend to think of Irish and Irishness as a kind of a static identity that is associated with political independence, it’s often associated with Catholicism, it’s often male dominated, it’s often heterosexual. But if you look at the celebrations of Saint Patrick’s Day around the world since the 1700s, you’ll see all of that. But you’ll also see challenges, challenges to all of that.  

And so, my current book, which I’m working on, looks at nine Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations in nine different parts of the world in nine different years. And it offers a snapshot. It looks at a very specific one, and then what it tries to do is make sense of how what it meant to be Irish in that time in that place—say, Boston in 1737, Toronto, 1858, Buenos Aires, 1875—the ways in which what it meant to be Irish in that particular time and space was shaped by the global networks in which those people were operating, so it builds very much on the articles that feature in this JAEH special issue, and I am, of course, deeply indebted to our authors for all of the time and effort and fantastic work that they put into making this such a fantastic experience.  

UIP: So, I think it’s about time for us to wrap up the episode. I want to say again, what a pleasure it was to have you both on the podcast to discuss this new special issue of Journal of American Ethnic History. Thank you both for your fantastic work on this issue and for joining us today.  

CM: Thank you! 

DG: Great to be with you, Mary. 

UIP: And a big thank you to our listeners for tuning in to learn more about this special issue of Journal of American Ethnic History. To find out more about the journal, please visit go.illinois.edu/JAEH.  

For further reading, the University of Illinois Press is also the publisher of many journals related to cultural studies. The Press has also published books on Irish history, including History’s Erratics: Irish Catholic Dissidents and the Transformation of American Capitalism, 1870–1930 by David M. Emmons and Irish Mormons: Reconciling Identity in Global Mormonism by Hazel O’Brien. You can view all of those and more at press.uillinois.edu. Thank you. 

* Articles by Cian T. McMahon in Journal of American Ethnic History: 

• “Cartoons in the Classroom: Using Digitized Political Caricatures to Teach Migration and Ethnicity” (2016) 33 (4): 87–93. 

• “Caricaturing Race and Nation in the Irish American Press, 1870-1880: A Transnational Perspective” (2014) 33 (2): 33–56. 

Book reviews by Cian T. McMahon in Journal of American Ethnic History: 

• “Mediating America: Black and Irish Press and the Struggle for Citizenship, 1870–1914” (2020) 39 (2): 93–95. 

• “Atlas of the Great Irish Famine” (2016) 35 (4): 118–120. 

• “Between Raid and Rebellion: The Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1867–1916” (2016) 35 (2): 124–125.