Monuments and Memorials of the Great Famine


Catherine Marshall

Regular price €12.00

2015, Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum,                                                                                   Paperback, 36 pages

Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University publishes Famine Folios, a unique resource for students, scholars and researchers, as well as general readers, covering many aspects of the Famine in Ireland from 1845–1852 — the worst demographic catastrophe of nineteenth-century Europe. The essays are interdisciplinary in nature, and make available new research in Famine studies by internationally established scholars in history, art history, cultural theory, philosophy, media history, political economy, literature and music.

Commemorative projects, born out of conflicting memories, can be problematic. Catherine Marshall challenges the coarsening of history by the construction of commemorative monuments that are thought to provide closure over the events that they mark. She explores how imaginative artists help us to work into and through the past. Through the vitality of her artists, at home and abroad, Ireland and the diaspora have attempted to come to terms with some of the inherited legacies of the Great Hunger, the most devastating event in modern Irish history.