S26-33 Irish American Collective Memories of the Irish Famine
Zoom | Registration opens 3/2/2026 9:00 AM EST
This Zoom course will be recorded. Loretto Horrigan Leary teaches about how Irish Americans have remembered the Great Famine and how those memories still shape their identity today. The class dives into the significance of port of entry records like ship lists and mortality schedules, immigrant letters, the Irish Folklore Collection, and banking records from New York and Providence, RI. It also looks at film, poetry, and song as ways of expressing Irish-American culture and identity, the rise of Irish Famine monuments in the mid-1990s and beyond, and the creation of an International Irish Famine Commemoration Day.
Loretto Leary
Loretto Horrigan Leary is a historian and cultural educator specializing in Irish American collective memory of ththe Connecticut–Ireland Trade Commission. Her work focuses on how famine memory is preserved, contested, and reimagined through burial sites, monuments, art, museums, and diaspora activism along the Eastern Seaboard. Drawing on memory studies, public history, and material culture, Leary explores how communities remember trauma across generations and how commemoration shapes identity, belonging, and historical responsibility in Ireland and the United States.e Irish Famine (An Gorta Mór). She is the Educational and Cultural Director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum of Fairfield and Co-Chair of the Connecticut–Ireland Trade Commission. Her work focuses on how famine memory is preserved, contested, and reimagined through burial sites, monuments, art, museums, and diaspora activism along the Eastern Seaboard. Drawing on memory studies, public history, and material culture, Leary explores how communities remember trauma across generations and how commemoration shapes identity, belonging, and historical responsibility in Ireland and the United States.