Breandán Mac Suibhne

BREANDÁN MAC SUIBHNEis a historian of society and culture in modern Ireland (PhD, Carnegie Mellon, 1999). His The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2017) was Irish Times Irish Non-Fiction Book of the Year in 2017. The Royal Irish Academy awarded it the inaugural Michel Déon Biennial Prize for Nonfiction and it received the Donnelly Prize for Books in History and Social Science from the American Conference for Irish Studies. His other publications include two major annotated editions, viz. John Gamble's Society and Manners in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Field Day, 2011), a compendium of the travel-writing of a hard-living doctor, and, with David Dickson, Hugh Dorian's The Outer Edge of Ulster: A Memoir of Social Life in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Donegal (Lilliput, 2000, 2001; University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), the most extensive lower-class account of Irelands Great Famine. Mac Suibhne was a founding editor, with critic Seamus Deane, of Field Day Review (2005-), a journal of political and literary culture, and, with Deane, he edited two book series, Field Files and Field Day Editions. With historian Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, he edited Ag Cur Chun Fónaimh (Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2023), a collection of essays on the history of the development agency Údarás na Gaeltachta. Mac Suibhne is currently completing a monograph that uses biographical studies of the actual people on whom characters in Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) are, more or less, based as a portal into the social and cultural history of modern Ireland. This item gives a sense of the project:

www.irishtimes.comculturebooksthe-inspiration-for-fr-jack-the-wee-donegal-priest-known-to-millions-1.4230588

Mac Suibhne has a longstanding interest in Ireland's Great Famine. In addition to his The End of Outrage (2017) and edition, with Dickson, of the Dorian memoir, see a collection of essays, co-edited with Enda Dealney, Ireland's Great Famine and Popular Politics (Routledge, 2015) and a pamphlet Subjects Lacking Words? The Grey Zone of Irelands Great Famine (Quinnipiac University and Cork University Press, 2017). An excerpt from the last item can be read here:

www.irishtimes.comculturebooksdisturbing-remains-a-story-of-black-47-1.3365683

At the University of Galway, Mac Suibhne, with Daniel Carey, English, and Cillian Joy, Library, has been invovled in project that a) facilitates access to Kerby A. Miller's vast collection of transcripts of Irish emigrant letters and memoirs through an online database, and b) continues his work of collection and transription: the database, Imirce, was launched in March 2024. Meanwhile, with David Dickson, Trinity College, Dublin, he leads an international team that is editing the extensive correspondence of the Moore family of Derry and Baltimore, Maryland, 1798–1846, to be published in three volumes in 2026 by the Irish Manuscripts Commission.

Social and cultural history of modern Ireland; migration; famine.

Irish social and cultural history; Historical Demography, especially Famine and Migration; Environmental History