Breandán Mac Suibhne

E. [email protected]

BREANDÁN MAC SUIBHNE is 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 Ireland’s Great Famine. In 2005 Mac Suibhne was a founding editor, with critic Seamus Deane, of Field Day Review, a journal of political and literary culture, and, with Deane, he edited two book series, Field Files and Field Day Editions. With 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. He has received, in the United States, a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Franklin Grant from the American Philosophical Society, and a Fulbright Scholarship and, in Ireland, a John Fitzgerald Kennedy Award.

Mac Suibhne has a longstanding interest in Ireland’s Great Famine. In addition to The End of Outrage and his edition, with Dickson, of the Dorian memoir, see a collection of essays, co-edited with Enda Delaney, Ireland’s Great Famine and Popular Politics (Routledge, 2015) and a pamphlet Subjects Lacking Words? The Grey Zone of Ireland’s Great Famine (Cork University Press, 2017). He 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. 

At the University of Galway, Mac Suibhne, with Catríona Cannon and Cillian Joy, Library, and Daniel Carey, English, is a director of Imirce, a project that a) facilitates access to historian 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 transcription: the Imirce database was launched in March 2024. Meanwhile, with David Dickson, 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 2027 by the Irish Manuscripts Commission.

Mac Suibhne is a member of the National Famine Commemoration Committee in the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport. He also serves on the editorial board of the European Journal of Food, Culture and Society.

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

Social and cultural history of modern Ireland; historical demography, especially famine and migration; history of education; environmental history