Imaging the Great Irish Famine: Representing Dispossession in Visual Culture

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The depiction of historical humanitarian disasters in art exhibitions, news reports, monuments and heritage landscapes has framed the harrowing images we currently associate with dispossession. People across the world are driven out of their homes and countries on a wave of conflict, poverty and famine, and our main sites for engaging with their loss are visual news and social media. In a reappraisal of the viewer's role in representations of displacement, Niamh Ann Kelly examines a wide range of commemorative visual culture from the mid-nineteenth-century Great Irish Famine. Her analysis of memorial images, objects and locations from that period until the early 21st century shows how artefacts of historical trauma can affect understandings of enforced migrations as an ongoing form of political violence. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of museum and heritage studies, material culture, Irish history and contemporary visual cultures exploring dispossession.

Reviews

Niamh Ann Kelly combines detailed research, theory, and meticulous language to discuss the grievous history and enduring legacy of the Irish famine and its impact on modern-day social and cultural concerns... the authors scholarship and range of argument makes a noteworthy contribution to visual culture studies, trauma studies, famine studies, Irish studies, and art historical and historical studies. * The Irish Arts Review *

Author Bio

Niamh Ann Kelly was born in Galway and is a lecturer in Visual Culture at the Dublin School of Creative Arts, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland. At the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, she studied Fine Art Painting and the History of Art at BA level and the History of Art at MA level by research. She received her PhD at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. She has published widely on her ongoing research interests of contemporary art, the history of art and commemorative visual cultures of monuments, museums and heritage practices.