Abstract: In this talk, Shahmima traces multiple constructions of Irish identity in national and international displays between the 1850s and 1960s as Ireland moved from a colonial to an independent, globally-connected state. She sketches how Irish businesses and labourers, the elite organisers of the fairs and successive Irish governments curated Irishness over successive decades. The paper demonstrates how the central malleability of Irish identity on display emerged in tandem with the unfolding of Ireland’s political transformation from a colony of the British Empire, a migrant community in the United States, to a divided Ireland in the form of the Republic and Northern Ireland, a separation that continues today. As a cultural history of Irish identity, Shahmima argues that exhibitions were a formative platform for imagining a host of Irish pasts, presents and futures. And the paper will show how Fair organisers responded to the contexts of famine and poverty, migration and diasporic settlement, independence movements and partition, as well as post-colonial nation building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
About the speaker: Dr Shahmima Akhtar is a lecturer in History at the University of Birmingham and is a historian of race, migration and empire. Her monograph: Exhibiting Irishness: Empire, Race and Identity, 1850s to 1960s came out over summer with Manchester University Press. Shahmima has formerly worked as Past and Present Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Royal Historical Society which involved actively embedding the Race, Ethnicity, Equality Working Group’s (REEWG) strategy and policy to improve BME representation in UK History, whether working with schools and the curriculum, cultural institutions, community groups or other learned societies. She has worked closely with museums and heritage sites as a researcher and consultant on shaping histories of the British Empire that are relevant to today’s populace. Overall, Shahmima is committed to researching migrant histories and thinking through their presentation in historic or contemporary visual platforms.
Venue: The Coop Lecture Theatre, MB0312, Minerva Building in the University of Lincoln’s Brayford Pool campus.
Talks start at 6.15pm, with refreshments served from 5.45.
Branch membership: £20 per year for all talks. Talks free to national HA members, students, teachers and university staff. Visitors: £4.
Branch website: https://cityoflincolnbranchha.wordpress.com/ (Twitter: @cityoflincolnha)