Rethinking the Irish Diaspora - After The Gathering

This book provides scholarly perspectives on a range of timely concerns in Irish diaspora studies. It offers a focal point for fresh interchanges and theoretical insights on questions of identity, Irishness, historiography and the academy's role in all of these. In doing so, it chimes with the significant public debates on Irish and Irish emigrant identities that have emerged from Ireland's The Gathering initiative (2013) and that continue to reverberate throughout the Decade of Centenaries (2012-2023) in Ireland, North and South. In ten chapters of new research on key areas of concern in this field, the book sustains a conversation centred on three core questions: what is diaspora in the Irish context and who does it include/exclude? What is the view of Ireland and Northern Ireland from the diaspora? How can new perspectives in the academy engage with a more rigorous and probing theorisation of these concerns? This thought-provoking work will appeal to students and scholars of history, geography, literature, sociology, tourism studies and Irish studies.

Dr Johanne Devlin Trew is Lecturer in the School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences, Ulster University, UK. Her research explores migration, diaspora, memory and historical narratives and she is the author of Leaving the North: Migration & Memory, Northern Ireland, 1921-2011 (2013).

Dr Michael Pierse is Lecturer in Irish Literature at Queen's University Belfast. His research mainly explores the writing and cultural production of Irish working-class life, and over recent years has expanded into new multi-disciplinary themes. He is the author of Writing Ireland's Working-Class: Dublin After O'Casey (2011).