Professor Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Professor of Contemporary Irish History (2023), will deliver her Inaugural Lecture entitled 'Stories from the Margins: History and the Making of Modern Ireland'.
Date: Tuesday 18 February 2025
Time: 18.15 to 19.15.
Location: Robert Emmet Lecture Theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin.
In 1922, a Dublin mother of seven wrote ‘Most Rev. Archbishop I will tell you a secret’: she was afraid her husband had lost his sexual and spiritual way in the streets of England and wanted the leader of her church to find him work nearer to home. She was just one of thousands of ordinary people struggling in the margins with the cards life dealt them, working with the resources they had, and, in the process, building a new state out of the vestiges of colonialism and civil war. In this talk I centre these stories of everyday negotiation and survival from the archives, reflecting upon what they can tell us about gender and class, discrimination and inequality in Ireland. It is in the multiple and layered everyday encounters between intimates and strangers alike that the ‘micro-physics of power’ are manifest. Keeping the archive in our line of sight, I look at how we can work against its inherent biases to hear the fuller stories people often tried to tell about themselves and their loved ones when engaging with the power structures of their universe. This is about more than telling different stories, it is an act of reclamation, one that works against the official bureaucratic flattening of complex lives. As Rebecca Solnit cautions: ‘Changing the story isn’t enough in itself, but it has often been foundational to real changes.’
This event is free and open to the public. Please click here to register your attendance by 14th February 2025.
