Exhibiting Irishness: Empire, Race and Identity, c. 1850-1970 (Manchester, 2024) traces multiple constructions of Irish identity in national and international displays as Ireland moved from a colonial to an independent, globally-connected state. It has won the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture and received an Honourable mention for the Donald Murphy Prize for Best First Book by the American Conference for Irish Studies.
As a cultural history of Irish identity, the book considers exhibitions as a formative platform for imagining a host of Irish pasts, presents and futures. 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. The book demonstrates how Irish businesses and labourers, the elite organisers of the fairs and successive Irish governments curated Irishness. 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.
My second project is provisionally titled: ‘Brown, White and Green: Whose Landscape?’. Overall, I research how marginalised communities, whether the Irish or South Asian have authenticated their selfhood within a majority hostile state. For instance, the case study of exhibitions enabled me to interrogate how the Irish imagined and re-imagined their person, community and nation over successive decades using the platform of display. This project will radically rethink health and wellness in Britain. It focuses on the more liminal ways in which marginalised bodies exist in public spaces, whether in urban industrial centres or the hills and fells of the British Isles. By broadening my scope from imagined urban utopias within parks, cities and Fairs to wild utopias in Britain whether mountainous or coastal landscapes, I am interested in investigating how marginalised communities such as South Asian women, navigated Britain’s vast countryside from the nineteenth century era. How belonging has historically been imagined in Britain tends to tie with a person’s employment, labour and profit-making capacity but what happens when we shift our lens to think about enjoyment, nature and rest. By interrogating how South Asian women utilised these spaces I intend to ask questions about where racially marginalised bodies are considered acceptable and how transgression into Britain’s wild landscapes challenges and subverts who is entitled to such spaces. This project will therefore move from the imagined space of the fairground to the actual lived space of the British Isles.