Wrought Resilience/ Féiniúlachtaí Cruthaithe: The Labor and Material of Irish Identities

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Deirdre Cooper Owens, Professor of History at University of Connecticut; Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer; author of the award-winning Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology

Daniel Lambert, Manager of Kneecap; Chief Operating Office for Bohemians F.C.; Owner of Bang Bang Cafe, Phibsboro

Paul Muldoon, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Prize; Howard G. B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities, Princeton University; Poetry editor for the New Yorker

Conference Theme:

Both at home and  in the global diaspora, Irish identities often rely on portrayals of labor, self-making and resilience.  These narratives connect to and are grounded in material objects and mass-produced commodities, even as they also connect to immaterial experiences.  They connect us to specific places and times and demonstrate the ways that Irish people fashion and build at home, and everywhere that they go.  Irish history and culture emerge from and are grounded in material objects that symbolize Irish identity as well as the immaterial, in all its forms.

Pittsburgh is built on the ancestral lands of the Shawnee people, who were systematically pushed into “reserves” in Ohio by the early 19th century. Roughly simultaneous with this, a sizable Irish Presbyterian settlement began to form in Pittsburgh, often working as artisans in the nascent industries of the city. The industrialization – and, most famously, the steel production – that is still synonymous with Pittsburgh began during the Reconstruction Era. As this developed, the city drew in large numbers of post-Famine Irish Catholic workers; the increasing acculturation of these male migrants, as well as the history of the Irish in Pittsburgh more broadly, points to many of the central tensions in Irish and Irish-American history. Initially facing animosity and racialized stereotyping, by the end of the century they were part of the steel industry’s aristocracy of labor.  They held more comfortable and prestigious positions in steel mills. Increasingly benefiting from their racial privilege, Irish workers could avoid the most onerous and poorly paid jobs, which went to newly arrived immigrants from the Balkans or, increasingly, Black migrant workers from the South.  Irish identity – in Pittsburgh, as in Ireland – has been created with and through labor of various forms.  It has been expressed through a variety of material objects and commodities, and it is oftentimes bound with elements of class, race and gender.

Paper Submission:

We welcome proposals that address the following concepts but also proposals that address any aspect of Irish culture including:

•     Irish labor and Industry
•     Forming/ De-forming National Identities
•     Material Objects and National Identity
•     Irish Propensities for Immateriality
•     Geographies of the Supernatural
•     Wrought Words and the Poetry of the Troubles
•     Labors of Irish Vernacular Poetry
•     Sport, Dance and Song as Celebration or Resilience
•     Objects of Ireland’s Past
•     Gender in Irish Labor
•     Academic Work and its Role in Irish Culture
•     The Place of History/ History of Place in Irish Studies
•     Materiality (and immateriality) of Place
•     Capitalism and Labor Relations of Irishness
•     Money and Religion
•     Crafts as Culture
•     Economic Philosophies and Irish Identities
•     A Shared Island? Economic and Cultural Dimensions in Transnational Perspective

Please submit proposals here by 1 December, 2026.